chapter 9
One winter afternoon during his third year with Gram and Gramps, Bud was waiting in the study hall for Mr. Demarest, who taught agriculture at the Haleyville High School. Bud glanced at the clock on the wall. What seemed an hour ago it had been five minutes past four. Now it was only six minutes after. He sighed and stared out at the snow that was trampled in the yards and left in dirty piles in the street.
Winter always seemed a barren, meaningless season in Haleyville. At Bennett's Farm, however, where the snow covered the fields with an inviting blanket and transformed the woods into another world, winter was a natural and fitting part of things. There the seasons were fully seen and felt, not mere dates on a calendar as they were in town. Spring was the time for new life to be born, summer for spring-born life to attain maturity, autumn for the harvest to be gathered and winter for the land to rest and recuperate for spring.
As he stared out the study-hall window, Bud thought of Bennett's Woods, where Old Yellowfoot still bore his proud rack of antlers as he skulked through the thickets and tested the wind for signs of an enemy. He had been unmolested for the past two seasons, for Gramps had not been well enough to hunt deer and nobody else had a chance of hunting him successfully.
In Bennett's Woods, too, the black buck, now a king in his own right, snorted his challenge from the ridges and put to flight lesser bucks that sought the favor of the does he coveted. Three years had not dimmed Bud's memory of his first meeting with the tiny black fawn or lessened his feeling of bondship with him. Whenever Bud was troubled or faced with problems for which there seemed to be no solution, he still went into Bennett's Woods to seek out the black buck. And always he found there the answer he needed, for seeing the black buck achieve his destiny gave Bud the confidence he needed to work out his own life.
Some of the things that had happened before he came to Bennett's Farm now seemed as remote as if they had taken place during some other life. Bud could hardly believe that he had been the frightened, defiant twelve-year-old boy who had trudged up the Bennetts' driveway three years ago expecting nothing and having received everything. It seemed incredible that three years had elapsed since then and that he had gone on from grammar school into high school. And although his marks were not the highest in his class, they were still a source of pride to Gram and Gramps.
Some of the things that had seemed horribly unreal, Bud now saw in their true perspective. He remembered vividly his first Christmas at the farm, but now he knew and liked the Bennetts' children and grandchildren. And now he appreciated the true measure of his own love for Gram and Gramps. He had been a starved waif, and they had fed his soul as well as his body. More than ever he wanted to be with them always, to live as they had lived and to shape his life by the ideals to which they had clung. But to be as good a farmer as Gramps had been, Bud needed technical knowledge. That was why he was waiting for Mr. Demarest.
Bud thought wistfully of Gramps, who for the past two seasons had been forced to confine his outdoor activities to a little fishing and grouse hunting. But now he was fit again, and when the deer season opened tomorrow, he and Bud would be on the trail of Old Yellowfoot once more. This time they were certain to bag him; Gramps felt it in his bones.
Then the door opened and Mr. Demarest came in. He was a small man, but quick and wiry. He was in his late thirties, but the ordeals of a poverty-stricken boyhood and youth had made him look ten years older than he was. His black hair had gray streaks and he could never manage more than a fleeting smile. The son of a ne'er-do-well tenant farmer, Mr. Demarest had had no formal schooling until he was fifteen. But then he had set doggedly out to educate himself. Once he had done so, he had dedicated himself to teaching future farmers how to succeed, for he could not forget his father's many failures.
"I'm sorry to be late, Allan," he said pleasantly as he came through the study-hall door. "What's on your mind, son?"
"Mr. Demarest," Bud stammered, "I want to be a farmer."
"Is something stopping you?" Mr. Demarest's eyes twinkled.
"No," Bud said. "I'm certain I can throw in with Gramps Bennett and take over from him. I can buy out Gram and Gramps' children. They aren't interested in farming."
"Think it over carefully," Mr. Demarest said seriously. "There are better farms you might have."
"I don't want any other farm," Bud said firmly. "I want that one."
"It's sort of special, eh?"
"It's very special."
"Then what is your problem?"
"I don't know enough," Bud said. "Three years ago, for Christmas, I was given a pen of White Wyandottes. They're the Eichorn strain, about as good as you can get. I built from them and I was able to show Gramps that my purebreds were more profitable than his mongrel flock. We replaced his flock with Eichorn Wyandottes, too, and we're doing all right with them. But I can see where I made a lot of mistakes that needn't have been made if I had known how to avoid them. I want to go to college and study agriculture."
"Do you have any money?"
"No," Bud said. "I'm going to need most of what I have saved for berry plants next spring."
"But why, if you've built up a flock of Eichorn Wyandottes from one single pen, do you have only enough money to buy some berry plants?"
"The chickens have earned money, but I have needed it for day-to-day living," Bud said.
"Can Mr. and Mrs. Bennett help you at all?"
"They have a little more than four thousand dollars in the bank here at Haleyville, but that's all they have. They'll need it if anything goes wrong with either of them and I wondered if I could work my way through agriculture college?"
"You could, but I wouldn't consider earning all your expenses. At least, not at the beginning. Haven't you been able to sell any breeding stock from your Wyandottes?"
"No," Bud said. "That's one reason I want to go to college."
"What's your scholastic average?"
"B plus."
"Good, but not good enough for a scholarship even if there were enough of them for all able youngsters and if Haleyville Consolidated School received its just share. Allan, I don't want to be a killjoy, but you asked for my advice. Don't even think of college until you're able to finance at least your first semester. Then, if you show enough promise, the college will help you find ways to continue."
"How much will I need?" Bud asked.
"If you're careful, you should be able to get by with about seven hundred dollars. Perhaps even less."
"Seven hundred dollars!" Bud gasped.
"It isn't a million."
"It might as well be!"
"You can earn that much on summer jobs."
"Gramps has been sick. He can't spare me in summer."
"What will he do when you go to college?"
"It looks as though I'll be spared that worry," Bud said miserably. "If I need seven hundred dollars, I'm not going."
"You asked for my advice and I gave it, Allan, and I'd have rendered you no service if I hadn't been realistic," Mr. Demarest said gently. "If I had a magic wand to wave you into college with, believe me, I'd wave it. But I have no such thing. All you can do is to keep trying and never abandon hope."
Bud could say nothing, and finally Mr. Demarest said, "The bus has left. How will you get home?"
"I'll walk."
"I'll take you," Mr. Demarest said.
Bud rode in heartbroken silence up the snow-bordered highway. Mr. Demarest, who knew so much about so many things that Bud had almost believed he knew all about everything, hadn't been able to tell him how to get a college education. And so it was hopeless. Mr. Demarest drew up at the foot of the Bennetts' drive and put out his hand.
Mr. Demarest drove off and Bud tried to put a spring in his step and a tilt to his chin as he walked up the drive. The whole world, after all, had not fallen apart—just half of it. And Gramps was not only better but excited as a six-year-old over the prospect of hunting Old Yellowfoot tomorrow. Bud took off his overshoes, patted Shep and went into the kitchen.
Gram had just taken a tray of ginger cookies from the oven and put them on the table. Their odor permeated the whole kitchen. Gramps sat against the far wall happily oiling his rifle. Since Dr. Beardsley had given Gramps permission to go deer hunting this season, Gramps had been inspecting his rifle ten times a day. By now he had sighted it in so finely that he could almost drive nails with it at a hundred yards.
"Tomorrow's the day," Gramps said as Bud came in, "and I'm betting Old Yellowfoot will be hanging out in Dockerty's Swamp. You'd best get your own rifle in working order."
Bud said, "I already have."
Gram was more observant. "You're late, Allan," she said.
"I stayed to talk with Mr. Demarest," Bud said, in what he hoped was a casual tone. "He brought me home."
"What's the trouble?" she said, and Gramps looked up sharply.
"There's no trouble," Bud said.
"You can tell me, Allan. We're here to help you."
"If you're in a jam, Bud, we're on your side," Gramps said. "What'd you do? Sock the principal?"
"Honestly there's no trouble," Bud said. "Mr. Demarest and I talked about agriculture college."
"How nice," Gram said. "Every one of our boys and girls has gone to college. Now the twelfth will go, too."
"No he won't," Bud said. "Mr. Demarest said I hardly need a degree in agriculture if I'm going to stay here and take over Bennett's Farm. He said I can learn what I must know about poultry husbandry and berry culture as I go along."
"You're a right handy young feller at a lot of things," Gramps said. "But you're 'bout the poorest liar I ever laid eyes on. Joe Demarest never told you that."
"Well," Bud stammered, "not exactly. We had quite a talk."
"About what?"
"College."
"You make nine times as many circles as Old Yellowfoot with fifteen hunters hot on his tail," Gramps said. "He told you to go to college, didn't he?"
"Yes," Bud admitted. "But I'm not going."
"Why not?"
"I don't want to waste that much time. I can pick up what I must know as I go along."
"That is about the foolishest notion I ever heard," Gramps declared. "In my time I've met lots of men who didn't know enough, but offhand I can't remember any who knew too much. Sure you're going. May be you can't live like a millionaire's son on what we got in the bank, but you can get through."
"I can't take your money!" Bud blurted.
"Pooh," Gram sniffed. "What's money for? Of course you'll take it and we'll be mighty proud to have a college graduate running Bennett's Farm. Won't we, Delbert?"
"Yeah," said Gramps who had begun to oil his rifle again. "Now you'd best get out of your school duds. I fed and bedded your hifalutin' chickens though I'm sort of uneasy around that one high-steppin' rooster. He's got so much blue blood that most any time at all I expect him to whip out one of those fancy glasses on sticks. That rooster sure ought to have one. He figures I'm not fit to be in the same chicken house with him. You beat it along now, Bud. I didn't milk the cows."
"Take a couple of cookies with you," Gram said.
Bud grabbed a handful of cookies and went up to his room. As he went about changing into work clothes, Bud kept his jaws clamped tightly. Gram and Gramps were wonderful, but they were so hopelessly out of touch with the world that they understood neither the value of money nor why Bud couldn't take the savings they had accumulated almost penny by penny over nearly half a century. They still added to it, but still almost penny by penny, and there was not even a possibility of sudden wealth. Anyway, Bud said to himself, he had another year of high school before he could even hope to enter college. Perhaps something would turn up before then. But in his heart he knew nothing would and he decided to say no more about college. There was no point in arguing with Gram and Gramps.
As Bud milked the cows, took care of the stock and ate the evening meal with Gram and Gramps, he all but forgot his lost hope for a college education. Tomorrow's hunt for Old Yellowfoot was too exciting for him to brood over what could not be helped.
The tinny clatter of his alarm clock jarred him out of deep sleep the next morning well before the usual time. Bud shut the alarm off, leaped to the floor, and padded across it to revel for a moment in the frigid blast that blew in his open window. With snow on the ground and weather cold enough to keep it from melting without being too cold for comfort, it was a perfect day for hunting deer.
When he returned to the kitchen after doing the morning chores, Gram was making pancakes and cooking sausage and Gramps was sitting in a chair. "Why didn't you call me?" he growled. "We'd have been in the woods sooner if I'd helped with the chores."
"Now don't be grouchy," Gram said. "Old Yellowfoot's been roaming about Bennett's Woods for a good many years. I think he'll last another fifteen minutes."
"A body would figure I'm a crippled old woman," Gramps said. "Maybe you should ought to wrap me up in cotton and put me to bed so I won't get scratched or something. Pah! I never did see the beat of such a business!"
"If you're feeling as mad as all that," Gram said sharply, "you won't have to shoot Old Yellowfoot. Just bite him and he'll die from hydrophobia."
Bud giggled and Gramps couldn't help chuckling.
"Of all the dang fools in the world, people are the dangdest," he said. "I put myself in mind of Charley Holan, who said he'd be the happiest man in Dishnoe County if he just had a good brood sow. He got the sow and then he needed a place to keep it. So he said he'd be the happiest man ever if he had a place to keep it. He got one and found he needed a boar. Charley got the boar and first thing you know he was overrun with pigs. They did poorly that year, it didn't even pay to haul 'em to market. So Charley says he'd be the happiest man in Dishnoe County if he'd never even seen a pig. And this is the first season in the past three I've ever been able to hunt Old Yellowfoot. We'll tag him 'fore the season ends, Bud."
"I hope so, Gramps," Bud said.
"Dig in. It takes a pile of Mother's pancakes and a heap of sausage to see a man through a day in the deer woods."
After breakfast they stepped into the cold predawn blackness. Shep, tied as usual while deer season was in swing, came to the end of his rope, whined, pressed his nose against their hands and pleaded as usual to be taken along.
Gramps stopped just inside Bennett's Woods, almost in sight of the barn. It was still too dark to shoot, but they often saw deer from the barn and they could expect to see deer from now on. It was true that Old Yellowfoot had never been seen so near the farm but that was no sign he never would be.
They went on as soon as they were able to sight clearly on a target a hundred yards away. Their jackets were tightly buttoned and their earmuffs pulled down against the frosty air. A doe faded across the trail like a gray ghost, leaving sharply imprinted tracks in the snow. A little farther on they saw a small buck. Then a doe and fawn ran wildly through the woods, and Gramps halted in his tracks.
Bud stared. Since he had come to Bennett's Farm he had seen many deer, and many of them had been running. But he had never seen any of them run like this.
"That pair's scared," Gramps said. "In all my born days I haven't seen ten deer run that fast, and the last one had wolves on its trail."
"Could wolves be chasing these?" Bud asked.
Gramps shook his head. "As far as I know, there hasn't been a wolf in Bennett's Woods for twenty-six years. Me and Eli Dockstader got the last one, and there's nothing else I can recall offhand that could start a couple of deer running that way and keep 'em running. Still, it has to be something."
Off in the distance, rifles began to crack as hunters started sighting and shooting at deer. Gramps and Bud paid no attention, for if other hunters could see them, they must be ordinary deer.
When they reached Dockerty's Swamp, where Gramps thought they might find Old Yellowfoot, Bud said, "Let me go down and track him through, Gramps, and you take it easy."
"Poof!" the old man said. "If Old Yellowfoot's in there, there's just one man got a chance of putting him out and that's me. Doc Beardsley said I could come deer hunting, didn't he? 'Sides, did you ever know a deer hunter—I'm talking of deer hunters and not deer chasers—who took it anything 'cept easy? The slower you go, the more deer you see."
"That's so," Bud admitted.
"Kite round and get on your stand," Gramps ordered. "I'll be through by and by."
He disappeared and Bud circled the swamp to the brush-grown knoll that deer chose as an escape route when they were driven out of Dockety's Swamp. Rifles, some of them close and some distant, cracked at sporadic intervals as other hunters continued to find and shoot at deer. Bud waited quietly, with a couple of chickadees that were sitting nearby on a sprig of rhododendron for company.
Before long he saw something move down the slope. Bud stiffened, ready to shoot. It could only be a deer. But at the moment it was too far away and too well hidden by brush for him to tell what kind of a deer. Then it came on up the slope and Bud saw that it was a very good ten-point buck, but he refrained from shooting. The ten point was a nice trophy but he was not Old Yellowfoot.
Then nine does came by in no hurry, but without lingering as they walked through the sheltering brush into the forest beyond. They were followed by two smaller bucks, and then by another doe. Two and a half hours after Bud had taken up his stand, Gramps reappeared. Bud saw with relief that the old man did not look tired or even winded. Doc Beardsley had known what he was talking about when he had said Gramps was able to hunt deer this season.
"There were plenty of deer in the swamp, but Old Yellowfoot wasn't among 'em," Gramps said. "We'll try Dozey Thicket."
But Old Yellowfoot was not in Dozey Thicket or Hooper Valley or Cutter's Slashing or Wakefoot Hollow. Nor did they find Old Yellowfoot the next day, although they saw at least three bucks with imposing racks of antlers.
On Monday Bud had to return to school and Gramps hunted alone. All week long he had no success, but when Bud came home Friday, Gramps was waiting for him in the kitchen. There was an air of triumph about him and a hunter's gleam in his eye.
"Found him, Bud," he said as soon as Bud came through the door.
"No!"
"Sure 'nough did! He's gone plumb out of Bennett's Woods into that footy little thicket above Joe Crozier's place. I saw his track where he came to the top of the hill and went back again, but I didn't hunt him 'cause I was afraid I might spook him. But two of us can get him right where he is."
Saturday morning, Bud and Gramps waited for dawn on the ridge overlooking Joe Crozier's thicket. When daylight came, they sighted their rifles on a rock about a hundred yards away, and for a moment neither spoke.
Crozier's thicket had at one time been a fine stand of hardwoods. Joe Crozier's father had cut the larger trees and buzzed them up for firewood, and the thicket had grown back to spindly young saplings. It was just the place a wise buck like Old Yellowfoot would choose as a refuge during hunting season, for nobody would ever think of looking for him there. But it was also a place where experienced hunters who did stumble onto his refuge would surely kill him.
"Let's go down," Gramps said softly.
Side by side they descended the hill, but when they were still forty yards from Crozier's thicket, they stopped. There was a patch of dark gray there that might have been a protruding knob of a tree or a boulder, but it wasn't. Old Yellowfoot, who knew the odds but was not about to give up, began to try to sneak away.
He was as huge as ever and he had lost none of his cunning. But his left antler was now only a single straight spike and his right one a snarled welter of many points.
Bud almost cried with disappointment, for he knew how Gramps had dreamed of the royal trophy Old Yellowfoot's antlers would make. And now he had overtaken Old Yellowfoot only to find him in his decadence. Never again would Old Yellowfoot be a worth-while trophy for anyone. He had succumbed to age.
As Bud was about to speak to Gramps, the old man said serenely, "Nature got to him before we could and I reckon that's as it should be. He was just a little too good to hang on anybody's wall. Let's go see Mother."
A week later, Bud and Gramps went into Bennett's Woods to bring out a load of firewood. Bud drove the team, Gramps sat on the bobsled seat beside him and Shep tagged amiably behind. They were half a mile from the farmhouse when the horses stopped of their own accord and raised their heads to stare. Looking in the same direction, Bud saw the black buck.
More darkly colored than any other deer Bud had ever seen, the buck was standing rigidly still in a little opening between two clusters of stunted hemlocks. His antlers had become magnificent. The black buck's head was high, and his eyes wary and his nostrils questing. A second later he glided out of sight into the nearest hemlocks.
For a moment Bud and Gramps sat enthralled, scarcely believing what they had seen. Then Gramps sighed and said, "Nothing's ever really lost, Bud. That's as good a head as Old Yellowfoot ever carried. Next year we'll hunt the black buck."