with little, sullen, melancholy eyes from under his
ponderous and shaggy front. "Last Bull"--and the passing of his race was
in the name.

Here, in his fenced, protected range, with a space of grassy meadow,
half a dozen clumps of sheltering trees, two hundred yards of the run of
a clear, unfailing brook, and a warm shed for refuge against the winter
storms, the giant buffalo ruled his little herd of three tawny cows, two
yearlings, and one blundering, butting calf of the season. He was a
magnificent specimen of his race--surpassing, it was said, the finest
bull in the Yellowstone preserves or in the guarded Canadian herd of the
North. Little short of twelve feet in length, a good five foot ten in
height at the tip of his humped and huge fore-shoulders, he seemed to
justify the most extravagant tales of pioneer and huntsman. His
hind-quarters were trim and fine-lined, built apparently for speed,
smooth-haired, and of a grayish lion-color. But his fore-shoulders,
mounting to an enormous hump, were of an elephantine massiveness, and
clothed in a dense, curling, golden-brown growth of matted hair. His
mighty head was carried low, almost to the level of his knees, on a neck
of colossal strength, which was draped, together with the forelegs down
to the knees, in a flowing brown mane tipped with black. His head, too,
to the very muzzle, wore the same luxuriant and sombre drapery, out of
which curved viciously the keen-tipped crescent of his horns. Dark,
huge, and ominous, he looked curiously out of place in the secure and
familiar tranquillity of his green pasture.

For a distance of perhaps fifty yards, at the back of the pasture, the
range of the buffalo herd adjoined that of the moose, divided from it by
that same fence of heavy steel-wire mesh, supported by iron posts, which
surrounded the whole range. One sunny and tingling day in late
October--such a day as makes the blood race full red through all healthy
veins--a magnificent stranger was brought to the Park, and turned into
the moose-range.

The newcomer was a New Brunswick bull moose, captured on the Tobique
during the previous spring when the snow was deep and soft, and
purchased for the Park by one of the big Eastern lumber-merchants. The
moose-herd had consisted, hitherto, of four lonely cows, and the
splendid bull was a prize which the Park had long been coveting. He took
lordly possession, forthwith, of the submissive little herd, and led
them off at once fro