By far the best place for calling, if one is in a moose country, is from a canoe on some quiet lake or river.  A spot is selected midway between two open shores, near together if possible.  On whichever side the bull answers, the canoe is backed silently away into the shadow against the opposite bank; and there the hunters crouch motionless till their game shows himself clearly in the moonlight on the open shore.

If there is no water in the immediate vicinity of the hunting ground, then a thicket in the midst of an open spot is the place to call.  Such spots are found only about the barrens, which are treeless plains scattered here and there throughout the great northern wilderness.  The scattered thickets on such plains are, without doubt, the islands of the ancient lakes that once covered them.  Here the hunter collects a thick nest of dry moss and fir tips at sundown, and spreads the thick blanket that he has brought on his back all the weary way from camp; for without it the cold of the autumn night would be unendurable to one who can neither light a fire nor move about to get warm.  When a bull answers a call from such a spot he will generally circle the barren, just within the edge of the surrounding forest, and unless enraged by jealousy will seldom venture far out into the open.  This fearfulness of the open characterizes the moose in all places and seasons.  He is a creature of the forest, never at ease unless within quick reach of its protection.

An exciting incident happened to Mitchell, my Indian guide, one autumn, while hunting on one of these barrens with a sportsman whom he was guiding.  He was moose calling one night from a thicket near the middle of a narrow barren.  No answer came to his repeated calling, though for an hour or more he had felt quite sure that a bull was 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.