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 establishing 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 space 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-fashioned 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?"
"Forty dollars."
Gramps whistled. "Twenty cents each for those piddling little plants?"
"I could have had good plants for less," Bud said, "but Mr. Demarest recommended these. They're bred especially for this climate and soil, and they're everbearing."
Gramps chuckled. "I mind the time Mother and me picked your first pen of chickens. We might have had some real good ones for half what yours cost. But Mother said 'Delbert Bennett! If we're going to give that boy chickens for Christmas, let's give him the best or none!' Now danged if they ain't running all over the farm."
"Are you sorry?" Bud queried.
"Oh, I could have done the same thing," Gramps said casually. "Matter of fact, I was thinking about it. Will say, though, that the more you put in at the beginning the more you're like to take out at the end, and Joe Demarest usually knows what he's talking about. I expect your berries will do right well if drought don't get 'em, or flood rains don't wash 'em out, or somebody's cattle don't trample 'em, or any of a couple dozen other things don't happen to 'em."
Gramps grinned, and then he said, "How long do you figure on being busy, Bud?"
"I'm not sure," Bud said. "I may be busy all morning." Two hundred strawberry plants were not so many, but Mr. Demarest always made much of the importance of doing things the right way, and this was the first time Bud had done anything like this on his own. He was determined to plant them properly even if it took all day.
"Shucks," Gramps said. "I got me another trout spotted."
Bud glanced up eagerly. "You have?"
"Sure have," Gramps said. "He lives two pools below the one where we saw the otter playing. He ain't as big as Old Shark, but he's big enough."
At first Bud was about to heel in the remaining strawberry plants and finish the next day. Then he thought again. The plants had cost almost all the money he had been able to save and, far more important, he had set out to accomplish something. Gramps was practically retired now and he could do about what he pleased. But Bud couldn't.
"I'd like to, Gramps," he said reluctantly, "but I've got to get the rest of these planted."
There was a brief silence before Gramps said, "Remember when we finally caught up with Old Yellowfoot but didn't shoot him because his antlers were no longer worth it? And remember the black buck we ran across while we were fetching a load of wood a while back?
"The more I think about him, the more I think he has a better rack of antlers than Old Yellowfoot ever had. I got to get me one really good head 'fore I hang up my rifle, and that's the one. We'll line our sights on him next season sure, Bud."
Bud kept his head down so Gramps could not see his face. He could not harm the black buck, but neither could he hurt Gramps. He had hoped the old man would forget the black buck, but from the beginning he had known that was a forlorn hope. Gramps forgot nothing connected with Bennett's Woods.
"What did you say, Bud?" Gramps asked.
"Why, sure we'll go deer hunting."
Gramps said, "We'll do more than that. We'll hunt the black buck and we'll get him. Well, seeing that you're so all-fired busy, I might as well start puttering about myself. Maybe I can even make Mother think I'm working for a change."
The old man left, and Shep rose from the grass in which he had been lying down to tag behind him. All at once Bud felt that he knew why he wanted to stay on Bennett's Farm. Even though few people can write great poetry, compose deathless music, paint immortal pictures, the creative urge could find its expression on the farm. Gram in her flawless kitchen, Gramps among his crops or in the woods and fields he loved so dearly and understood so well, were truly creative and therefore truly happy. So was Mr. Demarest, the underpaid, overworked agriculture teacher at Haleyville High.
Bud did not understand the whys and wherefores, but he knew that he wouldn't change places with anyone on this bright spring day. Planting strawberries might not be the ultimate in human achievement, but Bud knew that it suited him.
Then he frowned. Before preparing his strawberry bed, he had read all the books he could find on the subject and had talked at length with Mr. Demarest. According to the directions, the plants had to be set out precisely one foot apart in rows three feet apart. It was all very well to go by the book, but conditions vary even from field to field, and Bud realized that he did not know enough to adapt the method of planting to make it ideal for the special conditions of his strawberry bed. The more he knew about farming, the more keenly he felt his ignorance. But he had almost abandoned his dream of getting a degree in agriculture. Even so he was determined to learn anyhow. If he couldn't go to college, he could at least get the textbooks used there and teach himself. That would be hard, but if it was the only way, he would do it. He loved Bennett's Farm too much not to give it the attention it deserved.
Shep wandered back from wherever he had left Gramps and threw himself down in the grass to watch Bud, who looked at him affectionately. Shep had been his first friend when he came to Bennett's Farm and his true friend since. Shep had no pedigree, but a loving heart, and unswerving loyalty counted for a great deal, too.
"Only half a dozen more, Shep," Bud said. "Then I'll water them and we're through."
Shep wagged his tail lazily and grinned with his panting jaws. When Bud finished planting, Shep paced alongside him as he went to the barn for the hose.
Bud had chosen his strawberry patch partly for its location, for it caught the morning sun but was sheltered by a grassy knoll from the blazing heat of the midsummer afternoon sun. Wild strawberries had grown there plentifully, too, and it was near enough to the barn so that the farm's hundred-and-fifty-foot hose could be attached to the barn spigot and reach all corners of the bed.
The plants needed water now to help them overcome the shock of transplanting, and Bud watered them carefully, using a fine spray to keep from washing the loose soil away and at the same time giving each plant enough water to soak thoroughly both the roots of the plant and the earth about it. He had almost finished when Shep began to bark.
Bud looked around to see Sammy Toller, whose farm was a mile and a half north of Gramps', coming from the barn toward him. A small but tremendously energetic little man, Sammy was usually the epitome of good humor. Now his jaw was set, and his eyes smoldered and he did not even appear to notice the freshly planted berries.
"Is Delbert about?" Sammy asked.
"He's here somewhere, Mr. Toller," Bud said. "I'll find him as soon as I've rolled up this hose."
"Can you leave the hose for now?" Sammy asked. "This is pretty important."
Shep trailed along as they walked back to the barn, and Bud shut off the water at the spigot. They found Gramps working the newly spaded family garden with a hand rake. He looked around and said amiably,
"Hi, Sammy."
"'Lo, Delbert. Got a few minutes?"
"Sure thing. What's up?"
"I'd druther take you to my place so you can see for yourself."
"Can I go along?" Bud asked.
"Sure," Gramps said, "but scoot along and tell Mother where we're going."
After racing into the kitchen and back, Bud climbed into the cab of Sammy's pickup truck with Sammy and Gramps, Shep leaped into the rear. Sammy eased the truck down the drive into the road and turned north toward his own farm. Ordinarily Sammy was loquacious but he said nothing as they jogged along.
Sammy's house was a mile from the highway and his closest neighbor was half a mile away, which made his one of the most isolated farms in the Haleyville district. Otherwise it was very much like the surrounding farms, with a substantial house and the usual barns and outbuildings. Chickens were wandering about and a little group of Shropshire sheep—Sammy was trying to build up a registered flock of them—was huddled together in a pen near the barn. As they drove up, Sammy's dog, a farm collie like Shep, acted as if he was about to exterminate them until Shep walked stiffly forward. Then the two dogs sniffed noses, wagged their tails and went off for a romp.
"We'll have to walk a mite," Sammy said, and he led them up a hill from which the forest had been cleared from only the lower two-thirds. There was a long-abandoned apple orchard about a hundred yards from where the forest began, and a crow in one of the trees cawed lazily as they approached.
After Sammy had led them around the orchard, Bud stopped in his tracks at the sight of eighteen sheep strewn over the field between the orchard and the forest. All of them were horribly bloated and mangled.
"I turned 'em out yesterday morning," Sammy said, "and I sure never heard a thing to make me s'pose they were getting murdered. When they didn't come home last night I hunted 'em, and this is what I found 'bout an hour ago."
The two dogs trotted forward and sniffed at the first of the dead sheep. Neither gave any sign that anything was amiss. Gramps stood a moment, studying the dogs, and then he went to look at one of the sheep.
"Dog work," he said.
"How do you know?" Sammy said.
"Wolves kill clean and eat what they kill. They don't murder just for cussedness and they don't mangle. What's more, these were wild dogs."
"What makes you so all-fired sure?"
"Were you here all day yesterday, when those sheep must have been killed?"
"Yep."
"But you heard nothing?"
"Nary a whisper."
"Tame dogs you'd have heard. They haven't the sense to keep their mouths shut on a job like this. Wild ones know that the less noise they make, the longer they live."
Now Bud remembered the doe and fawn that he and Gramps had seen during the last deer season when he and Gramps had been hunting Old Yellowfoot. Gramps had said that something was chasing them. There must have been wild dogs in Bennett's Woods even then, and no wonder the doe and fawn had been running as though they were possessed.
"What can we do?" Sammy asked.
"Anything we try will take a heap of doing," Gramps said. "These wild dogs know more than the smartest trap-pinched fox you ever saw. Still, we'd best do all we can to stop 'em. Most of the time they hunt in the woods, but there's no telling when they'll come again or who they'll hit."
"How does a body go about stopping 'em?" Sammy asked.
"If it was most anything 'cept wild dogs I could tell you. A fox sticks pretty much to his own beat and habits. So does a deer, bear, cat or 'most anything else. But wild dogs haven't any pattern. The most we can do is, first of all, set traps. I doubt if it'll work 'cause the pack that killed these sheep haven't been back to eat off 'em. I don't think they'll decoy to bait either. We might bump into 'em by rambling round with deer rifles."
Sammy Toller said grimly, "Soon's I take you home, I aim to start rambling with my deer rifle."
Sammy took Bud, Gramps and Shep home and then roared back up the road at forty miles an hour, an unheard-of speed for Sammy. Gramps was serious and sober and Bud wondered. Dogs were dogs; did running wild make them so very different?
"Are these wild dogs really bad?" he asked Gramps.
"Didn't you see Sammy Toller's dead sheep?"
"Yes, but wasn't that unusual?"
"Not a bit. I'd rather face a pack of timber wolves than a bunch of wild dogs any day. Where a wolf will kite off and keep on kiting, a dog will plan. He'll run just far enough to get out of a man's sight. Then he'll figure some way to fool him and nine times out of ten he'll do it. Just a minute."
Gramps went to the telephone, and as soon as he had finished telling Pete Nolan, the game warden, about the wild dogs, the old man turned to Bud and said, "Let's you and me mosey out in the woods, and we'll pack rifles."
With Shep keeping pace, they sauntered into Bennett's Woods. A doe that was heavy with fawn crept off, but a strutting cock grouse scarcely bothered to move out of the way. Turkeys slunk away from their hidden nesting sites, and from a knoll a buck with grotesque knobs of antlers watched and stamped a threatening forefoot.
They found no sign of the pack in Bennett's Woods that day, but not long afterward Pete Nolan came upon six of the pack harrying one of Tommy Keeler's heifers and shot two of the wild dogs before the others fled. Jess Limley got another and Sammy Toller shot two when the pack had returned for another attack on his sheep. By the time the hunting season rolled around again, it was generally agreed that there were at least ten dogs in the pack and it was certain that they were still prowling the woods.
Leaves crisp with frost rustled beneath Bud's pacs as he strode on through the woods. His shotgun was half raised, but his mind was not on the grouse that, any moment now, might rocket up from the copse of brush he was approaching.
He sighed. It had been a busy summer and not entirely a good one. There had been a good crop of young chickens, but a mysterious malady had killed a third of them. Neither he nor Gramps had been able to discover what it was. Gramps thought the trouble was that the White Wyandottes were less hardy than crossbreeds. Bud was sure Gramps was mistaken, although none of his books gave a clue as to what was wrong. More keenly than ever, Bud felt his lack of knowledge and the need to acquire more.
During the spring and summer he had not worried much about hunting for the black buck. Autumn and the deer season had seemed very far away then. But now the season was here, and Gramps' anticipation mounted daily.
Since school had reopened, Gramps had made as intensive a study of the black buck and his habits as he had of Old Yellowfoot and his. At least three times a week and sometimes more often, Gramps went into Bennett's Woods to observe the buck. By now, Gramps knew the buck's favorite haunts, his drinking places, when he liked to rest and when he foraged. Twice Gramps had been within rifle shot, by which the old man concluded that the black buck was not as cunning as Old Yellowfoot. Still, the black buck would be no easy game, and he had an even bigger rack than Old Yellowfoot's at its best. To hang that rack on the living-room wall would be the crowning achievement of Gramps' career as a hunter and fisherman. Between them, Gramps had made up his mind, he and Bud would hang it there.
It occurred to Bud there in the autumn woods that if Gramps became ill again, he wouldn't be able to go on hunting the black buck. Bud still felt that a bond existed between him and the black buck, that his destiny and the buck's hung on the same thread, so that Bud's good fortune in being at Bennett's Farm would end if anything happened to the buck. But Bud realized at once that he would rather face the end of the buck and of his own happiness than another of Gramps' attacks.
Just as he came to that conclusion, the grouse rose in a thunder of wings. Bud raised his gun and knew as he shot that the bird he was aiming at was out of range. Then he heard Gramps' gun boom twice and saw two grouse plummet into the leaves.
"Dreaming today?" Gramps called. "As Pete Henderson said to his boy, Ben, 'I've taught you all I know and you still don't know nothing.' That was as neat a straightaway shot as I ever saw."
"I wasn't ready."
"We'll teach a few grouse to wait until you are," Gramps said. "I swear to gosh, Bud, you act like you got a girl on your mind."
Gramps went forward to pick up his grouse. He held them by the legs and their mottled plumage rippled in the faint breeze. Gramps, who had seen half a thousand grouse, looked for a moment at these two as though they were the first. Then he walked to and sat down on a mossy log.
"Guess I'm getting old," he remarked. "I doubt if I'll be hunting Bennett's Woods more than another forty or fifty years."
Bud said nothing as Gramps laid his grouse carefully in the leaves beside the log and ejected the two spent shells from his double-barreled twelve shotgun. The limit for grouse was four, but Gramps believed that two was enough for any hunter.
After they had sat together on the log for a while, Gramps said, "I ran across Old Yellowfoot day before yesterday and all he's got this year is two spikes. I swear he knows it, too, and that spikes ain't legal. Stood no more than twenty yards away, chewing his cud like any old cow and hardly giving me a second look. He'll be safe unless one of those trigger-happy hunters who'll shoot at anything runs across him, and I doubt if one of those can find him. He hasn't lost his brains just 'cause the rest of him started downhill."
"He's earned his right to peace."
"'Peace' is a word with a lot of stretch, Bud. Take people now. Some get it one way and some another, and some never get it. Heinrich Umberdehoven can't have any peace 'thout he's working, because only when he's working is there any hope of earning another dollar or two. Rudy Bursin, he don't have any peace unless he's loafing, and he'd rather be known as the Haleyville town bum than work. Sammy Toller never gets any peace and I don't know why unless it's 'cause he's always deviled by notions. When his sheep petered out, he figured to go in for cattle feeding. If that don't work, he'll try something else. If it does, he'll be fretted trying to make it bigger and better. Old Yellowfoot might have peace if by that you mean he's safe from hunters. But I think he'd rather be hunted."
"Why?"
"He's old, and the way he lives it ain't nice to get old. His bones will ache, he'll feel the cold, he'll have a rough time finding enough to eat in winter, and by and by he'll just naturally lay down and die. It won't be because he has to, but because his life will not be worth living any more. While he was being hunted he was in his prime, and he never gave a darn anyhow because he knew he could get away from any hunter. He did it for a good many years, and I think he got as much fun out of fooling hunters as they did out of hunting him."
For the first time it occurred to Bud that hunting could be a two-way street and that the hunted sometimes took as keen a delight in eluding their pursuers as the hunters in pursuing. "It makes sense," he said after he had thought it over.
"It is sense," Gramps said, "'less you get some poor little scared thing too young to know what it's all about, and those you oughtn't to hunt anyhow. But I'm sort of glad we didn't get Old Yellowfoot."
"Why?"
"He had the biggest rack I ever saw and I figured it'd be the biggest I ever would see. But the black buck beats him, and it ain't right for one person to kill two big deer. One's a trophy but two's hoggishness. If you get the buck you want, and the black buck is the one I want, leave the next big one for somebody else."
A fuzzy caterpillar, driven by some unseasonal urge, started crawling up the log on which they were sitting. Gramps pointed at the caterpillar, which was black at both ends and brown between.
"We're in for some early bad weather," he said.
"How do you know?" Bud asked.
"The longest black's on the fore end of that caterpillar, and that always means the fore end of the winter will be long and hard."
Bud pondered this piece of information. Gramps' lore had proved valid so often in the past that Bud knew better than to dismiss what the old man was saying about caterpillars as so much local superstition. Shortly after Bud had come to the farm, Gramps had told him that, when swallows flew near the ground, a storm was in the making. Bud hadn't taken much stock in that until he learned in school that the low-pressure area that precedes a storm drives insects down near the earth and so the swallows follow them. Therefore, when swallows fly close to the ground, a storm does usually follow.
"You aim to get yourself a couple of grouse?" Gramps asked.
"I don't think so," Bud said.
"Something is chewing on you," Gramps said. "What is it?"
"Nothing," Bud said, turning his face away because he could not look at Gramps and tell an untruth.
"You ain't going to stop hunting?" Gramps asked.
"Two grouse are plenty for the three of us."
"I hope you don't feel like hanging fire when we go after the black buck."
"I'll hunt him with you," Bud promised.
"Then we'll get him." Gramps seemed relieved. "Well, let's mosey home and see how Mother's doing."
In his first free period the following Monday, Bud sat in the principal's outer office at Haleyville High School. After five minutes Mr. Thorne's secretary told him to go in. Bud, who had always been at ease with Mr. Thorne, was nervous.
"I'd like permission to be excused from school for as much of the deer season as necessary, sir," he said stiffly.
"Want to get yourself a buck, eh?"
"Well, partly."
"Do you think that hunting is more important than your academic career?"
"No, sir."
"Then what is it?"
"There's a big buck in Bennett's Woods," Bud blurted out. "Gramps—Mr. Bennett, that is—has always dreamed of killing just such a deer. It's sort of like a dream he's always had. Gramps had been sick and he isn't exactly young. No one can be sure he'll be able to hunt next deer season. He has to get the black buck this year. He thinks I can help him."
"In other words you want to stay out of school for an indefinite period to help Delbert Bennett get this buck. Well, I think it can be arranged." Then, before Bud could thank him, Mr. Thorne went on. "In fact, I think it will be a very important part of your education. You may not see what I mean now, but maybe you will later."
Gramps, who was splitting wood when Bud got home that afternoon, yelled "Hallelujah!" when he heard the good news and threw a stick of firewood in the air. "The black buck's as good as ours," he said.
Not long afterward the school bus was crawling up the highway behind the snowplow that was clearing four inches of new snow that had added itself to the four inches that had fallen yesterday. Bud was staring out the window, almost oblivious to Goethe Shakespeare Umberdehoven who sat beside him as usual. He saw little since wind-blown sheets of snow obscured everything more than twenty yards from the highway, but he was thinking of the caterpillar that had crawled up the log when Gramps scored his double on grouse. Bud had been a little skeptical when Gramps had predicted a harsh, early winter from the caterpillar's markings, but now it looked as if they were in for the earliest and harshest winter in ten years.
When Get Umberdehoven asked if he was going deer hunting, Bud said "Yeah" without turning away from the window.
"You don't seem so excited about it."
"Why don't I?" Bud snapped.
"Always before when deer season came you couldn't hardly sit still. Now you act like you'd rather not go."
"Oh shut up!" Bud said. Then, feeling remorseful, he turned to face Get. "Are you going deer hunting?"
"Everybody goes the first day and we got to get a deer because if we do"—Bud waited for what he knew was coming next—"we can sell another pig."
"I'm going to stay out and hunt for as long as I want to," Bud said loftily. "I'll hunt the whole season if I feel like it."
"I wish I could," Get said. "School, it's hard for me. But if I don't go, I fall behind, and if I fall behind . . ." He shrugged eloquently.
Bud thought of Mr. Thorne's saying that he thought it would be a very important part of Bud's education to hunt the black buck, but he still had no idea what Mr. Thorne really meant. There were a lot of things he did not understand, Bud decided as the bus stopped in front of the Bennetts' driveway.
"Good luck," he said to Get to make up for having snapped at him.
"Yeah," Get said listlessly.
Bud left the bus and made his way through the eight inches of fluffy snow that blanketed the driveway. The snow was loose and easy to plow through. But still it would either keep the more timid hunters out of the woods entirely or make them concentrate in the fringe areas so that there would be fewer hunters in the deep woods.
Shep came to meet him as Bud stomped the snow from his overshoes and took them off on the porch, and for a moment Bud wished he could change places with Shep, who wasn't allowed to go out into the deer woods during the season. Then he opened the door and went into the kitchen.
A heavenly smell from the loaves of freshly baked bread that Gram was tumbling out of baking pans filled every corner of the kitchen and overflowed into the nearby rooms. Gramps sat at the table fussing with some minor adjustment of his deer rifle.
"All set, Bud?" he said, grinning.
"All set."
"Good. Tomorrow we get on his tail! Give us four days together, just four days, and you and me'll tag that black buck."
Gram said, "Oh, Delbert. You'd think that buck was more important than the President of the United States."
"Right now, and as far as I'm concerned, he is, Mother. 'Sides, who'd want the President's head hanging on his setting-room wall?"
Gram appealed to Bud. "That's all he's been talking about, just that black buck. And if he's been over his rifle once today, he's been over it a hundred times."
"Got to have it right, Mother," Gramps said. "We'll get one chance and no more. If we miss when the chance comes, we'll have only ourselves to blame."
"After all this fuss and bother you'd just better get him," Gram said dryly. "There'll be no living with you the rest of the winter if you don't. I'd give you a slice of butter bread, Allan, except that it's still too hot."
"I'm not hungry," Bud said. "I'll change my clothes and do the chores."
"I'll give you a hand," Gramps offered.
"No, you stay right here."
Bud went to his room, glad to escape. If only a miracle would occur. If only the snow would melt and the leaves would appear and deer season would be over with the black buck still in Bennett's Woods. There would be no miracle, Bud knew. There was just one thing he could do if the black buck came in range—shoot straight. Gramps wanted the head to hang in the living room and Bud would do his best to see that it hung there. It made no difference whether he or Bud shot the buck, since they would be working as a team.
Bud lingered at the chores, and for one of the very few times since he had come to live with the Bennetts, he had almost no appetite for supper. Gram looked at him with concern, but Gramps was too excited to notice.
"He won't be in the hills, Bud, with this snow," Gramps was saying. "He and all the other deer with sense, which means all the other deer, will be down in the valley swamps and thickets. If this snow deepens, and I think it will, the deer will yard in for another week or ten days. Do you know where we'll find that black buck?"
"Where?" Bud tried to inject enthusiasm into his voice.
"Hagen's Flat or Dockerty's Swamp," Gramps said. "I'm putting my money on Dockerty's Swamp. Not in twenty years have I put a buck out of there that I wanted to shoot, but I never lost the feeling that that's where my real luck lies. Yep, we'll find the black buck in Dockerty's Swamp."
The next morning, fortified with one of Gram's substantial breakfasts, and each with one of her ample lunches in his hunting jacket, Gramps and Bud left the house with Gram's warning not to overdo ringing in their ears. Bud glanced at Shep, whose feelings were hurt because he was tied up so he couldn't follow them into the woods.
The day grew lighter slowly and from far off came an occasional rifle shot or volley of shots as hunters began to encounter deer. Bud had been right the day before in thinking that the snow would keep most of the hunters in easily accessible areas, for most of the shooting was going on near the main highway. There were almost no shots from the deep woods but, as Gramps had predicted, that was where the deer were.
First they saw a herd of fourteen does and fawns that had been driven down from the hills by the stormy weather. Then there was a buck, a ten point with a very respectable rack of antlers. Either Gramps or Bud could have shot him before he glided out of sight in a rhododendron thicket. Next they saw a herd of nine in which there were two bucks.
They parted at Dockerty's Swamp. Gramps went down to track through the swamp while Bud took his stand on a knoll up which any deer driven from the swamp would be sure to run. The snow had stopped falling, but heavy clouds lingered in the sky and it would begin again. Now and then Bud saw a deer flitting across one of the few open spaces in Dockerty's Swamp, and he knew that the swamp must be almost overrun by deer seeking a refuge from the snow. But no deer came up the slope and before long it was clear that they preferred to take their chance in the swamp rather than to go back into the hills.
Bud had been at his stand a little less than an hour when he saw a deer running easily in the open country at the far edge of the swamp. Even if it had not been black, Bud would have known from its mighty rack of antlers that it was the black buck.
Bud raced down the slope, stopping to whistle when he reached the edge of the swamp. Then, receiving no answer, he went a short distance into the swamp and whistled again. This time there was a reply, and Bud found Gramps leaning against a dead stub.
"What in tunket are you doing?" he said angrily. "You should know better than to leave a deer stand."
"He went out the other side!" Bud said.
"The black buck?"
"Yes!"
"Come on!"
Bud led to where he had seen the black buck disappear and Gramps looked once at the tracks.
"It's him," he said, "and danged if he hasn't outsmarted us. He figures he knows as much about snow as we do, and I reckon he's right. Anyhow, he's going back into the hills."
They began to climb, and the snow became deeper and the drifts more frequent. Two-thirds of the way up Hammerson's Hill, Gramps turned to Bud.
"Give me an hour and come through on the track."
After a timed sixty minutes, Bud went ahead, following the buck's tracks. Before long he found Gramps, who had made a wide circle, standing beside a huge boulder. The tracks of the black buck, who had slowed from a run to a walk, still led on.
"I thought he came through here and he did," Gramps said. "But he came maybe ten minutes 'fore I got here. Ha! He thinks he's outsmarted us by taking to the hills, but could be he's tricked himself."
"How has he tricked himself?" Bud asked.
"Longer shooting," Gramps explained to Bud. "If we find where he's dipped into a gully, we have a good chance of catching him going up the other side."
They followed the tracks until two hours before dark. Whenever they came too near for comfort, the black buck would run a little way, but most of the time he was satisfied to walk. Then they found that he had given a mighty leap a full twenty feet to one side of his line of travel and begun to run continuously. The tracks of four wild dogs came from the opposite direction and joined those of the black buck where he had veered off.
Not speaking to save his breath for speed, Gramps followed the tracks. It was almost dark when he and Bud came to a place where the tracks separated, with the wild dogs' going off in one direction and the buck's in another.
"They smelled us coming and kited off," Gramps said. "But they'll be back.
"We'll start earlier tomorrow, Bud," the old man said as they turned to go home.
The next morning, when Gramps and Bud returned to the black buck's track, the light was too dim for shooting and even for adequate tracking. A brisk little wind sent snow devils whirling before it, and the wind had blown most of the night, reducing the sharply imprinted tracks the black buck had left the day before to shallow depressions in the snow. The clouds were darker than yesterday and snow drifted down from them and mingled with the snow devils.
The valley below them looked as black as though it was still midnight there, and above it, where Gramps and Bud were standing, the snow glowed weirdly in the pale light. Bud shivered, but he was grateful, too, for the very elements seemed to have conspired to save the fleeing black buck. Even Gramps couldn't hope to win against such odds as these.
Bud grew more and more uneasy as he stood there helplessly, not knowing what to do. Gramps seemed baffled, too, reluctant either to go on or to turn back. The old man raised his rifle, sighted at the black trunk of a birch tree about fifty yards away and then lowered his rifle uncertainly.
"He could be thirty yards away and the size of an elephant, and I still couldn't get my sights on him," Gramps said quietly. "That's what comes of selling a wise old buck short. He knew what he was doing when he came into the hills. He figured we were after him down in the swamp and was sure of it when we got on his tail. But he also knew there'd be more snow and he counted on it to cover his tracks."
"He's wise, all right," Bud said with secret elation. Yesterday he had seen nothing except doom for the black buck. But the buck had a wild wisdom all his own, and thanks to that and to the falling snow, he had escaped his pursuers. If his tracks were covered up by the snow, he might still live to reign once more in Bennett's Woods.
"We'll have to do our best anyhow," Gramps said. "If that pack finds him first, what's left won't be worth our carrying home."
Gramps' words were like an electric shock to Bud. He had thought of the pack and its pursuit of the buck, but it had not occurred to him that the wild dogs were competing with him and Gramps on equal terms. At the thought of the black buck as a piece of meat that happened to be charged with life, a prize contested for by Gramps and a pack of wild dogs, Bud could hardly keep from retching. He felt as if he had been swept back to the grim, loveless world he had known before he had come to the Bennetts'.
"I think you're right," Bud finally managed to answer.
"Let's get moving, then," Gramps said, and started off in the semidarkness with Bud behind him.
The buck had continued to run, twenty feet to the leap, even after the dogs had finally left his tracks the afternoon before. But the snow had shifted so much during the night that the places where he had landed were now so vaguely defined that Gramps and Bud's pace was agonizingly slow. They must go faster than this, Bud thought as he reached down for a handful of snow to cool his burning mouth. If it would mean the end of his good fortune if Gramps killed the buck, it would be even worse if the wild dogs killed him, for then Gramps' dream would be destroyed, too.
Restraining an impulse to rush past Gramps and find the black buck in a burst of speed, Bud began to watch Gramps and he grew less desperate as he saw the old man in action. The sullen light was too dim to see from one set of the black buck's tracks to the next, but Gramps never failed to know in which direction the buck had leaped. Gramps seemed to be thinking not as Delbert Bennett but as the black buck himself.
Perhaps the black buck enjoyed matching wits with hunters just as Old Yellowfoot seemed to, perhaps because he, too, was sure he could escape them. But wild dogs were different. The black buck had never run as far or as wildly with Gramps and Bud following him as he had even after the wild pack had stopped following. Plainly he knew what wild dogs could do and he was terrified.
The night lifted so slowly that its rise was almost imperceptible, and when dawn finally came, the clouds remained so dark that it did not seem to be day at all. But when he sighted on a tree about three hundred yards away and could see a knothole over the sights, Bud knew there was at least shooting light.
They were about a mile and a half from where they had returned to track the black buck. Where the tracks dipped into a gully whose only growth was wind-whipped aspens, the buck had slowed from a frantic run to a fast walk. Now that they were closer together and the light was stronger, the tracks were easier to follow. They turned straight up the gully toward the top of the hill.
Gramps halted and Bud stopped behind him without speaking. Bud's desperate urge to hurry was gone, for by now he knew better than to try to do in haste what had to be done slowly. Gramps had performed a miracle in bringing them this far, and Bud realized that such mastery of the wilds was the result of love for wild places and wild things as well as skill and the desire to conquer.
Then Gramps spoke, "He knows nothing's on his track any more and he thinks he's safe for a while. He's heading toward that patch of hemlocks on top of the hill because he's been pushed hard and needs a rest, and he can rest safely there. He's working back in the direction of the farm because there'll be more snow and he might have to get out of the hills in a hurry; he can do it by going down any of those deep gullys. But he knows those critters as well as I do, and he's going to be a mighty spooky buck until he's shaken that pack. He never was much afraid of us. But he's afraid of them."
"Will the dogs be back?" Bud's voice shook.
Gramps said grimly, "If they don't come, it's the first pack ever got on game and left it. They can't have that buck. I've marked him. Come on."
Leaving the tracks of the black buck, Gramps went straight across the gully, fought halfway through a thigh-deep drift and halted. Bud looked up in alarm, but there wasn't the terrible wheezing and the anguished fight for breath that there had been when Gramps suffered his attacks. His face was streaked with perspiration but its color was normal.
He had only stopped to rest, and after a moment he broke through the drift and quartered up the slope. Bud felt uneasily that he ought to be taking his turn breaking trail, but he knew better than to offer. It was Gramps' hunt and the buck was Gramps' prize. And only Gramps knew what to do.
It was hard to imagine these hills as they were in the full bloom of summer, when anxious does hovered there near spotted fawns hidden in thickets and summer-sluggish bucks, their antlers velvet-sheathed, moved out of the way as placidly as grazing cattle. In the summer, too, grouse and wild turkeys brought their downy young to feed there.
Now in the stormy depths of winter the hills looked like a desert of snow, although not all the wild life had fled. Cottontail rabbits huddled in their burrows and snowshoe hares crept about in the thickets. No doubt foxes and weasels were sheltering there from the storm and probably a few grouse and turkeys were still on the hills, too. But not even the track of a mouse could be seen on the virgin snow.
Bud glanced toward the valley and could see only a part of the way down the slope through the falling snow. There was life in abundance down there and for a moment he wished he were out of these hills where there seemed to be nothing but snow and a grim determination to end the black buck's life.
After Gramps had stopped to rest two more times, they broke over the crest of the hill. They traveled faster now, for although the snow was as deep as ever, the going was downhill. It was like coming out of the desert into an oasis when a grove of hemlocks loomed ahead. The hemlocks were partly covered with snow but their green needles were visible. They looked like Christmas trees decorated with great puffs of cotton.
Gramps entered the hemlocks very slowly, with his rifle half raised, and Bud almost hoped they would find the black buck in the grove and put an end to this almost unbearable uncertainty. But all they found, deep in the hemlocks, was a bed in which the weary buck had finally lain down. Apparently he had left it shortly before Gramps and Bud had returned to following his tracks that morning, for very little snow covered the tracks leading away.
When they came to the bed, Gramps stopped and said to Bud, "He's going to have himself a feed of beech nuts. Then he'll mosey down the hilltop to see if anything is on his trail. If he finds nothing, pretty soon he'll go back to the valley. He's afraid of this snow."
They came to a grove of gray-trunked beech trees so massive that they seemed impregnable to the wind and storm. Gramps and Bud were still a hundred yards away when they saw a pile of leaves freshly pawed through the snow and knew that the buck had been scraping for beech nuts. These tiny nuts came down like hail when the first frost opened their green pods, and there had been a great harvest of them that year.
Swiftly Gramps approached the place where the buck had been pawing, for the giant beech trees were widely separated and there was no brush to obscure the view. If the black buck was in the grove, they would see him. When they came to the scraped leaves, Gramps stopped again.
From where he stood the tracks of the wild dogs could be seen leading out of the beech grove and joining those of the black buck.
Gramps made a sound that was half a gasp and half a growl, and without looking back, began to move with giant strides along the mingled tracks. Bud hung back for a second. He had hunted and fished with Gramps hundreds of times, but he had never seen him react this way. Usually Gramps approached his quarry eagerly, but with a kind of reverence, too. Now Gramps seemed to have become a ferocious killer for whom the game was no longer a sport. Bud could only follow Gramps numbly, but it seemed to him that it had only become a question of whether Gramps or the wild dogs would kill the black buck first.
The buck was again making great leaps as the pack coursed him. Bud did not dare talk to Gramps, but he knew that no deer could maintain such a furious pace for long. And the longer-winded wild dogs could go on indefinitely.
Two miles after the pack had taken up the chase again, Gramps and Bud came upon the place where the dogs had first caught up with their quarry, and the trampled snow made it easy to reconstruct the scene. Pressed to his limit, the black buck had backed his haunches against a tangled windfall and waited with lowered antlers as the pack came on. The dogs had rushed and feinted, hoping to draw the buck out and make him expose his vulnerable flanks and hocks.
"Look!" Bud said, when he saw a patch of blood thinly covered by new snow.
"That ain't the black buck's blood," Gramps said. "If it was he never would have got out of here alive. He's hooked one of the dogs. They're not as anxious as they were."
It was true, Bud decided as he and Gramps raced on. The buck was still running hard, but he was no longer taking the same mighty leaps. No doubt that was partly because he was tired, but he had also taught the pack to respect him. Although they could have closed in on him, they had held off for another two and a half miles.
Then, on the rim of a shallow gully, the dogs had come forward with a determined rush. But the buck had backed up against three small trees whose trunks formed a triangle and held them off. There was no blood here, but when the buck had left, his leaps had been very short.
"He ain't going much farther," Gramps said grimly. "And he'll try to get back into the valleys where the snow ain't as deep. Come on. Hagen's Flat's the place he'll head for."
Gramps left the trail to quarter down the slope. Bud followed, not sure whether this was the right tactic, but not daring to question it. Gramps led them back down the snowy lifeless slope, and they ran on and on until Bud was sure they would run out of this world and into the next. When they came to the near side of a valley that sloped downward, they saw the black buck at bay across the valley.
This time there was no shelter for his haunches, and his feet were no longer nimble as the pack rushed him. The dogs were as big as wolves and determined to kill their quarry without getting hurt themselves. Two of the four wild dogs lunged at the black buck's haunches. But when he whirled around to confront them, they danced away and the other two dogs rushed in.
Bud was looking on frozen with horror when the sudden, sharp crack of Gramps' rifle startled him out of his trance. It was too far for any marksman who had been running, and he missed. The dogs turned to run and Gramps shot again, missing this time, too.
For a short time the black buck stayed where he was. Then he turned to go on, but his steps were very slow and very tired. He stumbled and almost fell. When he came to a drift so deep that the snow reached his shoulders, he stopped, too exhausted to move. He gave no sign of fear when Gramps and Bud came up to him. There was a serenity and a dignity about him, as if, having done his best and fought his hardest, he could do no more and was prepared for whatever he had to face.
As he looked at the buck there in the snowdrift, Bud thought of that summer day so long ago when the black buck had been a tiny fawn in his arms. The fawn had given Bud the courage to face life during those first days at Bennett's Farm and now what Bud had learned then was reconfirmed in the grown buck's quiet resignation to whatever fate had in store for him. Bud knew that he could fondle the buck now if he wanted to. The buck had no strength left to resist and his great antlers were as useless as those on the mounted head in the Bennetts' living room.
Then there was a click as Gramps slipped the catch of his rifle from safe to fire. Gramps had his prize. The black buck was less than two yards away from him, and he couldn't miss. Bud waited for a shot, but none came.
"Kite down to the barn and fetch the toboggan and a good strong hank of rope, Bud," Gramps said finally. "I'll wait here and see if those critters come back. I hope they do. But even if they don't, now that we know where they are, we'll get 'em on this snow."
Outside the wind howled and the snow swept down. But the kitchen stove radiated warmth to every corner of the room. It even seemed to warm his heart, Bud thought, although he knew that couldn't be.
"You're sure he'll be all right?" he asked Gramps.
"Dead sure," Gramps said. "He couldn't even wiggle when we tied him on the toboggan, but he'll be full of beans in a few days. Time deer season ends, he'll have enough hay and grain in him so he'll be able to make his way back into Bennett's Woods." Gramps chuckled. "You 'n' me will just open that box stall and watch him kite out."
"Aren't you sorry?" Bud asked.
"Heck no," Gramps said. "He'll carry a bigger rack than ever next year, and it'll be bigger still the year after."