Thus far the boys had been traveling through low, flat woods, scantily dotted with small pine trees and little thickets of spruces and oaks, but soon they began to enter an entirely different kind of country. Before them stretched a vast prairie, covered with grass and broken here and there by rising hummocks, densely wooded with pines, oaks and huge tropical trees. Every few hundred yards they saw grass ponds, or little sandy-bottomed lakes of crystal-clear water. Beside one of these little lakes the lads stopped to eat their lunch. It was full of fish of all sizes.
"I wish Chris was here," Walter observed. "He would have the time of his life yanking out those big fellows."
"Oh, he can get all the fishing he wants right close to camp," McCarty said. "I never saw such a country for fish in my life. Any hole that is deep enough to hold water is full of fish. Even the ditches the machine has left behind are full of little minnows already."
The lunch finished and washed down by draughts of clear, cold water from the lake, the lads began searching around its sandy shore for deer signs. They found animal tracks in abundance, and were amazed at the number of different kinds—coons, wild-cats, foxes, deer, bears—all seemed to have made the little lake their drinking place, and, in one place, they came upon the padded footprint of a panther.
"My, I wish we could put in a week hunting around this little lake," said McCarty regretfully. "We could make a shelter not far away and take stands here at night. But, wishing don't accomplish much, so I guess we might as well be pushing on. Without a dog our only chance is to work up against the wind and keep our eyes open."
They had traveled about two miles in this manner when Walter suddenly stopped. "Look ahead, there," he exclaimed. "Can't you see something rising up a little above the grass?"
"By George, you beat me to it," McCarty acknowledged. "It's a deer's antlers. The deer must be lying down resting, or we would see its body from here. It's hands and knees for us now. We had better keep together and make as little noise as we can. A deer's hearing is keen."
It was slow, hard work, crawling forward in this manner, but in the excitement the boys did not notice the strain it put on hands and knees. From time to time they would raise their heads cautiously and peer ahead, to see if the deer was still there. An hour and half of this slow traveling brought them to within a few hundred yards of the resting animal; then it suddenly arose, and sniffed the air suspiciously, with its head thrown back.
"Don't move," McCarty whispered. "It's beginning to scent danger."