Page:They who walk in the wilds, (IA theywhowalkinwil00robe).pdf/59

 two-year-old bull. Expert in forest lore as any moose, he was nevertheless an alien to the wilderness, driven by needs and instincts which he could not understand. The wilderness had no companionship to offer him save that of his foster mother, and this seemed now to be failing him. He was unhappy. Vague, ancestral half-memories haunted and eluded him. The life of the wilds, the only life he could conceive of, grew distasteful to him. Though he could not be aware of it, the wilderness was, indeed, his foe, hostile at heart to him because his race for ten thousand generations had belonged to Man and been stamped with Man's impress. It was even now beginning to show its enmity. In the end it would have crushed him, but only, perhaps, after years of bitter, unmated solitude, and savage hates and the torment of vain cravings. But the Unseen Powers relented, and offered him a noble exit from the ill-suited stage.

And this was the manner of it. There came a day when the moose cow, about to become a mother again, took refuge determinedly in the heart of a dense and dark clump of young fir trees. Red Bull knew exactly where she was, and having got it into his head at last that she wanted to be alone, he reluctantly endured her absence from his sight. There in her hiding-place she gave birth to two dark brown