s, and deprecating pigeons remained at
rigid attention. The old cock-pheasant, too, erect as an armored
warrior, unseen just within the covert, stood promptly at gaze.

Then, in no more time than one would take to inhale one puff from a
cigarette, the fields were empty--stark, cold, and deserted in the eye
of the morning sun. The birds had not so much gone, exactly, as simply
faded out--dissolved, as a picture may at a cinema-show. The
cock-pheasant did not go. He was in cover, and had a good view, a
strategic position of some moment.

Followed a pause. Then a man in tweeds entered one of the fields by
the gate. Followed him two more, then a fourth, then two not in
tweeds, then dogs, black and big, to the number of three, not to
mention the bar-like gleam given off by the barrels of the guns that
the first four carried. The whole procession passed silently, as they
thought--but to the waiting, watching, wild-folk unpardonably
noisily--diagonally across the field, and out of sight round a bend of
the wood. They had an air about them. I don't know what it was
exactly, but you could feel they were going to do something serious
that had not been done there for a long time. Perhaps the old
cock-pheasant felt it too, but--well, there now! Where had the old
"varmint" gone?

Half-way down the hedge, very low and long, the cock-pheasant was
sneaking. He seemed suddenly anxious to mind his own business, and
that everybody else should mind theirs. He was going away from the
wood, which the books tell us is the realm, the sanctuary, the all, to
a pheasant, and he had no desire to answer questions by the way. For
this reason, then, and a few others, he felt no special delight in
sighting, about two hundred yards farther on--at a place where two
stacks surrounded by rails stood and sheltered a fowlhouse--a baker's
dozen of fowls sunning themselves on the hedge-bank. He held for fowls
all the wild creatures' contempt for the tame or domestic. All the
same, he saw no health in risking the open just then, and would not
turn back, so there was nothing for it but the fowls.

Low as low he crouched, and ran very quickly, and hoped for the best;
and there is no bird that can wish itself out of sight in this fashion
better than friend pheasant. But he forgot the odd cockerel out. He
shot right on to the wretched thing--a gawky red youth--messing about
all alone in a nettle-clump, and it dashed into the field, racing on