184 Tue Aroostook Woops. 

and saw he had turned back toward his sleeping chance. 
Pretty well assured this walking back again was curiosity, and 
that he evidently would return to this course, I sat down a little 
up the ridge in a thicket and took the chances of waiting for 
him. Presently far away I saw him through the open growth 
coming back with an easy gait, now satisfied the way was 
clear and that nothing was following him. Waiting until he 
was nearly opposite, one shot was fired, and he dropped in 
his tracks. 
To get a deer in this manner, in the proper season when 
they are fat and fine eating, is, we claim, the most sportsman- 
like and the most pleasurable, satisfactory way. But to kill 
them late in the winter, and even toward spring, when they 
become miserably poor from not being able to range about 
through the deep and crusty snow, often four and five feet 
deep in Aroostook, seems most too cruel and must prove to 
be really unsatisfactory when they come to eat the meat. 
When a rain comes upon these deep snows, wetting down 
three or four inches, then a still, freezing night, a crust is 
formed which bears up the pot hunter on his snow-shoes upon 
the top of it, while the deer with his sharp pointed feet, 
punches through at each jump. They are then started from 
their yard, or the few well trodden paths, and their first jumps 
are high and wild, being frightened fearfully by the yells of 
the crust hunters. They sink deep in the snow at each jump ; 
the sharp crust cuts like a knife, first chafing off the hair 
from the legs, then the flesh is cut, torn, and bleeding, and 
when they can go no further, they turn meekly toward their 
pursuers, and those eyes, so almost human, seem to ask plead- 
ingly for their life. This way of hunting them is cruel and 
is not as sportsmen do; and there are but few extenuating 
