gray and sea-green wastes, deepening into sharp straight
bands of orange and smoke colour along the far horizon. It seemed
equally an expression of the harsh, darkening upland pastures, dotted
with ragged stumps and backed by ragged forests. It was the
distinctive autumn smell of the backwoods settlements, that smell
which, taken into the blood in childhood, can never lose its potency
of magic, its power over the most secret springs of memory and
longing.

On the rude snake fence at the back of the pasture sat a boy, with a
roll of birch bark in his hands. The bark was fashioned into the shape
of a fish-horn, and the boy handled it proudly. He took deep breaths
of the pungent-smelling air, and felt an exciting thrill as he
glanced over his shoulder at the dark woods just behind him. It was
for the sake of this thrill, this delicious though unfounded
apprehension, that he had come here to the very back of the pasture,
in the twilight, after bringing up the cows from the milking. The cows
he couldn't see, for they were feeding in the lower pasture, just
under the rise of the hill. The lights beginning to glimmer in the
farmhouse were very far down in the valley; and very far down were the
little creeping flames whence came that pungent smell pervading the
world; and the boy felt his spirit both expand and tremble before the
great spaces of the solitude.

It was for the purpose of practising privately the call of the
cow-moose that the boy had betaken himself to the lonely back pasture.
On the previous evening an old hunter, just back from a successful
"calling" over on Nictau Lake, had given the boy some lessons in this
alluring and suggestive department of woodcraft, and had made his joy
complete by the gift of the bark "moose-call" itself, a battered old
tube with many "kills" to its credit. The boy, with his young voice
just roughening toward the bass of manhood, had proved an apt pupil.
And the hunter had not only told him that practice would make him a
first-class "caller," but had promised to take him hunting next
season. This promise had set the boy's imagination aflame, and all day
he had been dreaming of tall moose-bulls, wide-antlered, huge-belled,
black of mane and shoulder.

Of course, when he went up to the fence of the back pasture to
practise his new accomplishment, the boy had no idea of being heard by
anything in the shape of a bull-moose, still less of being able to
deceive that crafty animal. Had he