Others of his kind have given me trouble and danger in varying degrees, and in a variety of ways; and I have known several persons killed by them. But the “closest call” a deer ever gave me, and one of the most terrible struggles in all my hunting and wandering, befell me in the heart of the city of Los Angeles; and the hero was a “tame” buck.
It was many years ago, at a time when my passion for pets, always strong, had unusual opportunities for gratification in one of the moss-gathering intervals of a usually rolling stone. Behind the house (where a half-million dollar block stands to-day) was a good-sized yard, for a city lot, well shaded with eucalyptus trees, and with a substantial shed. Here was plenty of room for pets, and we acquired a variety of them.
First in our affection was my precious old cat Beauty, which had come with the family from Ohio. There was also a horse, which boarded at the livery stable; and a fine Danish hound that had adopted us. This did very well for a while. But during a vacation run over New Mexico, I wounded a young eagle; and, seeing that his wing would soon heal under proper care, I brought him home and kept him in a leash on the back porch, where he throve admirably.
Then someone presented me with a barn-owl, and he kept the eagle company. Rabbits have always pleased me; and presently I made some hutches, and in time had them peopled with a dozen rabbits and guinea-pigs. In a cage in my study lived a couple of handsome rattlesnakes; and one day I brought home in a slatted box a tiny wildcat—at which a patient wife cried:
“Don’t get anything more, Charlie! We can’t move now without stepping on a pet; and they are too much care for me, with you gone at the office all day and almost all night!”
But in spite of herself she grew very fond of the wildcat baby, which would lie in her lap and purr with the most ridiculously disproportionate voice. It could hardly have been a month old; and had I been the hunter who found it in the Sierra Madre, it should never have been taken from its fierce mother at such an age—for it had not been weaned, evidently.
Its body was not as large as that of a lean house-cat, but its legs were quite one-half longer, so that it had rather the appearance of being on stilts—and very uncertain, wobbly ones, too. Its feet were twice the size of Beauty’s, and its voice, in growling, was so heavy and so savage that one could scarce believe it issued from that ungainly little frame.
It was very gentle with its mistress, purred sonorously whenever she petted it, and went stumbling all over the house at her heels. Nor was it hostile to the young lady who completed our family, not half so afraid of Beauty as Beauty was of this wild cousin. But with me it would have nothing to do. As I was then city editor of the morning newspaper, and was very little at home, it evidently looked upon me as an interloper, and at a glance of me would snarl and show fight as sincerely as a grown lynx. And it was an enemy not altogether to be laughed at, as there are still scars to testify.
Once it climbed up and hid among the springs of my bed, and the heavy buck gloves I put on for the task of dislodging it did not save me from ugly tastes of those keen teeth and claws. Perhaps it is quite as well that Tiger did not survive his infancy, but died of congestion at four or five months old. Had he grown up, without a change of heart, he might have become troublesome.
With this much of a household on our hands, we might very reasonably have been content; and so probably should have been but for one of those “chances of a lifetime” which are always befalling the enthusiast. A fellow down in the Mexican quarter of the city had a pet deer, and, learning of my hobby, pestered me to buy—“dirt cheap, Sir!”