Year: 1879

e'o ii' t1iId atll WdS peT1eCUly SU1ll. 1nefe was not the slightest sound of anything moving in the forest except that of the unfrequent flight of moose-bird close by. And so I sat watching that most glorious transformation scene = the change of day into night; saw the great sun sink slowly down behind the pine trees; saw the few clouds that hovered motionless above me blaze into the color of bright gold; saw the whole atmos- phere become glorious with a soft, vel low light, gradually dying out, as the night crept on, till only in the western sky there fingered faint glow, fading into pale, cold appe-green, against which the pines stood out as black as midnight and as sh arply defined as though cut out of steel. As the dark ness deepened 8 young crescent moon shone out pale and clear, with glitter ing star a little below the horn, and above her another star of lesser magni- tude. It looked as though supernatural Jewel-a heavenly pendant, two great dlamord d solitaires and a diamond cres- cent-were hanging in the western sky. Alter while the moon, too sank behind the trees, anddarkness fell upon the earth.

 Sol sat quietly below, while the Indian called from the tree-top. Not a sound answered to the three or four long-drawn- out notes with which he hoped to lure the bull. After a long interval he called agaln, but the same perfect, utter silence relgned in the woods-a silence broken only by the melancholy hooting of an owl or the imaginary noises that filled my head. It is extraordinary how small noises become magnified when the ear is kept at a great tension for any length of time, and how the head becomes filled with all kinds of fictitious sounds; and it is very remarkable also how utterly impossible it is to distinguish between q loud noise uttered at a distance and d scarcely audible sound close by. After listening very intently amidst the pro- found silence of quiet night in the forest for an hour or so the head becomes so -surcharged with blood, owing, I pre- sume, to all the faculties being concen- trated on a single sense, that one seems to hear distant voices, the ringing of bells and all kinds of strange and imros-

 

 vously alive to the slightest distus bance of the almost awful silence of still night in the woods that the faintest sound-- the cracking of minute twig or the fall of a leaf, even at great distance-will make him almost jump out of his skin. He is also apt to make the most ludicrous mistakes. Toward morning, about day break, l have frequently mistaken the first faint buzz of some minute fly, within a foot or so of my ear, for the call of moose two or three miles off

 About ten o'clock the Indian gave up in despair and came down the tree; we rolled ourselves up in our rugs, pulled the hoods of our blanket coats over our heads, and went to sleep. I awoke iit- erally shaking with cold. It was still the dead of night; and the stars were shining with intense brilliancy, to my great disappointment, for was in hopes of seeing the first streaks of dawn. It was freezing very hard, far too hard for me to think of going to sleep again. So I reused the Indian and suggested that he should try another call or two.

 Accordingly we stole down to the edge of the little point of wood in which we had ensconced ourselves, and in few minutes the forest was re-echoing the plaintive notes of the moose. Not an answer, not sound-utter silence, as if all the world were dead! broken sud- denly and horribly by yell that made the blood curdle in one's veins. It was the long, quavering, human, but un- earthly scream of a loon on the distant lake. After what seemed to me many hours, but what was in reality but short time, the first indications of dawn revealed themselves in the rising of the morning star, and the slightest possible paling of the eastern sky. The cold grew almost unbearable. That curious shivcr that runs through nature-the first icy current of air that precedes the day chilled us to the bones. I rolled myself up in my blanket and lighted pipe, trying to retain what little caloric re- mained in my body, while the Indian again ascended the tree. By the time he had called twice it was gray dawn. Birds were beginning to move about, and busy squirrels to look out for their breakfast of pine-buds. I sat listening intently, and watching the blank, emo tionless face of the Indian as he gazed around him, when suddenly I saw his countenance blaze up with vivid ex- citement. His eyes seem to start from his head, his muscles twitched, his face glowed, he seemed transformed in a moment into a different being. At the same time he began with the utmost celerity but with extreme caution to de- scend to the ground Hemotioned tome not to make any noise, and whispered that a moose was coming across the bar ren and must beclose by. Grasping my rifle, we crawled carefully through the grass, crisp and noisy with frost. down