They returned to the place where the deer had fallen and took up the
trail. It was easy to follow, for the animal had been badly hurt.
Straight down the trail it had run, and sixty yards farther on Ted found
where it had fallen again and thrashed about. The beech brush blended
back into beech forest and the trail Ted followed swerved to within
twenty feet of the valley floor. He found a great puddle of blood where
the deer had fallen a third time.
He marveled. The deer had been down three times in a little more than
three hundred yards and it never should have been able to get up and go
on. But it had gone on and it had also nearly stopped bleeding. From
this point there was only a spot here and there to mark the leaves. Ted
shook his head. If he wasn't seeing this himself, he wouldn't have
believed it. He remembered that a deer is an incredibly tough thing. It
can still run after receiving wounds that would stop a man in his
tracks.
Overrunning the trail, the boy had to stop and circle until he picked
it up again. It was necessary to do this so many times that, by
midafternoon, he was scarcely a mile from the three sycamores. A half
hour later he lost the trail completely; the deer had stopped bleeding.
Ted made a wide circle in an effort to find the trail again, and when he
failed, he made a wider circle. He stopped to think.
He'd have sworn, knowing how hard the deer was hit, that it would never
run five hundred yards. Obviously he had guessed wrong, and what now?
Anything he did would be little better than a shot in the dark, but if
he could help it, he would not leave an injured beast to a lingering,
terrible death. Wounded wild things were apt to seek a haven in
thickets. Perhaps, if he cast back and forth through brush tangles,
Tammie would scent the deer again.
Ted made his way to a grove of scrub hemlock, cut from there to a laurel
thicket and pushed and crawled his way through half a dozen snarls of
beech brush. He knew that he was not going to find the wounded deer and
he sorrowed for the suffering animal. About to drop his hand to Tammie's
head, he found that the collie was no longer beside him.
He was about twenty feet back, dancing excitedly in the trail. His ears
were alert, his eyes happy, and there was a doggy smile on his jaws. He
had a scent, but it was not the scent of a wounded deer. Ted took his
handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to the dog.
"Take it to Al," he ordered quietly. "Take it to Al, Tammie."
Carrying the handkerchief, Tammie streaked into the forest and
disappeared. Ted walked down Coon Valley and waited at the truck. An
hour and a quarter later, no longer carrying the handkerchief, Tammie
joined him. Ted petted him and looked somberly at the forest. He didn't
know where Al was hiding and he didn't want to know.
But Tammie knew.
6