Part 45

The climate about there seemed to suit him admirably. True, good food was not strewn in plenty just where he could most easily see it. He had to look for his acorns or his beechmast by the good old domestic-fowl plan of scratching among the leaves; roots also he was forced to scratch for; and the noisy mistle-thrushes with the tempers of Eblis had to be driven off the berries he would look after in the ditch.

Also, there was a stoat. That stoat, however, tackled him just once. In the process it discovered (a) that he wore spurs not meant to be ornaments, and (b) that no one could teach him much about using those same spurs. The stoat, plus a new carmine decoration for gallantry, remembered an urgent appointment down a rat-hole, and kept it. Perhaps it was a young stoat, and had not learnt that there are at least four degrees of cock-pheasant, namely, young and brainless, adult and brave, old and brave and cunning, and old and decrepit; but the last stage is a rare bird. There is nothing of any use to the stoat in the second and third degrees of cock-pheasant--no health to the stoat, you understand.

The dawning of the morning had passed by now in gold and crimson and purple splendor; the mist-curtain had been drawn back by the fingers of the wind, the utter darkness upon everything at ground-level had begun to give way before the sun, and to leeward of most trees and bushes there was a balmy luxuriance of golden light that held one lingering.

Gnats were dancing under the low-hung boughs in still corners, as they will dance on the coldest day; song-thrushes were beginning to take life for one more day, and tack hither and yon, as if they were busy pegging the field down with an invisible "cats' cradle"; and the black rooks, shining like burnished steel shields, flashed and flashed again as they began to gather beneath the trees, where the ground thawed most and first. Though they alone seemed to have discovered it, the pigeons very quickly found that the rooks had hit something good, and you can bet one jay, at any rate, must be there, to make profit out of somebody.

It was the jester of a jay, whom, in spite of his painted plumage, no one seemed to have noticed, that first gave the alarm that carried the cock-pheasant's suspicious temperament a step farther upon the path of independent action. Up till then you will note that, though he had left the vicinity of his own people, he had not yet left the realm that was peculiarly their own--the woods.

"W-a--r-k, w-a-a-r-k!" gasped out the jay suddenly, and fled, a half-seen vision of pinkish, of black and white, upon uncertain, almost fluttering, wings.

It was like striking a gong. Instantly all motion was suspended, and dotted thrushes, clustered rooks, 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 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.