Page:A La California.djvu/110

84 been looking down on the doe, and Wheeler had never seen him at all. That let him out as a deer-huntist.

It is not absolutely necessary that the game in sight should be a buck or doe, to give a green hunter the "buck fever." Prairie-chickens suddenly starting up around a man for the first time will not unfrequently produce a severe attack. I remember with a tender regard my old hunting friend and companion of other days, Len Huegunin, of Chicago, one of the gamest sportsmen I have ever known. He shot his left arm off gunning for ducks in the Calumet Marshes, but his right never forgot its cunning, and years thereafter he was one of the crack shots of the Garden City. One day Len was persuaded against his better judgment to go out on the prairie and initiate a green Bostonian in the mysteries of prairie-chicken shooting. When the dog took up the scent of the first covey, Len followed upon one side of an Osage orange hedge and his companion on the other. The chickens were concealed in the grass on the Bostonian's side of the hedge, and in an instant they were all off at once, flying, bur-r-r-r-r-r-r, bur-r-r-r-r-r, bur-r-r-r-r-r-r, up from around his feet and skurrying off right and left in all directions. Without the remotest idea of what he was doing or wanted to do, the startled Bostonian fired both barrels into the air at random, and with one of them bored a hole about the size of a saw log through the hedge and perforated old Len's coat, vest, and pants, to say nothing of his hide, with about ten thousand—more or less—No. 7.