56 CHAPTER VIII. 



Then I gave the final squeeze to the trigger and my second Scotch 

 stag was out of action. 



This fellow never moved an inch. Just fell over dead, shot through 

 the body a short distance back of the heart, a little high. That tiny 

 .280 hollow point, copper tube bullet had done its work. Later when 

 I examined this stag I found the point where the bullet had entered 

 impossible of discovery from the outside, except by investigation con- 

 ducted with a sharp lead pencil, but there was no such difficulty en- 

 countered in finding the traces of the missile on the other side; the 

 one farthest from me when I shot. There a hole which you could 

 scarcely cover with the palm of your hand with the fingers extended, 

 marked not where the bullet had gone out, but where the explosive 

 effect of that copper tube missile had worked its destructive way. 



It is a most enlightening thing to see how these little bullets would 

 set up explosive action inside of the body of a beast in a way to 

 make one think a small dynamite cartridge had taken the place of 

 the bullet. 



Well, anyway, the stag fell at the shot, and the other two shootable 

 ones, not being quite sure of where the enemy lay, started directly 

 toward me, running at a good gait. They came but a short distance 

 and then turned to enter a ravine which ran up the hill to the right. 

 As they turned I let shot number two go at the larger of them. 



The bullet hit him as he was in the air. He partly turned before 

 he struck the ground and instead of landing on his feet he landed on 

 his shoulder, his legs having doubled under him. Then he slid a little 

 way down the hill, and swung while sliding until he commenced to roll 

 over and over and over down a rock slide, not fetching up until he 

 had slid and rolled a hundred feet. 



He too, never kicked, being stone dead, apparently, from the moment 

 the shot struck him. The bullet had gone in about the center of the 

 body just back of the heart. The third stag running up the hill, had 

 to be in sight for perhaps another fifty yards. I swung the rifle on 

 him, and then said to myself, "Oh, two stags at one stalk are certainly 

 enough for any man;" and I did not fire. 



After Sandy and Duncan, the gillie who was with us that day, had 

 given the necessary attention to the stags, we sat down about half 

 past two and ate our lunch. It was then that the fiercest storm of 



