82 CHAPTER XII. 



I remember when I was a boy going to school I used to play 

 "rooster fight," a game in which two adversaries put their shoulders 

 together and each tried by main strength to push the other back. The 

 one giving ground was defeated. This seemed to be about the program 

 for the stags, substituting heads for shoulders. 



Although I saw them make lunges at each other with their needle- 

 pointed antlers, such severe treatment rarely seemed necessary. Two 

 stags met, encountered, did each his best to push the other stag, one 

 gave back and loped away to leave the other master of the field and 

 head of his transitory household. 



I would have been content to watch the deer longer, but John, 

 feeling sure they were not for us, because without intent to return to 

 our side of the land, wanted to move on that he might give me a 

 shot somewhere else. I knew what was in the big fellow's mind. 

 This was the third day I had been deer stalking with him. Once I 

 had broken a beast's leg, once I had missed (the day with the 

 telescope), and on this third one the whole desire of his heart was 

 to bring me close enough to a stag for a shot. 



We covered a vast amount of ground this day, as we walked rapidly 

 and only paused for a few moments to lunch, so that about an hour 

 before sunset unchecked, except where we had once stalked to a 

 vantage point near two hinds hoping there might be a stag near we 

 came in sight of another large herd of deer. I counted 120. There 

 were probably more. 



There were two or three good stags in this lot, but they were out 

 upon what looked like a perfectly flat and level plain and the chances 

 of approaching them although the wind, which had been blowing 

 wrongly, turned almost at the moment we first saw the deer until 

 it was quite from them to us seemed small. 



After an examination of the ground through his telescope, which 

 consumed a full fifteen minutes of the precious daylight left to us, 

 John began to stalk; a stalk which was to continue for over three 

 miles, through little depressions, along small burns, in them, over 

 them and by them, to a scene at last like this : Two hot, perspiring 

 men, one a black-browed, brawny Scotchman in tweeds; the other, the 

 American who writes this ; behind them a third figure, the gillie 

 Duncan. The two first lying flat-spread in the grass of a little round 



