The Black Fawn Part 20

Bud giggled and Gramps couldn't help chuckling.

"Of all the dang fools in the world, people are the dangdest," he said.

"I put myself in mind of Charley Holan, who said he'd be the happiest man in Dishnoe County if he just had a good brood sow. He got the sow and then he needed a place to keep it. So he said he'd be the happiest man ever if he had a place to keep it. He got one and found he needed a boar. Charley got the boar and first thing you know he was overrun with pigs. They did poorly that year, it didn't even pay to haul 'em to market. So Charley says he'd be the happiest man in Dishnoe County if he'd never even seen a pig. And this is the first season in the past three I've ever been able to hunt Old Yellowfoot. We'll tag him 'fore the season ends, Bud."

"I hope so, Gramps," Bud said.

"Dig in. It takes a pile of Mother's pancakes and a heap of sausage to see a man through a day in the deer woods."

After breakfast they stepped into the cold predawn blackness. Shep, tied as usual while deer season was in swing, came to the end of his rope, whined, pressed his nose against their hands and pleaded as usual to be taken along.

Gramps stopped just inside Bennett's Woods, almost in sight of the barn.

It was still too dark to shoot, but they often saw deer from the barn and they could expect to see deer from now on. It was true that Old Yellowfoot had never been seen so near the farm but that was no sign he never would be.

They went on as soon as they were able to sight clearly on a target a hundred yards away. Their jackets were tightly b.u.t.toned and their earm.u.f.fs pulled down against the frosty air. A doe faded across the trail like a gray ghost, leaving sharply imprinted tracks in the snow. A little farther on they saw a small buck. Then a doe and fawn ran wildly through the woods, and Gramps halted in his tracks.

Bud stared. Since he had come to Bennett's Farm he had seen many deer, and many of them had been running. But he had never seen any of them run like this.

"That pair's scared," Gramps said. "In all my born days I haven't seen ten deer run that fast, and the last one had wolves on its trail."

"Could wolves be chasing these?" Bud asked.

Gramps shook his head. "As far as I know, there hasn't been a wolf in Bennett's Woods for twenty-six years. Me and Eli Dockstader got the last one, and there's nothing else I can recall offhand that could start a couple of deer running that way and keep 'em running. Still, it has to be something."

Off in the distance, rifles began to crack as hunters started sighting and shooting at deer. Gramps and Bud paid no attention, for if other hunters could see them, they must be ordinary deer.

When they reached Dockerty's Swamp, where Gramps thought they might find Old Yellowfoot, Bud said, "Let me go down and track him through, Gramps, and you take it easy."

"Poof!" the old man said. "If Old Yellowfoot's in there, there's just one man got a chance of putting him out and that's me. Doc Beardsley said I could come deer hunting, didn't he? 'Sides, did you ever know a deer hunter--I'm talking of deer hunters and not deer chasers--who took it anything 'cept easy? The slower you go, the more deer you see."

"That's so," Bud admitted.

"Kite round and get on your stand," Gramps ordered. "I'll be through by and by."

He disappeared and Bud circled the swamp to the brush-grown knoll that deer chose as an escape route when they were driven out of Dockety's Swamp. Rifles, some of them close and some distant, cracked at sporadic intervals as other hunters continued to find and shoot at deer. Bud waited quietly, with a couple of chickadees that were sitting nearby on a sprig of rhododendron for company.

Before long he saw something move down the slope. Bud stiffened, ready to shoot. It could only be a deer. But at the moment it was too far away and too well hidden by brush for him to tell what kind of a deer. Then it came on up the slope and Bud saw that it was a very good ten-point buck, but he refrained from shooting. The ten point was a nice trophy but he was not Old Yellowfoot.

Then nine does came by in no hurry, but without lingering as they walked through the sheltering brush into the forest beyond. They were followed by two smaller bucks, and then by another doe. Two and a half hours after Bud had taken up his stand, Gramps reappeared. Bud saw with relief that the old man did not look tired or even winded. Doc Beardsley had known what he was talking about when he had said Gramps was able to hunt deer this season.

"There were plenty of deer in the swamp, but Old Yellowfoot wasn't among 'em," Gramps said. "We'll try Dozey Thicket."

But Old Yellowfoot was not in Dozey Thicket or Hooper Valley or Cutter's Slas.h.i.+ng or Wakefoot Hollow. Nor did they find Old Yellowfoot the next day, although they saw at least three bucks with imposing racks of antlers.

On Monday Bud had to return to school and Gramps hunted alone. All week long he had no success, but when Bud came home Friday, Gramps was waiting for him in the kitchen. There was an air of triumph about him and a hunter's gleam in his eye.

"Found him, Bud," he said as soon as Bud came through the door.

"No!"

"Sure 'nough did! He's gone plumb out of Bennett's Woods into that footy little thicket above Joe Crozier's place. I saw his track where he came to the top of the hill and went back again, but I didn't hunt him 'cause I was afraid I might spook him. But two of us can get him right where he is."

Sat.u.r.day morning, Bud and Gramps waited for dawn on the ridge overlooking Joe Crozier's thicket. When daylight came, they sighted their rifles on a rock about a hundred yards away, and for a moment neither spoke.

Crozier's thicket had at one time been a fine stand of hardwoods. Joe Crozier's father had cut the larger trees and buzzed them up for firewood, and the thicket had grown back to spindly young saplings. It was just the place a wise buck like Old Yellowfoot would choose as a refuge during hunting season, for n.o.body would ever think of looking for him there. But it was also a place where experienced hunters who did stumble onto his refuge would surely kill him.

"Let's go down," Gramps said softly.

Side by side they descended the hill, but when they were still forty yards from Crozier's thicket, they stopped. There was a patch of dark gray there that might have been a protruding k.n.o.b of a tree or a boulder, but it wasn't. Old Yellowfoot, who knew the odds but was not about to give up, began to try to sneak away.

He was as huge as ever and he had lost none of his cunning. But his left antler was now only a single straight spike and his right one a snarled welter of many points.

Bud almost cried with disappointment, for he knew how Gramps had dreamed of the royal trophy Old Yellowfoot's antlers would make. And now he had overtaken Old Yellowfoot only to find him in his decadence. Never again would Old Yellowfoot be a worth-while trophy for anyone. He had succ.u.mbed to age.

As Bud was about to speak to Gramps, the old man said serenely, "Nature got to him before we could and I reckon that's as it should be. He was just a little too good to hang on anybody's wall. Let's go see Mother."

A week later, Bud and Gramps went into Bennett's Woods to bring out a load of firewood. Bud drove the team, Gramps sat on the bobsled seat beside him and Shep tagged amiably behind. They were half a mile from the farmhouse when the horses stopped of their own accord and raised their heads to stare. Looking in the same direction, Bud saw the black buck.

More darkly colored than any other deer Bud had ever seen, the buck was standing rigidly still in a little opening between two cl.u.s.ters of stunted hemlocks. His antlers had become magnificent. The black buck's head was high, and his eyes wary and his nostrils questing. A second later he glided out of sight into the nearest hemlocks.

For a moment Bud and Gramps sat enthralled, scarcely believing what they had seen. Then Gramps sighed and said, "Nothing's ever really lost, Bud.

That's as good a head as Old Yellowfoot ever carried. Next year we'll hunt the black buck."

chapter 10

The spring sun was warm on Bud's back as he bent over the freshly tilled garden plot. He plucked a single strawberry plant from the tray beside him, trimmed off a precise third of its roots with a pair of Gram's old scissors and cut off a broken leaf. Then he scooped out a hole big enough to let the remaining roots fan out. Strawberries must be planted not too deep and not too shallow, Mr. Demarest had said, but at exactly the right depth. Although there were several systems for establis.h.i.+ng a strawberry bed, Mr. Demarest favored starting with the plants one foot apart in rows three feet apart. This made for large fruit, he said; and, once the plants had matured so that they formed a matted row eighteen inches or two feet wide, there would still be enough s.p.a.ce to weed, mulch and cultivate them.

The strawberry plant firmly imbedded, Bud was using a twelve-inch stick to measure the distance to the next one when Gramps came up behind him and said, "You're a thirty-second of an inch off."

Bud looked around and grinned. Gramps had been caustic when Bud had asked him if he could rent a patch of ground for a strawberry bed.

According to Gramps, the farm was used to good old-fas.h.i.+oned crops like potatoes, corn, beans and oats, and wasn't likely to take kindly to anything so newfangled as strawberries. Anyhow, Gramps had wanted to know, who in his right mind would think of planting cultivated berries when you could go out in the fields and pick all the wild ones you wanted?

When Gram had reminded Gramps of the high price Pat Haley paid for cultivated berries, Gramps had replied that it was not his fault if fools and their money were soon parted. But if Bud wanted a strawberry patch, and if he wanted to do all the work of plowing and preparing the plot himself, he wouldn't stop him. But he couldn't in all conscience charge him rent because, as anybody could see, there would never be any profits. And if there were any, he could always reconsider.

Gramps became even more eloquent when Bud said that he wanted to plant a raspberry and a blackberry patch as well as soon as he had the money to buy plants. There were hundreds of raspberry tangles and blackberry thickets in Bennett's Woods, Gramps had pointed out, and anyone too lazy to go out in the woods and pick his own raspberries or blackberries would never earn enough money to buy cultivated ones. What was the world coming to, anyhow? In his day they had taught common sense instead of foolishness in school.

But actually the old man was delighted because Bud wanted to stay on and eventually take over Bennett's Farm. Bud knew that secretly Gramps approved of the new venture and was being caustic because he didn't want to inflate Bud's ego. Gramps was too realistic to stand in the way of young blood and young ideas. He knew that it is inevitable for the young to take over when the old can no longer carry on--just as Old Yellowfoot had relinquished his crown to the black buck. Bud had already proved that purebred chickens would outproduce a mongrel flock, and Gramps had replaced his flock with White Wyandottes like Bud's. Although Gramps had never thought of growing cultivated berries, he saw its potential and looked on Bud's new venture as a forward step that the young, not the old, should take.

"How many of those plants you got, Bud?" Gramps asked as he inspected the row Bud had planted so far.

"Two hundred."

"What'd you pay for 'em?"