CHAPTER XXXII.

A LAST STALK.

_September 16._--The morning did not belie its fair promise, but opened as brightly as the most exacting hunter could require.

Esau and Jens made a last laborious and fruitless stalk, trying not only the whole Rus Valley, but crossing the mountains northwards into Veodalen and traversing all the slopes of Glitretind, a most splendid sight just now with his towering pyramid, 8,140 feet high. Such a walk would have been impossible but for the snow, which had been reduced by the wind to the consistence of hard sand, and made the going as good as it could be.

Esau, who saw nothing all day, was a little annoyed on his return to hear that John had wandered but a short distance up Nautgardstind to gloat over the view, and there walked almost into a reindeer buck; which, as John was armed with no more deadly weapon than a double-barrelled field glass, had escaped uninjured. 'Twas ever thus.

However, the mention of this buck opened on John's devoted head the floodgates of Esau's memory, and he insisted on telling about his last stalk here two years ago, as follows:--

'By George! I shall never forget how Jens and I turned out that morning across the same precipice that you passed to get up Nautgardstind: we started pretty early because it was my last day, and I had sworn to catch something or perish.

'About ten o'clock we saw four deer, a fine buck and three does, on a long narrow snow-drift on the east side of the mountain: they were about a mile off and moving away, with the wind blowing straight from them to us; so we went after them as fast as we could, without much attempt at concealment at first.

'Presently they left the snow and turned to the left, as if to skirt round the mountain, we still following and getting rather nearer to them. They seemed very restless and kept moving, and at last began to trot, and soon got out of our sight.

'We were half an hour without seeing them again, and at last Jens discovered them far down below us in the large valley where you saw that one to-day. The place where they were was quite unapproachable, but Jens pointed out a sort of pass by which he thought it was likely they might leave the valley, and so we went and hid ourselves in a convenient nook fifty yards to the leeward of that place.

'There we lay in a bitterly cold wind for an hour, and then the deer began to come in our direction. Now was the critical moment: there were two practicable routes in the pass; would they choose the nearer one, which would give me a shot, or the other? They stopped a little time to look for food, and provokingly grazed their way very slowly towards the wrong one, and then all of a sudden seemed to make up their minds and turned to the right one. The cold and cramp were forgotten as the deer came within three hundred yards and were nearing us quickly, and, with rifle cocked, I was already wondering whether the buck's horns were in velvet or not, and thinking what a splendid coat he had; when without any warning a storm of sleet swept down upon us, and a dense mist drifted over the mountain and shut out from our gaze the rocky pass and deer alike wrapped in impenetrable gloom.

'For fully half an hour this lasted, and then the mist cleared as quickly as it had come, the sleet stopped, and the sun shone out, making the ground fairly smoke: but, alas! the deer were gone. We looked for their tracks, and found that they had actually passed within forty yards of us during the storm; but our chance was missed, and there was nothing for it but to renew the search.

'Another hour of walking, and Jens' quick eye caught sight of them, this time high above our heads on some snow near the top of Nautgardstind, and at last, thank goodness, lying down. There seemed to be a possibility of getting to them, and we spent another hour crawling like serpents in the attempt, only to find our way barred when we were within four hundred yards by a ridge over which we could not pass unseen.

'However, from there we saw plainly that we could approach them by going up the mountain, and then coming quite straight down above them, with hardly any difficult ground to traverse. So we performed that weary crawl back again, until we were safely out of sight, and then went up Nautgardstind at a speed that has never been equalled.

'Half an hour took us to the top, and then Jens made the only mistake in a stalk that I ever saw: he got his bearings wrong somehow, and thought that the deer were on one bit of snow, the top end of which we could see, while I thought they were on another. Of course I had much more confidence in Jens' opinion than in my own, but it turned out that he was wrong, and in crawling to the place where he expected them to be, we unluckily came into full view of the snow where they really were--a fact which was made unpleasantly apparent to us by our suddenly catching sight of four deer galloping down the drift two hundred yards away.

'I took a careful aim at the buck, but fired too low, and the bullet broke his fore-leg, which did not prevent him from following the does, though at a reduced pace. Now I think our best chance would have been to remain perfectly still, and trust to his stopping in time in some place where I could get to him; but Jens was terribly excited, begging me to shoot, and my own head was by no means as cool as it should have been, so I sat on a rock and fired away all my remaining cartridges except two, at the gradually receding form of the reindeer: I suppose at the last shot he was five hundred yards away, and I don't think I ever hit him again.

'Presently he got round the corner to the right, and into the next valley, where a few days before I had killed two deer; and as I ran to the right above him an astonishing sight met my gaze. The valley was full of deer, about fifty altogether, in three distinct herds, and they were all running about frightened by the firing, and not sure in which direction it would be safe to go.

'While we watched them from our peak a mile above, a buck and two does with a calf left the herd, and began to come towards the very snowdrift on which the four deer were lying when we made the fatal mistake. What became of the rest we never knew, nor whither our wounded buck went; for when we saw this fresh four making for the drift, it occurred to us to run towards the top and try to intercept them if they should attempt to ascend the mountain on the snow, as we expected they would.

'Off we ran at top speed over terribly rough ground, and before we got nearly in shot of the top of the long drift we saw the deer get on to it at the bottom, and begin to gallop up with their untiring stride. It was simply a race, with long odds on the Running Rein; and soon we saw them standing at the top, while we were still over two hundred yards from it. Then for the first time they saw us (for the drift was in a ravine, and out of our sight as we ran), and they turned to flee, but Jens somehow managed to find breath enough to whistle, and the deer stopped for a moment.

'I fired my last two cartridges, but in the condition to which I was reduced by the run I could not have hit a haystack, and no damage was done. So we turned homewards with deep and abiding sorrow in our hearts, too despondent to look again for our wounded buck, or to see what became of the other herds.

'In those days I always took out seven cartridges, which I fondly imagined to be a lucky number; but after this I solemnly registered two vows: firstly, never to go out with so few again; and secondly, never to shoot them all away at absurd distances in the forlorn hope of killing a wounded deer.' Esau here paused for a moment or two, and then resumed: 'By Jove, I did make myself agreeable to the Skipper when I got home that night. I remember he said----'

But John thought it was _his_ turn to have a few weeks' conversation, and rudely interrupted Esau's reminiscences by calling his attention to some writing which, like Belshazzar, he had detected on the wall above his bed. It was in pencil, and seemed to have been written in prehistoric times, for it was all illegible except the first two lines, and even those required a great deal of deciphering by the aid of a dripping candle, while Esau knelt on his bunk and flattened his nose against the log wall, before he could read them. Then after licking the tip of a pencil for a long time in meditative silence, he scrawled the remainder of the poem underneath, so that the whole composition read as follows:--

A reindeer three miles off you spy, And to shoot that reindeer you will try. First a mile at the top of your speed you go, Then you climb a mile up loose rocks and snow, Then a mile on your hands and knees you crawl, And----

(when you have executed these little manoeuvres and arrived at the place with your garments all in tatters and your whole body a mass of bruises in all probability you will either find that the insidious animal has removed himself to the uttermost ends of the earth five minutes before your appearance on the scene, or else you _do_ get a shot at him and)

----you miss that reindeer after all.