In the midst of their conversation, Joe suddenly appealed to me to know how long Moosehead Lake was.

Meanwhile, as we lay there, Joe was making and trying his horn, to be ready for hunting after midnight.  The St. Francis Indian also amused himself with sounding it, or rather calling through it; for the sound is made with the voice, and not by blowing through the horn.  The latter appeared to be a speculator in moose-hides.  He bought my companion’s for two dollars and a quarter, green.  Joe said that it was worth two and a half at Oldtown.  Its chief use is for moccasins.  One or two of these Indians wore them.  I was told, that, by a recent law of Maine, foreigners are not allowed to kill moose there at any season; white Americans can kill them only at a particular season, but the Indians of Maine at all seasons.  The St. Francis Indian accordingly asked my companion for a wighiggin, or bill, to show, since he was a foreigner.  He lived near Sorel.  I found that he could write his name very well, Tahmunt Swasen.  One Ellis, an old white man of Guilford, a town through which we passed, not far from the south end of Moosehead, was the most celebrated moose-hunter of those parts.  Indians and whites spoke with equal respect of him.  Tahmunt said, that there were more moose here than in the Adirondack country in New York, where he had hunted; that three years before there were a great many about, and there were a great many now in the woods, but they did not come out to the water.  It was of no use to hunt them at midnight,—­they would not come out then.  I asked Sabattis, after he came home, if the moose never attacked him.  He answered, that you must not fire many times so as to mad him.  “I fire once and hit him in the right place, and in the morning I find him.  He won’t go far.  But if you keep firing, you mad him.  I fired once five bullets, every one through the heart, and he did not mind ’em at all; it only made him more mad.”  I asked him if they did not hunt them with dogs.  He said, that they did so in winter, but never in the summer, for then it was of no use; they would run right off straight and swiftly a hundred miles.

Another Indian said, that the moose, once scared, would run all day.  A dog will hang to their lips, and be carried along till he is swung against a tree and drops off.  They cannot run on a “glaze,” though they can run in snow four feet deep; but the caribou can run on ice.  They commonly find two or three moose together.  They cover themselves with water, all but their noses, to escape flies.  He had the horns of what he called “the black moose that goes in low lands.”  These spread three or four feet.  The “red moose” was another kind, “running on mountains,” and had horns which spread six feet.  Such were his distinctions.  Both can move their horns.  The broad flat blades are covered with hair, and are so soft, when the animal is alive, that you can run a knife through them.  They regard it as a good