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The habit of silence essential to the deer-hunter kept its mechanical hold upon his nerves. Only the hand with which he grasped the half-exposed roots of a great sycamore-tree, denuded in some partial caving of the bank long ago, relaxed and trembled slightly.
Finding the fresh track of the deer, he cautiously and noiselessly follows up the trail, keeping a sharp lookout ahead. A practised deer-hunter becomes very skillful and accurate, and the animal is nearly always tracked to discovery, when he is shot.
Over the shoulders of the Kentuckian were suspended, by several straps, pouch, horn, and haversack, and resting upon his toe was the butt of a heavy rifle, the muzzle of which reached to a level with his shoulder. He was a rich Kentucky planter, and known in his native state as a great deer-hunter. Some business or pleasure had brought him to Saint Louis.
He began his day with the dawn when he threw off the frost-coated tarpaulin; the icy water brought him a glow of exhilaration; he drank in the spiced cold air, and there was the spring of the deer-hunter in his step as he went down the slope for his horse. He no longer feared that Silvermane would run away.
Had Frank been an experienced deer-hunter, he would have been very careful not to approach the game in that manner; for a deer, when he finds himself unable to escape, will fight most desperately, and his sharp antlers and hoofs, which will cut like a knife, are weapons not to be despised.
Thus slowly pacing forth his course, with the air of a pilgrim rather than of a deer-hunter, Halbert about the close of the evening regained his paternal tower. The Miller was of manly make, To meet him was na mows; There durst na ten come him to take, Sae noited he their pows. It was after sunset, as we have already stated, when Halbert Glendinning returned to the abode of his father.
They encumbered his flight, however, and he disposed of them, finally, without compunction. Wheeling them into a swamp he left them, where, possibly, they remain to this day, the object of occasional start and wonderment to the stalking deer-hunter. This, says Judge James, "was the last instance of military parade evinced by the General."
He stolidly retraced his way until he was nearly home; then scrambling down rocky slopes he came presently upon a deer-path. All at once, he noticed the footprint of a man in a dank, marshy spot. He stopped and looked hard at it, for he had naturally supposed this path was used only by the woodland gentry. "Some deer-hunter, I reckon," he said. And so he went on.
The most fortunate deer-hunter I have personally known in New England had killed but 960; but in the northern part of the State of New York, a single sportsman is said to have shot 1,500, and this number has been doubtless exceeded by zealous Nimrods of the West. But so far as numbers are concerned, the statistics of the furtrade furnish the most surprising results.
When, later, a Pandit explained to me that in the next two lines the breeze went on "splitting the feathers of the peacock plume on the head of the eager deer-hunter," the thinness of this last conceit disappointed me. I was much better off when I had relied only upon my imagination to complete the verse.
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