Bill Dugan Read Online Free PDF

they would have to be careful and clever.
    Angling across the slope toward the northwest,they had almost reached the top when Curly stopped in his tracks. He grabbed Hump by the arm and hauled him in behind a slab of red rock. Hump started to argue, but Curly put a finger to his lips and pointed uphill.
    The older boy’s jaw went slack when he saw what his young friend was pointing at. The deer stood there just beyond a clump of cottonwoods, its head held high. An enormous rack of antlers speared the pure blue behind him like the ruins of an ancient oak.
    The buck’s ear twitched, and it kept canting its head to listen. Curly knew it must have heard something and was trying to decide whether it should stand and fight or run for its life. The boys crouched behind the rock, hardly daring to breathe. They could see sunlight glistening on the damp nose of the great buck, and when once it turned its head to look in their direction, its eyes seemed to be full of fire, where the sunlight reflected from the huge, dark pupils.
    “It’s the biggest deer in the world,” Hump whispered. The deer seemed to hear even the whisper, and looked sharply in their direction once more.
    Curly clamped a hand over Hump’s mouth to keep him quiet.
    At the deer’s feet, tall clumps of lush grass tempted it, and it shook its head, snorting once before lowering it to graze. Now, even the sharp tips of the antlers reflected the sunlight, and it looked to Curly as if lightning were spearing out from every point.
    “I think I can get close enough to shoot him,” Hump whispered.
    Curly shook his head no, but Hump ignored him. He started to ease out from behind the rock, and trying to stop him would make too much noise, so Curly let him go. Since staying where he was would do no good, he followed Hump, taking care to place his moccasined feet carefully. Even a small stone dislodged would make a clatter as it rolled away, and the deer was already nervous.
    Hump worked his way across the hillside, heading for some scrub oak tangled in among a clump of boulders. If he could reach the cover without spooking the deer, he would be close enough at least to try. Already, Hump had three arrows clutched in his left hand against the bow grip. Curly knew that the best warriors could fire four, five, even six arrows so rapidly that the last one would already be arcing toward the target before the first one hit.
    Hump was good, but not that good. Curly was better, but he didn’t want to shoot the deer in the first place, so he left his own arrows in their quiver.
    When the boys reached the cover, Hump dropped to his knees and turned to look at his companion. Leaning close, he mouthed the words, “I think I can hit him from here.”
    Once more, Curly shook his head. Soundlessly, he replied, “No. The deer is
wakan.”
    “The deer is not holy,” Hump insisted. “He is just a deer. I will bring him down, and then you will see. If he were
wakan
, I would not be able to kill him.”
    Curly nodded, as if in resignation, but that wasn’t what he meant and Hump knew it. But it didn’t deter him. He fitted the first arrow to hisbowstring, then started to rise up from behind the branches of a short oak.
    Curly could see the deer, and it seemed as if the animal were waiting for something. It shook its head, snorted, and pawed the ground. The clack of its hooves on the rocks sounded like gunshots, and Hump jumped a little, then gave Curly an embarrassed smile over his shoulder.
    “I’m nervous,” he said.
    “You are right to be nervous,” Curly told him. His own smile was more forlorn.
    Hump turned back to the buck who was now staring straight downhill toward the boys’ hiding place. Hump froze for a moment, his arm pulling back the bowstring until the arrowhead was right against the grip. As he stood up, his arms trembled from the strain of holding the bow at full draw.
    With a sudden hum, the string snapped forward and the arrow sped uphill. The buck seemed to