The question of food supply is always an important one where there is a family of growing children, but especially is it so in a wilderness of forest, far from stores and the supplies of towns and cities. The question is not so much one of variety as of quantity, as the vigorous out-of-door life of the pioneer gives an appetite which dainties prepared by a famous chef would not tempt from the generous dish of “pork and beans,” or roast beef and potatoes.
This question became a pressing one to our settlers in the “old lake bottom,” by the Necedah river. The severe summer drouth had cut short the yield of their potato crop upon which high hopes had rested at the spring planting, and a great horde of migrating squirrels had harvested their little field of corn before it had ripened.
Ruffled grouse, or “prairie-chickens,” as they were called, were abundant up to the time of the big fires in August. Indeed, from the first of July the young birds had furnished a supply of meat for the table more delicious than the boys of the family had ever known.
The old sow, which they had succeeded in bringing through the winter, had been turned out into the hardwood timber along the river to care for herself, and Uncle Sam Thompson reported having seen her on Big Bend with a fine litter of pigs, which would thrive upon the “mast,” the nuts of oak and hickory, and furnish good “hams” and “sides” by Christmas.
The fire which had come down out of the big woods during the summer, burning over the low prairies and shallow marches had been followed by a week of heavy rains, and what had been a wide stretch of blackened waste was soon transformed by the springing grass into an emerald garden. While light frosts occasionally nipped the top, through September, the grass grew rapidly and luxuriantly, and Mr. Allen’s few cows and yoke of young oxen were rolling with fat by October.
Families and herds of deer might be seen any day a mile west from the Allen home, though they appeared to be more difficult of approach as the cold season came on. As many as twenty in one herd were counted by the boys at one time. While they had become expert with their guns in securing small game, neither Rob nor Ed had as yet tried their marksmanship upon the larger animals.
There was, at that time, no “closed” season for its protection, but the settlers, as a rule, never killed game wantonly, nor for “sport.” No deer were shot in the summer, especially while the young needed the care of its mother. But when the sharp, frosty nights of October came, the hunter’s appetite was allowed to match the woods-wisdom and cunning of the “antlered lords of the forest.”
The moonlight nights of October is the mating season, and then the hunters know that the deer keep to regular paths or “runs” through the forest. Rough platforms of boughs were built upon the low branches of some tree at the crossing or intersection of two runs, and upon this the hunter will take his seat and watch, while a comrade starts off, and making a wide detour, starts a “drive” in the direction of the ambush. The watcher in the tree must be alert, quick of sight, and sure of aim, for the buck will come bounding toward him with prodigious leaps and be gone again in a flash.
Uncle Sam had promised his nephew Dauphin and the Allen boys a deer hunt on the night of the full moon in October, but Rob Allen was impatient. “You needn’t be in such a hurry,” said Dauphin. “You couldn’t hit a deer the first time, anyway. One always has ‘buck-fever’ the first time.”
“You’ll see,” boasted Rob; “I’ll show you that the laugh will not be on me.”