Forest Neighbors: Life Stories of Wild Animals

by William Davenport Hulbert

And now the doe was thriving as well as her son. Through the summer she had been thin and poor, for the Fawn had fed on her life and strength, and the best of all that came to her she had given to him; but the strain was over at last, and there were granted her a few weeks in which to prepare for the season of cold and storm and scanty food. She made the best of them, and in an amazingly short time she was rolling fat.

Everything was lovely and the goose hung high, when all of a sudden the peace and quiet of their every-day lives were rudely broken. The hunting season had come, and half-a-dozen farmers from lower Michigan had camped beside the Glimmerglass. They were not really very formidable. If one wants to kill deer, one should learn to shoot straight and to get around in the woods without making quite as much noise as a locomotive. But their racket was intolerable, and after a day or two the doe and the Fawn left home and spent the next three or four weeks near a secluded little pond several miles away to the southeast.

By the first of December these troublous times were over, and they had returned to their old haunts in the beech and maple woods, where they picked up a rather scanty living by scraping the light snow away with their forefeet in search of the savory nuts. But before Christmas there came a storm which covered the ground so deeply that they could no longer dig out enough food to keep them from going hungry; and they were forced to leave the high lands and make their way to the evergreen swamps around the head-waters of the Tahquamenon. There they lived on twigs of balsam and hemlock and spruce, with now and then a mouthful of moss or a nutritious lichen. Little by little the fat on their ribs disappeared, they grew lank and lean again, and the bones showed more and more plainly through their heavy winter coats. If one of those November hunters had succeeded in setting his teeth in their flesh he would have found that it had a very pleasant, nutty flavor, but in February it would have tasted decidedly of hemlock. Yet they were strong and healthy, in spite of their boniness, and of course you can't expect to be very fat in winter.

There were worse things than hunger. One afternoon they were following a big buck down a runway—all three of them minding their own business and behaving in a very orderly and peaceable manner—when a shanty-boy stepped out from behind a big birch just ahead of them, and said, "Aah!" very derisively and insultingly. The wind was blowing from them to him, and they hadn't had the least idea that he was there until they were within three rods of his tree. The buck was so startled that for an instant he simply stood still and stared, which was exactly what the shanty-boy had expected him to do. He had stopped so suddenly that his forefeet were thrust forward into the snow, and he was leaning backward a trifle. His head was up, his eyes were almost popping out of their sockets, and there was such a look of astonishment on his face that the man laughed as he raised his gun and took aim. In a second the deer had wheeled and was in the air, but a bullet broke his back just as he left the ground, and he came tumbling down again in a shapeless heap. His spinal cord was cut, and half his body was dead; but he would not give up even then, and he half rose on his forefeet and tried to drag himself away. The shanty-boy stepped to his side with a knife in his hand, the deer gave one loud bleat of fear and pain, and then it was all over.

But by that time the doe and the Fawn were far down the runway—out of sight, and out of danger. Next day they passed that way again, and saw a Canada lynx standing where the buck had fallen, licking his chops as if he had just finished a good meal. It is hard work carrying a deer through the woods, and the shanty-boy had lightened his load as much as possible. Lynxes are not nice. The mother and son pulled their freight as fast as they could travel.

When the world turned green again they went back to the Glimmerglass, but they had not been there long before the young Buck had his nose put out of joint by the arrival of two new babies. Thenceforth his mother had all she could do to take care of them, without paying any further attention to him. The days of his fawnhood were over, and it was time for him to strike out into the world and make his own living.

However, I don't think he was very lonesome. There were plenty of other deer in the woods, and though he did not associate with any of them as he had with his mother, yet he may have enjoyed meeting them occasionally in his travels. And there was ever so much to do and to think about. Eating took up a good deal of time, for he was very active and was still growing, and his strong young body was constantly calling for more food. And it wasn't enough merely to find the food and swallow it, for no sooner was his stomach full than he had to lie down and chew the cud for an hour or so. And, of course, the black-flies and mosquitoes and "no-see-'ems" helped to make things interesting, just as they had the year before. Strictly speaking, it is impossible to be lonely in the woods during fly-time. He changed his clothes, too, and put on a much handsomer dress, though I doubt if he took as much interest in that operation as most of us would. The change contributed greatly to his comfort, for his light summer garment was much better adapted to warm weather than his winter coat, but it did not require any conscious effort on his part. On hot days he sometimes waded out into the lake in search of lily-pads, and the touch of the cool water was very grateful. Occasionally he would take a long swim, and once or twice he paddled clear across the Glimmerglass, from one shore to the other.

And it was during this summer that he raised his first real antlers. Those of the previous autumn had been nothing but two little buds of bone, but these were pointed spikes, several inches in length, standing straight up from the top of his head without a fork or a branch or a curve. They did not add very much to his good looks, and, of course, they dropped off early in the following winter, but they were the forerunners of the beautiful branching antlers of his later years, and if he thought about them at all they were probably as welcome as a boy's first mustache.

Late in the following autumn an event occurred which left its mark on him for the rest of his life. One night he wandered into a part of the woods where some lumbermen had been working during the day. On the ground where they had eaten their lunch he found some baked beans and a piece of dried apple-pie, and he ate them greedily and was glad that he had come. But he found something else, too. One of the road-monkeys had carelessly left his axe in the snow with the edge turned up. The Buck stepped on it, and it slipped in between the two halves of his cloven hoof, and cut deep into his foot. The wound healed in the course of time, but from that night the toes—they were those of his left hind foot—were spread far apart, instead of lying close together as they should have done. Sticks and roots sometimes caught between them in a way that was very annoying, and his track was different from that of any other deer in the woods, which was not a thing to be desired. He was not crippled, however, for he could still leap almost, if not quite, as far as ever, and run almost as fast.

He continued to grow and prosper, and the next summer he raised a pair of forked antlers with two tines each.