THE SENSES OF THE GAME AND HUNTER. 47 



hand. They may also catch the snort or bleat of a 

 deer. They should by all means be cultivated. 



But your main reliance must be your eyes. And 

 these should be of the first class. If you are near- 

 sighted or weak-sighted you may as well give up all 

 hope of being anything like an expert. You may 

 be a good shot at the target and see very well with 

 glasses, but you will lack that quickness, comprehen- 

 siveness, and acuteness of sight that is indispensable 

 to success. A deer hanging up in market, standing 

 in a park, or stuffed in a museum is one thing. But 

 in the ground where he is generally found, whether 

 feeding, standing up or lying down, he is quite 

 another. This is the reason why all pictures are mis- 

 leading. A deer as he appears about five sixths of 

 the time in his native home would make an almost 

 invisible point on a two-by-four-foot canvas. Not only 

 his smallness but his varying color and shape in 

 different lights and positions, the fact that one sel- 

 dom sees the whole of the body at once and sees it 

 then only on a dim, perhaps dark, background, make 

 him one of the hardest of all objects to catch with the 

 eyes. Nothing in the whole line of hunting is so im- 

 portant as to see the deer before he sees you; and 

 there is scarcely anything else so hard to do. In this 

 more than in almost any other one thing lies the 

 secret of the old and practical still-hunter's success. 

 Sometimes a dim blur in a thicket; sometimes a small 

 spot of brown or gray or yellow or red or white or 

 nearly black far away on a hillside or ridge; some- 

 times a dark gray or brownish patch among tree- 

 trunks or logs of the same color; sometimes only a 

 pair of slender legs, looking like dead sticks beneath 

 a huge fallen tree; a few tines looking like dead 



