It ended suddenly.  Something halted me.  My buck, now scarcely fifteen feet from me, began to shake and struggle.  He raised his head, uttering a choking gasp.  I heard the flutter of blood in his throat.  He raised himself on his front feet and lifted his head high, higher, until his nose pointed skyward and his antlers lay back upon his shoulders.  Then a strong convulsion shook him.  I heard the shuddering wrestle of his whole body.  I heard the gurgle and flow of blood.  Saw the smoke of fresh blood and smelled it!  I saw a small red spot in his gray breast where my bullet had struck.  I saw a great bloody gaping hole on his rump where the.30 Gov’t expanding bullet had come out.  From end to end that bullet had torn!  Yet he was not dead.  Straining to rise again!

I saw, felt all this in one flashing instant.  And as swiftly my spirit changed.  What I might have done I never knew, but most likely I would have shot him through the brain.  Only a sudden action of the stag paralyzed all my force.  He lowered his head.  He saw me.  And dying, with lungs and heart and bowels shot to shreds, he edged his stiff front feet toward me, he dragged his afterquarters, he slid, he flopped, he skittered convulsively at me.  No fear in the black, distended, wild eyes!

Only hate, only terrible, wild, unquenchable spirit to live long enough to kill me!  I saw it, He meant to kill me.  How magnificent, how horrible this wild courage!  My eyes seemed riveted upon him, as he came closer, closer.  He gasped.  Blood sputtered from his throat.  But more terrible than agony, than imminent death was the spirit of this wild beast to slay its enemy.  Inch by inch he skidded closer to me, with a convulsive quivering awful to see.  No veil of the past, no scale of civilization between beast and man then!  Enemies as old as the earth!  I had shot him to eat, and he would kill me before he died.  For me the moment was monstrous.  No hunter was I then, but a man stricken by the spirit and mystery of life, by the agony and terror of death, by the awful strange sense that this stag would kill me.

But Copple galloped up, and drawing his revolver, he shot the deer through the head.  It fell in a heap.

“Don’t ever go close to a crippled deer,” admonished my comrade, as he leaped off his horse.  “I saw a fellow once that was near killed by a buck he’d taken for dead....  Strange the way this buck half stood up.  Reckon he meant bad, but he was all in.  You hit him plumb center.”

“Yes, Ben, it was—­strange,” I replied, soberly.  I caught Copple’s keen dark glance studying me.  “When you open him up—­see what my bullet did, will you?”

“All right.  Help me hang him to a snag here,” returned Copple, as he untied his lasso.

When we got the deer strung up I went off into the woods, and sat on a log, and contended with a queer sort of sickness until it passed away.  But it left a state of mind that I knew would require me to probe into myself, and try to understand once and for all time this bloodthirsy tendency of man to kill.  It would force me to try to analyze the psychology of hunting.  Upon my return to Copple I found he had the buck ready to load upon his horse.  His hands were bright red.  He was wiping his hunting-knife on a bunch of green pine needles.