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
long yellow legs, and squawking fit to wake the dead.
Down clapped the pheasant as if the noise had pierced his heart, and
remained stiller than the crawling roots around him, and not half so
easy to see. But it was no good. Up shot the dozen heads above the
herbage, and two dozen vacuous eyes regarded his vicinity with
empty-headed inquisitiveness.
He almost melted into the ground, but it was useless. An old, old
hen--who perhaps was ignored by the lord of the harem, and hoped for an
adventure--waddled up, stood within a yard of his crouched, rounded
shape without seeing him, saw him, shot straight up in the air at least
one foot, screaming for help, and promptly charged blindly into the
hedge, where she as promptly got held up among roots and twigs.
The old pheasant got to his feet just as the rooster who owned the
outfit came racing up, panting and red. He had heard a wife scream for
help. Perhaps it was the odd bird out; or, anyway, some one who had to
be abolished. And he never waited to think. He saw what might have
been a small cockerel (if it had been large he might have thought
twice) crouching, and--he just sailed right in.
Then something happened. The two met, going up breast to breast. For
a moment or two the cock-pheasant showed on or about that big rooster.
Some feathers hung in the air. The rooster sat on his heels, met by a
blow in the chest that seemed to take all the wind from his sails, so
to speak, and would have drawn off to reconsider things if he had not
promptly become more busy than ever before in his life.
It was over ere any one knew quite what was happening. The old
cock-pheasant had passed through the crowd and vanished at the double
down the hedge, and the big rooster was slowly subsiding into a pool of
his own blood, from which he was destined never to rise again.
But those who make, instead of following, their own destiny do not get
let off thus lightly in the wild. The pheasant had not gone a hundred
yards, when a most intolerable blast, an almost unbearable blast, of
shrill, nerve-racking noise throbbed through his head. The bird fell
in his tracks where he ran, as if some one had jerked his legs from
under him, and he peered out.
What he beheld was an under-keeper standing close by and blowing upon a
two-note pea-whistle till there seemed some danger that he would burst
his cheeks, or a blood-vessel, on the spot, and far up the field three
wandering pheasants racing back to the covert, as they thought, for
very life; but, as a matter of fact--and you shall see--it was to very
death. The blower of whistles was stationed there to drive back into
the covert any pheasants who were so misguided as to wish to roam
thence into the fields and away.
Now, that old reprobate of a pheasant of ours was a pretty confirmed
runner, anyway. He had trained himself to it. Yet never in all his
checkered life was he conscious of a more awful desire to flee by means
of the wings that God had given him. The weakness was over in a few
seconds, and he crept on; but it was a near thing while it lasted. He
passed, however, away from the danger zone, resisting temptation, and
it was as well.
As he went there burst forth, at the opposite end of the big covert to
that at which he had come out, a sudden, quick shot. It echoed away
and away back among the woods, clattering and banging like great doors
shutting. The old cock-pheasant stopped to listen; he cocked his green
head on one side; he stood with one foot daintily uplifted: and in the
same instant there burst upon the air a rending, crashing succession of
shots, worse than ragged volley-firing, which almost made him jump. It
had begun--the big shoot over _his_ covert, the largest, the best, the
richest in pheasants, which had been saved for this--"the day" had
begun. When it ended very few pheasants would be left alive, for word
had gone forth that it was to be thinned down, almost shot out, and
that not a cock must escape.
He, our own cock-pheasant, might have chuckled--as a cock-pheasant can,
and will, very low and softly to himself, if you are close enough to
hear him--if something had not very suddenly and very mysteriously said
"phtt!" just like that, close beside him. The old bird's head snicked
round, right round, almost hindpart before; but he made no other
movement. The sound was new to him, and of a strangely sinister
import. Also, there was a little splayed hole in the ground, as if a
walking-stick had been poked in there, close beside him, which had not
been there before.
He was still staring when something, singing a little, high-pitched
song in a minor key to itself, came romping through the silent air,
and, with an oddly emphasized and emphatic "phtt!" landed between his
feet. It bored a hole just like the first thing, and it spat dirt up
into his face.
The third mystery thing clipped three feathers from his back as he ran,
bolted for dear life, crouching low--even then he would not rise--for
the hedge. He got there alive, if not quite whole; while a fourth
nameless object cut twigs off above him. Then he kept on running,
always hugging the hedges, till he was two fields away. He was upset
and overstrained, for Fate had given him plenty of deaths to circumvent
as it was, in the ordinary course of business, and this addition was a
bit too much.
There are other forms of shooting pheasants than the orthodox one,
which begins with smoking a cigarette on a comfortable shooting-seat,
and ends with a wild and furious fusillade, using three guns as fast as
you can. So thought the farmer's son, who took the chance to test his
new American .22-bore repeating-rifle, now that all the keepers were
well out of the way. And he had come mighty close to bagging the old
cock-bird, too. "As near as made no odds," he said, which was true,
but only the old bird himself knew quite the closeness of the call.
In the far field the bronze king of the woods found peace for a bit.
The stunning reports in the covert not far away, and the thought that
his companions of yesterday, his lady-loves of last spring, were even
then being butchered by the hundred, made no difference to his
digestion. He fed on with that imperturbability that must have come to
him straight through his ancestors from the East--Kismet! It was
sufficient.
He ought, of course, to have been in the covert. He was, however,
here--knowingly here, cunningly here, safely--No, by Jove! Not that,
by any means.
A head, clean and neat and sharp, had poked out of the long, pale grass
at the edge of the hedge-ditch, and stared at him. He couldn't very
well miss seeing it because of the unforgettable brightness of its
beady eyes, and the absolutely spotless purity of its white
shirt-front. Besides, he knew the owner--and its reputation.
He was helping the farmer to clear an oat-stubble of charlock-seeds at
the moment, and bending down. That is to say, he was doing inestimable
good, for which he got no credit. The next moment, and the next, and
for many more, he was still bending down. In fact, from the instant he
got sight of that head, it was as if a Hand had come down and turned
him by magic into a big model of a bird cast in bronze. All life in
him appeared to have dried up and fled. He looked as if you could have
picked him up and put him upon a bracket in your drawing-room without
his ever moving again. But that was only because of the head he had
seen--and its reputation. Moreover, the head was not alone. At least,
it had multiplied itself half-a-dozen times in less than half-a-dozen
seconds, and even a stoat, which the head belonged to, cannot be in two
places at once--though for sheer quickness of movement it, and far more
its cousin the weasel, comes very near to it.
Just at this moment it seemed that about the roost unhealthful thing he
could do would be to be seen in the air. Wherefore did this innocent
and guileless old bird affect not to see the stoats, but made out that
he was feeding his way along, quite and absolutely intent upon that
yellow devil of a weed whose other name is charlock. He did not even
hurry, and each deliberate step was taken with almost a proud
daintiness. The only thing was, he never lifted his head; he was
almost too obviously unwary--for him. And he gave the impression that
every step would be his last out into the field; that he was always
going to turn back next instant or the next, as he had done before when
the stoats were not there.
On and on he kept till he had crossed the field, going faster and
faster, till he ended at the far hedge with a run. And there, so far
as he was concerned, was an end of the stoats. He put them aside. He
forgot all about them.
They, however, had not forgotten about him.
It was half-an-hour later, and he was patiently gleaning such food as
the rooks and the sparrows and the larks had left behind them, when
something, he could not tell what, caused him to straighten up, with
that beautiful, proud bearing that seems part of the pheasant's
heritage from the gorgeous East.
And he was only just in time.
The stoat that had come up behind him, unseen, turned on its heels as
it charged, changing its mind at the last moment, as if it saw he saw,
and was gone again before you could click a finger, diving superbly
back into long grass.
They were following him, then, those little hounds of death; tracking
him; running him down. And why? He did not know, perhaps, yet--maybe
he did. Blood is a dangerous thing to have on you in the wild--a
flaming signal of distress for eye and nose to detect--and they are not
often rescuers who hurry to the scene. He had blood on his back, that
cock-pheasant, and just every now and then a single bright drop fell by
the way. The .22-bore bullet had only grazed him. '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, which 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 strangely, too--not for the
first time, since she had been one of his wives in the dim peaceful
past--with the guns thundering away so close, and their sons and their
daughters being slain almost all around them. They had, however,
little time to think about it, for they came, after about twenty yards,
to a gap spanned by barbed wire, and they stopped, the cock about a
foot behind the hen's tail, in cover scarcely enough to hide them.
But that was not all. Two men in fawn overcoats stood in the road by
the gap, looking through it at the shooting; and a boy with a bicycle
stood close to them, interested in the same thing.
It was the boy with the bicycle that did it; or, rather, it was the
unhappy hen-pheasant that made him. She, being _in extremis_, had made
some noise among the stiff dead leaves. It was not much of a noise,
but it caught the boy's young ear, and he bent forward to peer at the
hedge.
One of the men saw him, said something, to which the boy nodded, jumped
down into the ditch, and thrusting in a long arm, began to feel with a
purposeful hand. The hen-pheasant, whose nerves were already shattered
to little pieces, struggled to get out of reach, and in a second had
given the whole show away.
But I like to think of what our cunning old cock-pheasant did then. He
did nothing--absolutely nothing at all. Crouching as flat as an
overturned saucer, just, behind the hen-pheasant's tail, he remained
stiller than a bunch of dead leaves, and far more silent. And this,
mark you, when the hen-pheasant was pulled out, frantically fluttering
and helpless, and there and then had her neck wrung in front of his
very eyes. That, my masters, needed a nerve, after all that he had
gone through. What?
The two men, seeming to think that they had got enough for one quiet
walk, departed, not quickly, but without unnecessary delay. The man
who had been looking for the hen-pheasant, and had seen nothing of what
took place at the gap, gave it up, and went away over the grass to the
shooters. The shooting ended with one last double shot, at one last
old cock-pheasant driven reluctantly from the last hush of the covert;
the dogs were out, galloping all over the ground for the wounded and
the slain; the watchers in the road departed; the shooters gradually
merged into groups, and drew farther and farther away up the park; and
the boy, who was shy, mounted his bicycle and rode off into the sad
blue-gray of the gathering dusk.
The big day was over, and the old cock-pheasant was alone with the
melancholy song of a single robin, and a chaffinch calling "Chink!"
And the cold breath of the sunset wind, shuddering and sighing all to
itself across the face of the empty scene, touched the feathers that
were left by the hen-pheasant attached to thorns and twigs in her last
struggle, so that they danced and wavered and flickered before the old
cock's eyes, as a reminder of all that had been for them in the
past--the past, which for him, but never for her, might be again.
That night he roosted in the covert, as usual.
THE END