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He remembered once shooting a big, beautiful, blacktail doe. She had dropped limply in her tracks and lain there, and he had sauntered up and stood looking at her stretched before him. He was out of meat, and the doe meant all that hot venison steaks and rich, brown gravy can mean to a man meat-hungry. While he unsheathed his hunting knife, he gloated over the feast he would have, that night.
"Of course he didn't. Andy hears your gun and he don't inquire further, but hits the first hole he kin crawl into. That's Andy! That's the kind of boy I hev to work for me. All the good ones goes where you're goin', where the grain grows without irrigation and the blacktail deer comes out on the hill and asks yu' to shoot 'em for dinner. Who's ready for the bottom?
At length they stopped one evening at a portage, and Lisle examined the stores. "The food's getting short," he announced. "One or two of you had better take out your rifles the first thing to-morrow, while the rest go fishing. I'll tackle the portage with two packers." He began his work at sunrise the next morning and it was toward evening when Crestwick came back exultant with a blacktail buck.
Buffalo, elk, and antelope, whitetail and blacktail deer, and bighorn sheep swarmed in extraordinary abundance throughout the lands watered by the upper Missouri and the Yellowstone; in their journals the explorers dwell continually on the innumerable herds they encountered while on these plains, both when travelling up-stream and again the following year when they were returning.
They reached the rain-shrouded forests of the coast before cold weather set in, and there they passed the winter; suffering somewhat from the weather, and now and then from hunger, though the hunters generally killed plenty of elk, and deer of a new kind, the blacktail of the Columbia. They Start Eastward Again. In March, 1806, they started eastward to retrace their steps.
"It's Dave Tutt who makes Bowlaigs captive; Dave rounds Bowlaigs up in his infancy one time when he's pesterin' about over in the foothills of the Floridas lookin' for blacktail deer. Dave meets up with Bowlaigs an' the latter's mother who's out, evident, on a scout for grub.
The settlers lived largely on venison during the fall and winter. She had killed dozens of blacktail, an elk or two, and more than once a bear. With a rifle she was a crack shot. But to-day she was not hunting. She moved steadily along the winding creek till she came to a bend in its course. Beyond this a fishing-rod lay in the path.
The pioneers at certain seasons provided for their needs by killing blacktail and salting down the meat. But they were dead shots and expert hunters. The automobile tourists with high-power rifles rush into the hills during the open season and kill male and female without distinction. For every deer killed outright three or four crawl away to die later from wounds.
So was the blacktail, or mule deer, which our adventurers began to find here and there as they gradually worked their way northwestward. So were the coyotes, whose uncanny wailing after nightfall varied the sinister baying of the gray wolves; so were many of the smaller animals, notably the prairie dogs, whose populous villages awakened the lively curiosity of Lewis and Clark.
The foxes did not run so well, and whether they were the little swift, or the big red prairie fox, they were speedily snapped up if the dogs had a fair showing. Once our dogs roused a blacktail buck close up out of the brush coulie where the ground was moderately smooth, and after a headlong chase of a mile they ran into him, threw him, and killed him before he could rise.