Cooper has dedicated five novels to Leather Stocking; therefore I ask my readers to permit me to dedicate some lines to quiot Biche, probably the only man in Europe who might, without disadvantage, be compared to the American hero.
Hanniquet, for I know not what reason, was nicknamed quiot Biche. He was, at the time of which I am speaking, a boy of about twenty years of age, of medium height, perfectly well made, strong as a well-balanced machine, and, more than all things else, a first-rate poacher.
Biche had begun by snaring and decoying birds, as should every true poacher, and in these two exercises he was, beyond doubt, to Boudoux what Pompey was to Cæsar; perhaps Biche might even have become Cæsar, and Boudoux Pompey, had not ambition led him away in the direction of poaching, a province Boudoux held in lofty and prudent disdain!
Nobody could distinguish a rabbit in its burrow in a spinney, or a hare in fallow land, better than Biche; nobody knew so well as Biche how to steal up carelessly to that hare or that rabbit, and to kill it with a stone or a blow from a stick.
The reader knows what pace a partridge can go when it runs. Well! Biche possessed the art of mesmerising partridges till he could walk up and kill one with a wretched old pistol, without cock or hammer, which he fired by means of a tinder-match.
I need hardly add that he never missed it: for when people are such keen lovers of sport as to shoot with such bad weapons they kill at every shot.
Biche was my professor, for he had taken a fancy to me.
He taught me all the tricks of hunter and animals; and, for every animal's trick he knew, he had one, and sometimes two, to cap it.
Later, his merits became appreciated, and, as he could not be prevented from poaching, he was made one of the keepers.
After a period of fifteen years' absence, not knowing what had become of him, I came across Biche once more as head keeper in the forest of Laigue, where I happened to be shooting by permission from the duc d'Orléans.