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.

"That 150-grain soft-nose bullet is some executioner," he declared,
forcefully. "Your bullet mushroomed just after it went into his breast.
It tore his lung to pieces, cut open his heart, made a mess of kidneys
an' paunch, an' broke his spine.... An' look at this hole where it came
out!"

I helped Copple heave the load on his saddle and tie it securely, and I
got my hands red at the job, but I did not really look at the buck
again. And upon our way back to camp I rode in the lead all the way. We
reached camp before sunset, where I had to endure the felicitations of
R.C. and my comrades, all of whom were delighted that at last I had
gotten a buck. Takahashi smiled all over his broad brown face. "My
goodnish! I awful glad! Nice fat deer!"

That night I lay awake a long time, and though aware of the moan of the
wind in the pines and the tinkle of the brook, and the melancholy hoot
of an owl, and later the still, sad, black silence of the midnight
hours, I really had no pleasure in them. My mind was active.

Boys are inherently cruel. The games they play, at least those they
invent, instinctively partake of some element of brute nature. They
chase, they capture, they imprison, they torture, and they kill. No
secret rendezvous of a boy's pirate gang ever failed to be soaked with
imaginary blood! And what group of boys have not played at being
pirates? The Indian games are worse--scalping, with red-hot cinders
thrown upon the bleeding head, and the terrible running of the gauntlet,
and burning at the stake.

What youngster has not made wooden knives to spill the blood of his
pretended enemies? Little girls play with dolls, and with toy houses,
and all the implements of making a home; but sweet and dear as the