I stood pondering and puzzling over this strange phenomenon. How in the name of wonder could one bullet break her hind leg and cut her throat? I stooped down and examined the wound. To my surprise, I found that it had not been made with a bullet at all. The joint was dislocated and the skin torn away until the disjointed member hung only by a narrow segment. Then the mystery was deeper than ever. What could possibly have caused this violent and terrible wound? It had been made after I shot, for at that time the agile creature was bounding over logs and through clumps of brush with all the grace and airiness of her sylph-like nature. I turned, took up her back track, and, following it thirty or forty feet, came to a fallen tamarack sapling about six inches in diameter, that laid up about a foot from the ground. The track showed that the poor creature, in one of her frantic leaps, just after being hit, came down with her fore feet on one side of this pole and her hind feet on the other; that one hind foot had slipped on the soft earth and slid under the pole to her knee, and that the next bound had brought it up against the pole in the form of a lever--much as a logger would place his handspike under it in attempting to throw it out of his way--and the pole, being far too long and heavy to yield to her strength, the leg had been snapped short off.
I describe this incident merely as one of the many strange and mysterious ones that come under the observation of woodsmen, and not with any desire to give pain to sensitive and sympathetic readers.
The beautiful animal did not suffer long from this hurt, however, for she was dead when I reached her, within perhaps three or four minutes after I fired the fatal shot. I saved her head and had it mounted and it hangs beside that of the buck whose taking off has been described and whose throat was also neatly severed by the bullet. They were two remarkable shots.
After dressing this deer I returned to the old burn in which I had killed the doe in the morning, and took a stand on a high, flat-top stump, which commanded a good view of a large tract of surrounding country. I felt certain that the young buck that was with her when I killed her would come back toward night to look up his companion, for he probably did not realize that she was dead. I stood within thirty yards of her carcass and for an hour kept a close watch in every direction, turning slowly from one position to another, so that any game that came in sight could not detect the movement and would, if seeing me at all, consider me one of the numerous old high stumps with which the landscape was marked. Toward sundown a large, handsome buck came out of the green woods half a mile away, walking deliberately toward me. I could see only a proud head and spreading antlers, and an occasional glimpse of his silvery-gray back as he marched with stately but cautious tread through the dry weeds. He stopped frequently to look and listen for danger, or the coy maidens of his kind, of whom he was in search. Oh, how I longed for a shot at him! With bated breath and throbbing heart I watched his slow progress across the open country. But, alas! the wind (what little there was) was wrong. When within about 200 yards of me he scented me and bounded squarely sidewise as though a rattlesnake had bitten him, uttering at the same time one of those peculiarly thrilling whistles that might have been heard in the stillness of the evening a mile or more. He struck a picturesque attitude and scanned the country in every direction, trying to locate the danger but could not. After a few seconds he made another high bound, stopped, and whistled again. I stood perfectly still, and he could make nothing animate out of the inanimate objects about him. He leaped hither and thither, snorted, whistled, and sniffed the air as we have seen a wild colt do when liberated in a pasture field after long confinement in his stall.