THE OREGON SPORTSMAN 181 
THE FEVER 
By Bo B. Foster, McMinnville, Oregon 
been my luck to have a fishing and hunting trip, and the older 
I get, the worse the fever grows. My father was a great hand 
to fish and hunt, so I think it is partly hereditary; but, just the same, 
about April 1 I have an attack, and when the deer season opens, I 
have another; then October 1 I have it again. 
In the summer of 1903 I was working on a farm about three miles 
from town, putting up hay.- I was then 16 years old and the fever 
struck me. It was about 10 A. M. and about 90 in the shade, and 
that hay was awfully heavy. The more I thought about the moun- 
tains, the heavier it got, so I stuck the pitchfork into a cock of hay 
and did not even go to the house and tell them, but hit for town. 
I saw my brother C. and a friend of ours, and the result was 
two more cases of fever. There is but one cure, so the next morning 
we packed the old black mare and hit the road. We went out the 
old Goucher Road to the head of Testament Creek and took the trail 
past the old Gortner place down to Rainy Camp. 
We hunted and fished for three or four days; no deer and not 
very many fish, so we decided to come back to the Gortner place and 
try our luck, 
Every one who has hunted on the Nestucca River knows how thick 
the fog can get in that canyon. It was foggy the next morning, but 
we were up early and waited until the fog began to rise, then 
started out. C. went southwest and D. and I to the north. We had 
gone about 300 yards from camp when a yearling buck jumped out 
from behind some brush, and we could just see his back and head 
when he came above the fern. He made about five or six jumps when 
we both shot, and we did not see him after that so hurried up there 
—no deer. He had been running between two logs, which we could 
not see for the fern, and we both shot into a log. We both indulged 
in a little profanity, possibly more than that. We cussed that log 
till the fern won’t even grow around it any more. 
We went on about five or six hundred yards and heard an awful 
bombardment in the direction C. had taken, seventeen shots as we 
counted, and I think we missed some. We went on into a canyon 
and it looked awful brushy, so we got out on a log that stuck up 
above the brush and watched a long ridge that ran clear to the river 
and was pretty open. We had been watching about a half hour, when 
the sun began to hit the low points, and I saw a deer get up away 
down the canyon. We watched him a few minutes and another one 
got up close by, and then another that looked twice as large as either 
of the others. They were too far away to shoot at from where we 
were, as there was a very brushy canyon between us, so we decided 
to watch and see where they would go. Pretty soon they started 
around toward the head of the canyon. We decided, if both of us 
tried to go down there we would make too much noise, so I told D. © 
to go and I would stay and watch them. I waited and watched and 
they kept coming around and had just passed through some small firs 
and hazel brus1, when they wheeled around and ran back into the 
thicket. Pretty soon I saw D. in a little open spot within about 150 
yards of them. The only way they could get out of there without 
him seeing them was to go straight up the hill, so I holloed and told 
him where they were. 
Pretty soon one started out back the way they had come, and the 
F, been year since I was a boy of 12 or 13 years, it has always 
