imagined the possibility of gaining
any response to his call, he would have come well-armed, and would
have taken up his post in the branches of some safe tree. But it was
getting near the end of the season, and what was more to the purpose,
there ran a tradition in the settlement that the moose never came east
of Five Mile Creek, a water-course some four miles back from the fence
whereon the boy was sitting. Such traditions, once established in a
backwoods village, acquire an authority quite superior to fact and
proof against much ocular refutation. The boy had an unwavering faith
that, however seductively he might sound the call of the cow, never a
moose bull would hear him, because never a moose bull could be found
this side of Five Mile Creek. It was fascinating to pretend,--but he
had no will to evoke any monstrous apparition from those dark woods
behind him, on which he found it so thrillingly hard to keep his
back turned.

After sitting silent and moveless for a few minutes, listening to the
vague, mysterious stir of the solitude till his eyes grew wide as a
watching deer's, the boy lifted his birchen tube in both hands,
stretched his neck, and gave forth the harsh, half-bleating bellow, or
bray, with which the cow-moose signals for a mate. It was a good
imitation of what the old hunter had done, and the boy was proud of
it. In his exultation he repeated it thrice. Then he stopped to
listen,--pretending, as boys will, that he expected an answer.

The silence following upon that sonorous sound seemed startling in its
depth; and the boy held his breath lest he should mar it. Then came an
unexpected noise, at which the boy's heart jumped into his throat,--a
sharp crashing and rattling of branches, as if somebody was thrashing
the underbrush with sticks. It seemed to be some hundreds of yards
away, beyond the farthest fence of the pasture. For a moment the boy
wondered tremulously what it could be. Then he thought he understood.
"Some fool steer's got through the fence and gone stumbling through
the brush piles," he muttered to himself. The explanation had the
merit of explaining; and when the sound had ceased the boy once more
set the bark trumpet to his lips and sounded its harsh appeal.

This time he called twice. As he paused to draw breath, a little
creepy feeling on the skin of his cheeks and about the roots of his
hair made him turn his head and fix his eyes upon a dense spruce
thicket some twenty paces be