Adventure Magazine, December 10, 1924 — page 92: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

70 troubled. He seemed perplexed, stuck on a dead center. And for why? Simply he had no Young Bill to take ’em to. That indeed had been his job, his profession, to slay things and take them to Young Bill, saying nothing in the process, taking jolly good care that the things said nothing, and expecting Young Bill to say nothing, or next to nothing, in return Now there was no Bill. The thought sort of straightened Snowzer up where he stood. There was only Snowzer, and that straight- ened him up still more. He was up against the wild, and must fend for himself, or—die. Man, he guessed, or at any rate the man of those parts, would not cherish him after the affair of the little white farm. Then Snowzer ate the rabbit, cleanly and swiftly. A passing fox stopped to hear the bones crack in the darkness, and later got the fowl which the lurcher had slain from habit, for Young Bill. AND then Snowzer removed into the night. I do not think he had any distinct idea where he wanted to remove to, or what he wanted to do when he got there. The moon showed him trotting along a sheep path through the heather, head down, tail down, thin as a rake, wasp- waisted, hazel-wand-legged, spring-footed, long-jawed, grinning his everlasting grin from ear to ear as if he were perpetually laughing silently up his sleeve. Suddenly in a hollow, full of the more delicate cross-leaved heath and of cottony rushes, he stopped—stopped so utterly in- stantly that his right foot remained sus- pended in the air. __A-pool was in front of him at the base of the hollow, like a big round looking-glass laid flat, and the moon was reflected full in the middle of the pool. And the pool was broken by ripples. That was the rub. No wind would reach the water in that sheltered hollow. Nor could anything be heard at first. Then it could—a faint splash, as if something were walking in the shallows.. Snowzer’s experience of the wild up to that date was limited, limited to as far out of town and back as Young Bill could take him in one night. Therefore he started a bit when he saw wading out into that silver pool a beast about as big as himself, but daintier, with legs like hazel wands as his were, eyes like stars on a summer’s eve, and Adventure the grace unsurpassed, the superb proud carriage of a deer and of nothing else. It was, in fact, a roebuck, smallest of that great clan, but by no means least. Next instant the buck whipped round where he stood up to his knees in the silver pool. Snowzer could see his silky wet muzzle uplifted to the airs, and Snowzer may or may not have known that there were back eddies of wind in that hollow which the roebuck’s keen nose was sifting. For a moment he waited there, a picture of elegance personified in that magic scene, then pranced up the opposite bank as gay as a lamb on a spring morn, and five hundred times as graceful. There was no hint or glimpse of fear about him. He just went up into the air, all four feet together, landing and rebounding again as if he were on a spring-board, clean up, straight up, for all the world as if he were in idle play, and, being alone, must, from sheer exuberance of spirits, needs gambol with his own bounding shadow. But his last leap took him into the tangled heath, and when Snowzer arrived—he took the pool flying, I think—the roebuck was not there. Snowzer’s curiosity was aroused, and he turned to on his lightning trailing act which hitherto had been guaranteed to run any game to earth, or death, or into the open inside of four minutes. It certainly turned out of that hollow a good many more creatures than one would ever have sus- pected of being there, including four rab- bits; one fox; two stoats, swearing; one pole- cat, gibbering; one long-eared owl, who barked, and seven snipe; but the one thing it was meant to turn out, the roebuck, it did not even so much as reveal one horn or hoof of. That roebuck was, and he was not; nor could even .Snowzer’s startling tactics reveal him. And Snowzer at the end stood panting and unpleased. : This was his first ‘wrestle with the real wild, and he had taken a tumble. !More- over, he began to'suspect that the roebuck had been aware of his presence all the time, and was from the first laughing at him. This galled him, for he was no lap dog to look upon, and the little deer ought to have been terrified; but he did not know the roe deer, who, as few are aware, is unlike all other deer, and a mischievous elf of the waste. CoMmicbook Wh) © =