"Well," Bud said, and then he came out with it, "I've wanted to do it for a long time."
"A body ought to do what he wants more often," Gramps said. "Maybe it'd make a heap of people feel a heap better a lot sooner. Do you like it here with us?"
"So'd our young'uns, but after they grew up, they couldn't wait to leave. That's right and as it should be; the old have no call to tell the young what they must do. What are you aiming to be when you grow up?"
"Yes. I want to raise chickens," Bud said recklessly.
"Raise chickens!" Gramps was surprised. "How come? Tell me."
Bud told him of the agricultural journals he had found in the closet off the living room and of the articles he had read about chickens, which had convinced him that the farm's present flock ought to be exchanged for purebreds. At any rate, he told Gramps, as soon as he could somehow earn enough money to buy a small pen of purebreds, he wanted to test his theory, if he could have Gram and Gramps' permission.
"Guess we can find room for a few more chickens. We'll think about it," Gramps said when Bud finished. Then he lowered his voice to a whisper. "We'd best take it easy. Should be grouse round this next bend."
Noting that Shep had left them for an excursion of his own, Bud balanced the shotgun with both hands and poised his thumb to slip the safety catch. They rounded the bend and stopped in their tracks.
About a hundred and fifty feet away there was a dense thicket of young hemlocks, small bushy trees about eight feet high. Ten feet from the thicket, so still that at first he seemed to be a statue rather than a living thing, stood a mighty buck. His head was turned toward them and his ears flicked forward as he tested the wind with his black nose. From the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail, every line was graceful and yet brutally powerful. His craggy antlers curved high and spread wide. As little as he knew about deer, Bud knew his antlers were superb. From the hocks and knees down, each of the buck's feet was a light yellow.
An instant later the buck had melted like a ghost into the hemlocks and Gramps said in awed tones,
Bud looked again where the legendary buck of Bennett's Woods had been, half expecting to see him still there. But Old Yellowfoot was gone without a sound. It seemed impossible for so large an animal to have faded out of sight so quickly, and for a moment Bud wondered if he really had been there. But he had seen Old Yellowfoot, the buck no hunter ever saw fully.