"Remember to keep your head down, and don't feel that you've got to
look every two or three minutes to see whether the game is there or
not. It won't run without it gets scared, and if it starts to run,
your looking won't stop it. When, by crawling as carefully as you
know how, you've got up so you can see your animal again, wait until
it puts its head down to feed, or looks away from you, and then raise
your head a little bit to see if there are any others with it, so as
to get an idea of the general situation. When you raise your head, if
you can see the whole body of your antelope, you had better shoot.
If the animal is broadside toward you, shoot at his heart; if head
toward you, at the point of his breast; if tail toward you, shoot
between the hams, about three inches below the tail; if quartering to
you, at the point of the shoulder, or, if quartering from you, at the
flank, just in front of the ham. You want your bullet to go through
the heart, and you must remember that the heart lies just back of the
fore legs, and low down. The life lies low. Don't forget that. There
is a little curl of hair on an antelope just back of the elbow, and
here the hair is thin, and the dark skin shows through and makes this
curl look black. That is the mark I always shoot at, if I can. An
antelope hit there don't go far.
"Now, it ain't much use for me to tell you all these things, because
you've got to see 'em done and to do 'em yourself before you can know
much about hunting, but maybe what I've told you will make it easier
for you to learn.
"There's one thing I ain't told you about, because I suppose you know
all about it without being told. That's the wind. All animals are
terrible keen smellers, and of course you can't never get up to them
from the windward side. You've always got to go to leeward. Let the
wind blow from them to you, not from you to them."
"I think I understand all that you've told me," said Jack, "and I'll
try to remember it. Do you think we'll get any game to-day?"
"Oh, we'll sure see some antelope," answered Hugh, "but maybe we
won't find what we want in a good place. You see, the does are going
to have young ones pretty soon now, and so I don't like to kill 'em.
The bucks are in better order, and if we can find one of them in a
place where we can get at him, we'll try to kill him."
As they rode on farther and farther, the country became more broken,
and they passed over one little ridge after another, with little
valleys between. They had almost reached the top of one of these
ridges, when Hugh suddenly stopped and looked intently toward the
right, where the valley widened out a little. Jack stopped and looked
too, but he could see nothing except the brown prairie.
"See 'em?" said Hugh, after a moment.
"No, I don't see anything," replied Jack.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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