h fence running zigzag through the woods,
with snares set every few yards in the partridge and rabbit runs. At
the third opening a fine cock partridge swung limp and lifeless from a
twitch-up. The cruel wire had torn his neck under his beautiful ruff;
the broken wing quills showed how terrible had been his struggle. Hung
by the neck till dead!--an atrocious fate to mete out to a noble bird.
I followed the hedge of snares for a couple of hundred yards, finding
three more strangled grouse and a brown rabbit. Then I sat down in a
beautiful spot to watch the life about me, and to catch the snarer at
his abominable work.

The sun climbed higher and blotted out the four trails in the field
below. Red squirrels came down close to my head to chatter and scold and
drive me out of the solitude. A beautiful gray squirrel went tearing by
among the branches, pursued by one of the savage little reds that nipped
and snarled at his heels. The two cannot live together, and the gray
must always go. Jays stopped spying on the squirrels--to see and
remember where their winter stores were hidden--and lingered near me,
whistling their curiosity at the silent man below. None but jays gave
any heed to the five grim corpses swinging by their necks over the
deadly hedge, and to them it was only a new sensation.

Then a cruel thing happened,--one of the many tragedies that pass
unnoticed in the woods. There was a scurry in the underbrush, and
strange cries like those of an agonized child, only tiny and distant,
as if heard in a phonograph. Over the sounds a crow hovered and rose and
fell, in his intense absorption seeing nothing but the creature below.
Suddenly he swooped like a hawk into a thicket, and out of the cover
sprang a leveret (young hare), only to crouch shivering in the open
space under a hemlock's drooping branches. There the crow headed him,
struck once, twice, three times, straight hard blows with his powerful
beak; and when I ran to the spot the leveret lay quite dead with his
skull split, while the crow went flapping wildly to the tree tops,
giving the danger cry to the flock that was gossiping in the sunshine on
the ridge across the valley.

The woods were all still after that; jays and squirrels seemed appalled
at the tragedy, and avoided me as if I were responsible for the still
little body under the hemlock tips. An hour passed; then, a quarter-mile
away, in the direction that the deer had taken in the early morning,
a sin