The moose is singularly grotesque and awkward to look at.  Why should it stand so high at the shoulders?  Why have so long a head?  Why have no tail to speak of? for in my examination I overlooked it entirely.  Naturalists say it is an inch and a half long.  It reminded me at once of the camelopard, high before and low behind,—­and no wonder, for, like it, it is fitted to browse on trees.  The upper lip projected two inches beyond the lower for this purpose.  This was the kind of man that was at home there; for, as near as I can learn, that has never been the residence, but rather the hunting-ground of the Indian.  The moose will perhaps one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns,—­a sort of fucus or lichen in bone,—­to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!

Here, just at the head of the murmuring rapids, Joe now proceeded to skin the moose with a pocket-knife, while I looked on; and a tragical business it was,—­to see that still warm and palpitating body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe, which was made to hide it.  The ball had passed through the shoulder-blade diagonally and lodged under the skin on the opposite side, and was partially flattened.  My companion keeps it to show to his grandchildren.  He has the shanks of another moose which he has since shot, skinned and stuffed, ready to be made into boots by putting in a thick leather sole.  Joe said, if a moose stood fronting you, you must not fire, but advance toward him, for he will turn slowly and give you a fair shot.  In the bed of this narrow, wild, and rocky stream, between two lofty walls of spruce and firs, a mere cleft in the forest which the stream had made, this work went on.  At length Joe had stripped off the hide and dragged it trailing to the shore, declaring that it weighed a hundred pounds, though probably fifty would have been nearer the truth.  He cut off a large mass of the meat to carry along, and another, together with the tongue and nose, he put with the hide on the shore to lie there all night, or till we returned.  I was surprised that he thought of leaving this meat thus exposed by the side of the carcass, as the simplest course, not fearing that any creature would touch it; but nothing did.  This could hardly have happened on the bank of one of our rivers in the eastern part of Massachusetts; but I suspect that fewer small wild animals are prowling there than with us.  Twice, however, in this excursion I had a glimpse of a species of large mouse.