BUCK FE^^E. — MIMIC BATTLES. 61 



AW this was to be doue, it had been explained to me as 

 being the Neophyte,— but at the last the deer itself 

 might fail to perform its part of the drama. There's many 

 a slip, I was told, between a deer and a shot. Sometimes 

 the deer has grown wise through experience, and in its 

 small bi'ain reasons that if a candle explodes and roars and 

 stings the innocent spectator with a stray bu(;k-shot one 

 night, it may do so another night, and is not to be trusted 

 to approach; and the deer betakes it to its legs and shows 

 no globes of tire at all. Bat an unsophisticated deer is very 

 curious, — and. }iossil»ly, would know good and evil, — and 

 upon seeing a briglil light, and nothing more, stares and 

 stands, if he hears no noise and does not smell the foe, 

 until the huntei' approaches to within tifty, forty, thirty 

 feet. Then there is nothing to do but to keep one's nerves 

 steady, silently raise and aim the gun, and pull the trigger. 

 If, however, the shooter is new to the experience, he is 

 likely to be more nei'vous than the deer is, — to forget to 

 shoot, sometimes, or to shake as in an ague tit, and to 

 commit indiscribableblunders,-in other words, to have "the 

 buck fever. " So that, after all, "jacking deer " is not such 

 a one-sided affair as at tirst it would seem to be. 



Meanwhile, we had withdrawn to the hut, and retilled and 

 lighted our pipes. A quartette of us, seated like so man}^ 

 tailors on the blanket-spread couch, were, with joke and 

 laughter and .snatches of song and whistled airs, fighting the 

 mimic battle of "kings" and "queens " and "knaves." 

 Nothing more fearful was done in these battles than tliat 

 "clubs" smashed "hearts," the vulgar " spade " won 



