AND OTHER HUNTING ADVENTURES. 281 



the game passes at intervals while moving from one 

 feeding ground to another. In such localities a deer 

 may be seen at a considerable distance, and shots 

 are often taken at 150 to 200 yards. 



I remember one of my first trips to these hunting 

 grounds, many years ago, before I knew how to 

 sneak on the game, and before I had gained sufficient 

 control of my nerves to be able to stop a deer while 

 vaulting over a fallen tree trunk, turning suddenly 

 from left to right and vice versa, as a wary old buck 

 will frequently do when fleeing from a hunter. I 

 stopped at a hotel in Merrill, on the Wisconsin 

 Valley Division of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. 

 Paul Railway, and, having learned something of 

 the nature of the surrounding country by a hasty 

 tramp in the afternoon, I got up the next morning 

 and started at four o'clock to what seemed to be a 

 favorable piece of ground. By daylight I was on 

 the margin of a large slash that, since being chopped 

 off, had burned over and then grown up to brush 

 and weeds. There were many blackened trunks of 

 trees lying everywhere, and some still standing that 

 had been scorched and roasted in the great conflagra- 

 tion that had swept over the country, but had not 

 been entirely consumed. These latter, stripped of 

 bark and limbs, looked like gloomy monuments 

 placed there to mark the resting places of their 

 hapless fellows, and the whole aspect of the land- 

 scape in the gray of dawn was weird and chilly in 

 the extreme. There was scarcely a breath of air 

 stirring, and by listening intently I could hear the 

 rustling of dry leaves and the occasional snapping 

 of twigs in various directions, that indicated the 



