'For fully half an hour this lasted, and then the mist cleared as quickly as it had come, the sleet stopped, and the sun shone out, making the ground fairly smoke: but, alas! the deer were gone. We looked for their tracks, and found that they had actually passed within forty yards of us during the storm; but our chance was missed, and there was nothing for it but to renew the search.
'Another hour of walking, and Jens' quick eye caught sight of them, this time high above our heads on some snow near the top of Nautgardstind, and at last, thank goodness, lying down. There seemed to be a possibility of getting to them, and we spent another hour crawling like serpents in the attempt, only to find our way barred when we were within four hundred yards by a ridge over which we could not pass unseen.
'However, from there we saw plainly that we could approach them by going up the mountain, and then coming quite straight down above them, with hardly any difficult ground to traverse. So we performed that weary crawl back again, until we were safely out of sight, and then went up Nautgardstind at a speed that has never been equalled.
'Half an hour took us to the top, and then Jens made the only mistake in a stalk that I ever saw: he got his bearings wrong somehow, and thought that the deer were on one bit of snow, the top end of which we could see, while I thought they were on another. Of course I had much more confidence in Jens' opinion than in my own, but it turned out that he was wrong, and in crawling to the place where he expected them to be, we unluckily came into full view of the snow where they really were--a fact which was made unpleasantly apparent to us by our suddenly catching sight of four deer galloping down the drift two hundred yards away.
'I took a careful aim at the buck, but fired too low, and the bullet broke his fore-leg, which did not prevent him from following the does, though at a reduced pace. Now I think our best chance would have been to remain perfectly still, and trust to his stopping in time in some place where I could get to him; but Jens was terribly excited, begging me to shoot, and my own head was by no means as cool as it should have been, so I sat on a rock and fired away all my remaining cartridges except two, at the gradually receding form of the reindeer: I suppose at the last shot he was five hundred yards away, and I don't think I ever hit him again.