e'll be
gittin' himself shot, the fool. Or mebbe some old bull'll be after
givin' him a lickin' fer interferin', and he'll come home to us!"

To which his wife retorted with calm superiority: "Ye're a bigger
fool'n even I took ye fer, Jabe Smith."

But the young bull did not come back that winter, nor the following
summer, nor the next year, nor the next. Neither did any Indian or
hunter or lumberman have anything to report as to a bull moose of
great stature, with a long white slash down his side. Either his quest
had carried him far to other and alien ranges, or some fatal mischance
of the wild had overtaken his inexperience. The latter was Jabe's
belief, and he concluded that his ungainly favourite had too soon
taken the long trail for the Red Men's land of ghosts.

Though Jabe Smith was primarily a lumberman and backwoods farmer, he
was also a hunter's guide, so expert that his services in this
direction were not to be obtained without very special inducement. At
"calling" moose he was acknowledged to have no rival. When he laid his
grimly-humourous lips to the long tube of birch-bark, which is the
"caller's" instrument of illusion, there would come from it a strange
sound, great and grotesque, harsh yet appealing, rude yet subtle, and
mysterious as if the uncomprehended wilderness had itself found voice.
Old hunters, wise in all woodcraft, had been deceived by the
sound--and much more easily the impetuous bull, waiting, high-antlered
and eager, for the love-call of his mate to summon him down the shore
of the still and moon-tranced lake.

When a certain Famous Hunter, whose heart took pride in horns and
heads and hides--the trophies won by his unerring rifle in all four
corners of earth--found his way at last to the tumbled wilderness that
lies about the headwaters of the Quah Davic, it was naturally one of
the great New Brunswick moose that he was after. Nothing but the
noblest antlers that New Brunswick forests bred could seem to him
worthy of a place on those walls of his, whence the surly front of a
musk-ox of the Barren Grounds glared stolid defiance to the snarl of
an Orinoco jaguar, and the black, colossal head of a Kadiak bear was
eyed derisively by the monstrous and malignant mask of a two-horned
rhinoceros. With such a quest upon him, the Famous Hunter came, and
naturally sought the guidance of Jabe Smith, whom he lured from the
tamer distractions of a "timber cruise" by double pay and the pledge
of