or bad sign, if the horns turn this way or that.  His caribou horns had been gnawed by mice in his wigwam, but he thought that the horns neither of the moose nor of the caribou were ever gnawed while the creature was alive, as some have asserted.  An Indian, whom I met after this at Oldtown, who had carried about a bear and other animals of Maine to exhibit, told me that thirty years ago there were not so many moose in Maine as now; also, that the moose were very easily tamed, and would come back when once fed, and so would deer, but not caribou.  The Indians of this neighborhood are about as familiar with the moose as we are with the ox, having associated with them for so many generations.  Father Rasles, in his Dictionary of the Abenaki Language, gives not only a word for the male moose, (aianbe) and another for the female, (herar,) but for the bone which is in the middle of the heart of the moose (!), and for his left hind-leg.

There were none of the small deer up there; they are more common about the settlements.  One ran into the city of Bangor two years before, and jumped through a window of costly plate glass, and then into a mirror, where it thought it recognized one of its kind, and out again, and so on, leaping over the heads of the crowd, until it was captured.  This the inhabitants speak of as the deer that went a-shopping.  The last-mentioned Indian spoke of the lunxus or Indian devil, (which I take to be the cougar, and not the Gulo luscus,) as the only animal in Maine which man need fear; it would follow a man, and did not mind a fire.  He also said, that beavers were getting to be pretty numerous again, where we went, but their skins brought so little now that it was not profitable to hunt them.

I had put the ears of our moose, which were ten inches long, to dry along with the moose-meat over the fire, wishing to preserve them; but Sabattis told me that I must skin and cure them, else the hair would all come off.  He observed, that they made tobacco-pouches of the skins of their ears, putting the two together inside to inside.  I asked him how he got fire; and he produced a little cylindrical box of friction-matches.  He also had flints and steel, and some punk, which was not dry; I think it was from the yellow birch.  “But suppose you upset, and all these and your powder get wet.”  “Then,” said he, “we wait till we get to where there is some fire.”  I produced from my pocket a little vial, containing matches, stoppled water-tight, and told him, that, though we were upset, we should still have some dry matches; at which he stared without saying a word.