Deer on a Ledge (Cont'd)

It was an exciting but comparatively simple job to pluck three Boy Scouts off a narrow ledge jutting from the perpendicular, 1,000-ft. face of Wallface Mountain near Lake Placid, N. Y. last week. The Scouts had climbed up 300 ft., could not advance or retreat. After a chilly night on the ledge they were sighted by search parties. A Coast Guard aviator flew a 1,000-ft. rope from Plattsburgh, hovered overhead signaling directions while res- cuers hauled the boys hand over hand, one at a time, up the cliff.

Meanwhile the handsome, velvet-horned seven-point buck deer marooned on a ledge in Watkins Glen, N. Y. State Park, about 275 miles from Lake Placid, continued to stump his would-be rescuers (TIME, Sept. 4). He was only 35 ft. up on the 85-ft. wall of a mountain gorge, but he viewed with alarm all efforts by human beings to rescue him.

The buck had bruised its flank badly when something, probably dogs, frightened it, and its mate now lying dead in the gorge below, into scrambling over great boulders onto the ledge. It might have rested there comfortably, with dew to lick and foliage to nibble, until it got well enough to scramble back the way it had come. But Man was everywhere. Men gathered by hundreds along the path on the chasm's opposite bank. Men threw a threatening bridge straight across to the ledge. Worst of all, they descended terrifyingly from the sky.

First a newsreel cameraman had himself lowered from the top of the cliff. Then So-Lat-Dowanee, a Mohawk Indian "chief," came dangling down in full tribal regalia, and began making passes with a lariat. The deer plunged perilously back & forth on the ledge, sending small stones rattling down into the gorge. Chief So-Lat-Dowanee, who had been confident of succeeding where the white man had failed, was ignominiously hauled back. He announced that he would go into seclusion, write a poem about the deer.

After a week the deer had grown accustomed to being gaped at, was eating the sweet corn and drinking the water lowered daily from the cliff, sleeping on a bale of hay. Hemlock branches and moss were strewn across the five-foot-wide plank bridge, a trail of salt sprinkled across it as a lure. Park officials were deluged with rescue suggestions. One man wanted to put an opiate in the deer's water. Another suggested a jacklight to lure the buck across the bridge at night. A farmer offered to bring a flock of sheep, place them reassuringly on the chasm's opposite bank. Two taxidermists from Elmira brought a pair of stuffed deer on rollers. Park Superintendent Frank Haight had almost decided that the deer should be left alone until it recovered from its lameness, when a message came from Albany ordering all rescue efforts to cease until the arrival of the State's Game Superintendent Gardiner Bump.

"Exciting Two Minutes"

Frederick Trubee Davison broke his back flying in the War but lived, with a vigorous limp, to write a letter to his four sons describing "the most exciting and dangerous two minutes I have ever been through." The two minutes had to do with elephants, not airplanes. The letter reached the U. S. last week from Nairobi where Father Davison, now president of the American Museum of Natural History after seven years as Assistant Secretary of War for Aeronautics, went collecting with his wife last month.

Out to get one small bull, one large one and two cows,* the Davison party had one cow to go when their trackers led them at dawn up to a herd of elephants feeding slowly along in thick bush. Wrote Father Davison:

"For five hours we followed and studied them, often very, very close, but never sure enough of any particular one to shoot. Believe me, it was a thrilling five hours! They look as big as the Grand Central Station, but there was one very cunning little calf about two feet high, playing around the old folks.

"At last a calf-less one presented a fine target, and I fired. Then started the most exciting and dangerous two minutes I have ever been through. My bullet hit the cow in the neck and broke the spinal cord. She went down, instantly killed. It sounded like a ton of bricks falling.

"Immediately the herd stampeded and milled around in every direction, as they didn't seem to know where the danger was. But within two or three seconds a big bull picked us out and came for us like an express train.

"Can you imagine how we felt? As a matter of fact, we didn't have time to think. Mother had her movie camera going all the time, and was standing back of me. Well, the elephant came and came and came, followed by the herd. Klein yelled at him, hoping to turn him, but still he came. I had one shell left in my double-barreled gun, and shot at his head. Klein and Pete shot at the same time. I was off my balance. . . . My foot caught as I stepped back from the kick of the gun, and down I fell on my back in the thorn bushes. Now, two things happened as I fell: First, I saw the bull go down, and secondly I knocked your mother down, too. We were lying flat on our backs in the thorns. Klein yelled to run. Pete shot again. Isaiah and a Somali guide had disappeared over the horizon. . . ."

The shots sent the herd thundering off in another direction. The relieved Davisons dethorned themselves and Hunter Klein "put two bullets into the bull's brain as he lay just 18 paces from where we had stood as we brought him down; and that was the end of that."

--The letter also elaborated Father Davison's cable of last month: ''Got small bull elephant" (TIME, Aug. 14). He slew the first bull, Mrs. Davison the next, a larger one; Pete Quesada, their airplane pilot, the first cow.

Rich Pets

Last week in Boston, Union Trust Co. filed in Suffolk County Probate Court the fourth annual accounting of its stewardship of a client's estate. The estate of $5,160 was conservatively invested in stocks & bonds of A. T. & T., Eastern Gas & Fuel, United Corp., National Dairy Products Corp. Income for last year was $352.70. Of this, $270.77 had been expended for the client's room & board, $5.60 for Massachusetts income tax. The client, last week summering in Wakefield, N. H., was a staid, elderly, nonswearing Mexican parrot, which five years ago was left a $5,000 trust fund by its late master, Frederick D. Allen of Brighton, Mass.

The pet which observers once thought would have to pay the world's highest animal income tax, pays none. Tobey, last of a succession of 18 similarly-named French poodles, was not even mentioned in the will disposing of the late, eccentric Ella Virginia von Echtzel Wendel's $40,000,000 estate. Grown fat and phlegmatic in his ninth year, Tobey still lives in the ugly old house on Fifth Avenue at 39th Street, with two servants whose only duties are to care for him.

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