Starting up near Goff, the Spring creek deer-run came down to within a half mile of Wetmore, then went southeast across the prairie to Mosquito creek, thence up Mosquito creek nearly to Bancroft and across the prairie again to the head of Spring creek.
Three deer were the most ever seen at one time on this run. They came into a flock of 4,000 sheep I was herding for old Morgan on the Dan Williams place a mile south of town, where Clyde Ely now lives. The sheep were frightened and divided themselves into two bunches as the deer loped gaily through the flock.
If you don’t know, a deer-run is the feeding grounds of those ruminants. As long as the deer remain in the country they travel the same route closely. In the winter—in the old days here—they fed largely on hazel-brush and Other tender twigs.
We observed in our early hunts that the deer when feeding always traveled the circle in the same way, never reversing. Sometimes however when routed suddenly they would backtrack. And when pressed they would usually run with the wind. Probably that was not so much to gain speed as it was to camouflage the trail of their own scent and to more readily themselves catch the scent of their pursuers. When hard pressed they would sometimes take off with the wind and go ten or twelve miles off the run—in one instance, nearly to Sabetha. Whenever a deer would turn tail to wind we were ready to go home. I have seen them break out against the wind and then when off a reasonable distance circle around and go the other way. At such times my father would say, “Ah damn it, now he’s gone with the wind!”
Since I am employing a rather broad drag-line brand of technique, there is one more thing I might amplify here. In the beginning I said it would entail a lot of research to do a good Indian story, historically complete. Reliable information is hard to obtain. The old Indians—the Indians I knew—have all gone to their “happy hunting grounds.” The present generation does not seem to have a very clear picture of the old days.
For instance, I made two trips to the reservation about five years ago and interviewed a number of the older ones — second generation, of course—in a vain effort to obtain just one Indian word. You may recall that the tanyard story was, I might say, predicated on the Indian’s name of sumac. When a small boy, I had understood Eagle Eye to call it “sequaw.” I wanted to be accurate, as that flaming little bush played an important part in the story as well as in the tannery. Not one of them could tell me the Indian name.
I found one Indian, Henry Rhodd, 64 years old at that time, who said he could not tell me the Indian name for sumac, but he knew what their fathers used it for. He said they tanned their deer skins with it. That was the same thing Eagle Eye had so dexterously managed to convey to my father and me up in the Wolfley timber sixty-odd years earlier. Henry, whom I would judge carries a mite of French blood in his veins, sniffed as if he were inhaling the perfume of a fragrant rose, and said, “And oh it smelled so good.” This, however, did not coincide with my findings as a tanner’s helper. Still, I have seen my father sniff his newly tanned calf skins and say the same thing. Our tan-yard was just about the “stinkenist” place on earth.
In this connection I might mention that some years later I, myself, shot a deer on lower Mosquito creek. My brother Sam and I had started out one afternoon, the two of us riding our old roan mare, Pet. We struck a fresh trail south of town about where the three deer and the four thousand sheep had mixed. We followed the tracks to the Frank Purcell timber. There we ran onto John Dixon and “Dore” Thornton. They said they had been trailing the deer on foot all day.
John Dixon told me to go around to the south side of the timber; that they would follow the tracks through the woods. The deer came out running fast, and I shot it. The charge of buckshot from my muzzle-loading shotgun hit a little too far back to make a clean kill.
We trailed that crippled deer—it was shot through the body as evidenced by blood on either side of the trail—for a distance of ten miles to the very spot where it had been started in the morning. At the line between the John Wolfley place and the Mary Morris place, now owned by R. M. Emery, the following morning, we lost the trail because of melting snow and cattle tracks. The deer was found dead a few days later only a quarter of a mile away.