tree and drops off. They cannot run on a "glaze," though
they can run in snow four feet deep; but the caribou can run on
ice. They commonly find two or three moose together. They cover
themselves with water, all but their noses, to escape flies. He had
the horns of what he called "the black moose that goes in low lands."
These spread three or four feet. The "red moose" was another kind,
"running on mountains," and had horns which spread six feet. Such were
his distinctions. Both can move their horns. The broad flat blades are
covered with hair, and are so soft, when the animal is alive, that you
can run a knife through them. They regard it as a good or bad sign, if
the horns turn this way or that. His caribou horns had been gnawed by
mice in his wigwam, but he thought that the horns neither of the moose
nor of the caribou were ever gnawed while the creature was alive, as
some have asserted. An Indian, whom I met after this at Oldtown, who
had carried about a bear and other animals of Maine to exhibit, told
me that thirty years ago there were not so many moose in Maine as now;
also, that the moose were very easily tamed, and would come back when
once fed, and so would deer, but not caribou. The Indians of this
neighborhood are about as familiar with the moose as we are with the
ox, having associated with them for so many generations. Father
Rasles, in his Dictionary of the Abenaki Language, gives not only a
word for the male moose, (_aianbe_) and another for the female,
(_herar_,) but for the bone which is in the middle of the heart
of the moose (!), and for his left hind-leg.

There were none of the small deer up there; they are more common about
the settlements. One ran into the city of Bangor two years before, and
jumped through a window of costly plate glass, and then into a mirror,
where it thought it recognized one of its kind, and out again, and so
on, leaping over the heads of the crowd, until it was captured. This
the inhabitants speak of as the deer that went a-shopping. The
last-mentioned Indian spoke of the _lunxus_ or Indian devil,
(which I take to be the cougar, and not the _Gulo luscus_,) as
the only animal in Maine which man need fear; it would follow a man,
and did not mind a fire. He also said, that beavers were getting to be
pretty numerous again, where we went, but their skins brought so
little now that it was not profitable to hunt them.

I had put the ears of our moose, which were ten inches long,