There weren't that many deer when Al came of an age to hunt. His elders were at a loss to explain the scarcity, unless some mysterious plague had come among the animals. Never once did they think of themselves and their indiscriminate, year-round slaughter as the "plague." On Al's thirteenth birthday, he shot a buck and a doe. They were the last deer taken in the Mahela for the next thirteen years.
It wasn't an inexhaustible larder at all, but just a place that could be depleted by always thoughtless and often vicious greed. Then had come the change.
The Game Department, the Lorton paper announced, had purchased deer from a state that still had some. In the hope that they'd multiply and rebuild the vast herds that had once roamed there, twenty of them were to be released in the Mahela. There was to be no hunting at all until such time as there were sufficient deer to warrant a hunt, and game wardens were to enforce that regulation.
It hadn't been easy. Bitterly jealous of what they considered their vested rights, the natives of the Mahela had resisted the game wardens. There had been quarrels and even a couple of shootings. But the wardens had won out and the deer had come back.
There were as many as there'd ever been and perhaps more. Protected by strict and sane laws, they flourished. Seven families had all but exterminated the Mahela deer. Now four thousand properly regulated hunters a year couldn't do it, and this Al Harkness had seen.
He thought of the families—still the Harknesses, the Delberts, the Crawfords and the Staceys, who lived in the Mahela. With the exception of Al and Ted, who observed the game laws to the letter, most of them took more than their share of the Mahela's wildlife. Smoky Delbert was an especially vicious poacher who belonged, and one day would land, in jail. But, with game wardens on constant patrol, even Smoky could no longer indulge in wholesale slaughter.
There was, Al had always conceded, some excuse for the Crawfords and the Staceys. Al was the only Mahelaite who'd held on to the entire family acreage. Glad to raise money any way he could, the Staceys and Crawfords had sold theirs, all but a homesite and garden patch, and the proceeds were long since exhausted. Most of the men worked at day labor and their employment was never certain. Always struggling, there were times when they would have no meat at all if they did not shoot an occasional deer. That condition would not endure. Since all the younger people left the Mahela, preferably for some brightly lighted city, as soon as they possibly could, the Staceys and Crawfords who remained were not going to last forever.
But if there was some excuse for them, there was none whatever for Carl Thornton. Comparatively wealthy, certainly he was in no danger of going hungry. Educated, he must understand what conservation meant. Supposedly intelligent, he must know that nobody at all could take what he wanted simply because he felt like taking it, or for his own advantage, and still hope to leave enough for others and for future generations. Al braked to a halt in Crestwood's drive and entered the lodge.
Jules Crowley, Thornton's pale-faced clerk, stepped in front of him. "You can't come in here!"
Al said, "Oh yes I can."