t-clean circle on the grass, and there was
sopped bread upon both. And that place was given over entirely to
chaffinches, _all hens_, tripping, mincing, pecking, feasting,
fighting--because they were chaffinches, I suppose, and must fight--all
over the place.

The thrush came to anchor upon the roof of the summer-house,
and--straightway fell upon his beak! And that was Fate's punishment
for laziness, one second's relaxation from vigilance.

Righting himself, he almost overbalanced the other way, and only
finally managed to come to an intricate halt on one leg. The other
leg--the right one--was twisted back under him, in line with his closed
wings and tail; that is to say, it was pointing the wrong way for a
bird's leg, or, rather, so far as could be seen among the feathers,
that was how it seemed. But the leg was not broken; he could still
move his toes and expand his foot. Otherwise he could do nothing with
it. The leg might not have been there, for all the use it was to him;
it would have been better if it had not been there, for it hampered his
flight, or unbalanced him, or something, so that he was incapable of
traveling now beyond the snow, even if he would. Undoubtedly the
air-rifle had done its work.

Now, in the wild it is a fairly sound maxim that an injured wildling is
a dead wildling--that is, unless the injury is quite slight. There are
exceptions, of course. Flesh-wounds and quick-healing wounds are
exceptions.

However, our thrush seemed to be no coward, and he at once buckled to,
to fight Fate and all the world--one bird _v_. the rest. It was
appalling odds, and I guess no darn fool could have been found to back
that bird's chance of winning through.

Then he showed that he had at least one trump up his sleeve. A shape
like unto the shape of a silken kite came floating in ample circles
across the low-hung sky. And the color of that shape was brown--pale
brown; and the shape was alive, and had the appearance of eternally
looking for something, which it always could not find. So hunts the
kestrel falcon, and by the same token the thrush knew that this was a
big hen-kestrel. I say "big" advisedly, because in kestrel society it
is the ladies who have the weight and the vote.

And the thrush, who had by that time flown to the ground, promptly
"froze "--froze to stillness, I mean--and vanished. It was a startling
little trick of his, almost an eccentricity; but the fact was that so
long a