"Why, look here, you blooming idiot," said he. "No wonder you couldn't kill at short range. The wedge has slipped up under your rear sight two notches. She's elevated for 350 yards, and at that rate would shoot about a foot high at a hundred yards." I looked and found it even so. Then I offered him and Dick a dollar each if they would kick me, but they wouldn't.
Sam said good-naturedly: "Come, go with me and get the head of the buck I killed. It's a very handsome one, and only two miles from camp."
I said I didn't want any heads for my own use unless I could kill their owners myself, but would take this one home for a friend, so we saddled our horses and started.
As we reached the top of a hill about a mile from camp a large buck that was grazing ahead of us jumped and ran away to what he seemed to consider a safe distance, and stopped to look at us. Sam generously offered me the shot, and springing out of my saddle I threw down my rifle, took careful aim and fired. At the crack the buck turned just half way round, but was unable to make a single jump and sank dead in his tracks.
Sam is ordinarily a quiet man, but he fairly shouted at the result of my shot. I paced the distance carefully to where the carcass lay, and it was exactly 290 steps. The buck was standing broadside to me and I had shot him through the heart. Of course, it was a scratch. I could not do it again perhaps in twenty shots, and yet when I considered that I shot for one single animal and got him I could not help feeling a little proud of it. As we approached the animal, not knowing just where I had hit him, I held my rifle in readiness, but Sam said:
"Oh, you needn't be afraid of his getting up. One of those Winchester express bullets is all an antelope needs, no matter what part of the body you hit him in."
This old fellow had a fine head, and we took it off, and now as I write it gazes down upon me with those large, lustrous black eyes, from its place on the wall, as proudly and curiously as it did there on the prairie when I looked at it through the sights of my Winchester. His portrait adorns page 199 of this book, and though the artist has treated it with a master's hand, it does not possess the lordly beaming, the fascinating grace, the timid beauty that distinguished the living animal.
It was so late when we got this one dressed that we decided to return to camp at once.
The curiosity which is so prominent a feature in the antelope's nature costs many a one of them his life, and is taken advantage of by the hunter in various ways. When we reached camp that afternoon Dick told us how he had taken advantage of it. He had seen a small band on a level stretch of prairie where there was no possible way of getting within range of them, and having heard that if a man would lie down on his back, elevate his feet as high as possible, and swing them back and forth through the air, that it would attract antelopes, decided to try it. But the antelopes of this section had evidently never seen soap boxes or bales of hay floating through the air, and had no desire to cultivate a closer acquaintance with such frightful looking objects as he exhibited to their astonished gaze. And Dick said that when he turned to see if they had yet come within shooting distance they were about a mile away, and judging from the cloud of dust they were leaving behind them seemed to be running a race to see which could get out of the country first.
The next morning Sam and I went together and Dick alone in another direction. During the forenoon I shot a buck through both fore legs, cutting one off clean and paralyzing the other. Sam said not to shoot him again and he would catch him, and putting spurs to his horse was soon galloping alongside of the quarry. He caught him by one horn and held him until I came up. The little fellow pranced wildly about, and bleated pitifully, but a stroke of the hunting knife across his throat soon relieved his suffering.