h kept the stoat-pack
at his heels. They seemed convinced that he was badly wounded and
unable to fly.

Then came the road. He was on it before he knew. There was the
wedge-shaped, low-browed head of a stoat racing up along one side of
him, with murder plainly written in the gleam of its beady eyes; there
was the hot breath of another beating on his opposite flank; there was
one with feet out and all brakes on, trying its best to pull out one of
the feathers of his long and beautiful tail; and--there was the road
dead ahead.

It was one of three--the road, the air, or death where he was. He
chose the road, and crossed, like a hunted cat crossing a back-yard.
His feet seemed scarcely to touch the dust as he negotiated the open,
yet he had time to take in a fact or two. One was that the stoats had
stopped--a little bunch of peering heads on a group of craning necks on
the edge of the ditch behind him. Another was that several people and
a motor-car were standing still in the road quite close, watching the
shooting. I don't think any of them saw him, but he felt as if all of
them did.

Arrived in the hedge on the far side of the road, he clapped down,
panting. The hedge ran along the road. On the other side of it was
the grass of the park-land, stretching away two hundred yards or so to
the edge of the covert, which came down to a point here. He could hear
the tapping of sticks in the covert--beaters' sticks. He could hear an
occasional shout. Men in tweeds stood motionless on the edge of the
covert, and suddenly moved.

Then came the infernal crash of the guns again, and he saw a
hen-pheasant pitch sickeningly on her head from a height, and a
cock-pheasant, flaming like a rocket in the sinking sun, run the
gauntlet of four shots, only to turn over and slide down at a fifth.

Then--and then, he jumped.

Something had pushed past him. In the din he had not heard it. He
turned as he crouched, and saw that it was a hen-pheasant, with blood
on her breast and one wing trailing alongside. And in the same instant
he was aware of a man--an under-keeper--crackling about in the hedge
only ten yards away, looking for that hen-pheasant.

And the unwounded old cock, crouching almost till he looked like a
tortoise, followed the blundering, staggering, wounded hen. It was the
only thing he dared do.

It was a strange creep, and an erratic one, with many stops, those two
hunted ones took together, meeting, so st