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Updated: May 13, 2025
"'Sh-h-h! Don't move. Don't speak. Don't breathe, if you can help it." Adrian became rigid, all his faculties merged in that one desire to lose no sound. Again Pierre gave the moose-call, and hark! what was that? An answering cry, a far-away crashing of boughs, the onrush of some big creature, hastening to its mate.
Peeling a sheet of bark from the nearest white birch, he twisted himself a "moose-call," then climbed into the branches of a willow which spread out over the edge of the shining lake. From this concealment he began to utter persuasively the long, uncouth, melancholy call by which the moose cow summons her mate.
"Verrie big moose we make call at next camp think it is early for call." At the next camp Jimmie made the usual birch-bark moose-call, and at evening blew it, as he also did on the following morning. This camp was a divine spot on a rise back of a long sandy beach, and we concluded to stop for a day. The Norseman and I each took a man in our canoes and started out to explore.
"I say, Neal, this is life; the little humbugging scrapes we used to call adventures at home are only play for girls. It's something to talk about for a lifetime, when a fellow comes to close quarters with a creature like that moose. I said I'd get the better of his ears, and I did it. Pinch me, old boy, if I begin a moose-call in my sleep."
On the previous evening an old hunter, just back from a successful "calling" over on Nictau Lake, had given the boy some lessons in this alluring and suggestive department of woodcraft, and had made his joy complete by the gift of the bark "moose-call" itself, a battered old tube with many "kills" to its credit.
At daybreak, chilled to the marrow, I rose, and gathered the fire together in speechless agony: no wonder, the thermometer stood at 40 degrees below zero; and yet, can it be believed? the baby seemed to be perfectly oblivious to the benefits of the bag, and continued to howl unmercifully. Such is the perversity of human nature even at that early age! Our arrival at the mission put an end to my family responsibilities, and restored me once more to the beloved bag; but the warm atmosphere of a house soon revealed the cause of much of the commotion of the night. "Wasn't-it-its-mother's-pet" displayed two round red marks upon its chubby countenance! "Wasn't-it-its-mother's-pet" had, in fact, been frost-bitten about the region of the nose and cheeks, and hence the hubbub. After a delay of two days at the mission, during which the thermometer always showed more than 60 degrees of frost in the early morning, I continued my journey towards the east, crossing over from the North to the South Branch of the Saskatchewan at a point some twenty miles from the junction of the two rivers a rich and fertile land, well wooded and watered, a region destined in the near future to hear its echoes wake to other sounds than those of moose-call or wolf-howl. It was dusk in the evening of the 19th of January when we reached the high ground which looks down upon the "forks" of the Saskatchewan River. On some low ground at the farther side of the North Branch a camp-fire glimmered in the twilight. On the ridges beyond stood the dark pines of the Great Sub-Arctic Forest, and below lay the two broad converging rivers whose immense currents; hushed beneath the weight of ice, here merged into the single channel of the Lower Saskatchewan a wild, weird scene it looked as the shadows closed around it. We descended with difficulty the steep bank and crossed the river to the camp-fire on the north shore. Three red-deer hunters were around it; they had some freshly killed elk meat, and potatoes from Fort-
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