The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

The old sway-backed horse sulked along, refusing to “take any hand” in such a trifling performance. He must have felt the insult of Polly’s babyish heels dangling against his weather-beaten ribs, that were wont to be decorated with the pendent hoofs and horns of his master’s vanquished game.

Relations between the family and their neighbor in the dugout continued to be friendly and mutually profitable. The old ex-soldier’s venison was better than could be purchased in town. Charley Moy saved the picture papers for him, and seldom failed to find the half of a pie, a cup of cold coffee, or a dish of sweets for him to “discuss” on the bench by the kitchen door. Discovering that antlers were prized in camp, he brought his very best pair as a present, bearing them upon his shoulders, the furry skull of the deer against his own, back to back, so that in profile he was double-headed, man in front and deer behind.

But the young men of the camp were ambitious to kill their own venison. The first light dry snow had fallen, and deer-tracks were discovered on the trails leading to the river. A deer was seen by John Brown and Mr. Dane, standing on the beach on the farther side, in a sort of cul-de-sac formed by the walls of the lava bluffs as they approached the shore. They fired at and wounded him, but he was not disabled from running. His only way of escape was by the river in the face of the enemy’s fire. He swam in a diagonal line down stream, and assisted by the current gained the shore at a point some distance below, which his pursuers were unable to reach in time to head him off.

They followed him over the hills as far and fast as legs and wind could carry them, but lost him finally, owing to the dog Cole’s injudicious barking, when the policy of the men would have been to lie quiet and let the deer rest from his wound. By his track in the snow they saw that his left hind foot touched the ground only now and then. If Cole had pressed him less hard the deer would have lain down to ease his hurt, the wound would have stiffened and rendered it difficult for him to run, and so he might have met his end shortly, instead of getting away to die a slow and painful death.

They lost him, and were reproached for it, needlessly, by the women of the family. One Saturday morning, when Mr. Dane was busy in the office over his notebooks, and Jack’s mother was darning stockings by the fire, Jack came plunging in to say that John Brown was trying to head off a deer that was swimming down the river—and would Mr. Dane come with his rifle, quick?

Below the house a wire-rope suspension bridge for foot passengers only spanned the river at its narrowest point, from rock to rock of the steep shore. Mr. Dane looked out and saw John Brown running to and fro on this bridge, waving his arms, shouting, and firing stones at some object above the bridge that was heading down stream. Mr. Dane could just see the small black spot upon the water which he knew was the deer’s head. He seized his gun and ran down the shore path. Discouraged in his attempt to pass the bridge, the deer was making for the shore, when Mr. Dane began firing at him. A stranger now arrived upon the scene, breathless with running; he was the hunter who had started the game and chased it till it had taken to the river. The deer was struggling with the current in midstream, uncertain which way to turn. Headed off from the bridge and from the nearest shore, he turned and swam slowly toward the opposite bank. The women on the hill were nearly crying, the hunt seemed so hopeless for the deer and so unfair: three men, two of them with guns, combined against him, and the current so swift and strong! It was Mr. Dane’s bullet that ended it. It struck the deer as he lifted himself out of the water on the rocks across the river.

The venison was divided between the stranger who started the game and the men of the camp who cut off its flight and prevented its escape.

The women did not refuse to eat of it, but they continued to protest that the hunt “was not fair;” or, in the phrase of the country, that the deer “had no show at all.”

THE GATES ON GRANDFATHER’S FARM

Little Eastern children, transplanted in their babyhood to the far West, have to leave behind them grandfathers and grandmothers, and all the dear old places associated with those best friends of childhood.