The Way of the Wild (Hawkes)/The Flight of Red Buck
Red Buck was an ordinary white-tailed Virginia deer, so he was really not red at all, but the reddish brown in his case was so much brighter than in the ordinary Virginia deer that I have elected to call him Red Buck.
He had been dropped five years before our story, early in May, in a dark spruce thicket, near the top of the Hoosac Mountains in western Massachusetts. He had been a wonderful fawn to look upon had there been any one but his dam to see him. He was so tall and rangy that he might have passed for a month old fawn at birth. But all who were there to see him were his dam and a white throat sparrow.
The sparrow, feeling that something out of the ordinary had happened, caroled away in the dark thicket with all his might, then flew away to find his mate and tell her. The delivery of Red Buck had been such a strain on his dam who was only a two-year-old that she lay very quiet in the dark thicket for several days recuperating her strength. Even at the end of that time when she at last went forth to browse, she left Red Buck hidden in the dark thicket. She knew full well that if his sire, old Six Pointer, saw so promising a male fawn as Red Buck, he would promptly kill him, fearing a rival in the future, so she kept her wonderful fawn hidden away from all hostile eyes.
So, for the first month, the dark spruce thicket had been the fawn's only world. When he at last ventured forth with his mother, he was much astonished to see how large the world was and how many strange things there were in it. His life had been much like that of any fawn of the New England forest up to about the first of July, then something happened that quite changed the tenor of his life. His mother, while attempting to jump a six-foot brush fence, caught her fore leg between the two top poles and broke it.
The farmer, on whose farm they had been trespassing, found her limping about on three legs and reported the find to the game warden. That official came and investigated and seeing that the break was a bad one, he shot her, intending to catch Red Buck and take him to a local deer park, but he had reckoned without his host, for Red Buck at once took to his heels, or rather hoofs, and disappeared so completely that the warden could not even find him. The farmer finally discovered that one of his cows which was running in the pasture was being regularly milked. At first he could not account for it, but he finally laid the theft of milk to the motherless fawn.
As the cow was farrow and not giving very much milk, he forgave the offender. Finally, Red Buck got lonesome and took up his abode with several calves on the farm which were pastured out in a small lot. He could almost always be found there running with the calves.
When the children at the farmhouse discovered this, they at once set to work to make his acquaintance. This was a long and arduous task, and it took several weeks, but they finally had the fawn so he would eat out of their hands. Thus Red Buck had grown up the first summer more as a domestic animal than one of the Wild Kindred.
When the open season on deer came round late in November, the farmer knew full well that the children's pet would be one of the first to be killed because he trusted man, so he took pity on him, and at the risk of being fined himself, coaxed Red Buck into a stable and kept him until the open season was over. After that, he was turned loose again.
When his playmates, the calves, were brought up to the barn, Red Buck wanted to come with them, but this the farmer refused.
So while they were snug and warm in the barn, Red Buck lived on the outside, and fought the cold and the storms the best he could.
The farmer placed a pile of hay for him in an open shed and also allowed him raw turnips and other vegetables. But he was not the tame little creature he had been in the summer. Instead, he was larger, wilder and more impetuous and determined in his ways. His favorite retreat was a clump of hemlocks half a mile from the house.
Late in the winter, he ceased coming to the farmhouse and the children greatly missed him. During the following summer, he was rarely seen. Occasionally, he would be discovered with the cows, but he never came back to his old haunt among the calves.
The following autumn, he had been a very respectable spike horn buck and had mated with a female deer of his own age. They had yarded with several older deer in the Great Bear Swamp which was the favorite retiring place for the deer in the Berkshires. This was a tract of almost impenetrable swamp, five miles across. Here the deer had been quite safe for the winter.
If the children could have seen the tiny fawn that trotted after Red Buck's mate the following spring, they would have been delighted.
That fall, Red Buck had fared rather badly. He had been shot at several times and had escaped to the great swamp the last day of the open season badly wounded. But the deer is very hardy. Buck shot he does not mind if they do not strike a vital spot. So after a hard week of recuperation he was almost as good as new, full of fight and more wary than ever. He had learned much about his worst enemv, man, and it was to stand him in good stead in the future.
The next great event in his life was in the following autumn when he engaged in a deadly fight with his natural enemy a savage old buck who had dominated the Berkshires for several years. For an hour they had struggled in deadly antler play, striking and thrusting, advancing and retreating. Then their horns had been locked together as though with bands of steel. For three days they had thrashed and tugged, snorted and stamped, gnashed their teeth and foamed, tearing up the turf and streaking their sides with foam, but all to no effect. Then, at last, when there had been great danger that they would both die of slow starvation the older buck's horn on one side had broken and the combatants were free. For an angry five seconds they stood glaring at each other, then they had fled in opposite directions as fast as their feet and legs could carry them. They had seen enough of each other for all time.
During the fourth open season, Red Buck had been very wary, so he had returned to the Great Bear Swamp at the first sound of shotguns, and had escaped for that year.
Now in his fifth year, five days before the open season, he was the largest, proudest buck in the Berkshires, a king among the Virginia deer of New England. Much is said and written about four hundred pound bucks hut they are rarely seen. Red Buck was a prize that any hunter might well have been proud of. He probably weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds, which is a very large buck. His coat was a glossy, reddish brown, with the red predominating, so that in some lights he really looked red. He was deep-chested and powerful. His hind quarters were heavy, and the muscles on his rump were wonderful to look upon.
His forearm was like whipcord as were all his muscles. When he ran, these same muscles slipped so easily under the hide that it looked as though all of his splendid mechanism was oiled and greased. No human-made machine ever ran so smoothly. His antlers were large and shapely, and his eyes were dark and full of fire.
His face was clean cut and his nostrils wide. Altogether he was a wonderful running machine, one of the best ever designed by nature. So it was a rather remarkable undertaking that the Renegate Pack assayed when it undertook to run Red Buck down. But they were hungry and his three hundred pounds of deer meat looked good to them.
The Renegade Pack were five outlaw dogs. They had gotten in badly with the Berkshire farmers by their deprivations as sheep killers. In fact, that was what had made them outlaws. They were led by a large collie whose name, when he had been a respectable dog, was Shep. The collie is only a generation or two removed from the wolf, so he will slip back into the wolf state more readily than any other dog. Put a collie pup into a den of wolves and in the autumn, this full-blooded dog will be hunting with the wolf pack just like one of them. This, although the collie is one of the most lovable of dogs.
The Renegade Pack had formed the wolf habit of hunting in a pack. They hunted rabbits and foxes and always caught their quarry if it did not hole. They had also hunted sheep and calves and made many raids on chicken coops, although this was not really in their line.
The largest of the pack was a half-blooded Newfoundland and Siberian blood hound named Bruiser, weighing perhaps seventy pounds. The rest of the pack were two hounds of doubtful breeding and a bulldog, named Towser. He it was who always came in at the kill and got a death grip and did not let go until the fun was over.
The Renegade Pack started Red Buck on Wednesday morning, five days before the open season. He had often seen them either alone or in the pack and he despised them, one and all. They were a lot of mongrels. They could not catch him and if they did he could fight them all to a standstill, so Red Buck did not much worry when the pack started him. He just trotted along in front of them keeping well out of their way, but not paying much attention to them. They would soon discover that he was not their sort of game and let him alone.
If Red Buck did not hurry for the pack, neither did the pack seem inclined to hurry him, but they kept him on the move. They spread out in a fan shape, with the hounds on either wing and Shep in the middle. Shep, Bruiser and Towser all ran by sight, and the hounds on the wings would pick up the scent if they lost sight of their big game. For the first two or three hours Red Buck thought it more of a joke than a real dead earnest race for life, something that was annoying but not serious. If he stopped to browse they were sure to catch up with him when Shep would begin barking. This so annoyed him that he would at once leave his browse and trot away to another birch. But all birches were alike to the pack and the great deer would no sooner begin nibbling at the tender twigs than he was admonished by Shep's sharp barking to move on. After about three hours Bed Buck decided that he would lie down for a spell in a thick clump of spruce. He was no sooner ensconced in a comfortable bed of dead leaves than the pack appeared. Three heads were thrust out from as many hiding-places in the thicket and three pairs of sinister eyes glared through the semi-gloom at him. As though this was not enough Shep set up his high-keyed barking and old Bruiser a deep baying. Then a fit of rage came over Red Buck. He sprang to his feet and with an angry snort charged at them.
But he could not charge in three directions at once, so he selected old Bruiser upon whom to vent his rage. But the dog ran into some thick cover and soon eluded him. Just as Red Buck lost sight of the big dog he felt a sharp twinge in his hind leg just below the gambrel joint. This was getting serious. He wheeled sharply just in time to see Shep slip between two trees and out of his reach. The dog, with his wolf cunning, had struck for the deer's large ligament seeking to hamstring him. Six inches higher and he would have accomplished his design.
Red Buck was quick to recognize this great danger, so he broke from cover to the open fields and he did not allow himself to be caught in this way again.
Still snorting and boiling with rage, and with the slight wound on his shank reminding him that he had no mean adversaries to face, Red Buck adopted a new policy. He would show these mongrels a hit of speed.
It would be an easy matter to put a few miles between himself and them, and they would probably tire of the chase once they saw how fleet he was. So he galloped away like the wind and the last he saw of the pack that afternoon they were forty rods behind following persistently. He ran steadily for three hours. He skirted the entire Hoosac Mountains, swam the Hoosatonic River three times and did what he could in other ways to muddle up his trail for the Renegade Pack. When he at last felt free he put in half an hour browsing and then lay down to rest, this time in an opening in the woods where he could watch from all sides. To his great disgust, at the end of the fourth hour he heard the hounds baying in the distance and in another half-hour the entire pack were up with him. They did not approach too close, but circled about baying or yelping. With an angry snort Red Buck sprang up and charged them. First at this dog and then at that one, but the wary canines always kept close to cover and dodged behind trees and turned sharp corners.
After several futile charges he gave up this mode of attack and made for the Great Bear Swamp. That thick cover had always been his stronghold and he thought it would save him now. He did not think the pack would follow him there. Men never had.
The Great Bear Swamp was the most hopeless morass in western Massachusetts. It was rather densely timbered for a swamp with larches, balsams, soft maples and osier, with a great growth of laurel. But the ground was rather treacherous, for it was interlaced with dark patches of water covered with green moss. Red Buck knew all these bogs and he carefully avoided them. He had learned them through many a sad flounder in their depths. It was a swamp that few hunters cared to penetrate, so it was with much confidence that the great buck fled to its very heart. He lay down on a mossy hillock under a large larch to await developments. He felt sure as long as he kept quiet he was safe from his pursuers, but he was mistaken. In an hour's time he heard the hounds crying at the edge of the swamp on his trail, but their baying did not stop there. Instead it came steadily on to the very heart of the swamp, and in another half-hour the pack were besieging him again.
True they did not come very close, but it was just menace enough to anger him. So he got warily up and ran for the further side of the swamp.
He would try again what speed could do for him. He had not really shown the pack his best pace in the run of the afternoon. There was still time to put fifteen miles between him and his tormentors.
So Red Buck again fled precipitately, this time going to the north. He selected the most rugged country he could find and made the trail as difficult as crossing rivers and roadways and running in thick cover could make it. By nine o'clock he was rather tired himself. By this time he was near the Vermont line, so he decided to rest for a couple of hours and then to take his late supper.
For a full hour he was unmolested, then to his great surprise the disgusting cry of the hounds again floated to his keen ears. He got up hurriedly, browsed for a few minutes until his tormentors came up and then doubled back southward, going over nearly the same trail that he had made to the north. The Hoosacs were his home and he felt safer there, even though it was also the home of the Renegade Pack.
Red Buck, reached the Hoosacs by eleven o'clock and had an hour's respite from his pursuers, but by midnight he again heard the yelling of the hounds and in another half-hour they were up with him. So he sprang up from his comfortable bed and fled on through the dark night.
As the haunts of men were forsaken he took to the open country where the running was easier and gave them a stiff chase to the south.
Residents of Stockbridge heard the full cry of the pack in the small hours of the morning. As daylight was breaking the great deer again doubled back along the mountains toward his home haunts. All day Thursday he fled and the pack pursued. He was not much afraid of the mongrels, but flight seemed his only course, and he did really dread having them corner him in close quarters, for the wound on his shank still stung.
By Thursday evening the old hero was beginning to tire. True, he still ran like the wonderful running machine that he was. None of them, not even Shep, could have caught him in a straightaway race, but he was beginning to tire. It was not so much the running that tired him as it was this persistent relentless menace behind him. This thing that would not let him rest. Their yelping and baying tired him as much as did the running. That night the pack adopted a new plan. Shep and one of the hounds ran the quarry while the other three dogs lay in the deep woods sleeping. This night was a repetition of the night before. First the buck led them to the Vermont line, then he doubled back to the Hoosacs and in the small hours of the morning he was very close to the Connecticut line running in the open country.
The two dogs and the hunted deer reappeared on the slopes of the Hoosacs Friday forenoon when the trail was taken up by Bruiser, Towser and the other hound. This was an unfair advantage, but it could not be helped. The warfare in nature for survival is a cruel, stern warfare without mercy or ethics. So all that day the King of the Hoosacs had the fresh pack on his heels. Several times he turned to fight them. They were now minus Shep, and lie was the most to be feared of them all, but it was almost a hopeless task to fight them. When he charged they merely slunk away. If he charged one, another was at his heels snapping at his vital spot, the great cord above the gambrel joint. So after chasing them out and in through dense cover for half an hour he decided that this tired and fretted him more even than running, so he again took to his fleet limbs.
He swam rivers and climbed mountains, plunged into deep swamps and through bramble patches. He doubled and turned, or ran for miles in a straightaway, but all to no avail. No matter how hard or how fast he ran, sooner or later he would again hear the baying of the hounds.
Friday evening found him again hugging the skirts of old Hoosac, hoping vainly for a respite from his pursuers, but there was to be none. Here Shep and the other hound again took up the trail and the great Buck again fled through a starless, moonless night running in the open country. By daylight he had crossed into New York, where he again doubled toward home. By this time his flanks were covered with sweat and he galloped heavily. He took even the low fences with difficulty.
He did not at once strike for the Hoosacs but kept to the south. By the middle of the forenoon the other three dogs picked up the trail on the skirts of old Graylock and the first two dogs retired for the day. Fresh from their night sleep the new pack pressed the old fighter 1 hard. Now for the better part of the way they were running by sight. The great buck could no longer gallop, though he still trotted at a good clip. But even so he was occasionally obliged to quicken his pace to keep the yelping dogs from his heels. All through Saturday they pursued him. He crossed the great divide and came down its eastern slope, crossing rivers, plunging through deep chasms and climbing steep banks, but he could not shake his pursuers. Finally a wonderful thought came to him. He would flee to a lake to the east, which was two miles in length, and if he could put that much water between himself and the pack he felt sure they could not follow. Eagerly he plunged into the cool water which was skimmed with ice along the shores, but even this refuge was to prove treacherous, for the pack quickly skirted the lake and when Red Buck, badly spent from his long swim, staggered up the bank on the other side they nearly got him, and he received another wound in his shank, this time from Towser. Fortunately for him the bulldog did not get a good grip, and he simply lost a little hide. Otherwise his fate might have been settled then and there. So he wearily turned his antler-crowned head back to the home land and fled.
But his great strength was waning. His flanks were white with foam. His breath came through his widely distended nostrils with whistling gasps. Every mile or two he was obliged to turn and fight off the pack. By evening he wearily climbed the sides of old Graylock and looked back at his pursuers. To his dismay he saw that Shep and the other hound had joined them. He now for the first time felt wild, desperate, hunted. This thing which he could not fight was closing in on him gradually. They had taken his strength, his courage. His fighting spirit was slowly waning. Out and in among thick cover, into deep gulches, in thick tangles of swampland all night he ran heavily, recklessly. He was no longer afraid of breaking a leg. The only thing he now feared was this fearful yelping, yawning danger which hung like a dead weight upon his foam-streaked flanks.
When the first faint streak of dawn appeared in the east he came to bay at a wedge-shaped crevasse in a sheer cliff. It was an ideal spot for a fight to the finish, one that nature must have provided for him.
When the Renegade Pack closed in they saw him there, his hind-quarters wedged in, with the wall on three sides presenting only his sharp cutting hoofs and his many-pronged antlers. His head was lowered, his legs were wide apart because of weakness, but his eyes blazed and as the pack came close he stamped and snorted with the fury of battle.
Towser, who had never seen a deer before at such close range, whimpered with joy. It was his time. He would get the death grip, so he lunged straight at the desperate fighter without even recognizing the danger. Like a sledgehammer the buck's hoof descended and Towser rolled upon the ground with a broken back. This put him out of the fight, and he crawled away into the bushes to die a few hours later. This event made the pack more careful, so they sprang and snapped and worried their quarry for another hour, but at last one of the hounds ventured too close and the great deer's hoof descended fairly upon his skull.
It cracked it like a ripe nut and the hound joined Towser behind the firing line among the mortally wounded.
Two hours later the other hound got a fatal antler thrust that passed nearly through his body and put him out of the battle.
The fight now lay between old Bruiser and Shep on the one hand and the King of the Hoosacs on the other. How it would have ended is uncertain, although the dogs would have probably worried their quarry to death, had it not been that Tom Remmington, one of the game wardens of the Berkshires, had heard of the chase that morning and taking his Winchester had gone out to investigate. A traveler on the country road had reported that five dogs were running the King of the Hoosacs and that he was nearly all in. "They will get him in another half day if you don't get them," had been the report. So Tom had slipped five cartridges into his Winchester and gone to investigate.
He had taken two snap shots at a bob cat which he had bounced in a thicket, so he finally arrived on the scene with three cartridges in his rifle. He was guided to the spot by the deep baying of old Bruiser.
For half an hour he could not locate the fight, due to the echoes which rolled along the mountainside in a deceitful manner, but when he finally rounded a cliff and came in full sight of the fray it was a battle royal that met his eyes. The great deer was down on one knee, he was wedged as far as possible into the crevasse, while old Bruiser had him by the nose and Shep had a firm grip on his free fore legs. They were holding him like a vise and were in the act of pulling him down. Two careful shots stretched the dogs by their intended victim and left the King free from the Renegade Pack. Slowly he arose, snorting and stamping at his new enemy. For he recognized this man with the thunder-stick as his most deadly foe. Yet this enemy had seemed to deliver him from the grip of the dogs. He could not flee without running straight toward the man. Yet he could not stay there; he had learned it was dangerous to stand still in the sight of man. So he trotted slowly toward him.
The warden's first impulse was to give him the remaining bullet in his rifle. He was a prize. He could let him lie until the morning when the open season would be on. He raised his gun. Then he noticed how spent the King was. He could barely move one leg by the other. Then another thought came to him. He could not shoot a deer with a rifle even if it had been a day later. Then, too, he was the game warden; if any were to keep the law he must set them the example. So he dropped his Winchester to the ground and took off his hat and saluted as the antlered King trotted slowly by him. As the deer passed he gave the warden one fearful hunted look that he did not forget for many a day. Then he turned and trotted away to the cool fastness of Great Bear Swamp to recuperate his strength and courage in hiding. There he slept and ate and slept again until the open season was passed. So perhaps his long flight which caused him to lay low during the open season saved for another year the finest set of antlers in the Berkshires for their rightful owner.