seen nothing except doom for the black buck. But the buck had a wild
wisdom all his own, and thanks to that and to the falling snow, he had
escaped his pursuers. If his tracks were covered up by the snow, he
might still live to reign once more in Bennett's Woods.
"We'll have to do our best anyhow," Gramps said. "If that pack finds him
first, what's left won't be worth our carrying home."
Gramps' words were like an electric shock to Bud. He had thought of the
pack and its pursuit of the buck, but it had not occurred to him that
the wild dogs were competing with him and Gramps on equal terms. At the
thought of the black buck as a piece of meat that happened to be charged
with life, a prize contested for by Gramps and a pack of wild dogs, Bud
could hardly keep from retching. He felt as if he had been swept back to
the grim, loveless world he had known before he had come to the
Bennetts'.
"I think you're right," Bud finally managed to answer.
"Let's get moving, then," Gramps said, and started off in the
semidarkness with Bud behind him.
The buck had continued to run, twenty feet to the leap, even after the
dogs had finally left his tracks the afternoon before. But the snow had
shifted so much during the night that the places where he had landed
were now so vaguely defined that Gramps and Bud's pace was agonizingly
slow. They must go faster than this, Bud thought as he reached down for
a handful of snow to cool his burning mouth. If it would mean the end of
his good fortune if Gramps killed the buck, it would be even worse if
the wild dogs killed him, for then Gramps' dream would be destroyed,
too.
Restraining an impulse to rush past Gramps and find the black buck in a
burst of speed, Bud began to watch Gramps and he grew less desperate as
he saw the old man in action. The sullen light was too dim to see from
one set of the black buck's tracks to the next, but Gramps never failed
to know in which direction the buck had leaped. Gramps seemed to be
thinking not as Delbert Bennett but as the black buck himself.
Perhaps the black buck enjoyed matching wits with hunters just as Old
Yellowfoot seemed to, perhaps because he, too, was sure he could escape
them. But wild dogs were different. The black buck had never run as far
or as wildly with Gramps and Bud following him as he had even after the
wild pack had stopped following. Plainly he knew what wild dogs could do
and he was terrified.
The night lifted so slowly that its rise was almost imperceptible, and
when dawn finally came, the clouds remained so dark that it did not seem
to be day at all. But when he sighted on a tree about three hundred
yards away and could see a knothole over the sights, Bud knew there was
at least shooting light.
They were about a mile and a half from where they had returned to track
the black buck. Where the tracks dipped into a gully whose only growth
was wind-whipped aspens, the buck had slowed from a frantic run to a
fast walk. Now that they were closer together and the light was
stronger, the tracks were easier to follow. They turned straight up the
gully toward the top of the hill.
Gramps halted and Bud stopped behind him without speaking. Bud's
desperate urge to hurry was gone, for by now he knew better than to try
to do in haste what had to be done slowly. Gramps had performed a
miracle in bringing them this far, and Bud realized that such mastery of
the wilds was the result of love for wild places and wild things as well
as skill and the desire to conquer.
Then Gramps spoke, "He knows nothing's on his track any more and he
thinks he's safe for a while. He's heading toward that patch of hemlocks
on top of the hill because he's been pushed hard and needs a rest, and
he can rest safely there. He's working back in the direction of the farm
because there'll be more snow and he might have to get out of the hills
in a hurry; he can do it by going down any of those deep gullys. But he
knows those critters as well as I do, and he's going to be a mighty
spooky buck until he's shaken that pack. He never was much afraid of us.
But he's afraid of them."
"Will the dogs be back?" Bud's voice shook.
Gramps said grimly, "If they don't come, it's the first pack ever got on
game and left it. They can't have that buck. I've marked him. Come on."
Leaving the tracks of the black buck, Gramps went straight across the
gully, fought halfway through a thigh-deep drift and halted. Bud looked
up in alarm, but there wasn't the terrible wheezing and the anguished
fight for breath that there had been when Gramps suffered his attacks.
His face was streaked with perspiration but its color was normal.
He had only stopped to rest, and after a moment he broke through the
drift and quartered up the slope. Bud felt uneasily that he ought to be
taking his turn breaking trail, but he knew better than to offer. It was
Gramps' hunt and the buck was Gramps' prize. And only Gramps knew what
to do.
It was hard to imagine these hills as they were in the full bloom of
summer, when anxious does hovered there near spotted fawns hidden in
thickets and summer-sluggish bucks, their antlers velvet-sheathed, moved
out of the way as placidly as grazing cattle. In the summer, too, grouse
and wild turkeys brought their downy young to feed there.
Now in the stormy depths of winter the hills looked like a desert of
snow, although not all the wild life had fled. Cottontail rabbits
huddled in their burrows and snowshoe hares crept about in the thickets.
No doubt foxes and weasels were sheltering there from the storm and
probably a few grouse and turkeys were still on the hills, too. But not
even the track of a mouse could be seen on the virgin snow.
Bud glanced toward the valley and could see only a part of the way down
the slope through the falling snow. There was life in abundance down
there and for a moment he wished he were out of these hills where there
seemed to be nothing but snow and a grim determination to end the black
buck's life.
After Gramps had stopped to rest two more times, they broke over the
crest of the hill. They traveled faster now, for although the snow was
as deep as ever, the going was downhill. It was like coming out of the
desert into an oasis when a grove of hemlocks loomed ahead. The hemlocks
were partly covered with snow but their green needles were visible.
They looked like Christmas trees decorated with great puffs of cotton.
Gramps entered the hemlocks very slowly, with his rifle half raised, and
Bud almost hoped they would find the black buck in the grove and put an
end to this almost unbearable uncertainty. But all they found, deep in
the hemlocks, was a bed in which the weary buck had finally lain down.
Apparently he had left it shortly before Gramps and Bud had returned to
following his tracks that morning, for very little snow covered the
tracks leading away.
When they came to the bed, Gramps stopped and said to Bud, "He's going
to have himself a feed of beech nuts. Then he'll mosey down the hilltop
to see if anything is on his trail. If he finds nothing, pretty soon
he'll go back to the valley. He's afraid of this snow."
They came to a grove of gray-trunked beech trees so massive that they
seemed impregnable to the wind and storm. Gramps and Bud were still a
hundred yards away when they saw a pile of leaves freshly pawed through
the snow and knew that the buck had been scraping for beech nuts. These
tiny nuts came down like hail when the first frost opened their green
pods, and there had been a great harvest of them that year.
Swiftly Gramps approached the place where the buck had been pawing, for
the giant beech trees were widely separated and there was no brush to
obscure the view. If the black buck was in the grove, they would see
him. When they came to the scraped leaves, Gramps stopped again.
From where he stood the tracks of the wild dogs could be seen leading
out of the beech grove and joining those of the black buck.
Gramps made a sound that was half a gasp and half a growl, and without
looking back, began to move with giant strides along the mingled tracks.
Bud hung back for a second. He had hunted and fished with Gramps
hundreds of times, but he had never seen him react this way. Usually
Gramps approached his quarry eagerly, but with a kind of reverence, too.
Now Gramps seemed to have become a ferocious killer for whom the game
was no longer a sport. Bud could only follow Gramps numbly, but it
seemed to him that it had only become a question of whether Gramps or
the wild dogs would kill the black buck first.
The buck was again making great leaps as the pack coursed him. Bud did
not dare talk to Gramps, but he knew that no deer could maintain such a
furious pace for long. And the longer-winded wild dogs could go on
indefinitely.
Two miles after the pack had taken up the chase again, Gramps and Bud
came upon the place where the dogs had first caught up with their
quarry, and the trampled snow made it easy to reconstruct the scene.
Pressed to his limit, the black buck had backed his haunches against a
tangled windfall and waited with lowered antlers as the pack came on.
The dogs had rushed and feinted, hoping to draw the buck out and make
him expose his vulnerable flanks and hocks.
"Look!" Bud said, when he saw a patch of blood thinly covered by new
snow.
"That ain't the black buck's blood," Gramps said. "If it was he never
would have got out of here alive. He's hooked one of the dogs. They're
not as anxious as they were."
It was true, Bud decided as he and Gramps raced on. The buck was still
running hard, but he was no longer taking the same mighty leaps. No
doubt that was partly because he was tired, but he had also taught the
pack to respect him. Although they could have closed in on him, they had
held off for another two and a half miles.
Then, on the rim of a shallow gully, the dogs had come forward with a
determined rush. But the buck had backed up against three small trees
whose trunks formed a triangle and held them off. There was no blood
here, but when the buck had left, his leaps had been very short.
"He ain't going much farther," Gramps said grimly. "And he'll try to get
back into the valleys where the snow ain't as deep. Come on. Hagen's
Flat's the place he'll head for."
Gramps left the trail to quarter down the slope. Bud followed, not sure
whether this was the right tactic, but not daring to question it. Gramps
led them back down the snowy lifeless slope, and they ran on and on
until Bud was sure they would run out of this world and into the next.
When they came to the near side of a valley that sloped downward, they
saw the black buck at bay across the valley.
This time there was no shelter for his haunches, and his feet were no
longer nimble as the pack rushed him. The dogs were as big as wolves and
determined to kill their quarry without getting hurt themselves. Two of
the four wild dogs lunged at the black buck's haunches. But when he
whirled around to confront them, they danced away and the other two dogs
rushed in.
Bud was looking on frozen with horror when the sudden, sharp crack of
Gramps' rifle startled him out of his trance. It was too far for any
marksman who had been running, and he missed. The dogs turned to run and
Gramps shot again, missing this time, too.
For a short time the black buck stayed where he was. Then he turned to
go on, but his steps were very slow and very tired. He stumbled and
almost fell. When he came to a drift so deep that the snow reached his
shoulders, he stopped, too exhausted to move. He gave no sign of fear
when Gramps and Bud came up to him. There was a serenity and a dignity
about him, as if, having done his best and fought his hardest, he could
do no more and was prepared for whatever he had to face.
As he looked at the buck there in the snowdrift, Bud thought of that
summer day so long ago when the black buck had been a tiny fawn in his
arms. The fawn had given Bud the courage to face life during those first
days at Bennett's Farm and now what Bud had learned then was reconfirmed
in the grown buck's quiet resignation to whatever fate had in store for
him. Bud knew that he could fondle the buck now if he wanted to. The
buck had no strength left to resist and his great antlers were as
useless as those on the mounted head in the Bennetts' living room.
Then there was a click as Gramps slipped the catch of his rifle from
safe to fire. Gramps had his prize. The black buck was less than two
yards away from him, and he couldn't miss. Bud waited for a shot, but
none came.
"Kite down to the barn and fetch the toboggan and a good strong hank of
rope, Bud," Gramps said finally. "I'll wait here and see if those
critters come back. I hope they do. But even if they don't, now that we
know where they are, we'll get 'em on this snow."
* * * * *
Outside the wind howled and the snow swept down. But the kitchen stove
radiated warmth to every corner of the room. It even seemed to warm his
heart, Bud thought, although he knew that couldn't be.
"You're sure he'll be all right?" he asked Gramps.
"Dead sure," Gramps said. "He couldn't even wiggle when we tied him on
the toboggan, but he'll be full of beans in a few days. Time deer season
ends, he'll have enough hay and grain in him so he'll be able to make
his way back into Bennett's Woods." Gramps chuckled. "You 'n' me will
just open that box stall and watch him kite out."
"Aren't you sorry?" Bud asked.
"Heck no," Gramps said. "He'll carry a bigger rack than ever next year,
and it'll be bigger still the year after."
=Transcriber's Notes:=
hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in the original
Page 97, horses in the barn ==> horses in the barn.
Page 182/183, a threat ening forefoot ==> a threatening forefoot
Page 190, Gramps asked ==> Gramps asked.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Black Fawn, by James Arthur Kjelgaard