returned again I behaved better.

By seven o'clock the birds had scattered, and we left our places to go
back to the horse. On the way we encountered two hunters wandering
rather disconsolately over the marsh. They stopped us to ask what luck,
and we tried not to look too self-satisfied, but probably they read our
success in our arrogant faces, streaked with tar and sweet oil as they
were. Possibly the bulge of our hunting-coat pockets helped to tell the
story.

"How long have you been out here?" they asked enviously.

"Two hours or so," said Jonathan.

"How'd you get out so early?"

"We got up early," said Jonathan, with admirable simplicity.

The strangers looked at him twice to see if he meant to jeer, but he
appeared impenetrably innocent, and they finally laughed, a little
ruefully, and went on out into the marsh we were just leaving. Why does
it make one feel so immeasurably superior to get up a few hours before
other people?

We drove home along the sunny road, where the bakers' carts and meat
wagons were already astir. Could it be the same road that a few hours
before had been so cold and gray and still? Were these bare white houses
the same that had nestled so cozily into the dark of the roadside? We
reached our own plain little white house and went in. In the dining-room
our candles and the remains of our midnight breakfast on the table
seemed like relics of some previous state of existence. Sleepily I set
things in order for a real breakfast, a hot breakfast, a breakfast that
should be cozy. Drowsily we ate, but contentedly. Everything since the
night before seemed like a dream.

It still seems so. But of all the dream the most vivid part--more vivid
even than the alarm clock, more real than my tumble into wetness--is the
vision that remains with me of mist-swept marsh, all gray and green and
yellow, with tawny haycocks and glimmerings of water and whirrings of
wings and whistling bird notes and the salt smell of the sea.

Yes, Jonathan was right. Dawn hunting on the marshes is different, quite
different.

XIV

In the Wake of the Partridge

"The kangaroo ran very fast,
I ran faster.
The kangaroo was very fat,
I ate him.
Kangaroo! Kangaroo!"

This, the hunting-song of the Australian Bushman, is the best one I
know. Without disguise or adornment, it embodies the primitive hunting
instinct that is in every one of us, whether we hunt people or animals
or things or i