her in the logic of that
reasoning. Put yourself in the mental attitude of a man looking for
deer. His eye sweeps rapidly over a side hill; so rapidly that you
cannot understand how he can have gathered the main features of that
hill, let alone concentrate and refine his attention to the seeing of
an animal under a bush. As a matter of fact he pays no attention to the
main features. He has trained his eye, not so much to see things, as
to leave things out. The odd-shaped rock, the charred stub, the bright
flowering bush do not exist for him. His eye passes over them as
unseeing as yours over the patch of brown or gray that represents his
quarry. His attention stops on the unusual, just as does yours; only
in his case the unusual is not the obvious. He has succeeded by long
training in eliminating that. Therefore he sees deer where you do not.
As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an
artificially obvious, then you too will see deer.

These animals are strangely invisible to the untrained eye even when
they are standing "in plain sight." You can look straight at them, and
not see them at all. Then some old woodsman lets you sight over his
finger exactly to the spot. At once the figure of the deer fairly
leaps into vision. I know of no more perfect example of the
instantaneous than this. You are filled with astonishment that you
could for a moment have avoided seeing it. And yet next time you will
in all probability repeat just this "puzzle picture" experience.

The Tenderfoot tried for six weeks before he caught sight of one. He
wanted to very much. Time and again one or the other of us would hiss
back, "See the deer! over there by the yellow bush!" but before he
could bring the deliberation of his scrutiny to the point of
identification, the deer would be gone. Once a fawn jumped fairly
within ten feet of the pack-horses and went bounding away through the
bushes, and that fawn he could not help seeing. We tried
conscientiously enough to get him a shot; but the Tenderfoot was unable
to move through the brush less majestically than a Pullman car, so we
had ended by becoming apathetic on the subject.

Finally, while descending a very abrupt mountain-side I made out a buck
lying down perhaps three hundred feet directly below us. The buck was
not looking our way, so I had time to call the Tenderfoot. He came.
With difficulty and by using my rifle-barrel as a pointer I managed to
show