le when quiet, his coloring blends so perfectly with the
roots and leaves and tree stems among which he hides. This wonderful
invisibility is increased by the fact that he changes color easily. He
is darker in summer, lighter in winter, like the rabbit. When he lives
in dark woods he becomes a glossy red-brown; and when his haunt is among
the birches he is often a decided gray.

This was certainly true of the old beech partridge. When he spread
his tail wide and darted away among the beeches, his color blended so
perfectly with the gray tree trunks that only a keen eye could separate
him. And he knew every art of the dodger perfectly. When he rose there
was scarcely a second of time before he had put a big tree between you
and him, so as to cover his line of flight. I don't know how many times
he had been shot at on the wing. Every hunter I knew had tried it many
times; and every boy who roamed the woods in autumn had sought to pot
him on the ground. But he never lost a feather; and he would never
stand to a dog long enough for the most cunning of our craft to take his
position.

When a brood of young partridges hear a dog running in the woods, they
generally flit to the lower branches of a tree and kwit-kwit at him
curiously. They have not yet learned the difference between him and the
fox, who is the ancient enemy of their kind, and whom their ancestors of
the wilderness escaped and tantalized in the same way. But when it is an
old bird that your setter is trailing, his actions are a curious mixture
of cunning and fascination. As old Don draws to a point, the grouse
pulls himself up rigidly by a stump and watches the dog. So both stand
like statues; the dog held by the strange instinct which makes him
point, lost to sight, sound and all things else save the smell in his
nose, the grouse tense as a fiddlestring, every sense alert, watching
the enemy whom he thinks to be fooled by his good hiding. For a few
moments they are motionless; then the grouse skulks and glides to a
better cover. As the strong scent fades from Don's nose, he breaks
his point and follows. The grouse hears him and again hides by drawing
himself up against a stump, where he is invisible; again Don stiffens
into his point, one foot lifted, nose and tail in a straight line, as if
he were frozen and could not move.

So it goes on, now gliding through the coverts, now still as a stone,
till the grouse discovers that so long as he is still the dog see