I have forgotten whether we ran. I am inclined to think that we did not. But we were not long in getting home, and then the elder was gone.
VI.
HOMESICK.
A pathetic little incident happened that week, which suggested many thoughts to us. Passing by a cleared space in the woods one afternoon, Mr. Smith saw a deer family quietly grazing there. Plentiful as these creatures were in that region, they never suffered a near approach; but this group looked at the intruder peacefully and showed no sign of alarm.
Is there on earth an animal more fierce and cruel than man in deed if not in intention? This man did not deliberately mean to perpetrate a fiendish act; but no otherwise could what he did be characterized. He did not want the venison, the skins, the graceful antlers; but he fancied it rather a fine thing to have that bounding target still for a moment. His rifle was over his shoulder; he lowered it, and took aim at the stag's stately front. There was a report; the creature gave one leap into the air, then fell, shot through the forehead.
Not even then did the others fly. While he loaded his rifle again, they bent over their prostrate companion, touching him, moved by what mute, incredulous grief, who can say? The marksman gleefully took aim again, and the doe fell with a bullet through her heart, and sobbed her life away. When Mr. Smith saw the young one put its head down to the mother's, for the first time some compunction touched his coarse, unsympathetic soul. But he had gone too far to retreat, and in a few minutes the fawn lay dead beside its mother.
Sally reproached her husband passionately when he told her the story of his wonderful feat.
"If dumb creatures were like men," she said, "the wild beasts would get up a mob to-night, and come here and lynch us; and not be to blame either!"
Blanch and I left Mr. Smith meekly taking his castigation, and went out to see his victims.
They lay where they had fallen, on the greensward, poor creatures! a sad blot upon the peaceful scene, their innocent, happy lives quite ebbed away. We stood by them a little while in the sunny silence, and it seemed as though every thing living shrank from us. We had never before been out without seeing some form of that wild animal life with which the woods were teeming. But now there was no sound of skittish steps evading us, no glimpse of shadowy figures among the trees. All was silent and dead.
We went to the road-side, and, seating ourselves on the moss under an aspen-tree, mourned silently. And thinking of the slaughtered deer, I thought of the first death in Eden; and from that, of the first sin in the world; and from that, of all the sin and sorrow that is in the world; and from that, of Him who came to restore us to the true Eden, the city of real peace, and how he stays here unseen, and watches lest we kill or are killed; and then I thought, "The nearer one keeps to the place where he is, the better."