Swiftly Gramps approached the place where the buck had been pawing, for the giant beech trees were widely separated and there was no brush to obscure the view. If the black buck was in the grove, they would see him. When they came to the scraped leaves, Gramps stopped again.
From where he stood the tracks of the wild dogs could be seen leading out of the beech grove and joining those of the black buck.
Gramps made a sound that was half a gasp and half a growl, and without looking back, began to move with giant strides along the mingled tracks. Bud hung back for a second. He had hunted and fished with Gramps hundreds of times, but he had never seen him react this way. Usually Gramps approached his quarry eagerly, but with a kind of reverence, too. Now Gramps seemed to have become a ferocious killer for whom the game was no longer a sport. Bud could only follow Gramps numbly, but it seemed to him that it had only become a question of whether Gramps or the wild dogs would kill the black buck first.
The buck was again making great leaps as the pack coursed him. Bud did not dare talk to Gramps, but he knew that no deer could maintain such a furious pace for long. And the longer-winded wild dogs could go on indefinitely.
Two miles after the pack had taken up the chase again, Gramps and Bud came upon the place where the dogs had first caught up with their quarry, and the trampled snow made it easy to reconstruct the scene. Pressed to his limit, the black buck had backed his haunches against a tangled windfall and waited with lowered antlers as the pack came on. The dogs had rushed and feinted, hoping to draw the buck out and make him expose his vulnerable flanks and hocks.
"Look!" Bud said, when he saw a patch of blood thinly covered by new snow.
"That ain't the black buck's blood," Gramps said. "If it was he never would have got out of here alive. He's hooked one of the dogs. They're not as anxious as they were."
It was true, Bud decided as he and Gramps raced on. The buck was still running hard, but he was no longer taking the same mighty leaps. No doubt that was partly because he was tired, but he had also taught the pack to respect him. Although they could have closed in on him, they had held off for another two and a half miles.
Then, on the rim of a shallow gully, the dogs had come forward with a determined rush. But the buck had backed up against three small trees whose trunks formed a triangle and held them off. There was no blood here, but when the buck had left, his leaps had been very short.
"He ain't going much farther," Gramps said grimly. "And he'll try to get back into the valleys where the snow ain't as deep. Come on. Hagen's Flat's the place he'll head for."