They kept pushing on; and Step Hen began to believe they must be many miles from their starting point; at any rate he began to feel a little heavy-footed, though too proud to mention the fact to Thad. Besides, Step Hen had walked pretty good distances before, and believed that he must soon get what he called his “second wind.” After that he would be good for hours, he fancied.
It must have been well on to eleven o’clock when Thad felt his companion nudge him in the back. As he turned to look, Step Hen made a suggestive gesture with his head, and pointed upwards.
There was a dead gray sky above them, and already a few scattered flakes of snow, really the first of the season, were drifting downward, looking like tiny feathers plucked from the downy breast of a snow goose.
Thad simply nodded his head to indicate that he too had observed them; and at the same time he shook his finger toward Step Hen, afraid lest the other might be itching to start a conversation. In fact, this was just what the other scout was hoping to do. This grim silence had begun to work upon his nerves–just walking on and on, with not a blessed sign of the fine buck they expected to get, commenced to pall upon Step Hen, in whom the instincts of a hunter had never been born; although of late he had begun to develop a taste for roaming the woods with a gun over his shoulder. But he had much to learn concerning the secrets that Nature hides from most eyes, but which are as the page of an open book to the favored few.
Step Hen began to twist his head around frequently. At first Thad thought he was developing a new eagerness to discover signs of game; but then he soon saw that the wistful expression on the other’s face was brought about by quite a different cause.
To tell the honest truth about it, Step Hen was trying to figure out in his benighted brain just what the cardinal points of the compass might be. It was not that he possessed any alarming interest in proving certain facts Thad and Allan had explained, concerning the fascinating game of learning where the north lay by marks on the trees; the general direction in which they slanted; signs of moss on the north or northwest side of the tree, and various other well proven methods of locating one’s self. Oh! nothing of the kind. Step Hen wanted to find out one particular fact. They had started north when leaving camp; and now, if he could only learn that they were heading due south, it would tell him that Thad had swung around, and was facing back home again; and thus he would not be under the painful necessity of informing his companion that he was tired of the useless hunt, when nothing worth while showed up.
And then it happened!
Step Hen happened to have his eyes in the right quarter when suddenly a fine big buck sprang to its feet, and stared at them a second or two, before starting to spring away. They had been heading up into the wind all the time, which was a part of Thad’s principle as a true still hunter; and the deer had not known of their presence until the greenhorn happened to step on a small branch, which snapped under his weight.
Possibly Step Hen never really knew just how he did it. Indeed, he afterwards confessed to himself that his ready little rifle just seemed to swing upward to his shoulder by some instinct, which was probably the exact truth; for hunters seldom have time to do any thinking.
He saw that splendid deer standing there before him. Now, Step Hen had often fired a target rifle at just such a picture of a deer as this in the shooting gallery in Cranford. And when he took a hasty aim just behind the shoulder of the startled buck, he was really following out his usual custom of covering the bull’s-eye on the artificial deer, so familiar to his boyish eyes.