1886
Nov. 21
Great Island, Hyannis, Mass.
  Clear and warm for the season light W. wind.
  Left Boston yesterday P.M. at 4.15 with C.B. Cosy
for Great Island, Hyannis, when I was invited to spend
three days. It was seven o'clock when we reached
Hyannis and the drive to the "Island" was a slow,
groping journey, most of the way lying through pine
woods and over numerous salt marshes and sand-hills
dimly visible at the best and often nearly obscured by
the mist and darkness of a cloudy November evening.
  Rising early this morning we found the sky clear
and the sun shining over the wide stretch of rolling
pasture and sand-hills that surrounded the house and
lighting up the dark sea beyond. Immediately after
breakfast we started for the deer park, a presence of
about two hundred acres surrounded by a high fence.
C. was armed with a Winchester rifle, I with a Ballard 
which he furnished. Our object was to kill a buck and
I was to have the first shot.
  The enclosure in supposed to contain, at present, about
one hundred deer, probably not an overestimate although we
saw only a dozen during the forenoon.  All of them were
does except one at which C. had a fair shot which he 
refused, waiting for me.  A few of the does were rather tame
but the majority would start at the slightest alarm and 
instantly disappear in the dense cover. This cover was
of scrubby oaks (2. alba, cocinea, Ilicifolea, trictoria) and
pines (P. rigida). It was everywhere difficult and when
overrun with greenbriar often fairly impenetrable. Let the
deer traversed it with apparent ease, sometimes starting
along its obscure paths as silently as shadows, at others
where fairly alarmed dashing through the thickest places