'Twas nothing--but
it bled more than you would expect. And that explained it. The
tracking stoats thought he was wounded.

But even then the old cock-pheasant would not rise.

The firing in the covert had risen suddenly to a fierce crescendo,
breaking out afresh from another quarter. Here, however, was
silence--the absolute, deadly silence in which all the weasel tribe
hunt. But they were there, though he could not see them. He knew
that, invisible even in the sunlight--they were closing in, tracking
him fast, those stoats.

Then he ran. He ran not so much for his life, but for the right to
keep on the ground. If the worst came to the worst, he could always
fly; but he would do anything rather than that.

He turned and ran away from the woods--raced like a fowl, but quicker,
lower, much harder to see. A sudden gleam of bright-chestnut fur dead
ahead, however, stopped him, and he turned back, keeping always to the
hedge--towards the covert. He could hear no sound around him, only the
burst and the bang of the guns in the woods, and he might have been
alone; but directly he came to another hedge, and swung down to it at
right angles, a furry tail with a paint-brush tip, vanishing round a
holly-stem, fetching him up all standing. They were there, too, those
stoats. He seemed to be surrounded on all sides save one, and that the
one towards the woods. So he swung back into his original path.

Then, very soon, as he ran up the hedge-ditch, it seemed to him as if
the dead leaves collected there were beginning to whisper behind him.
But there was no wind to move them. Moreover, it grew closer, till it
seemed at his very tail, that whisper of dead leaves.

Then, in a flash, he had stopped, spun about like a top, and struck
with his spurs twice--whack, whack--more than instantly, and a long,
low, brown body--close behind him, that had risen as he turned, so that
its spotlessly clean shirt-front offered him a fine mark, went over
sideways--with a grunt and all the wind knocked out of it, as well as
an inch-and-a-half gash to remember friend pheasant by. That was one
stoat; but it was not alone. He had a vision of chestnut forms sliding
and rippling in and out of the shadows and the long copper gleams of
the westering sun.

As he turned again, and the whispering began once more behind, the
firing in front broke out afresh, and much nearer. Still he would not
rise, however. It was this fact, probably, whic