A DAY IN THE TABLE-LANDS. 177 



as it rises and all striking the ground, not one after the 

 other, but all at once, not with a touch as do the feet 

 of the white-tailed or Virginia deer, but with a violent 

 blow that sends the animal three or four feet in air in 

 a twinkling. Though this is a tiresome gait, this deer 

 will hold it with surprising speed for half a mile or 

 even a mile or more. All ground is about alike to 

 these deer, and either up or down hill, across gullies, 

 over rocks, among boulders, through brush, or along 

 steep hill-sides, they can accomplish a hundred per 

 cent more of disappearance per second than any other 

 animal that lives. 



Owing to the entire absence of persecution in the 

 past and the comparatively small amount to which 

 they are subjected now, these deer are mere block- 

 heads compared with those of the Eastern woods, 

 whose ancestors have been harried until wildness be- 

 comes a second nature transmissible to progeny, and 

 whose natural wildness thus acquired has, from the 

 spotted baby-jacket upward, been kept at the finest 

 point of cultivation by the incessant crack of the still- 

 hunter's rifle. Nevertheless they are wild enough by 

 nature to make some care necessary; they become 

 wild surprisingly quick when hunted a little, and even 

 with the tamest of them the most scientific hunting is 

 the most profitable. I shall therefore adhere to my 

 general plan and consider them as if all very wild. 



The table-land we shall try to-day is quite bare in 

 places; in other places it is covered with a dark cedar- 

 like brush from waist-high to as high as your head. 

 Here and there run valleys from fifty to four hundred 

 feet deep. Some are narrow at the bottom; others are 

 two hundred yards or more in width. Some are half 

 a mile long; others are several miles long. All of 



