waiting there a few moments.  So we sat down again.  The forest was almost silent now.  Somewhere a squirrel was barking.  The sun peeped out of the pale clouds, lighted the glades, rimmed the pines in brightness.  I opened my lips to speak to R.C. when I was rendered mute by a piercing whistle, high-pitched and sweet and melodiously prolonged.  It made my ears tingle and my blood dance.  “Right close,” whispered R.C.  “Come on.”  We began to steal through the forest, keeping behind trees and thickets, peeping out, and making no more sound than shadows.  The ground was damp, facilitating our noiseless stalk.  In this way we became separated by about thirty steps, but we walked on and halted in unison.  Passing through a thicket of little pines we came into an open forest full of glades.  Keenly I peered everywhere, as I slipped from tree to tree.  Finally we stooped along for a space, and then, at a bugle blast so close that it made me jump, I began to crawl.  My objective point was a fallen pine the trunk of which appeared high enough to conceal me.  R.C. kept working a little farther to the right.  Once he beckoned me, but I kept on.  Still I saw him drop down to crawl.  Our stalk was getting toward its climax.  My state was one of quivering intensity of thrill, of excitement, of pleasure.  Reaching my log I peeped over it.  I saw a cow-elk and a yearling calf trotting across a glade about a hundred yards distant.  Wanting R.C. to see them I looked his way, and pointed.  But he was pointing also and vehemently beckoning for me to join him.  I ran on all fours over to where he knelt.  He whispered pantingly:  “Grandest sight—­ever saw!” I peeped out.

In a glade not seventy-five yards away stood a magnificent bull elk, looking back over his shoulder.  His tawny hind-quarters, then his dark brown, almost black shaggy shoulders and head, then his enormous spread of antlers, like the top of a dead cedar—­these in turn fascinated my gaze.  How graceful, stately, lordly!

R.C. stepped out from behind the pine in full view.  I crawled out, took a kneeling position, and drew a bead on the elk.  I had the fun of imagining I could have hit him anywhere.  I did not really want to kill him, yet what was the meaning of the sharp, hot gush of my blood, the fiery thrill along my nerves, the feeling of unsatisfied wildness?  The bull eyed us for a second, then laid his forest of antlers back over his shoulders, and with singularly swift, level stride, sped like a tawny flash into the green forest.

R.C. and I began to chatter like boys, and to walk toward the glade, without any particular object in mind, when my roving eye caught sight of a moving brown and checkered patch low down on the ground, vanishing behind a thicket.  I called R.C. and ran.  I got to where I could see beyond the thicket.  An immense flock of turkeys!  I yelled.  As I tried to get a bead on a running turkey R.C. joined me.  “Chase ’em!” he yelled.  So we dashed through the forest with the turkeys running ahead of us.  Never did they come out clear in the open.  I halted to shoot, but just as I was about to press the trigger, my moving target vanished.  This happened again.  No use to shoot at random!  I had a third fleeting chance, but absolutely could not grasp it.  Then the big flock of turkeys eluded us in an impenetrable, brushy ravine.