SLASHED BULL

HER back crushed beneath the massive weight of a "deadfall," the
mother moose lay slowly sobbing her life out on the sweet spring air.
The villainous log, weighted cunningly with rocks, had caught her just
above the withers, bearing her forward so that her forelegs were
doubled under her, and her neck outstretched so that she could not
lift her muzzle from the wet moss. Though her eyes were already
glazing, and her nostrils full of a blown and blood-streaked froth,
from time to time she would struggle desperately to raise her head,
for she yearned to lick the sprawling, wobbling legs of the ungainly
calf which stood close beside her, bewildered because she would not
rise and suckle him.

The dying animal lay in the middle of the trail, which was an old,
half-obliterated logger's road, running straight east into the glow of
the spring sunrise. The young birches and poplars, filmed with the
first of the green, crowded close upon the trail, with, here and
there, a rose-blooming maple, here and there, a sombre, black-green
hemlock, towering over the thick second growth. The early air was
fresh, but soft; fragrant with the breath of opening buds. Faint mists
streamed up into the sunlight along the mossy line of the trail, and
the only sounds breaking the silence of the wilderness were the
sweetly plaintive calls of two rain-birds, answering each other slowly
over the treetops. Everything in the scene--the tenderness of the
colour and the air, the responses of the mating birds, the hope and
the expectancy of all the waking world--seemed piteously at variance
with the anguish of the stricken mother and her young, down there in
the solitude of the trail.

Presently, in the undergrowth beside the trail, a few paces beyond the
deadfall, a twig snapped sharply. Admonished by that experience of a
thousand ancestral generations which is instinct, the calf lifted his
big awkward ears apprehensively, and with a shiver drew closer to his
mother's crushed body. A moment later a gaunt black bear thrust his
head and shoulders forth from the undergrowth, and surveyed the scene
with savage, but shrewd, little eyes. He was hungry, and to his
palate no other delicacy the spring wilderness could ever afford was
equal to a young moose calf. But the situation gave him pause. The
mother moose was evidently in a trap; and the bear was wary of all
traps. He sank back into the undergrowth, and crept noiselessly nearer
to reconnoi