be the big bull of Mo. I could see that Elias was not very keen about trying for him, but as the footprints led straight into a small thick wood which we could hunt up-wind, I determined to have another try for him, and hunted through the wood with extraordinary care and deliberation. After some time we took the tracks out into an open fjeld where there was no covert for miles, and Elias looked at me as much as to say, “ I told you so.” Half an hour later, whilst pegging away over the bare fjeld to make up for lost time, Pasop became interested in a scent which seemed very sweet to him. But as no tracks were visible, and the ground was utterly bare in the direction of the wind for a long distance, and the country too high, as I thought, for elk at that season, I suggested to Elias that it might be a fox or a stray reindeer that he winded. Many Norse elk-hounds will take up and run a scent of either of these, and I have known them draw up to a capercaillie; but Pasop was not addicted to small game and Elias had the greatest faith in his steadiness. So we spied the ground up-wind with our glasses, and could find no place where even a calf could hide, and after going half a mile, against my own judg¬ ment, I wanted to resume our original plan as the morning was getting on. Elias, however, persuaded me to try a little further, and about a mile from the place where Pasop had first got wind I saw the ears of a cow elk lying clown behind a big stone, I knew the bull could not be far off, and crawled on alone, keeping the stone between me and the elk’s head and spying every bit of fresh ground as it came in view. When about a hundred yards from the elk I saw that her calf was lying by her side, and that I should not much longer be able to keep both their heads covered. When only twenty or thirty yards off, the calf saw me and jumped tip, and knowing that the bull, if in sight, would be off at once, I jumped up and came in sight of the top of a little dell full of birch scrub, into which the cow and calf bolted. Then a glimpse of horns showed between the bushes, and I had to take a snapshot as one does at a rabbit among furze bushes. A crash told me that something was down, and there stone dead I found to my great joy the big bull of Mo, which had for so many years defeated the cunning of better hunters than myself.
His head though carrying eighteen points was, however, very disappoint¬ ing, as the horns had been going back for years, and the body was so thin and so far advanced in the rut that it smelt ranker than any I had ever killed. I cannot be sure that this was the same bull of which so many tales had been told, and whose shed horns, figured in the Zoological Society’s Proceedings, 1903, p. 142, arc the largest I have seen from Scandinavia. But as far as I could learn the big bull of Mo was never seen again, and I much fear that such elk are now no longer living in those parts of Norway. This was a capital finish to the best season I ever had, but not my last in Elias’s company. For, before leaving Norway, I secured a number of excellent rights in upper Namdalen, and arranged that Elias and his brother Thomas should meet me there the following year, at a farm called Linsetmo, where we got comfortable quarters.
When we arrived there at the end of August, 1895, Elias gave us good prospects of sport, but was in despair at the loss of his favourite old Pasop, who had been lost in the winter; and was supposed to have been killed
