However, the mention of this buck opened on John’s devoted head the floodgates of Esau’s memory, and he insisted on telling about his last stalk here two years ago, as follows:—
‘By George! I shall never forget how Jens and I turned out that morning across the same precipice that you passed to get up Nautgardstind: we started pretty early because it was my last day, and I had sworn to catch something or perish.
‘About ten o’clock we saw four deer, a fine buck and three does, on a long narrow snow-drift on the east side of the mountain: they were about a mile off and moving away, with the wind blowing straight from them to us; so we went after them as fast as we could, without much attempt at concealment at first.
‘Presently they left the snow and turned to the left, as if to skirt round the mountain, we still following and getting rather nearer to them. They seemed very restless and kept moving, and at last began to trot, and soon got out of our sight.
‘We were half an hour without seeing them again, and at last Jens discovered them far down below us in the large valley where you saw that one to-day. The place where they were was quite unapproachable, but Jens pointed out a sort of pass by which he thought it was likely they might leave the valley, and so we went and hid ourselves in a convenient nook fifty yards to the leeward of that place.
‘There we lay in a bitterly cold wind for an hour, and then the deer began to come in our direction. Now was the critical moment: there were two practicable routes in the pass; would they choose the nearer one, which would give me a shot, or the other? They stopped a little time to look for food, and provokingly grazed their way very slowly towards the wrong one, and then all of a sudden seemed to make up their minds and turned to the right one. The cold and cramp were forgotten as the deer came within three hundred yards and were nearing us quickly, and, with rifle cocked, I was already wondering whether the buck’s horns were in velvet or not, and thinking what a splendid coat he had; when without any warning a storm of sleet swept down upon us, and a dense mist drifted over the mountain and shut out from our gaze the rocky pass and deer alike wrapped in impenetrable gloom.
‘For fully half an hour this lasted, and then the mist cleared as quickly as it had come, the sleet stopped, and the sun shone out, making the ground fairly smoke: but, alas! the deer were gone. We looked for their tracks, and found that they had actually passed within forty yards of us during the storm; but our chance was missed, and there was nothing for it but to renew the search.
‘Another hour of walking, and Jens’ quick eye caught sight of them, this time high above our heads on some snow near the top of Nautgardstind, and at last, thank goodness, lying down. There seemed to be a possibility of getting to them, and we spent another hour crawling like serpents in the attempt, only to find our way barred when we were within four hundred yards by a ridge over which we could not pass unseen.
‘However, from there we saw plainly that we could approach them by going up the mountain, and then coming quite straight down above them, with hardly any difficult ground to traverse. So we performed that weary crawl back again, until we were safely out of sight, and then went up Nautgardstind at a speed that has never been equalled.
‘Half an hour took us to the top, and then Jens made the only mistake in a stalk that I ever saw: he got his bearings wrong somehow, and thought that the deer were on one bit of snow, the top end of which we could see, while I thought they were on another. Of course I had much more confidence in Jens’ opinion than in my own, but it turned out that he was wrong, and in crawling to the place where he expected them to be, we unluckily came into full view of the snow where they really were—a fact which was made unpleasantly apparent to us by our suddenly catching sight of four deer galloping down the drift two hundred yards away.