It was early in September when the four of us—Clarke, Jamieson, Thompson, and myself—landed at Bathurst, on Chaleur Bay, and took the little railroad which runs twenty miles up the Nepisiquit River to some iron-mines. From that point we expected to pole up the river about forty miles farther and then begin our hunting.

For the four hunters—“sports” was what the guides called us—there were six guides. Three of them bore the name Venneau; there were Bill Grey and his son Willie, and the sixth was Wirre (pronounced Warry) Chamberlain. Among themselves the guides spoke French—or a corruption of French—which was hard to understand and which has come down from generation to generation without ever getting into written form. A fine-looking six they were,—straight,—with the Indian showing in their faces.

At the end of the third day of poling—a lazy time for the “sports,” but three days of marvellously skilful work for the guides—our heavily laden canoes were brought up to the main camp. From here we expected to start our hunting expeditions, each taking a guide, blankets, and food, and striking off for the more isolated cabins in the woods. My purpose was to collect specimens for the National Museum at Washington. I wanted moose, caribou, and beaver—a male and female of each species. Whole skins and leg-bones were to be brought out.

A hard rain woke us, and the prospects were far from cheerful as we packed and prepared to separate. Bill Grey was to be my guide, and the “Popple Cabin,” three miles away, was to be our shelter. Our tramp through the wet woods—pine, hemlock, birch, and poplar—ended at the little double lean-to shelter. After we had started a fire and spread our blankets to dry we set off in search of game.

We climbed out of the valley in which we were camped and up to the top of a hill from which we could get a good view of some small barren stretches that lay around us. It was the blueberry season, and these barrens were covered with bushes, all heavily laden. We moved around from hill to hill in search of game, but saw only three deer. We’d have shot one of them for meat, but didn’t care to run the chance of frightening away any moose or caribou. The last hill we climbed overlooked a small pond which lay beside a pine forest on the edge of a barren strip. Bill intended to spend a good part of each day watching this pond, and it was to a small hill overlooking it that we made our way early next morning.

Before we had been watching many minutes, a cow moose with a calf appeared at the edge of the woods. She hesitated for several minutes, listening intently and watching sharply, and then stepped out across the barren on her way to the pond. Before she had gone far, the path she was following cut the trail we had made on our way to the lookout hill. She stopped immediately and began to sniff at our tracks, the calf following her example; a few seconds were enough to convince her, but for some reason, perhaps to make doubly sure, she turned and for some minutes followed along our trail with her nose close to the ground. Then she swung round and struck off into the woods at a great slashing moose trot.

Not long after she had disappeared, we got a fleeting glimpse of two caribou cows; they lacked the impressive ungainliness of the moose, and in the distance might easily have been mistaken for deer.

It was a very cold morning, and throughout the day it snowed and sleeted at intervals. We spent the time wandering from hill to hill.

For the next week we hunted industriously in every direction from the Popple Cabin. In the morning and the evening we shifted from hill to hill; the middle of the day we hunted along the numerous brooks that furrowed the country. With the exception of one or two days, the weather was uniformly cold and rainy; but after our first warm sunny day we welcomed rain and cold, for then, at least, we had no black flies to fight. On the two sunny days they surrounded us in swarms and made life almost unbearable; they got into our blankets and kept us from sleeping during the nights; they covered us with lumps and sores—Bill said that he had never seen them as bad.

It was lovely in the early morning to stand on some high hill and watch the mist rising lazily from the valley; it was even more lovely to watch the approach of a rain-storm. The sunlight on some distant hillside or valley would suddenly be blotted out by a sheet of rain; a few minutes later the next valley would be darkened as the storm swept toward us, and perhaps before it reached us we could see the farther valleys over which it had passed lightening again.

We managed to cover a great deal of ground during that week, and were rewarded by seeing a fair amount of game—four caribou, of which one was a bull, a bull and three cow moose, and six does and one buck deer. I had but one shot, and that was at a buck deer. We wanted meat very much, and Bill said that he didn’t think one shot would disturb the moose and caribou. He was a very large buck, in prime condition; I never tasted better venison. Had our luck been a little better, I would have had a shot at a moose and a caribou; we saw the latter from some distance, and made a long and successful stalk until Wirre, on his way from the main camp with some fresh supplies, frightened our quarry away.

On these trips between camps, Wirre several times saw moose and caribou within range.

After a week we all foregathered at the main camp. Clarke had shot a fine bear and Jamieson brought in a good moose head. They started down-river with their trophies, and Thompson and I set out for new hunting-grounds. As Bill had gone with Jamieson, I took his son Willie, a sturdy, pony-built fellow of just my age. We crossed the river and camped some two miles beyond it and about a mile from the lake we intended to hunt. We put up a lean-to, and in front of it built a great fire of old pine logs, for the nights were cold.

My blankets were warm, and it was only after a great deal of wavering hesitation that I could pluck up courage to roll out of them in the penetrating cold of early morning. On the second morning, as we made our way through dew-soaked underbrush to the lake, we came out upon a little glade, at the farther end of which stood a caribou. He sprang away as he saw us, but halted behind a bush to reconnoitre—the victim of a fatal curiosity, for it gave me my opportunity and I brought him down. Although he was large in body, he had a very poor head. I spent a busy morning preparing the skin, but in the afternoon we were again at the lake watching for moose. We spent several fruitless days there.

One afternoon a yearling bull moose appeared: he had apparently lost his mother, for he wandered aimlessly around for several hours, bewailing his fate. This watching would have been pleasant enough as a rest-cure, but since I was hunting and very anxious to get my game, it became a rather irksome affair. However, I could only follow Saint Augustine’s advice, “when in Rome, fast on Saturdays,” and I resigned myself to adopting Willie’s plan of waiting for the game to come to us instead of pursuing my own inclination and setting out to find the game. Luckily, I had some books with me, and passed the days pleasantly enough reading Voltaire and Boileau. There was a beaver-house at one end of the lake, and between four and five the beaver would come out and swim around. I missed a shot at one. Red squirrels were very plentiful and would chatter excitedly at us from a distance of a few feet. There was one particularly persistent little chap who did everything in his power to attract attention. He would sit in the conventional squirrel attitude upon a branch, and chirp loudly, bouncing stiffly forward at each chirp, precisely as if he were an automaton.

When we decided that it was useless to hunt this lake any longer, we went back to the river to put in a few days hunting up and down it. I got back to the camp in the evening and found Thompson there. He had had no luck and intended to leave for the settlement in the morning. Accordingly, the next day he started downstream and we went up. We hadn’t been gone long before we heard what we took to be two shots, though, for all we knew, they might have been a beaver striking the water with his tail. That night, when we got back to camp, we found that, on going round a bend in the river about a mile below camp, Thompson had come upon a bull and a cow moose, and had bagged the bull.

The next morning it was raining as if it were the first storm after a long drought, and as we felt sure that no sensible moose would wander around much amid such a frozen downpour, we determined to put in a day after beaver. In one of my long tramps with Bill we had come across a large beaver-pond, and at the time Bill had remarked how easy it would be to break the dam and shoot the beaver. I had carefully noted the location of this pond, so managed successfully to pilot Willie to it, and we set to work to let the water out. This breaking the dam was not the easy matter I had imagined. It was a big pond, and the dam that was stretched across its lower end was from eight to ten feet high. To look at its solid structure and the size of the logs that formed it, it seemed inconceivable that an animal the size of a beaver could have built it. The water was above our heads, and there was a crust of ice around the edges. We had to get in and work waist-deep in the water to enlarge our break in the dam, and the very remembrance of that cold morning’s work, trying to pry out logs with frozen fingers, makes me shiver. It was even worse when we had to stop work and wait and watch for the beavers to come out. They finally did, and I shot two. They were fine large specimens; the male was just two inches less than four feet and the female only one inch shorter. Shivering and frozen, we headed back for camp. My hunting costume had caused a good deal of comment among the guides; it consisted of a sleeveless cotton undershirt, a many-pocketed coat, a pair of short khaki trousers reaching to just above my knees, and then a pair of sneakers or of high boots—I used the former when I wished to walk quietly. My knees were always bare and were quite as impervious to cold as my hands, but the guides could never understand why I didn’t freeze. I used to hear them solemnly discussing it in their broken French.

I had at first hoped to get my moose by fair stalking, without the help of calling, but I had long since abandoned that hope; and Willie, who was an excellent caller, had been doing his best, but with no result. We saw several cow moose, and once Willie called out a young bull, but his horns could not have had a spread of more than thirty-five inches, and he would have been quite useless as a museum specimen. Another time, when we were crawling up to a lake not far from the river, we found ourselves face to face with a two-year-old bull. He was very close to us, but as he hadn’t got our wind, he was merely curious to find out what we were, for Willie kept grunting through his birch-bark horn. Once he came up to within twenty feet of us and stood gazing. Finally he got our wind and crashed off through the lakeside alders.

As a rule, moose answer a call better at night, and almost every night we could hear them calling around our camp; generally they were cows that we heard, and once Willie had a duel with a cow as to which should have a young bull that we could hear in an alder thicket, smashing the bushes with his horns. Willie finally triumphed, and the bull headed toward us with a most disconcerting rush; next morning we found his tracks at the edge of the clearing not more than twenty yards from where we had been standing; at that point the camp smoke and smells had proved more convincing than Willie’s calling-horn.

Late one afternoon I had a good opportunity to watch some beaver at work. We had crawled cautiously up to a small lake in the vain hope of finding a moose, when we came upon some beaver close to the shore. Their house was twenty or thirty yards away, and they were bringing out a supply of wood, chiefly poplar, for winter food. To and fro they swam, pushing the wood in front of them. Occasionally one would feel hungry, and then he would stop and start eating the bark from the log he was pushing. It made me shiver to watch them lying lazily in that icy water.

I had already stayed longer than I intended, and the day was rapidly approaching when I should have to start down-river. Even the cheerful Willie was getting discouraged, and instead of accounts of the miraculous bags hunters made at the end of their trips, I began to be told of people who were unfortunate enough to go out without anything. I made up my mind to put in the last few days hunting from the Popple Cabin, so one rainy noon, after a morning’s hunt along the river, we shouldered our packs and tramped off to the little cabin from which Bill and I had hunted. Wirre was with us, and we left him to dry out the cabin while we went off to try a late afternoon’s hunt. As we were climbing the hill from which Bill and I used to watch the little pond, Willie caught sight of a moose on the side of a hill a mile away. One look through our field-glasses convinced us it was a good bull. A deep wooded valley intervened, and down into it we started at headlong speed, and up the other side we panted. As we neared where we believed the moose to be, I slowed down in order to get my wind in case I had to do some quick shooting. I soon picked up the moose and managed to signal Willie to stop. The moose was walking along at the edge of the woods somewhat over two hundred yards to our left. The wind was favorable, so I decided to try to get nearer before shooting. It was a mistake, for which I came close to paying dearly; suddenly, and without any warning, the great animal swung into the woods and disappeared before I could get ready to shoot.

Willie had his birch-bark horn with him and he tried calling, but instead of coming toward us, we could hear the moose moving off in the other direction. The woods were dense, and all chance seemed to have gone. With a really good tracker, such as are to be found among some of the African tribes, the task would have been quite simple, but neither Willie nor I was good enough. We had given up hope when we heard the moose grunt on the hillside above us. Hurrying toward the sound, we soon came into more open country. I saw him in a little glade to our right; he looked most impressive as he stood there, nearly nineteen hands at the withers, shaking his antlers and staring at us; I dropped to my knee and shot, and that was the first that Willie knew of our quarry’s presence. He didn’t go far after my first shot, but several more were necessary before he fell. We hurried up to examine him; he was not yet dead, and when we were half a dozen yards away, he staggered to his feet and started for us, but he fell before he could reach us. Had I shot him the first day I might have had some compunction at having put an end to such a huge, handsome animal, but as it was I had no such feelings. We had hunted long and hard, and luck had been consistently against us.

Our chase had led us back in a quartering direction toward camp, which was now not more than a mile away; so Willie went to get Wirre, while I set to work to take the measurements and start on the skinning. Taking off a whole moose hide is no light task, and it was well after dark before we got it off. We estimated the weight of the green hide as well over a hundred and fifty pounds, but probably less than two hundred. We bundled it up as well as we could in some pack-straps, and as I seemed best suited to the task, I fastened it on my back.

The sun had gone down, and that mile back to camp, crawling over dead falls and tripping on stones, was one of the longest I have ever walked. The final descent down the almost perpendicular hillside was the worst. When I fell, the skin was so heavy and such a clumsy affair that I couldn’t get up alone unless I could find a tree to help me; but generally Willie would start me off again. When I reached the cabin, in spite of the cold night-air, my clothes were as wet as if I had been in swimming. After they had taken the skin off my shoulders, I felt as if I had nothing to hold me down to earth, and might at any moment go soaring into the air.

Next morning I packed the skin down to the main camp, about three miles, but I found it a much easier task in the daylight. After working for a while on the skin, I set off to look for a cow moose, but, as is always the case, where they had abounded before, there was none to be found now that we wanted one.

The next day we spent tramping over the barren hillsides after caribou. Willie caught a glimpse of one, but it disappeared into a pine forest before we could come up with it. On the way back to camp I shot a deer for meat on our way down the river.

I had determined to have one more try for a cow moose, and next morning was just going off to hunt some lakes when we caught sight of an old cow standing on the opposite bank of the river about half a mile above us. We crossed and hurried up along the bank, but when we reached the bog where she had been standing she had disappeared. There was a lake not far from the river-bank, and we thought that she might have gone to it, for we felt sure we had not frightened her. As we reached the lake we saw her standing at the edge of the woods on the other side, half hidden in the trees. I fired and missed, but as she turned to make off I broke her hind quarter. After going a little distance she circled back to the lake and went out to stand in the water. We portaged a canoe from the river and took some pictures before finishing the cow. At the point where she fell the banks of the lake were so steep that we had to give up the attempt to haul the carcass out. I therefore set to work to get the skin off where the cow lay in the water. It was a slow, cold task, but finally I finished and we set off downstream, Wirre in one canoe and Willie and myself in the other. According to custom, the moose head was laid in the bow of our canoe, with the horns curving out on either side.

We had been in the woods for almost a month, and in that time we had seen the glorious changes from summer to fall and fall to early winter, for the trees were leafless and bare. Robinson’s lines kept running through my head as we sped downstream through the frosty autumn day:

V
Two Book-Hunters in
South America