one
wants to kill deer, one should learn to shoot straight and to get around
in the woods without making quite as much noise as a locomotive. But
their racket was intolerable, and after a day or two the doe and the
Fawn left home and spent the next three or four weeks near a secluded
little pond several miles away to the southeast.

By the first of December these troublous times were over, and they had
returned to their old haunts in the beech and maple woods, where they
picked up a rather scanty living by scraping the light snow away with
their forefeet in search of the savory nuts. But before Christmas there
came a storm which covered the ground so deeply that they could no
longer dig out enough food to keep them from going hungry; and they
were forced to leave the high lands and make their way to the evergreen
swamps around the head-waters of the Tahquamenon. There they lived on
twigs of balsam and hemlock and spruce, with now and then a mouthful of
moss or a nutritious lichen. Little by little the fat on their ribs
disappeared, they grew lank and lean again, and the bones showed more
and more plainly through their heavy winter coats. If one of those
November hunters had succeeded in setting his teeth in their flesh he
would have found that it had a very pleasant, nutty flavor, but in
February it would have tasted decidedly of hemlock. Yet they were strong
and healthy, in spite of their boniness, and of course you can't expect
to be very fat in winter.

There were worse things than hunger. One afternoon they were following a
big buck down a runway--all three of them minding their own business and
behaving in a very orderly and peaceable manner--when a shanty-boy
stepped out from behind a big birch just ahead of them, and said, "Aah!"
very derisively and insultingly. The wind was blowing from them to him,
and they hadn't had the least idea that he was there until they were
within three rods of his tree. The buck was so startled that for an
instant he simply stood still and stared, which was exactly what the
shanty-boy had expected him to do. He had stopped so suddenly that his
forefeet were thrust forward into the snow, and he was leaning backward
a trifle. His head was up, his eyes were almost popping out of their
sockets, and there was such a look of astonishment on his face that the
man laughed as he raised his gun and took aim. In a second the deer had
wheeled and was in the air, but a bullet broke his back just