others. Then I sat down quietly in the snow, and we were face to
face at last.

He feared me--I could hardly expect otherwise, while a deer has
memory--but he lay perfectly still, his head extended on the
snow, his sides heaving. After a little while he made a few
bounds forward, at right angles to the course he had been
running, with marvelous instinct remembering the nearest point in
the many paths out of which the pack had driven him. But he
stopped and lay quiet at the first sound of my snowshoes behind
him. "The chase law holds. You have caught me; I am yours,"--this
is what his sad eyes were saying. And sitting down quietly near
him again, I tried to reassure him. "You are safe. Take your own
time. No dog shall harm you now."--That is what I tried to make
him feel by the very power of my own feeling, never more strongly
roused than now for any wild creature.

I whistled a little tune softly, which always rouses the wood
folk's curiosity; but as he lay quiet, listening, his ears shot
back and forth nervously at a score of sounds that I could not
hear, as if above the music he caught faint echoes of the last
fearful chase. Then I brought out my lunch and, nibbling a bit
myself, pushed a slice of black bread over the crust towards him
with a long stick.

It was curious and intensely interesting to watch the struggle.
At first he pulled away, as if I would poison him. Then a new
rich odor began to steal up into his hungry nostrils. For weeks
he had not fed full; he had been running hard since daylight, and
was faint and exhausted. And in all his life he had never smelled