122 PRAIRIE AND FOREST. 
half the trouble in his ultimate capture that you would 
have by constantly keeping him on the move. So I prac- 
ticed in this instance; carefully for ten or fifteen minutes 
I watched that he did not leave the cover; then, having 
concluded that he had laid down, I quietly lighted my pipe, 
and dawdled away an hour more. Deeming that I had 
granted sufficient law, I renewed operations and pushed 
forward; the track was very irregular in length of pace 
from where he had reduced his gait to a walk, and several 
times, from want of lifting his feet high enough, he had 
plowed the surface of the snow with his toes. An old 
deer-stalker will know these symptoms; a young one may 
without harm remember them. Having cautiously fol- 
lowed the trail three parts of the way across the cover, and 
almost commenced to think I would have done better by 
waiting half an hour longer, the buck jumped up within 
twenty yards, heading straight from. me, when I gave him 
the contents a second time of the right-hand barrel in the 
back of his head. 
The distance was too great to remove him home that 
day, so, cutting a branch off a willow, I affixed my hand- 
kerchief to it, and left this banner waving to denote pos- 
session, also to furnish a hint to the prairie-wolves that they 
had better steer clear. That night at the tavern bar, in 
the most ostentatious manner, in presence of the assembled 
crowd, I ordered a team to be got ready in the morning to 
bring in the Big Buck; old Leather-stocking, sotto voce, re- 
marking that I had not been reared on the right soil to be 
able to come that game. However, next morning, when I 
arrived with my trophy, the crowd congratulated me, while 
Leather-stocking remarked that he knew not what the world 
was coming to, by G—4d, when a Britisher, with a bird-gun, 
could kill the biggest buck in Illinois. In conclusion, I would 
say that in skinning we found that at the first. shot one grain 
