DEER AND STILL HUNTERS. 109 



we must regard as one of the most valuable treatises 

 extant upon the forest hunter's art. 



" I have seen deer, " he says, " that I positively knew had 

 no other disturbances than my own hunting, desert entirely 

 the low hills and open canons in which they were keeping 

 before I began to trouble them, shift a thousand feet higher 

 up, keep in the thick chapparal all day, and double their 

 vigilance when they were out of it." " They also learn to run 

 on hearing a noise, without stopping to look back, to keep 

 on running long past the point where you can head them 

 off; to slip away before you get in sight of them, to skulk 

 and hide in thick bush and let you pass them, and a score 

 of other tricks we will notice as we go on." * 



On the other hand, open attacks by hunters aided 

 by hounds, though presumably they might appear to 

 disturb a very much larger area of country, and be 

 brought to the knowledge of a far greater number of 

 animals, seem by no means to create so widespread a 

 feeling of alarm among them generally, as the stealthy 

 attacks of a single still-hunter upon a few for again 

 quoting from Mr. Van Dyke's pages it appears that the 

 common idea that hunters, chasing deer with hounds, 

 drives them away and makes them wilder, is to a great 

 degree erroneous. 



" This may in some places (Mr. Van Dyke thinks) be 

 true. It may also be generally true if swift hounds be used. 

 But there are places where it is not so, and within my 

 observation deer have little fear of slow dogs. Deer that 

 had been made so wild with still-hunting that it was almost 



* The Still-Hunter, by Theodore S. Van Dyke, pp. 27 and 28. (N.B. 

 These facts, though unseen by the hunter would become evident from 

 the trail. It is quite easy to see where a deer has started off with 

 long jumps in a panic, and where it has stopped and stood to look 

 round). 



