hunting. The chase is the thing--the chase after a
particular bird once flushed, the setting of my wits against his in the
endeavor to follow up his flight. We have now and then flushed the same
bird nine or ten times before we got him--and we have not always got him
then. For many and deep are the crafty ways of the old partridge, and we
have not yet learned them all. That is why I like partridge-hunting
better than quail or woodcock, though in these you get far more and
better shooting. Quail start in a bunch, scatter, fly, and drop where
you can flush them again, one at a time; woodcock fly in a zigzag, drop
where they happen to, and sit still till you almost step on them. But
the partridge thinks as he flies--thinks to good advantage. He seems to
know what we expect him to do, and then he does something else. How many
times have we gone past him when he sat quietly between us, and then
heard him fly off stealthily down our back track! How often, in a last
desperate search for a vanished bird, have I jumped on every felled
cedar top in a field--except the one he was under! How often have I
broken open my gun to climb a stone wall,--for we are cautious folk,
Jonathan and I,--and, as I stood in perilous balance, seen a great bird
burst out from under my very feet! How often--but I am not going to be
tempted into telling hunting-stories. For some reason or other,
hunting-stories chiefly interest the narrator. I have watched sportsmen
telling tales in the evenings, and noted how every man but the speaker
grows restive as he watches for a chance to get in his own favorite
yarn.

And it is not the partridges alone with whom we grow acquainted. We have
glimpses, too, of the other outdoor creatures. The life of the woods
slips away from us as we pass, but only just out of sight, and not
always that. The blue jays scream in the tree-tops, officiously
proclaiming us to the woods; the chickadees, who _must_ see all that
goes on, hop close beside us in the bushes; the gray squirrel dodges
behind a tree trunk with just the corner of an eye peering at us around
it. The chipmunk darts into the stone wall, and doubtless looks at us
from its safe depths; the rabbit gallops off from the brier tangle or
the brush heap, or sits up, round-eyed, thinking, little silly, that we
don't see him. Once I saw a beautiful red fox who leaped into the open
for a moment, stood poised, and leaped on into the brush; and once, as I
sat resting, a woodc