uch of the cool water was
very grateful. Occasionally he would take a long swim, and once or twice
he paddled clear across the Glimmerglass, from one shore to the other.

And it was during this summer that he raised his first real antlers.
Those of the previous autumn had been nothing but two little buds of
bone, but these were pointed spikes, several inches in length, standing
straight up from the top of his head without a fork or a branch or a
curve. They did not add very much to his good looks, and, of course,
they dropped off early in the following winter, but they were the
forerunners of the beautiful branching antlers of his later years, and
if he thought about them at all they were probably as welcome as a
boy's first mustache.

Late in the following autumn an event occurred which left its mark on
him for the rest of his life. One night he wandered into a part of the
woods where some lumbermen had been working during the day. On the
ground where they had eaten their lunch he found some baked beans and a
piece of dried apple-pie, and he ate them greedily and was glad that he
had come. But he found something else, too. One of the road-monkeys had
carelessly left his axe in the snow with the edge turned up. The Buck
stepped on it, and it slipped in between the two halves of his cloven
hoof, and cut deep into his foot. The wound healed in the course of
time, but from that night the toes--they were those of his left hind
foot--were spread far apart, instead of lying close together as they
should have done. Sticks and roots sometimes caught between them in a
way that was very annoying, and his track was different from that of any
other deer in the woods, which was not a thing to be desired. He was not
crippled, however, for he could still leap almost, if not quite, as far
as ever, and run almost as fast.

He continued to grow and prosper, and the next summer he raised a pair
of forked antlers with two tines each.

And now he is well started down the runway of life, and we must leave
him to travel by himself for two or three years. He ranged the woods far
and near, and came to know them as a man knows his own house; but no
matter what places he visited, the old haunts that his mother had shown
him were the best of all, as the deer have learned by the experience of
generation after generation. He always came back again to the
Glimmerglass, and as the seasons went by I often saw his broad,
spreading hoof-print on the