BRIDGER AND / HIS PARTNER pulled out early the following morning. Before they were even out of sight, Mr. Grimes said, “Back to work. We lost a good part of a day, Mr. Tucket, and we couldn’t afford it.”

He walked out of camp to get more bait sticks, and Francis went back to work on the drying hoops.

Actually, they were fairly simple to make. He took a slim piece of springy willow or aspen, eight feet long, and bent it into a circle about three feet across. Then he lashed the ends together with wet, green rawhide that seemed to shrink when it dried and made the two ends of the willow become one piece. After a beaver was skinned, the hide was put in this hoop and with lacing around the sides pulled toward the edges so that when it was dry it would be a hard plate of hide with fur on one side.

Mr. Grimes wanted two hundred of these hoops. Francis ran out of rawhide that evening on the fiftieth hoop. He told Mr. Grimes about it.

“Well, Mr. Tucket, the woods are full of deer and you’ve got a rifle. Seems like a fairly simple problem to me …”

So the next morning Francis walked quietly through the pine glades, glad of a chance to get away from the lean-to. Not three hundred yards from the house, he stopped on the edge of a small clearing, just to enjoy the morning, and found himself facing a nice three-point buck.

There was the deer, and there was Francis, with perhaps fifty feet between them. He raised his rifle, aimed at the buck’s shoulder, and squeezed the trigger. The little Lancaster cracked sharply—higher and faster sounding than Mr. Grimes’s big bull gun—and the deer took two steps forward, sagging as he walked, and fell. Francis reloaded, as cool as though he were shooting buffalo chips, and aimed at the deer’s head. He fired again and it was over.

He started forward, then, remembering what he’d been taught, stopped and reloaded again.

And he suddenly started shaking all over, as though he had a chill. He couldn’t even walk right and had to sit down. It was silly, but he was nervous about the deer—nervous and rattled. He didn’t know what it was—he just had to sit down for a minute.

When he got up, it was as though it had never happened. He grabbed the deer by its rack and dragged it back to camp. There he skinned it and cut the wet hide into strips half an inch wide. By late afternoon, he was again making hoops, the incident all but forgotten.

Mr. Grimes came in at about four o’clock, his arm full of sticks, and Francis told him about the deer.