f
climate and vegetation that we were getting up into the high latitudes,
and as she always looked a little tireder and a little more discouraged
after each rush, I judged that I was safe to win, in the end, the
competition being purely a matter of staying power and the advantage
lying with me from the start because she was lame.
Along in the afternoon I began to feel fatigued myself. Neither of us
had had any rest since we first started on the excursion, which was
upwards of ten hours before, though latterly we had paused awhile after
rushes, I letting on to be thinking about something else; but neither of
us sincere, and both of us waiting for the other to call game but in no
real hurry about it, for indeed those little evanescent snatches of rest
were very grateful to the feelings of us both; it would naturally be
so, skirmishing along like that ever since dawn and not a bite in the
meantime; at least for me, though sometimes as she lay on her side
fanning herself with a wing and praying for strength to get out of this
difficulty a grasshopper happened along whose time had come, and that
was well for her, and fortunate, but I had nothing--nothing the whole
day.
More than once, after I was very tired, I gave up taking her alive, and
was going to shoot her, but I never did it, although it was my right,
for I did not believe I could hit her; and besides, she always stopped
and posed, when I raised the gun, and this made me suspicious that
she knew about me and my marksmanship, and so I did not care to expose
myself to remarks.
I did not get her, at all. When she got tired of the game at last, she
rose from almost under my hand and flew aloft with the rush and whir
of a shell and lit on the highest limb of a great tree and sat down and
crossed her legs and smiled down at me, and seemed gratified to see me
so astonished.
I was ashamed, and also lost; and it was while wandering the woods
hunting for myself that I found a deserted log cabin and had one of
the best meals there that in my life-days I have eaten. The weed-grown
garden was full of ripe tomatoes, and I ate them ravenously, though I
had never liked them before. Not more than two or three times since have
I tasted anything that was so delicious as those tomatoes. I surfeited
myself with them, and did not taste another one until I was in middle
life. I can eat them now, but I do not like the look of them. I suppose
we have all experienced a surfeit at one
|