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Updated: May 18, 2025
Suddenly, when there were only two or three of the smallest scraps left, he stopped. "Mon Dieu, it was whisky-jack!" he cried. "I have eaten it all!" The young Englishman's white face grinned at him. "I've got the flour inside of me, Thoreau you've got the moose-bird. Isn't that fair?" The plate dropped between them.
Such was his confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped up to him, he reached out at it with a playful paw. The result was a sharp peck on the end of his nose that made him cower down and ki-yi. The noise he made was too much for the moose-bird, who sought safety in flight. But the cub was learning. His misty little mind had already made an unconscious classification.
Suddenly there came to Dixon's ears a sound. It was a sound that would have been unheard in the gentle whispering of a wind, in the swaying of the spruce-tops; but in this silence it fell upon the starving man's hearing with a distinctness that drew his muscles rigid and set his eyes staring about him in wild search. Just beyond the hanging pails a moose-bird hopped out upon the snow.
"'Save the wailing of the moose-bird With a plaintive note and low; And the skating of the red leaf Upon the frozen snow. "The rest of the poem runs thus: "'And said I, Though dark is falling, And far the camp must be, Yet my heart it would be lightsome If I had but company.
Then, from far up that dusky avenue of cedars, there came the sudden startled chatter of a moose-bird. It was a warning which years of experience had taught Wabi always to respect. Perhaps a roving fox had frightened it, perhaps the bird had taken to noisy flight at the near tread of a moose, a caribou, or a deer. But To Wabi the soft, quick notes of the moose-bird spelled man!
Once more the shadow disappeared, then came again, larger and more distinct than before. There was no doubt now. Whatever had startled the moose-bird was coming slowly, noiselessly. Wabi brought his rifle to his shoulder. Life and death hovered with his anxious, naked finger over the gun trigger. But he was too well trained in the ways of the wilderness to fire just yet.
And he turned toward Neewa now, growling at a gay-plumaged moose-bird that was hovering about for a morsel of meat. A few minutes before, Neewa had weighed a dozen pounds; now he weighed fourteen or fifteen. His stomach was puffed out like the sides of an overfilled bag, and he sat humped up in a pool of warm sunshine licking his chops and vastly contented with himself and the world.
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