"I hope I am."
That night the temperature fell to zero, and every buck on every game rack in the Mahela froze solid. There was no longer any evidence whatever to prove that Damon, as Ted thought of the great buck on Crestwood's game rack, had been taken by other than legal means.
Even if Ted wanted to do something now, his chance was gone.
For twenty days, always leaving the Harkness house before dawn and never getting back until after dark, Ted and his guest had hunted Pythias.
They had seen deer, dozens of them, and Ted had dropped a nice eight-point so close to his house that they had needed only fifteen minutes to dress it out, slide it in over the six inches of crisp snow that now lay in the Mahela and hang it on the game rack. John Wilson had had his choice of several bucks, and at least four of them had been fine trophies. But he had come to hunt the big buck that still lurked on Burned Mountain and he was determined to get that one or none.
It looked as though it would be none, Ted reflected as he sat in front of the blazing fire, tearing a bolt of red cloth into strips. Pythias, who had sucked in his woodcraft with his mother's milk, had only contempt for any mere human who coveted his royal rack of antlers.
The second day of the season, giving John Wilson ample time to post himself in the white birches, Ted had gone to the bed in which they'd seen Pythias on the first day. A small buck and two does had gone through, but Pythias had not. Most deer have favorite runways, or paths, that are as familiar to them as sidewalks are to humans. Pythias seldom used one, and he never took the same route twice in succession.
Hunted hard every day, he hadn't let himself be chased from the top of Burned Mountain. Staying there, he knew what he was doing. Sparsely forested, the top of the mountain was given over to a devil's tangle of twining laurel and snarled rhododendron. Some of the stems from which the latter evergreen grew were thick as tree trunks, and some of the winding, snaking branches were thirty feet long. It was heartbreaking work just to go through one, and impossible for a man to do so without making as much noise as a running horse. Once within the laurel or rhododendron, and some thickets were a combination of both, it was seldom possible to see seven yards in any direction. Often, visibility was restricted to seven feet.
Pythias haunted those thickets that varied from an eighth of an acre to perhaps eighty acres. Chased out of one, he entered another, flitting like a gray ghost through the scrub aspen that separated them. Then he lingered until the hunters came and entered another thicket. Only when going through the aspens, where he knew very well he could be seen, did he run. In the thickets he walked or slunk, and he never made a foolish move.