When The Moose Cow Calls

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Title:     When The Moose Cow Calls
Author: Charles G. D. Roberts [More Titles by Roberts]

The smell of the burning rubbish heaps--the penetrating November smell--spread up from the clearings and filled the chilly, windless evening air. It seemed a sort of expression of the cold sky, those pale steel-gray and sea-green wastes, deepening into sharp straight bands of orange and smoke colour along the far horizon. It seemed equally an expression of the harsh, darkening upland pastures, dotted with ragged stumps and backed by ragged forests. It was the distinctive autumn smell of the backwoods settlements, that smell which, taken into the blood in childhood, can never lose its potency of magic, its power over the most secret springs of memory and longing.

On the rude snake fence at the back of the pasture sat a boy, with a roll of birch bark in his hands. The bark was fashioned into the shape of a fish-horn, and the boy handled it proudly. He took deep breaths of the pungent-smelling air, and felt an exciting thrill as he glanced over his shoulder at the dark woods just behind him. It was for the sake of this thrill, this delicious though unfounded apprehension, that he had come here to the very back of the pasture, in the twilight, after bringing up the cows from the milking. The cows he couldn't see, for they were feeding in the lower pasture, just under the rise of the hill. The lights beginning to glimmer in the farmhouse were very far down in the valley; and very far down were the little creeping flames whence came that pungent smell pervading the world; and the boy felt his spirit both expand and tremble before the great spaces of the solitude.

It was for the purpose of practising privately the call of the cow-moose that the boy had betaken himself to the lonely back pasture. 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. The boy, with his young voice just roughening toward the bass of manhood, had proved an apt pupil. And the hunter had not only told him that practice would make him a first-class "caller," but had promised to take him hunting next season. This promise had set the boy's imagination aflame, and all day he had been dreaming of tall moose-bulls, wide-antlered, huge-belled, black of mane and shoulder.

Of course, when he went up to the fence of the back pasture to practise his new accomplishment, the boy had no idea of being heard by anything in the shape of a bull-moose, still less of being able to deceive that crafty animal. Had he imagined the possibility of gaining any response to his call, he would have come well-armed, and would have taken up his post in the branches of some safe tree. But it was getting near the end of the season, and what was more to the purpose, there ran a tradition in the settlement that the moose never came east of Five Mile Creek, a water-course some four miles back from the fence whereon the boy was sitting. Such traditions, once established in a backwoods village, acquire an authority quite superior to fact and proof against much ocular refutation. The boy had an unwavering faith that, however seductively he might sound the call of the cow, never a moose bull would hear him, because never a moose bull could be found this side of Five Mile Creek. It was fascinating to pretend,--but he had no will to evoke any monstrous apparition from those dark woods behind him, on which he found it so thrillingly hard to keep his back turned.

After sitting silent and moveless for a few minutes, listening to the vague, mysterious stir of the solitude till his eyes grew wide as a watching deer's, the boy lifted his birchen tube in both hands, stretched his neck, and gave forth the harsh, half-bleating bellow, or bray, with which the cow-moose signals for a mate. It was a good imitation of what the old hunter had done, and the boy was proud of it. In his exultation he repeated it thrice. Then he stopped to listen,--pretending, as boys will, that he expected an answer.

The silence following upon that sonorous sound seemed startling in its depth; and the boy held his breath lest he should mar it. Then came an unexpected noise, at which the boy's heart jumped into his throat,--a sharp crashing and rattling of branches, as if somebody was thrashing the underbrush with sticks. It seemed to be some hundreds of yards away, beyond the farthest fence of the pasture. For a moment the boy wondered tremulously what it could be. Then he thought he understood. "Some fool steer's got through the fence and gone stumbling through the brush piles," he muttered to himself. The explanation had the merit of explaining; and when the sound had ceased the boy once more set the bark trumpet to his lips and sounded its harsh appeal.

This time he called twice. As he paused to draw breath, a little creepy feeling on the skin of his cheeks and about the roots of his hair made him turn his head and fix his eyes upon a dense spruce thicket some twenty paces behind him. Surely there was a movement among the young spruce tops. Almost as smoothly as a mink slips from a rock the boy slipt down from his too conspicuous perch and crouched behind the fence. Peering between the rails he saw a tall, dark shape, with gigantic head, vast antlers, and portentous bulk of shoulder, step noiselessly from the thicket and stand motionless. With a heart that throbbed in mingled exultation and terror, the boy realized that he had called a bull-moose.

Huge as seemed its stature to the boy's excited vision, the moose was in reality a young and rather small bull, who had been forced by stronger rivals to go unmated. Driven by his restless desire, he had wandered beyond his wonted range. Now he stood like a statue, head uplifted, peering on every side to catch sight of the mate whose voice had so resistlessly summoned him. Only his wide ears moved, waving inquisitively. His nostrils, ordinarily his chief source of information, were dulled almost to obtuseness by that subtly acrid perfume of the smoke.

The boy in his fence corner, with a gray stump beside him, shrank within himself and stared through half-closed eyes, trembling lest the mighty stranger should detect him. He had a very reasonable notion that the mighty stranger might object to the deception which had been practised upon his eager emotions, and might not find the old rail fence much barrier to his righteous wrath. For all his elation, the boy began to wish that he had not been in such haste to learn moose-calling. "Don't call till you've some idea who'll answer!" was a rule which he deduced from that night's experience.

It is possible that the bull, during those few minutes while he stood waiting and watching, saw the dim figure of the boy behind the fence. If so, the figure had no concern for him. He caught nothing of the dreaded man-smell; and he had no reason to associate that small, harmless creature with the mate to whose calling he had sped so eagerly. But there was no doubt that the calling had come from this very place. Was it possible that the cow, more coquettish than her kind are apt to be, had hidden herself to provoke him? He came closer to the fence, and uttered a soft grumble in his throat, a sound both caressing and appealing. "My! how disappointed he'll be!" thought the boy, and devoutly wished himself safe at home.

At this trying moment came relief from an unexpected quarter. That distant threshing of the bushes which the boy had heard after his first calling had not been a stray steer. Not by any means. It was the response of another young wandering moose bull, beating on the underbrush with his ill-developed, but to himself quite wonderful, antlers. He, too, was seeking a mate in a region far remote from that where ruled the tyrannous elder bulls. Silently and swiftly, assured by the second summons, he had hurried to the tryst; and now, to his ungovernable rage, what he saw awaiting him in the dusk was no mate at all, but a rival. Pausing not to consider the odds, he burst from the covert and rushed furiously to the attack.

The first bull, though somewhat the larger of the two, and by far the better antlered, was taken at a disadvantage. Before he could whirl and present his formidable front to the charge, the newcomer caught him on the flank, knocked him clear off his feet, and sent him crashing into the fence. The fence went down like stubble; and the boy, his eyes starting with astonished terror, scurried like a rabbit for the nearest tree. Climbing into the branches with an agility which surprised even himself, he promptly recovered from his panic and turned to watch the fight.

The first bull, saved from serious injury by the defects of his adversary's antlers, picked himself up from the wreckage of the fence, and, grunting with anger, plunged back to meet his assailant. The latter, somewhat puzzled by the fence and its zig-zag twistings, had drawn a little to one side, and so it happened that when the first bull rushed at him, the angle of a fence corner intervened. When the opposing antlers came together, they met harmlessly between the heavy rails, and got tangled in a way that seemed to daunt their owners' rage. In the pushing and struggling the top rail was thrown off and fell smartly across the newcomer's neck. At the same time one of the stakes flew up and caught the first bull fairly on the sensitive muzzle. Sneezing violently, he jumped back; and the two stood eyeing each other with fierce suspicion over the top of the fence.

The boy was trembling with excitement there in his tree, eager for the fight to go on and eager to see which would win. But in this he was doomed to disappointment. The end came in a most unlooked-for fashion. It chanced that the boy's "calling" had deceived others besides the two young bulls. The old hunter, in his cabin under the hill, had heard it. He had snatched his rifle from behind the door, and stolen swiftly up to the back pasture.

From a clump of hemlock not fifty yards away came a red flash and a sharp report. The bull on the near side of the fence sprang into the air with a gasping cough, and fell. The smaller bull, who knew what guns meant, simply vanished. It was as if the dusk had blotted him out, so noiselessly and instantaneously did he sink back into the thickets; and a moment later he was heard crashing away through the underbrush in mad flight. As the hunter stepped up to examine his prize, the boy dropped from the tree, grabbed his birch-bark tube, and came forward proudly.

"There wasn't any cow at all,--'cept me!" he proclaimed, his voice ringing with triumph.

[The end]
Charles G. D. Roberts's essay: When The Moose Cow Calls

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