THE FIRST SIGHT OF GAME. 93 



nothing but running shots, but will get only very long 

 and bad ones even of those. 



Half an hour more brings you in sight of a piece of 

 low ground along a creek. And here a slight move- 

 ment in some brush some two hundred yards away 

 arrests your eye. 



Drop at once out of its sight and see what it is. 

 In a moment two delicate gray ears appear above the 

 brush, followed by the head and slim, graceful neck 

 of a fawn. 



Pshaw! Only a fawn! Surely no sportsman ever 

 butchers a little baby-deer. 



No; not with the pen. It is always that everlast- 

 ing "old buck," the biggest, oldest, fattest, and 

 heaviest ever seen. He never weighs under two hun- 

 dred and fifty pounds, dressed, and never flourishes 

 less than seven or eight tines on his horns. Such a 

 number of these fall annually before the unerring 

 quill-shots of our country that I have at times felt in- 

 clined, in the interests of natural history, to offer a 

 reward for any really reliable information about the 

 killing of a small doe or a fawn. 



The idea that a fawn is necessarily easy to kill is 

 the offspring of an ignorant head. The spotted fawn 

 generally is, and few sportsmen ever kill one if they 

 can see exactly what it is. But when seven or eight 

 months old a fawn can often slip through the fingers 

 of skill and experience in a style so deeply impressive 

 that the older one grows in experience (with the rifle 

 instead of the pen) the more his respect for a fawn in- 

 creases. Fawns are wilder to-day than full-grown 

 deer were twenty years ago; they grow still wilder 

 with a little hunting ; and they are always wild enough 



