White Tail the Deer's Adventures

by George Ethelbert Walsh

Now back in the broad trail, Buster, who had been nearly as much surprised as they, suddenly roared with glee, his fat sides shaking and wobbling. “Ho! Ho!” he laughed. “What a scare I gave them! And I didn’t open my mouth. I wonder what they’d done if I’d roared like this.”

He let out a roar that shook the leaves off the bushes, and made White Tail and Young Black Buck run harder than ever. To them it seemed as if that roar was trying to catch them, and they couldn’t dodge its echo.

But, of course, Buster wasn’t pursuing them. In the first place, he knew he couldn’t overtake them, and in the second he wasn’t particularly hungry and rarely killed deer or bucks. He was too kind-hearted for that. But he did enjoy a joke, and he thought it was a huge one to scare them half out of their wits.

White Tail and Young Black Buck ran without knowing which way they were going. In fact they might have run straight into the camp of the man hunters if they hadn’t been stopped by the sudden baying of the dogs.

This time the dogs were so close that they couldn’t expect to throw them off their scent. In fact, one of them saw White Tail’s head, and immediately gave the signal. He rushed for them with wild yelps of delight, and two others followed him.

The two bucks swung around in another direction, and ran pell-mell through the woods. The fear of the dogs made them forget Buster. Indeed White Tail realized his mistake now. He knew that Buster could not overtake him in a race, but the dogs of the man hunters might. They would follow them night and day until exhaustion killed one or the other.

“We’re in for it now,” White Tail said to his companion, breathing hard. “The dogs are fresh, and we’re not. We must find a river to throw them off our scent.”

But finding a river in a strange woods was not an easy thing to do. So far as they knew there was no river there. They were completely turned around, and hardly knew which direction to take to reach home.

Young Black Buck soon began to show signs of weariness, and his lame leg hurt him again. In vain White Tail urged him on, but he couldn’t run any faster. The dogs would certainly soon overtake him.

Then White Tail did a magnanimous thing. He couldn’t bear to leave his companion behind to be pulled down by the dogs, while he escaped. No, no, that would never do for one who some day expected to be leader of the herd!