292 CRUISINGS IN THE CASCADES 



bullet at all. The joint was dislocated and the skin 

 torn away until the disjointed member hung only 

 by a narrow segment. Then the mystery was 

 deeper than ever. What could possibly have caused 

 this violent and terrible wound? It had been made 

 after I shot, for at that time the agile creature was 

 bounding over logs and through clumps of brush 

 with all the grace and airiness of her sylph-like 

 nature. I turned, took up her back track, and, 

 following it thirty or forty feet, came to a fallen 

 tamarack sapling about six inches in diameter, that 

 laid up about a foot from the ground. The track 

 showed that the poor creature, in one of her frantic 

 leaps, just after being hit, came down with her fore 

 feet on one side of this pole and her hind feet on the 

 other; that one hind foot had slipped on the soft 

 earth and slid under the pole to her knee, and that 

 the next bound had brought it up against the pole 

 in the form of a lever much as a logger would place 

 his handspike under it in attempting to throw it out 

 of his way and the pole, being far too long and 

 heavy to yield to her strength, the leg had been 

 snapped short off. 



I describe this incident merely as one of the many 

 strange and mysterious ones that come under the 

 observation of woodsmen, and not with any desire to 

 give pain to sensitive and sympathetic readers. 



The beautiful animal did not suffer long from this 

 hurt, however, for she was dead when I reached her, 

 within perhaps three or four minutes after I lired 

 the fatal shot. I saved her head and had it mounted 

 and it hangs beside that of the buck whose taking 

 off has been described and whose throat was also 



