Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/154



ATE one winter afternoon, when the sun was gilding the pines on the western mountains and the shadows stretched long and chill through the snow-laden woods, a huge bull moose broke out of the gloom of the spruces and went swinging up the sunlit barren at a stride whose length and power would have discouraged even a wolf from following. Five minutes later I came out of the same tunnel under the spruces, just as the fringe of green across the barren swished back to cover the flanks of the plunging bull, and then nodded and nodded in twenty directions—''this way! that way! here! yonder!''—to mislead any that might follow on his track. For at times, even the hemlocks, and the alders, and the waters, and the leaves, and the crackling boughs, and the dancing shadows, all seem to conspire together to shield the innocent wood folk from the hostile eyes and hands of those who pursue them. And that is one reason why it is so hard to see game in the woods.

The big moose had fooled me that time. When he knew that I was following him he ran far ahead and then circled swiftly back, to stand motionless in a hillside thicket within twenty yards of the trail that he had made scarcely an hour previous. There he could see perfectly, without being seen, what it was that was following him. When I came by, following swiftly and silently the deep tracks in the snow, he let me pass below him, while he took a good look and a sniff at me; then he glided away like a shadow in the opposite direction. Unfortunately a dead branch under the snow broke with a dull snap beneath his cautious hoof, and I turned aside to see—and so saved myself the long tramp up and down the cunning trails. When he saw that his trick was discovered, he broke away for the open barren, with all his wonderful powers of eye and ear and tireless legs alert to save himself from the man whom he mistook for his deadly enemy.

It was of small use to follow him farther, so I sat down on a prostrate yellow birch to rest and listen awhile in the vast silence, and to watch anything that might be passing through the cold, white woods.

Under the fringe of evergreen the soft purple shadows jumped suddenly, and a hare as white as the snow bounded out. In long, nervous jumps, like a bundle of wire springs, he went leaping before my face across a narrow arm of the barren to the shelter of a point below. The soft arms of the ground-spruces and the softer shadows beneath them seemed to open of their own accord to let him in. All nodding of branches and dropping of snow pads and jumping of shadows ceased instantly, and all along the fringe of evergreen silent voices were saying: there is nothing here; we have not seen him; there is nothing here.

"Now why did he run that way?" I thought; for Moktaques is a crazy, erratic fellow, and never does things in a businesslike way unless he has to. As I wondered, there was a gleam of yellow fire under the purple shadows whence Moktaques had come, and the fierce round head of a Canada lynx was thrust out of the tunnel that the hare had made only a moment before. His big gray body had scarcely pushed itself into sight when the shadows stirred farther down the fringe of evergreen; another and another lynx glided out; and I caught my breath as five of the savage creatures swept across the narrow arm of the barren, each with his head thrust out, his fierce eyes piercing the gloom ahead like golden lances, and holding his place in the stately, appalling line of fierceness and power as silent as the shadow of death. My nerves tingled at the thought of what would happen to Moktaques when one of the line should discover and