The Black Fawn Part 14

By almost imperceptible degrees the day lightened. They were perhaps a half mile from the house when Gramps stopped. He raised his rifle and sighted on a stump about a hundred yards away. Then he lowered his rifle and said, "We'll wait here a bit, Bud."

"Why?"

"It ain't light enough to see the sights, and while I think Old Yellowfoot will be hanging out in Dockerty's Swamp, he could be anywhere from here on. If we jump him, we don't want to guess where we're shooting."

Just then, they heard five shots.

"Fool!" Gramps growled. "He saw something move and, though it's a lead-pipe cinch he couldn't tell what it was, he shot anyway. Those kind of hunters got less brains than the game they hunt."

Twenty minutes later there were three more shots s.p.a.ced far enough apart to indicate that the hunter was taking aim. Gramps listened carefully.

He sighted a second time on the stump, held his sight for a full three seconds, and turned to Bud.

"What do you make of it?"

Bud raised his own rifle, centered the ivory bead of the front sight in the notched rear, and aimed at a puff of snow that clung like a boll of cotton to the stump. He lowered the rifle.

"It looks all right to me."

"You can see?"

"Well enough for a good aim."

"Come on, and from here on there's no talking."

Gramps slowed to a snail's pace, stopping every ten minutes or so to look all around. Bud understood what he was doing, for while it is true that deer are noted for their speed, it is a mistake to try to chase them. If you slog as far as twenty miles a day through deer country, you are almost sure to see deer, but not as many as the hunter who works carefully through a comparatively limited deer cover. Slow and easy is the proper way nine times out of ten.

Rifles were cracking from all quarters now, sometimes three or four at once, sometimes only one and occasionally none at all. Gramps stopped suddenly and pointed to two deer about a hundred and twenty yards away.

Both were bucks. One bore a stunted rack of antlers, but the second had a trophy that would shame no hunter.

Gramps went on. The two bucks, aware now of their presence, each sounded a single blasting snort and bounded away. Bud watched them go without regret. Either buck would have been a fairly simple shot. But they were hunting Old Yellowfoot.

They saw seven more deer before they reached Dockerty's Swamp. It covered about seventy acres and was a tangle of high bush huckleberries, cedar, balsam and a few great hardwoods, whose branches rose gaunt and bare above the surrounding stunted growth. A bush-grown knoll flanked the swamp and it was surrounded by low mountains that were covered with cutover hardwoods and patches of laurel and small evergreens. Although Dockerty's Swamp was well known as a refuge for deer, Gramps was one of the few who knew how to flush them out.

Gramps led Bud to the summit of the knoll and halted in a thicket so dense that they could see no farther than forty feet ahead of them.

Gramps raised a forefinger, a signal for Bud to stay where he was.

Foolish young deer might show themselves in spa.r.s.e cover or even open meadows, but a buck as wise as Old Yellowfoot would make for the thickest cover when Gramps chased him out of the swamp. It was a foregone conclusion that he would come up the knoll. All other ways out of the swamp were so spa.r.s.ely forested that anything emerging would make an easy shot.

Two and a half hours after Gramps left, Bud saw a deer move farther down the slope. Bud remained perfectly still. The deer was almost completely hidden by brush and he was unable to tell if it was a buck or doe or even how large it was.

Ten seconds later the black fawn stepped into plain sight.

He was a well-grown buck now, and st.u.r.dy, and his hair was so dark that the fawn spots had faded into it. Little nubbins that were his first antlers projected two inches above his head.

The black buck came on, stopping now and then to look behind him and always testing the winds. He had been chased from the swamp and, young though he was, he had planned and executed a masterly retreat instead of panicking. He pa.s.sed thirty feet to Bud's right, turned and stared fixedly at him when they were abreast. Then the black buck leaped out of sight into a laurel thicket.

Three does came next, then a chesty little six-point buck that shook his antlers and rolled his eyes as though anything that dared challenge him did so at its own peril. Finally Gramps appeared.

"Old Yellowfoot wasn't there, Bud. We'll try Happy Ridge."

But Old Yellowfoot was not on Happy Ridge, or in Hargen's Pines or Dead Man's Hollow, or any other place where they looked. They might have had either one of two more nice bucks that day, but they scorned both.

Finally, sorry that a nearly perfect day was ending, Gramps and Bud turned homeward. Tomorrow was another day and there were more to follow.

They entered the house and Gramps said to Gram,

"Nary a sign, not even an old track . . ."

He stopped suddenly, staggered across the floor and dropped his rifle on the table before sinking into a chair. He buried his face in his hands, and once more Bud heard the terrible wheezing that had been so terrifying back in the grouse woods.

chapter 7

From the school bus the blacktop road looked to Bud like a frozen black river between the banks of snow cast aside by the snowplow and he pretended that the poles indicating culverts were channel markers. The Barston farm buildings to the left and a hundred and fifty yards from the highway seemed to him an island in the sea of snow and the Barstons'

orchard looked like a great ma.s.s of seaweed.

Soon he tired of daydreaming and stared stonily out of the window. When Christmas had still been weeks away, he had been able to tell himself that it might never come. But now that only a few days remained before Christmas, there was no more hope. This was the last trip the school bus would be making until after New Year's, for the Christmas vacation was beginning and in just three days Gram and Gramps' children and grandchildren would arrive and there would be no place for an outsider.

It would have been far better, he thought bleakly, if he had never come to Bennett's Farm and probably it would be better if he left now. But although Bud's imagination could whisk him anywhere at all, the harsh realities of life as he had lived it sobered him. He could dream of the French Foreign Legion, the carefree existence of a cowboy, the adventurous career of a seaman or the unhampered life of a trapper in the arctic north, but he knew in his heart his dreams would never come true. Twelve-year-old boys had run away from the orphanage, but none had stayed away for more than three days before they had returned of their own accord or had been brought back by the police. A youngster traveling alone without resources had less than one chance in a thousand of remaining undetected, and Bud knew it.

Besides, he was stubborn and unwilling to back away from any situation.

He would face the a.s.sembled Bennetts and do the best he could. In one way or another, he had faced giants before.

To take his mind away from the ordeal ahead of him, Bud turned back to the hunt for Old Yellowfoot and the day Gramps had been stricken in the kitchen.

He had been frightened then, too, but not with the stark fear he had known the day he and Gramps had hunted for grouse and Gramps had become ill while they were in the woods. That day Bud had been alone, but now there was Gram. Things might still go wrong now, but not altogether wrong if she was there.

He remembered how Gram had walked calmly over to Gramps as soon as he was stricken and said quietly,

"You're tired, Delbert. Now you just sit right there and take it easy."

Then she had gone to the telephone and, after she had spoken to Dr.

Beardsley, returned to sit beside Gramps. Only her eyes had shown the torment she was enduring. Bud had hovered in the background, not knowing what to do, but ready to do anything. Gramps raised his head again and there was that terrible convulsive cough, but afterward he breathed more easily. The blue color that had invaded his face began to fade. He started to sweat and Gram wiped his face gently.

"Gosh blame nonsense," Gramps gasped.

"Of course," Gram said. "That's just what it is. You sit there anyway."

"Why?"

"Maybe because I like your company and you have been gone all day."

Only later had it occurred to Bud that she was deliberately resorting to subterfuge to make him sit still until Dr. Beardsley arrived. Gramps would never have accepted a doctor otherwise. As it was, he gave an outraged growl when Dr. Beardsley finally came.

"What the blazes do you want?" Gramps grumbled.

Dr. Beardsley said calmly, "To see you, Delbert, and I don't have all night. Open your shirt."