Deer- Hunting on the Au Sable. 251 



curious to hear both gentlemen, on returning to camp, protesting 

 that to have shot deer under such circumstances would have been 

 wholly unsportsmanlike. 



It was upon my sixth day, when a dozen deer were hanging in 

 the barn, and I, quite guiltless of the death of even one of them, 

 had gone to the river. The hours passed tediously up to noon, 

 when I heard a splash, and saw a deer take the water three hundred 

 yards or so above me. She was a large doe and came down the 

 middle of the river, swimming rapidly and looking anxiously from 

 side to side. I felt unutterable things, and just as she got abreast 

 of me I brought up my Winchester and fired. She sank, coming up 

 again some little distance down, and floated quietly away out of my 

 sight around the bend. This performance produced a sense of 

 pleasant inflation. All my fears were dispelled, and I felt a keen 

 desire for the presence of others to whom to impart the agreeable 

 fact. It was one of those things about which one always feels as if 

 he could not, unaided, sufficiently gloat upon it. At half-past twelve, 

 the canoe came around the bend, and I prepared to be indifferent, as 

 should become a person who could shoot deer every day if only he 

 were so minded. Strange, I thought, that the legs do not project 



over the side of the canoe, and how is it that At this moment 



the canoe gave a lurch, and I saw young Curtis's coat with painful 

 distinctness lying in the bottom of it, — nothing else. I immediately 

 inferred that he had missed the deer among some drift-logs as he 

 came up. He protested he had not, but agreed to go back and 

 search. I went with him, and just a few yards around the bend we 

 found in the oozy bank tracks which indicated that the animal had 

 fallen to its knees in leaving the water, and up the bank to the top a 

 trail marked with blood. The remarks of Mr. Curtis, though fluent 

 and vigorous, were inadequate to the occasion. I was in a condition 

 of unbounded exasperation. For a little distance through the grass 

 and the bushes the marks could be seen plainly enough, but there 

 they disappeared, and that was the last I saw of my deer. The cap- 

 tain put two dogs out on the trail that afternoon, but the wounded 

 animal had probably died in some dense thicket, for they soon re- 

 turned without having run any great distance. Four fine deer were 

 killed the next day, without any participation upon my part, and in 

 the evening some of us, with lanterns, went down to the river to 



