Jan. 9, iQcg.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
' 49 
about three miles clown Buck Bayou he climbed 
a low-branching ironwood tree and stayed awake. 
Two turkeys wandered his way, feeding along 
the sloping bank of the bayou. He roosted 
quietly on his perch until they came close and 
then shot the fattest looking one with his .30-30. 
When the gentler sex goes for big game, some 
strange things happen. jMadame Siegfried, un¬ 
aided, found a full-sized doe and shot at it from 
about seventy-five yards. This was the second 
live deer ever seen in the woods by her, and the 
first one shot at, therefore a miss was not re¬ 
markable. The strange part is in the sequel. 
The deer, being partly concealed by trees and 
vines, paid no attention to the shot, but went 
on feeding. The huntress then proceeded to 
move to a point from which surer aim could 
be . taken and crept to within thirty-five yards 
of the doe. The last 
part of this stalking was 
in plain sight of the 
deer, which at length 
looked up and the hunt¬ 
ress, though one foot 
was far in advance of 
the other and the two 
arms were thrust out as 
balances, like those of a 
tight-rope walker, be¬ 
came as a statue. There 
stood the two, staring 
each other out of coun¬ 
tenance, for full five 
minutes — it seemed to 
the huntress—when the 
deer seemed to become 
utterly frantic with 
fright, wheeled and 
plunged away through 
an intervening thicket, 
then down through an 
open woods with a con¬ 
tinuous succession of 
short bleats that lasted 
as long as she could be 
heard. Whether this was 
an especially timid doe, 
whether she saw reflect¬ 
ed in the Madame’s eye 
the terrible prowess of 
her Viking ancestors, or whether she was grieved 
and chagrined at being outstared by one of her 
own sex are questions that will probably ever 
remain unanswered. Certain it is that all this 
happened, and the distances given were paced 
by me the same day and are correct. 
Later that day Scattergun accelerated the de¬ 
parture of another deer by liberating a load of 
buckshot in that part of the woods. Some of 
them struck the deer—how can anything escape 
in a landscape full of buckshot—and the deer 
fell, only to rise again. After a fruitless attempt 
to trail it by a few scant blood drops, Scatter¬ 
gun gave up the pursuit of this deer, and it has 
probably fully recovered. Madame La Belle Zona 
was along and saw this. 
Crusoe and Mississippi went down Buck Bayou 
that day. The latter bagged two ’coons at a time 
of the day when deer were not apt to be moving 
about. One of these ’coons was discovered peek¬ 
ing through a fork and was shot in the eye. It 
hung for several seconds and the second one 
planted its comical face exactly where the first 
had been, to see what had caused the disturb¬ 
ance. A hasty reload and quick aim got this 
one in the neck. They both fell together, and 
for an instant it appeared to be raining ’coons. 
The Deacon’s face was embellished by a huge 
grin when he saw the ’coons. Can anyone who 
was raised among Southern negroes remember 
an instance during his lifetime when a negro, 
having a ’coon brought to his notice, did not 
grin his broadest? 
As Crusoe and Madame made their way back 
to camp after dark, by the aid of a head light, 
a flock of turkeys was flushed from its roosting 
place. By the following dawn Crusoe and an¬ 
other had lighted their way back there and suc¬ 
ceeded in calling up and killing a turkey. It 
fell to Crusoe’s .30-30. 
While the above was taking place, Scattergun 
and Madame had taken their posts near a likely 
crossing and were rewarded by seeing the largest 
buck of the forest pass that way. Scattergun 
had been induced to try a rifle, and he shot at 
this deer, which was coming toward him, while 
it was yet a long way off. To this Madame 
testifies, as also to a belief that he shot high 
over the deer. After that Scattergun took little 
interest in the hunt. After the first two deer 
had been killed, it had been resolved that none 
but ladies should again shoot at a doe, which 
accounts for this episode: Robinson Crusoe was in 
the fork of a tree—as tigers and panthers dispose 
themselves to spring, down upon their prey—and 
Mississippi was perched upon a large clay root 
about two hundred yards therefrom, when a doe 
was seen by Mississippi running by his position 
at about forty yards distance. Mississippi said, 
“Ba-a-a,” and the doe stopped to investigate this 
strange sound. She then turned at right angles 
to her former course and cautiously crept in a 
semi-crouching attitude from the vicinity. Al¬ 
most immediately several dogs were heard back 
in the distance and doubtless upon her trail. At 
about the same time a yearling doe had passed 
another way beyond Mississippi’s stand and had 
stopped almost directly under Crusoe’s perch. 
He greeted it with, “Hello, little deer, where 
are you going?’’ spoken in soft tones, not cal¬ 
culated to be startling. The doe looked right 
and left and seemed puzzled by this conversa¬ 
tion in a foreign tongue, but could not decide 
which way the sound came from. The conver¬ 
sation was protracted into several sentences, after 
which the little doe bounded away, only to be 
shot several minutes later by a negro, the owner 
of the dogs. Crusoe heard the shot and went 
quickly to see what it meant. The negro was 
told of some of the unadmirable kinds of a being 
he was in the eyes of Crusoe, but this was all 
that could be done in this happy Southland, 
where any lazy negro who can gather together 
a pot metal gun and one or two starved curs— 
though without a dol¬ 
lar’s interest in the 
State, or any other 
State, and probably in 
debt to the man that 
fed him the year be¬ 
fore on his promise to 
work — can range the 
woods and shoot down 
whatever he sees, even 
to yearling does that a 
sportsman has but a 
minute before' allowed 
to pass, as he thought, 
to safety. 
Let every Southern 
State impose a privilege 
license of at least $10 
for the possession of a 
gun and $5 each on 
dogs. 
Cleveland’s Love of 
Nature. 
There was a touch of 
another imagination in 
him (President Cleve¬ 
land) that sometimes 
appeared when he was 
out of doors. A scene 
of sylvan beauty in the 
springtime, especially when the apple blossoms 
were coming into flower amid the greenery, and 
the songbirds were back again, moved to deep 
silence. “I can’t find a word for it,” he said 
quietly on just such a day, after a flood of sun¬ 
shine had burst through a light April shower. 
“What makes it so beautiful? There is no word 
good enough. ‘Ravishing’ comes nearest, I think. 
Where does it come from? Do you know what 
I mean? It is too good for us. Do you under¬ 
stand me? It is something we don’t deserve.” 
W'^ell, if one of our acknowledged esthetes had 
said this to anybody we should not soon hear 
the end of it. 
PURITY ESSENTIAL. 
In no other form of food is Purity so abso¬ 
lutely essential as in milk products. _ Rich¬ 
ness is also necessary, as without richness, 
milk is of little value as a food. Purity and 
richness are the embodiment of Borden’s 
Eagle Brand Condensed Milk. As a food for 
infants or for general household purposes it 
has no- equal.— 
