Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/240

178 a tree and he would soon see the male deer, and he would stand a good show to get a fine pair of horns. In a few moments two deer came tracking the one I had shot.

"Be ready, now," said I, "and when he stops let him have it." So when the deer were within about fifty yards I gave a keen whistle and they stopped, stock still. The Colonel fired and brought the big buck to the ground. The other, which was a small one, started to run, but I sent a bullet after it that made more venison.

We now had plenty of meat, and the Colonel was as proud over killing that deer as I was over my first pair of boots.

We stopped here until the command came up, dressed the venison and went on our way rejoicing.

Soon we were ascending the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and about three o'clock we struck the snow-line.

To one who has never gone from comparative summer in a few hours' ride, to the depths of winter and a considerable depth of snow, the sensation is a strange one. Of course, I had often done that before. But having more leisure to think of it now, and having more to do with the snow, I thought of its strangeness, and I am reminded of a little girl whom I have become acquainted with long since those days, and the effect that the first sight of snow had upon her. She was born in San Francisco, and had not seen any snow up to the time when she was three years old. Her parents were coming east with her on a railroad train, which runs over about the same ground that we were on at the time I was there with Col. Elliott. Awakening in the morning in a sleeping-