XIV

In the Wake of the Partridge

"The kangaroo ran very fast, I ran faster.

The kangaroo was very fat, I ate him.

Kangaroo! Kangaroo!"

This, the hunting-song of the Australian Bushman, is the best one I know. Without disguise or adornment, it embodies the primitive hunting instinct that is in every one of us, whether we hunt people or animals or things or ideas.

Jonathan and I do not habitually hunt kangaroos, and our hunting, or at any rate my share in it, is not as uniformly successful as the Bushman's seems to have been. For our own uses we should have to amend the song something as follows:--

"The partridge-bird flew very fast, I missed him.

The partridge-bird was very fat, I ate--chicken.

Partridge-bird! Partridge-bird!"

But we do not measure the success of our hunting by the size of our bag. The chase, the day out of doors, two or three birds at the most out of the dozen we flush, this is all that we ask. But then, we have a chicken-yard to fall back upon, which the Bushman had not.

We sit before a blazing open fire, eating a hunter's breakfast--which means, nearly everything in the pantry. Coffee and toast are all very well for ordinary purposes, but they are poor things to carry you through a day's hunting, especially our kind of hunting. For a day's hunt with us is not an elaborate and well-planned affair. It does not mean a pre-arranged course over "preserved" territory, with a rendezvous at noon where the luncheon wagon comes, bringing out vast quant.i.ties of food, and taking home the morning's bag of game. It means a day's hunt that follows whither the birds lead, in a section of New England that is considered "hunted out," over ground sometimes familiar, sometimes wholly new, with no luncheon but a few crackers or a sandwich that has been stowed away in one of Jonathan's game pockets all the morning, and perhaps an apple or two, picked up in pa.s.sing, from some old orchard now submerged in the woods--a hunt ending only when it is too dark to shoot, with perhaps a long tramp home again after that. No, coffee and toast would never do!

As we turn out of the sheltered barnyard through the bars and up the farm lane, the keen wind flings at us, and our numb fingers recoil from the metal of our guns and take a careful grip on the wood. At once we fall to discussing the vital question-- Where will the birds be to-day?

For the partridges, as the New Englander calls our ruffed grouse, are very fastidious about where they spend their days. Sometimes they are all in the swamps, sometimes they are among the white birches of the hillsides, sometimes in the big woods, sometimes on the half-wooded rock ledges, sometimes among the scrub growth of lately cut timberland, and sometimes, in very cold weather, on the dry knolls where the cedars huddle--the warm little brooding cedars that give the birds shelter as a hen does her chicks.

When I first began to hunt with Jonathan, he knew so much more than I in these matters that I always accepted his judgment. If he said, "To-day they will be in the swamps," I responded, "To the swamps let us go." But after a time I came to have opinions of my own, and then the era of discussion set in.

"To-day," begins Jonathan judicially, "the wind is north, and the birds will be on the south slopes close to the swamp bottoms to keep warm."

"Now, Jonathan, you know I don't a bit believe in going by the wind. The partridges don't mind wind, their feathers shed it. What they care about is the sun, and to-day the sun is hot,--at least," with a shiver, "it would be if we had feathers on instead of canvas. _I_ believe we shall find them in the big woods."

I usually advocate the big woods, because I like them best for a tramp.

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 woodc.o.c.k 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 pa.s.sed 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 woodc.o.c.k, 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; woodc.o.c.k 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 pa.s.s, 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, b.u.t.tercups, 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.