In pattering droves of hundreds they trekked in from the camise before there was light enough to shoot by, and nipped once and with precision at the ripest in every bunch. Afterward they dusted themselves in the chaparral and twitted the proprietor with soft contented noises. At the end of the October rut the deer came back plentifully to the Tonkawanda District, and Greenhow gave up the greater part of the rainy season to auditing his account with them. He spent whole days scanning the winter colored slope for the flicker and slide of light on a hairy flank that betrayed his enemy, or, rifle in hand, stalking a patch of choke cherry and manzanita within which the mule-deer could snake and crawl for hours by intricacies of doubling and back tracking that yielded not a square inch of target and no more than the dust of his final disappearance. Wood gatherers heard at times above their heads the discontented whine of deflected bullets. Windy mornings the quarry would signal from the high barrens by slow stiff legged bounds that seemed to invite the Pot Hunter's fire, and at the end of a day's tracking among the punishing stubs of the burnt district, Greenhow returning would hear the whistling cough of the mule-deer in the ravine not a rifle shot from the house. In the meantime rabbits burrowed under the wire netting to bark his young trees, and an orchardist who held the job of ditch tender along the Tonkawanda, began to take an interest in the Homesteader's daughter. Seldom any smoke went up now from the cabin under the Dolphin's nose. Occasionally there rose a blue thread of it far up on the thinly forested crest of San Jacinto where the buck, bedded in the low brush between the bosses of the hills, kept a look out across the gullies from which Greenhow attempted to ambuscade him. Day by day the man would vary the method of approach until almost within rifle range, and then the wind would change or there would be the click of gravel underfoot, or the scrape of a twig on stiff overalls, and suddenly the long oval ears would slope forward, the angular lines flow into grace and motion and the game would begin again. Greenhow killed many deer that season and got himself under suspicion of the game warden, but never THE deer; and a very subtle change came over him, such a change as marks the point at which a man leaves off being hunter to become the hunted. He began to sense, with vague reactions of resentment, the personality of Power.