A couple of
drab-colored whisky-jacks, with bold mien and fearless bright eyes,
hopped and fluttered round, picking up the scraps, and uttering an
extraordinary variety of notes, mostly discordant; so tame were they
that one of them lit on my outstretched arm as I half dozed, basking in
the sunshine.
When the shadows began to lengthen, I shouldered my rifle and plunged
into the woods. At first my route lay along a mountain side; then
for half a mile over a windfall, the dead timber piled about in crazy
confusion. After that I went up the bottom of a valley by a little
brook, the ground being carpeted with a sponge of soaked moss. At the
head of this brook was a pond covered with water-lilies; and a scramble
through a rocky pass took me into a high, wet valley, where the thick
growth of spruce was broken by occasional strips of meadow. In this
valley the moose carcass lay, well at the upper end.
In moccasined feet I trod softly through the soundless woods. Under the
dark branches it was already dusk, and the air had the cool chill
of evening.
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