CHAPTER XXII. 

 ^ Two Cases of Buck Fever. 



THAVE heard many hunters say that they had never had a 

 case of buck fever, and that they could shoot at a deer with 

 as little emotion under all circumstances as they could at a 

 target. Now this is not the case with me, for the conditions 

 under which I am working makes all the difference imaginable 

 with my nervous system. I never saw but one place that I did not 

 get the buck fever when deer hunting and that was in Trinity and 

 Humboldt counties, California. There I saw deer so thick and 

 tame that it was no more exciting than it would be to go into a 

 drove of sheep in a pasture and shoot sheep. If by chance you 

 failed to hit the deer the first shot it was only a matter of a few 

 minutes . when you would have another opportunity to kill your 

 deer. So there was no cause to get the fever, but such has not 

 been the case in Eastern States, for many years at least. 



About 1880, a man by the name of Corwin and I were camping 

 on the Jersey Shore turnpike in Pennsylvania. We had just gone 

 into camp and as I usually make it a point to first get plenty of 

 wood cut for the camp at night, so that when I come home in the 

 evening I will not have to go out and cut wood, 1 had been cut- 

 ting wood and fixing up all day until four o'clock in the after- 

 noon, when I suggested to Mr. Corwin that we go out and see if 

 we could find some signs and locate the deer so that we would 

 know where to look for them early the next morning. We fol- 

 lowed down a ridge for some distance without seeing any signs 

 ' of deer but about the time that it was getting dark so that we 

 could not see very good and we were about to go to camp, we 

 came onto a trail of a number of deer. As it was so dark we 

 left the trail and went to camp being careful not to start or alarm 

 the deer. The next morning when we got up we found that a snow 

 had fallen of some 8 or 10 inches and knowing that this snow would 



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