nd.

It is not hard for the trapper to find a moose yard. There is the
tell-tale cleft footprint in the snow. There are the cast-off antlers
after the battles have been fought--the female moose being without horns
and entirely dependent on speed and hearing and smell for protection.
There is the stripped, overhead twig, where a moose has reared on hind
legs and nibbled a branch above. There is the bent or broken sapling
which a moose pulled down with his mouth and then held down with his
feet while he browsed. This and more sign language of the woods--too
fine for the language of man--lead the trapper close on the haunts of a
moose herd. But he does not want an ordinary moose. He is keen for the
solitary track of a haughty spinster. And he probably comes on the print
when he has almost made up his mind to chance a shot at one of the herd
below the hill, where he hides. He knows the trail is that of a
spinster. It is unusually heavy; and she is always fat. It drags
clumsily over the snow; for she is lazy. And it doesn't travel straight
away in a line like that of the roving moose; for she loiters to feed
and dawdle out of pure indolence.

And now the trapper knows how a hound on a hot scent feels. He may win
his prize with the ease of putting out his hand and taking it--sighting
his rifle and touching the trigger. Or, by the blunder of a hair's
breadth, he may daily track twenty weary miles for a week and come back
empty at his cartridge-belt, empty below his cartridge-belt, empty of
hand, and full, full of rage at himself, though his words curse the
moose. He may win his prize in one of two ways: (1) by running the game
to earth from sheer exhaustion; (2) or by a still hunt.

The straightaway hunt is more dangerous to the man than the moose. Even
a fat spinster can outdistance a man with no snow-shoes. And if his
perseverance lasts longer than her strength--for though a moose swings
out in a long-stepping, swift trot, it is easily tired--the exhausted
moose is a moose at bay; and a moose at bay rears on her hind legs and
does defter things with the flattening blow of her fore feet than an
exhausted man can do with a gun. The blow of a cleft hoof means
something sharply split, wherever that spreading hoof lands. And if the
something wriggles on the snow in death-throes, the moose pounds upon it
with all four feet till the thing is still. Then she goes on her way
with eyes ablaze and every shaggy hair bristling.

The