within hearing, somewhere within the dark fringe of forest. He was
about to try the roar of the bull, when it suddenly burst out of the
woods behind them, in exactly the opposite quarter from that in which
they believed their game was concealed. Mitchell started to creep
across the thicket, but scarcely had the echoes answered when, in
front of them, a second challenge sounded sharp and fierce; and they
saw, directly across the open, the underbrush at the forest's edge
sway violently, as the bull they had long suspected broke out in a
towering rage. He was slow in advancing, however, and Mitchell glided
rapidly across the thicket, where a moment later his excited hiss
called his companion. From the opposite fringe of forest the second
bull had hurled himself out, and was plunging with savage grunts
straight towards them.

Crouching low among the firs they awaited his headlong rush; not
without many a startled glance backward, and a very uncomfortable
sense of being trapped and frightened, as Mitchell confessed to me
afterward. He had left his gun in camp; his employer had insisted upon
it, in his eagerness to kill the moose himself.

The bull came rapidly within rifle-shot. In a minute more he would be
within their hiding place; and the rifle sight was trying to cover a
vital spot, when right behind them--at the thicket's edge, it
seemed--a frightful roar and a furious pounding of hoofs brought them
to their feet with a bound. A second later the rifle was lying among
the bushes, and a panic-stricken hunter was scratching and smashing
in a desperate hurry up among the branches of a low spruce, as if only
the tiptop were half high enough. Mitchell was nowhere to be seen;
unless one had the eyes of an owl to find him down among the roots of
a fallen pine.