Delbert was getting tired of small game now. He began to plan for deer and pork. He made himself a new bow, larger and stronger than he had ever had before, with a new, strong string, and he made new arrows tipped with the best points he could get, and then he and Esther went deer-hunting.
Jennie always stayed with Marian, to help with Davie and because she really did not like hunting. She could not bear to kill things nor to see them killed. She carried her bow and arrows and shot at marks along with the rest of them, and sometimes at game, but she never seemed to enjoy it when she hit it.
As soon as it was light enough for them to see their way at all, Delbert and Esther would creep out and try for a close approach to the deer. Sometimes they did not come back till about noon, their only breakfast having been some raw vegetables carried with them, a few bananas usually, which they carried in their quivers with their arrows,—sometimes not even that. Marian had no hopes of their ever getting a deer, but she never discouraged them. She and Jennie could manage Davie and tend the little burros, and the lessons could be studied in the afternoons. Davie, poor boy, certainly had to take his lessons with great regularity in those days; there was no way he could escape from them. Marian had had to loosen his bandages a number of times, but she did not yet dare take them off, though she had not kept him strapped to the house very long.
Marian now began to study very earnestly on the spinning and weaving problem. Rabbit-skin clothing was very unsatisfactory, as were the crocheted fiber things, too, though for different reasons, but little King David’s misfortune had simply wiped every other kind out of existence. What with bandages and towels, there was not one single thin, worn garment left, only a little pile of frayed rags. Marian took her swim at night now. It was imperative that new clothes be acquired in some way, and she thought and thought, and was just beginning to see light on the subject when Esther came tearing in one morning, breathless and disheveled, to announce that Delbert had killed his deer.
His sisters could scarcely credit the story, but Marian took the path straightway, leaving Jennie to keep Davie company and give him his frequently demanded drinks of water and dampen his bandages and see if he had remembered from yesterday the little words written on the big clamshell. Marian found Delbert dancing a veritable war dance round a fair-sized buck. The thing had happened almost as far back as Little Pig Cove, where Davie had fallen, and, in a way, the two occurrences were somewhat similar.
Delbert and Esther had crept along that morning, as luck would have it, in time to witness a very serious disagreement between two bucks. The wind was in their favor; otherwise they might not have got quite so close to where the two were struggling together.
Perhaps one of them had thought they should cross the pasture on the level land, perhaps the other wanted the herd to hunt panales among the rocks. Delbert never knew what the quarrel was about. He had read of such things, but this was his first chance to see anything of the sort. His blood leaped, and his eyes sparkled. Esther, a little behind him, practically inclined, fitted an arrow to her bow and shot. In her excitement the shaft went wide of the mark; so much so that no one, not even the deer, noticed it at all, a result which so sobered her that she did not try again. Delbert was actually forgetting to shoot at all, which Esther afterwards declared was worse than shooting and missing, even as wildly as she had.
But the stronger of the two bucks was beginning to push the other about, and in the scuffle they worked nearer and nearer to the edge of the rocks, though it is hardly likely this was other than accidental. Probably they were so taken up with their tussle that they did not notice where they were going. But presently a rock loosened and slipped, and then, before they could realize what was happening, a great mass of rocks and earth and bushes fell thundering down the steep to the level strip below.
Esther screamed and ran back; the group of deer which had been watching the combat also fled, and did not stop till they had reached the safety of the farther pasture. One of the fighting bucks was able to spring back and save himself, and he fled with the rest, but the other one went down with the avalanche.
