search.

I observed, while he was tracking the moose, a certain reticence or
moderation in him. He did not communicate several observations of interest
which he made, as a white man would have done, though they may have leaked
out afterward. At another time, when we heard a slight crackling of twigs
and he landed to reconnoitre, he stepped lightly and gracefully, stealing
through the bushes with the least possible noise, in a way in which no
white man does,--as it were, finding a place for his foot each time.

About half an hour after seeing the moose, we pursued our voyage up Pine
Stream, and soon, coming to a part which was very shoal and also rapid, we
took out the baggage, and proceeded to carry it round, while Joe got up
with the canoe alone. We were just completing our portage and I was
absorbed in the plants, admiring the leaves of the aster macrophyllus, ten
inches wide, and plucking the seeds of the great round-leaved orchis, when
Joe exclaimed from the stream that he had killed a moose. He had found the
cow-moose lying dead, but quite warm, in the middle of the stream, which
was so shallow that it rested on the bottom, with hardly a third of its
body above water. It was about an hour after it was shot, and it was
swollen with water. It had run about a hundred rods and sought the stream
again, cutting off a slight bend. No doubt, a better hunter would have
tracked it to this spot at once. I was surprised at its great size, horse-
like, but Joe said it was not a large cow-moose. My companion went in
search of the calf again. I took hold of the ears of the moose, while Joe
pushed his canoe down stream toward a favorable shore, and so we made out,
though with some difficulty, its long nose frequently sticking in the
bottom, to drag it into still shallower water. It was a brownish black, or
perhaps a dark iron-gray, on the back and sides, but lighter beneath and
in front. I took the cord which served for the canoe's painter, and with
Joe's assistance measured it carefully, the greatest distances first,
making a knot each time. The painter being wanted, I reduced these
measures that night with equal care to lengths and fractions of my
umbrella, beginning with the smallest measures, and untying the knots as I
proceeded; and when we arrived at Chesuncook the next day, finding a two-
foot rule there, I reduced the last to feet and inches; and, moreover, I
made myself a two-foot rule of a thin and narrow strip of black a