The boy soon mastered the feeling, but then, to his great surprise, he was attacked by another emotion.

Suddenly he began to have pity, and a fellow-feeling for the stag.

It, too, was in the great wilderness, rejoicing in the woods and the grass and the running streams and had done no harm.

It seemed sad that so fine a life should end, without warning and for so little.
The feeling was that of a young boy, the instinct of one who had not learned to kill, and he suppressed it.

Men had not yet thought to spare the wild animals, or to consider them part of a great brotherhood, least of all on the border, where the killing of game was a necessity.