Jonathan, too well content at the prospect of a day's hunt to mind
contradiction, says genially, "All right; I'll go wherever you say."
Which always reduces me to terms at once. Above all things, I dislike to
make myself answerable for the success or failure of the day. I prefer
irresponsible criticism beforehand--and afterwards. So I say hastily,
"Oh, no, no! Of course you know a great deal more than I do. We'll go
wherever you think best."
"Well, perhaps it _is_ too warm for the swamps to-day. Now, they might
be in the birches."
"Oh, dear! _Don't_ let's go to the birches! The birds can't be there.
They never are."
"I thought we were going to go where I thought best."
"Yes--but only not to the birches. It's all a private myth of yours
about their being there."
"Is it a private myth of mine that you shot those two woodcock in the
birches of the upper farm last year? And how about that big gray
partridge--"
"Well--of course--that was later in the season. I suppose the birds do
eat birch buds when everything else gives out."
And so I criticize, having agreed not to. But it's good for Jonathan; it
makes him careful.
"Well, shall it be the swamp?"
"No; if you really _think_ they're in the birches, we'll go there.
Besides, the swamp seems a little--chilly--to begin with. Wait till
I've seen a bird. Then I shan't mind so."
"Then you do admit it's a cool morning?"
"To paddle in a swamp, yes. The birds don't have to paddle."
We try the birches, and the pretty things whip our faces with their
slender twigs in their own inimitable fashion, peculiarly trying to my
temper. I can never go through birches long without growing captious.
"Jonathan," I call, as I catch a glimpse of his hunting-coat through an
opening, "I thought the birds were in the birches this morning. They
don't seem really abundant."
Jonathan, unruffled, suggests that I go along on the edge of the woods
while he beats out the middle with the dog, which magnanimous offer
shames me into silent if not cheerful acquiescence. Suddenly--
_whr-r-r_--something bursts away in the brush ahead of us. "Mark!" we
both call, and, "Did you get his line?" My critical spirit is stilled,
and I am suddenly fired with the instinct to follow, follow! It is
indeed a primitive instinct, this of the chase. No matter how tired one
is, the impulse of pursuit is there. At the close of a long day's hunt,
after fifteen miles or so of hard tramping,--equal to twice that of easy
walking,--when my feet are heavy and my head dull, I have never seen a
partridge fly without feeling ready, eager, to follow anywhere.
After we move the first bird, it is follow my leader! And a wild leader
he is. Flushed in the birches, he makes straight for the swamp. The
swamp it is, then, and down we go after him, and in we go--ugh! how
shivery the first plunge is--straight to the puddly heart of it,
carefully keeping our direction. We go fast at first, then, when we have
nearly covered the distance a partridge usually flies, we begin to slow
down, holding back the too eager dog, listening for the snap of a twig
or the sound of wings, gripping our guns tighter at every blue jay or
robin that flicks across our path. No bird yet; we must have passed him;
perhaps we went too far to the left. But no--_whr-r-r_! _Where_ is he?
There! Out of the top of a tall swamp maple, off he goes, sailing over
the swamp to the ridge beyond. No wonder the dog was at sea. Well--we
know his line, we are off again after him in spite of the swamp
between, with its mud and its rotten tree trunks and its grapevines and
its cat briers.
Up on the ridge at last, we hunt close, find him, get a shot, probably
miss, and away we go again. Some hunters, used to a country where game
is plenty, will not follow a bird if they miss him on the first rise.
They prefer to keep on their predetermined course and find another. But
for me there is little pleasure in that kind of sport. What I enjoy most
is not shooting, but hunting. The chase is the thing--the chase after a
particular bird once flushed, the setting of my wits against his in the
endeavor to follow up his flight. We have now and then flushed the same
bird nine or ten times before we got him--and we have not always got him
then. For many and deep are the crafty ways of the old partridge, and we
have not yet learned them all. That is why I like partridge-hunting
better than quail or woodcock, though in these you get far more and
better shooting. Quail start in a bunch, scatter, fly, and drop where
you can flush them again, one at a time; woodcock fly in a zigzag, drop
where they happen to, and sit still till you almost step on them. But
the partridge thinks as he flies--thinks to good advantage. He seems to
know what we expect him to do, and then he does something else. How many
times have we gone past him when he sat quietly between us, and then
heard him fly off stealthily down our back track! How often, in a last
desperate search for a vanished bird, have I jumped on every felled
cedar top in a field--except the one he was under! How often have I
broken open my gun to climb a stone wall,--for we are cautious folk,
Jonathan and I,--and, as I stood in perilous balance, seen a great bird
burst out from under my very feet! How often--but I am not going to be
tempted into telling hunting-stories. For some reason or other,
hunting-stories chiefly interest the narrator. I have watched sportsmen
telling tales in the evenings, and noted how every man but the speaker
grows restive as he watches for a chance to get in his own favorite
yarn.
And it is not the partridges alone with whom we grow acquainted. We have
glimpses, too, of the other outdoor creatures. The life of the woods
slips away from us as we pass, but only just out of sight, and not
always that. The blue jays scream in the tree-tops, officiously
proclaiming us to the woods; the chickadees, who _must_ see all that
goes on, hop close beside us in the bushes; the gray squirrel dodges
behind a tree trunk with just the corner of an eye peering at us around
it. The chipmunk darts into the stone wall, and doubtless looks at us
from its safe depths; the rabbit gallops off from the brier tangle or
the brush heap, or sits up, round-eyed, thinking, little silly, that we
don't see him. Once I saw a beautiful red fox who leaped into the open
for a moment, stood poised, and leaped on into the brush; and once, as I
sat resting, a woodchuck, big and uncombed, hustled busily past me, so
close I could have touched him. He did not see me, and seemed so
preoccupied with some pressing business that I should hardly have been
surprised to see him pull a watch out of his pocket, like Alice's
rabbit, and mutter, "I shall be late." I had not known that the wood
creatures ever felt hurried except when pursued. Another time I was
working up the slope on the sunny edge of a run, and, as I drew myself
up over the edge of a big rock, I found myself face to face--nose to
nose--with a calm, mild-eyed, cottontail rabbit. He did not remain calm;
in fact, we were both startled, but he recovered first, and hopped
softly over the side of the rock, and went galloping away through the
brushy bottom, while I, still kneeling, watched him disappear just as
Jonathan came up.
"What's the joke?"
"Nothing, only I just met a rabbit. He sat here, right here, and he was
so rabbit-y! He looked at me just like an Easter card."
"Why didn't you shoot him?"
"I never thought of it. I wish you had seen how his nose twiddled! And,
anyhow, I wouldn't shoot anything sitting up that way, like a tame
kitten."
"Then why didn't you shoot when he ran?"
"Shoot a rabbit running! Running in scallops! I couldn't."
The fact is, I shouldn't shoot a rabbit anyway, unless driven by hunger.
I am not humane, but merely sentimental about them because they are soft
and pretty. Once, indeed, when I found all my beautiful heads of
lettuce neatly nibbled off down to the central stalks, I almost hardened
my heart against them, but the next time I met one of the little fellows
I forgave him all.
I believe that one of the very best things about our way of following a
partridge is the sense of intimacy with the countryside which it
creates--an intimacy which nothing else has ever given us. In most
outdoor faring one sticks to the roads and paths, in fishing one keeps
to the water-courses, in cross-country tramping one unconsciously goes
around obstacles. Nothing but the headlong and undeviating pursuit of a
bird along a path of his choosing would ever have given me that
acquaintance with ledge and swamp and laurel copse that I now possess. I
know our swamp as a hippopotamus might, or--to stick to plain Yankee
creatures--a mud turtle. It is a very swampy swamp, with spring holes
and channels and great shallow pools where the leaves from the tall
swamp maples--scarlet and rose and ashes of roses--sift slowly down and
float until they sink into the leaf mould beneath. I have favorite paths
through it as the squirrels have in the tree-tops; I know where the mud
is too deep to venture, where the sprawling, moss-covered roots of the
maples offer grateful support; I know the brushy edges where the
blossoming witch-hazel fills the air with its quaint fragrance; I know
the sunny, open places where the tufted ferns, shoulder high, and tawny
gold after the early frosts, give insecure but welcome footing; I
know--too well indeed--the thickets of black alder that close in about
me and tug at my gun and drive me to fury.
Yes, we know that swamp, and other swamps only less well. We know the
rock ledges, the big dry woods of oak and chestnut and maple and beech.
We know the ravines where the great hemlocks keep the air always dim and
still, and one goes silent-footed over the needle floor. We grow
familiar, too, with all the little things about the country. We discover
new haunts of the fringed gentian, the wonderful, the capricious, with
its unbelievable blue that one sees nowhere else save under the black
lashes of some Irish eyes. We find the shy spring orchids, gone to seed
now, but we remember and seek them out again next May. We surprise the
spring flowers in their rare fall blossoming--violets white and blue in
the warm, moist bottom-lands, sand violets on the dry knolls, daisies,
hepaticas, buttercups, and anemones-- I have seen all these in a single
day in raw November. We learn where the biggest chestnuts grow--great
silky brown fellows almost twice the size of Jonathan's thumb. We
discover old landmarks in the deep woods, surveyors' posts, a heap of
stones carefully piled on a big rock. We find old clearings, overgrown
now, but our feet still feel underneath the weeds the furrows left by
the plow. Now and then we come upon a spot where once there must have
been a home. There is no house, no timbers even, but the stone cellar is
not wholly obliterated, and the gnarled lilac-bush and the apple tree
stubbornly cling to a worn-out life amidst the forest of young white
oaks and chestnuts that has closed in about them. Once we came upon a
little group of gravestones, only three or four, sunken in the ground
and so overgrown and weather-worn that we could read nothing. There was
no sign of a human habitation, but I suppose they must have been placed
there in the old days when the family burial-ground was in one corner
of the farm itself.
We learn to know where the springs of pure water are, welling up out of
the deep ground in a tiny pool under some big rock or between the roots
of a great yellow birch tree. And when the sun shines hot at noon, and a
lost trail and a vanished bird leave us to the sudden realization that
we are tired and thirsty, we know where is the nearest water. We know,
too, the knack of drinking so as not to swallow the little gnats that
skim its surface--you must blow them back ever so gently, and drink
before they close in again. How good it tastes as we lie at full length
on the matted brown leaves! How good the crackers taste, too, and the
crisp apples, as we sit by the spring and rest, and talk over the
morning's hunt and plan the afternoon's--subject to the caprices of the
birds.
But I suppose the very best about hunting can never be told at all. That
is true of any really good thing, and there is nothing better than a
long day after the birds. It is always good to be out of doors. And
there are seasons when one is glad to wander slowly over the fields and
byways; there are times when it seems best of all to be still--in the
heart of the woods, on the wide hill pastures, in the deep grass of the
meadows. But not in the fall! Is it a breath of the migrating instinct
that makes us want to be off and away, to go, and go, and go? Yes, fall
is the time for the hunt--gay, boisterous fall, rioting in wind and
color to keep up its spirits against the stealthy approach of winter.
And whether we shoot well or ill, whether our game pockets are heavy or
light, no matter what the weather we find or the country we cross, it is
all good hunting, very good. And at night we come in to a blazing fire,
feeling tired, oh, so tired! and hungry, oh, so hungry! and with soul
and body shriven clean by wind and sun.