The tinny clatter of Ted's alarm clock awakened him at half-past three the next morning. He reached down to shut it off, reset it for half-past five and stole in to put it near the still sleeping John Wilson. Ted breakfasted, gave Tammie his food and a pat, donned his hunting jacket, put the strips of red cloth into the game pocket and stepped into the black morning.
He bent his head against the north wind and started climbing Burned Mountain. He knew as he climbed that he was pitting himself against a force as old as time.
The woodcraft of Pythias, or any deer, shamed that of the keenest human. Deer could identify every tiny sound, every wind that blew and the many scents those winds carried. They knew everything there was to know about their wilderness and they were all masters of it. No human could hope to equal their senses.
But Pythias, the greatest and most cunning of all, was still a beast. He knew and could interpret the wilderness, but he couldn't possibly apply reason to that which was not of the wilderness. If his confidence could be shaken....
It was still black night when Ted reached the summit of Burned Mountain, but he had crossed and re-crossed it so many times in the past twenty days that he could do so in the darkness. Pythias was there, and possibly he already knew that Ted was back on the mountain. But he'd feel secure in the thicket where he was bedded and he would not go out until he was flushed.
Ted sought the aspen grown aisles between the thickets. He hung a strip of red cloth on a wind whipped branch, walked fifty yards and hung another. The night lifted and daylight came, and an hour later Ted tied his last strip of cloth to a twig. Carrying no rifle—but Pythias couldn't possibly know that—he put his hands in his pockets to warm them. Now he had to flush the big buck.
He and his guest had left the great animal in one of the larger thickets last night, but it was almost certain that he hadn't passed the whole night there. Ted circled the thicket, found Pythias' unmistakable tracks and followed to where the big buck had nibbled tender young aspen shoots and pawed the snow to get at the dried grass beneath it. Thereafter Pythias had done considerable wandering. Ted worked out the trail and discovered where his quarry had gone to rest in another thicket.
He tracked him in, and he'd done this so many times that he knew almost exactly what to expect. The big buck would wait until he was sure someone was again on his trail, then he'd get up and sneak away. There would be nothing except tracks in the snow to mark his going. A man could not travel silently through the thickets, but a deer could.
Deep within the thicket, Ted found the bed, a depression melted in the snow, to which Pythias had retired when his wandering was done. The tracks leading away were fresh and sharp, no more than a couple of minutes old, but they were not the widely spaced ones of a running buck. Knowing very well what he was doing, aware of the fact that he could not be seen while there, Pythias always walked in the thickets.
However, when he decided to leave this thicket, he had leaped through the scrub aspen separating it from the next one. It could have taken him no more than a second or so. If a hunter had been watching, he would have had just a fleeting shot and only a lucky marksman would have connected. Ted followed fast. There were no cloth strips in these aspens.