Early autumn's frosts had tinged the foliage of the birch, maple, oak, and elm trees, that intermingle in the great pine forests, with a thousand rich colors and shades of gold, brown, olive, pink, and crimson, while the pines, the hemlocks, the firs, and the cedars still wore their dark mantels of perennial green, and all Nature was clad in her sweetest smiles. A solitary woodpecker, perched on the topmost branch of a dead giant of the forest, reaching out far above the surrounding network of leafy branches, from which he might survey the surrounding country, sounded his morning reveille and awaited the coming of his mate. The dry leaves with which mother earth was carpeted, rustled now and again to the bound of the saucy red squirrel, the darting hither and thither of the shy wood-mouse, or the tread of the stupid, half-witted porcupine. The chill October wind soughed through the swaying tree-tops, laden with the rich ozone that gives life, health, and happiness to all animate beings that are permitted to inhale it.
On such a morning, and amid such a scene of natural loveliness, I left the train at Junction City, on the Wisconsin Central Railway, started on a three-mile jaunt to a logging camp, for a day or two on a deer roundup. I reached my destination at nine o'clock. The men had long since gone to their work, but the "boss" had returned to camp to attend to some business in hand, and, welcoming me with the generous hospitality that is always shown by these sturdy sons of the forest to strangers, bade me make myself at home as long as I cared to stay. To my inquiry as to the presence of game in the vicinity, he said there was plenty of it, and that the men saw one or more deer nearly every day while going to or returning from their work, which was only a mile away.
I lost no time in getting out and entering an old slashing to the east of the camp where the foreman said signs were plentiful. I had not gone more than half a mile, when, turning to the left, on an old logging road, I saw several fresh tracks of deer that had been feeding there that morning. It was now eleven o'clock in the forenoon and I had no hope of finding the game on foot at that late hour, but depended entirely upon jumping a deer from its bed and upon having to risk, in all probability, a running shot. I moved very cautiously, however, and was on the _qui vive_ for any straggler that might perchance be moving. Every foot of ground that came within the scope of my vision was carefully scanned and every sound or movement of leaf or shrub, no matter how slight, received the most careful attention, during long and frequent pauses, before proceeding on my way.