Bennie looked, and saw a small deer—a mule deer, as it is called—coming rapidly up the steep incline, directly toward them! He could not get their scent from so far below, and he quite evidently hadn’t seen them. On he came, bounding easily up the incline, where a man would have toiled breathlessly.
“Wow! I’d like to be able to go up a mountain like that!” Bennie exclaimed.
Almost at his first word, they saw the deer’s big ears prick up. He landed stock still and rigid, and raised his eyes. Then he saw the two boys above him, and with a single bound, so quick the scouts couldn’t detect how he made the turn, he was off at right angles, along the slope. Working upward as he leapt along, he reached the rim three hundred yards away from them, and disappeared like smoke into a stand of fir.
“What a shot!” breathed Bennie.
“Aw, you couldn’t have hit him in a year,” Spider laughed.
“Why couldn’t I?”
“First place, you can’t shoot well enough, and second place I’d have knocked up your gun,” said Spider. “I wouldn’t shoot a deer as long as I had anything else to eat.”
“He was kind o’ pretty,” Bennie agreed.
“’Tisn’t that so much. But he’s wild. He’s part of the wilderness. He belongs to it. Killing a deer is just as bad as knocking off the top of a mountain, or spoiling all the forest trees.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Bennie admitted. “But how about going back and getting grub?”