. "It looks
as though it would slide down the hill any minute."

"I reckon it's firm enough," said Uncle Teddy. "It's been hanging on
there for considerably over a hundred years, by its size."

"What's this on the rock?" asked Sahwah, who had been examining the
boulders which lay at the bottom of the ravine just under the tree. She
pointed to a mark on one of the stones, an arrow chiseled out of the
hard rock. They all crowded around and exclaimed in wonder. What could
it mean?

"Maybe somebody's buried here," said the Captain.

"Rather a heavy tombstone," said Uncle Teddy. "And not much of an
epitaph. I'll want more than an arrow on mine."

"It must mean something," said Hinpoha, her romantic imagination fired
immediately.

But the consuming interest they had all shown in the arrow on the rock
was driven out of them the next moment by a wild uproar at the other end
of the ravine--the sound of a great crashing accompanied by a frightful
bellow. Then there was another crash; the sound of rock striking against
rock, a ripping, tearing, falling sound, a thud and another frightful
bellow.

"Goodness, what was that?" asked Uncle Teddy, running forward in the
direction of the noise, followed by the others.

They soon saw. On the ground at the upper end of the ravine lay the
great bull moose they had seen that afternoon when he had come, in the
pride of his strength, to answer the call of the birchbark trumpet. Now
he lay in a heap, his sides heaving convulsively, beside a good-sized
rock he had either carried over the edge of the precipice in his fall
from above, or which had carried him. At the top of the ravine there was
a deep hole in the soil where the ground had given away and hurled him
over the edge. But the fall was not the worst of it. Down in the ravine
there stood a broken sapling about two feet high, its sharp point
standing up like a bayonet. Straight onto this the moose had plunged in
his fall, ripping his chest open in a great jagged gash from which the
blood flowed in a stream.

Hinpoha turned away and covered her eyes with her hands at the dreadful
sight.

"Kill him, kill him," said Aunt Clara, catching hold of her husband's
arm in distress, "I can't bear to see him suffer so."

"I have nothing to kill him with," said Uncle Teddy, in equal distress.

But the moose was beyond the need of a friendly bullet to end his
sufferings, for after a few more convulsive heaves he stiffened out and
lay sti