The supreme destroyer which leaves a country barren, waterless and hungry 
dense cover of young spruce he played 
us literally a game of hide-and-seek. 
After sending us around in a circle sev¬ 
eral times he abruptly changed his 
J tactics and plunged down the south- 
westerly slope of the mountain. In the 
! teeth of the wind we followed him. 
When he reached the bottom, he turned 
tc the right, and skirting level ground 
l : a short distance, proceeded to climb up 
again ! 
“I never saw such a deer,” blustered 
the Sheriff, “Where’s he takin’ us to?” 
As a matter of fact, he was not tak¬ 
ing us anywhere. Apparently this 
follow-the-leader business was mightily 
to his liking. Not‘once in all those 
hours of trailing did we obtain even a 
. fleeting glimpse of his lordship. And 
when, after laborious efforts, we had 
climbed up the mountain a second time, 
only to find he had gone down the other 
side, we were at length forced to ac¬ 
knowledge ourselves beaten. 
The Sheriff pulled out his watch. “It’s 
nearly half past two,” he announced. 
“Seems as if we ought to be eatin’ our 
lunch.” 
Without further delay we slipped a 
few hundred yards down the mountain 
to a snug lodge, where we could hear 
-the wind marching overhead, but were 
well protected from its chilly blast. 
Here the Sheriff kindled a neat fire and 
I for half an hour we sat and devoured 
one sandwich after another and drank 
cold tea and steamed and smoked and 
luxuriated in the generous heat. 
All the time we were eating my 
thoughts kept turning back to that 
sagacious old buck who had so tritely 
made himself victor of the occasion. In¬ 
deed I was glad he had escaped; glad 
because I admired so much his clever¬ 
ness and glad also because he was left 
to perpetuate that intelligence among 
his descendants. Apparently, the chase 
to him had been but pure sport—as pure 
sport, in fact, as it had been to us. And 
the incident of this hunt well illustrates 
the battle of contention relative to fol- 
| lowing the trail of the whitetail. The 
odds are nearly always divided evenly. 
The deer has as fair a chance of giving 
you slip as you have of bagging him. 
i Sometimes, of course, the odds may be 
more or less in favor of one or the 
other, but whichever way the wind sets 
the game of still-hunting is a square 
| one. Even' on the snow, if your buck is 
of that alert, watchful and clever type, 
he will leave you in the lurch nine times 
out of ten. So, go your way rejoicing, 
old yellow horns! May you never 
suffer the pangs of thirst or hunger, nor 
lay yourself down amid the bitter snows 
as provender for those little red wolves 
of the wilderness who are and ever shall 
be the sworn enemies of your clan. Live 
j and grow fat, and build in the airs of 
some future spring and summer such a 
set of antlers as will royally grace that 
hour when you shall fall to the painless 
end of a swift, clean bullet! 
■ DEFORE we finished lunch the rain, 
■ which had descended steadily all 
day, turned into hail and presently the 
hail gave place to large goose-feather 
flakes of snow. For a time the woods 
grew hushed with that peculiar quiet 
usually attending the advent of a snow 
storm. We extinguished our cheerful 
blaze under the ledge and struck off 
down the mountain, the Sheriff leading 
off at a stride that ate up the miles with 
extraordinary speed. Just before we 
reached the wagon road the snow ceased 
falling. Then abruptly a weird gloom 
descended into the forest—a gloom dank 
and fog-laden and charged with ominous 
portent. 
We were following along a log trail 
when a jagged flame of violet-colored 
lightning uplit the woods. Almost im¬ 
mediately an ear-splitting crash of 
thunder rolled over our heads. Nor was 
the downpour long^ delayed in its ar¬ 
rival. Soaked to the skin and wading 
up to our ankles in snow and slush, we 
pushed forward and presently, after an¬ 
other very severe flash of lightning 
there came distinctly to our nostrils the 
smell of smoke. At once the Sheriff 
halted and tested the air anxiously. 
“Can’t be that Mac D’s camp has took 
fire?” he questioned. 
“It smells closer than that,” I re¬ 
joined. 
We were half inclined to turn back in 
order to find out where the bolt had 
struck. But the afternoon was nearly 
gone, so on second thought we contin¬ 
ued our way. It came to our ears 
shortly after that a large skidway lo¬ 
cated but a short distance from the spot 
where we had stood at the time of the 
flash had been reduced to a smouldering 
heap of ashes and twenty or thirty cords 
of valuable pulp wood lost. 
“I always hate that smell of wood 
burning,” remarked the Sheriff as we 
plowed homeward. I was curious to 
know why. 
“It reminds me of forest fires,” said 
he, as we tramped through rivers of 
muddy water with the sun glinting on 
the drenched hillsides. “I don’t know 
of anything I hate worse. I’ve seen 
some bad ones, too,” he added. 
A BRIEF seven months after that ex- 
**■ hilarating hunt in company with 
the Sheriff, I had a vivid experience 
with a forest fire that swept the better 
portion of Albany Mountain from base 
to summit. 
It happened in June. I was at the 
Lake. The day was Saturday and I was 
finishing up some letters in my cabin 
preparatory to driving over the road to 
the railroad. About 10 o’clock there 
came a knock on my door and I opened 
it to find Rube standing outside with an 
anxious face. 
“Come out and have a look at what’s 
going on,” said he. 
Up from the horizon, in a westerly 
direction, towered a solid column of 
blue-white smoke. As I looked a piece 
of leaf, charred and cold, sifted down 
from nowhere and fell on my hand. The 
wind was blowing stiffly from the south. 
Fifteen or twenty minutes later we 
were rattling over the road. Always as 
we drew near the region sentineled by 
Albany mountain did the smoke grow 
denser and more pungent. No one of 
us knew at that time how very near we 
were to the fire. Indeed Rube surmised 
it to be five or six miles farther away 
than it actually was. Had we been able 
to look over the crest of a certain hill 
within a mile of the wagon road what a 
scene would have met our eyes! But in 
ignorance amid a steady sifting of ashes 
and burned leaves we drove on to the 
railroad and little lumber town gathered 
at this particular point. 
Here we were at once elucidated as 
to the position of the fire. Men with 
shovels and pails and mattocks were 
piling on the flat cars of the lumber 
train. Anxiously the Sheriff was hurry¬ 
ing from one place to another attending 
(Continued on page 202) 
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