Page:The Way of the Wild (1923).pdf/261



was an ordinary white-tailed Virginia deer, so he was really not red at all, but the reddish brown in his case was so much brighter than in the ordinary Virginia deer that I have elected to call him Red Buck.

He had been dropped five years before our story, early in May, in a dark spruce thicket, near the top of the Hoosac Mountains in western Massachusetts. He had been a wonderful fawn to look upon had there been any one but his dam to see him. He was so tall and rangy that he might have passed for a month old fawn at birth. But all who were there to see him were his dam and a white throat sparrow.

The sparrow, feeling that something out of the ordinary had happened, caroled away in the dark thicket with all his might, then flew away to find his mate and tell her. The delivery of Red Buck had been such a strain on