In the fall of the year when an old buck has his horns fully grown to see him running in his native forest is a beautiful sight. At that season his color has changed to a bluish grey. When the weather gets cold and it freezes hard his horns drop off, and he has to go bareheaded until spring. Then his hair is very long and grey. Deer are commonly poor in the spring, and at this season their hide is very thin and not worth much. So we see the deer is a very singular animal. As I have been going through the woods I have often picked up their horns and carried them home for curiosities. They were valuable for knife-handles. When the old buck is started from his bed and is frightened how he clears the ground. You can mark him from twenty to thirty feet at every jump. (I have measured some of his jumps, by pacing, and found them to be very long, sometimes two rods.) How plump he is, how symmetrically his body is formed, and how beautiful the appearance of his towering, branching antlers! As he carries them on his lofty head they appear like a rocking chair. As he sails through the air, with his flag hoisted, he sometimes gives two or three of his whistling snorts and bids defiance to all pursuers in the flight. He is able to run away from any of his enemies, in a fair foot race, but not always able to escape from flying missiles of death. Before the fawn is a year old, if frightened and startled from its bed, it runs very differently from the old deer. Its jump is long and high. It appears as though it were going to jump up among the small tree tops. The next jump is short and sometimes sidewise, then another long jump and so on. It acts as though it did not know its own springs, or were cutting up its antics, and yet it always manages to keep up with the rest of the deer. [Illustration] Father had killed some deer. He shot one of the largest red bucks I had seen killed. After this we wanted meat. Father said we'll go hunting and see if we can get a deer. He said I might take his rifle and he would take my gun. (For some reason or other he had promoted me, may be he thought I was luckier than he.) We started out into the woods south of our house, I went ahead. There was snow on the ground, it was cold and the wind blew very hard. We crossed the windfall. This was a strip of land about eighty rods wide. It must have been a revolving whirlwind that past there, for it had taken down pretty much all the timber and laid it every way. Nothing was left standing except some large trees that had little tops, these were scattered here and there through the strip. It struck the southeast corner of what was afterward our place. Here we had about three acres of saplings, brush and old logs that were windfalls.