can barely force your way by daylight, then you
realize suddenly that the most wonderful part of a deer's education
shows itself, not in keen eyes or trumpet ears, or in his finely trained
nose, more sensitive a hundred times than any barometer, but in his
forgotten feet, which seem to have eyes and nerves and brains packed
into their hard shells instead of the senseless matter you see there.

Watch the doe yonder as she bounds away, wigwagging her heedless little
one to follow. She is thinking only of him; and now you see her feet
free to take care of themselves. As she rises over the big windfall,
they hang from the ankle joints, limp as a glove out of which the hand
has been drawn, yet seeming to wait and watch. One hoof touches a twig;
like lightning it spreads and drops, after running for the smallest
fraction of a second along the obstacle to know whether to relax or
stiffen, or rise or fall to meet it. Just before she strikes the ground
on the down plunge, see the wonderful hind hoofs sweep themselves
forward, surveying the ground by touch, and bracing themselves, in a
fraction of time so small that the eye cannot follow, for the shock of
what lies beneath them, whether rock or rotten wood or yielding moss.
The fore feet have followed the quick eyes above, and shoot straight and
sure to their landing; but the hind hoofs must find the spot for
themselves as they come down and, almost ere they find it, brace
themselves again for the push of the mighty muscles above.

Once only I found where a fawn with untrained feet had broken its leg;
and once I heard of a wounded buck, driven to death by dogs, that had
fallen in the same way never to rise again. Those were rare cases. The
marvel is that it does not happen to every deer that fear drives through
the wilderness.

And that is another reason why the fawns must learn to obey a wiser head
than their own. Till their little feet are educated, the mother must
choose the way for them; and a wise fawn will jump squarely in her
tracks. That explains also why deer, even after they are full grown,
will often walk in single file, a half-dozen of them sometimes following
a wise leader, stepping in his tracks and leaving but a single trail. It
is partly, perhaps, to fool their old enemy, the wolf, and their new
enemy, the man, by hiding the weakling's trail in the stride and hoof
mark of a big buck; but it shows also the old habit, and the training
which begins when the fawns f