( AKIAcrs VIRGINIANUS. 133 



affords, works cautious!)- toward it. The branches are reached 

 but no live tiling is seen, and his eyes are bent in other directions 

 when, crash, crash, under his very nose, and he is deluged with 

 a shower of snow that, for the moment, completely blinds him. He 

 may, or he may not, get his eyes open in time to catch a vanish- 

 ing glimpse of the affrighted Deer, and, now that it is too late, 

 discovers the bed of his would-be victim under the fallen tree-top, 

 at his very feet. 



The hunter rarely sees the whole outline of a Deer in still- 

 hunting. The forests are so thick, and the evergreens so loaded 

 with snow, that an object is not commonly visible at any great 

 distance, and a part of the leg or a patch of hair constitute the 

 target usually presented to his eye. He sometimes fires directly 

 at what he sees, and sometimes "allows a trifle" aiming a little 

 ahead or a little behind, as the case maybe. If severely wounded, 

 without being killed outright, the animal is generally left for 

 several hours, or until the next day; for if pursued it would con- 

 tinue to run as long as its strength held out ; while, on the other 

 hand, if left alone it soon lies down and will probably never rise 

 again. Judge Caton says : " But few animals will go so far and 

 so fast, after receiving a mortal wound, as a Virginia Deer," * and 

 I have myself followed a buck, shot through both lungs with a 44 

 calibre rifle-ball, more than a mile and a half through the woods ! 



In localities where Deer are abundant an expert still-hunter 

 frequently kills two or three in a single day, but such hunts are 

 very laborious, for the track often leads many miles, in a tortuous 

 course, over hard-wood ridges, across stretches of spruce and 

 hemlock, and through dense balsam and cedar swamps. It is a 

 long distance to camp, but thitherward, at nightfall, the weary 

 hunter wends his way. His course lies through a swamp in which 

 the evergreens grow so near together that the eye is unable to 

 penetrate farther than a few paces in any direction, and are so 



* Loc. Cit., p. 383. 



