, a sheen as of
silver mist along the stream in the valley, a fleecy light-shot cloud on
the sea, to suggest more, and more beautiful, beyond the veil.

Evening found me hurrying homeward through the short twilight, along
silent wood roads from which the birds had departed, breathing deep of
the pure air with its pungent tang of ripened leaves, sniffing the first
night smells, listening now for the yap of a fox, now for the distant
bay of a dog to guide me in a short cut over the hills to where my room
in the old farmhouse was waiting.

It mattered little that, far behind me (though not so far from where
the trail ended), the big buck began his twilight wandering along
the ridges, sniffing alertly at the vanishing scent of the man on his
feeding ground. The best things that a hunter brings home are in his
heart, not in his game bag; and a free deer meant another long glorious
day following him through the October woods, making the tyro's mistakes,
to be sure, but feeling also the tyro's thrill and the tyro's wonder,
and the consciousness of growing power and skill to read in a new
language the secrets that the moss and leaves hide so innocently.

There was so much to note and learn and remember in those days! A bit of
moss with that curiously measured angular cut in it, as if the wood folk
had taken to studying Euclid,--how wonderful it was at first! The deer
had been here; his foot drew that sharp triangle; and I must measure and
feel it carefully, and press aside the moss, and study the leaves,
to know whether it were my big buck or no, and how long since he had
passed, and whether he were feeding or running or just nosing about and
watching the valley below. And all that is much to learn from a tiny
triangle in the moss, with imaginary a, b, c's clinging to the dried
moss blossoms.

How careful one had to be! Every shift of wind, every cloud shadow had
to be noted. The lesson of a dewdrop, splashed from a leaf in the early
morning; the testimony of a crushed flower, or a broken brake, or a
bending grass blade; the counsel of a bit of bark frayed from a birch
tree, with a shred of deer-velvet clinging to it,--all these were vastly
significant and interesting. Every copse and hiding place and cathedral
aisle of the big woods in front must be searched with quiet eyes far
ahead, as one glided silently from tree to tree. That depression in the
gray moss of a fir thicket, with two others near it--three deer lay down
th