huck, big and uncombed, hustled busily past me, so
close I could have touched him. He did not see me, and seemed so
preoccupied with some pressing business that I should hardly have been
surprised to see him pull a watch out of his pocket, like Alice's
rabbit, and mutter, "I shall be late." I had not known that the wood
creatures ever felt hurried except when pursued. Another time I was
working up the slope on the sunny edge of a run, and, as I drew myself
up over the edge of a big rock, I found myself face to face--nose to
nose--with a calm, mild-eyed, cottontail rabbit. He did not remain calm;
in fact, we were both startled, but he recovered first, and hopped
softly over the side of the rock, and went galloping away through the
brushy bottom, while I, still kneeling, watched him disappear just as
Jonathan came up.

"What's the joke?"

"Nothing, only I just met a rabbit. He sat here, right here, and he was
so rabbit-y! He looked at me just like an Easter card."

"Why didn't you shoot him?"

"I never thought of it. I wish you had seen how his nose twiddled! And,
anyhow, I wouldn't shoot anything sitting up that way, like a tame
kitten."

"Then why didn't you shoot when he ran?"

"Shoot a rabbit running! Running in scallops! I couldn't."

The fact is, I shouldn't shoot a rabbit anyway, unless driven by hunger.
I am not humane, but merely sentimental about them because they are soft
and pretty. Once, indeed, when I found all my beautiful heads of
lettuce neatly nibbled off down to the central stalks, I almost hardened
my heart against them, but the next time I met one of the little fellows
I forgave him all.

I believe that one of the very best things about our way of following a
partridge is the sense of intimacy with the countryside which it
creates--an intimacy which nothing else has ever given us. In most
outdoor faring one sticks to the roads and paths, in fishing one keeps
to the water-courses, in cross-country tramping one unconsciously goes
around obstacles. Nothing but the headlong and undeviating pursuit of a
bird along a path of his choosing would ever have given me that
acquaintance with ledge and swamp and laurel copse that I now possess. I
know our swamp as a hippopotamus might, or--to stick to plain Yankee
creatures--a mud turtle. It is a very swampy swamp, with spring holes
and channels and great shallow pools where the leaves from the tall
swamp maples--scarlet and rose and ashes of roses--sift