“It’s all very well for you, as was brought up to it.”
“What do you mean?” I answered; “that you ain’t going to take the hint?”
“If ever I snare another,” he said, growling, “may I be shot myself and nailed to a barn door!”
“Well, then,” I said, “for all my being brought up to it, as you call it, you’re the better gentleman, because I was still in two minds about giving it up, it was such fun.”
“You’ll have to,” he said. He was grown more loyal even than I to Mr. Sant.
“O! shall I?” I retorted. “Who’s going to make me?”
We were both bristling for a moment. Then Harry chuckled.
“Guess you won’t catch a-many without me to help you, anyhow,” he said; which was so disgustingly true that I had to laugh in my turn.
Before this moral reformation occurred, however, we made some thrilling captures. One day it was a hare, which Harry caught in the most wonderful way with his hands alone. We were crossing an open space between two copses, when he suddenly threw down his hat in the snow, bidding me at the same time to take no notice, but walk on with him as if unconcerned. There were tufts of gorse and withered bracken projecting all over the clearing. We advanced briskly a short distance, then quickly wheeled and came back, making a crooked line for the hat. As we neared it, Harry, as swift as thought, swerved aside to a patch of red dead fern and bramble, and, plunging down his hand, brought up what looked like a mat of leaves and snow. But it was a hare, which in that unerring swoop he had clutched behind the poll; and before the startled creature could shriek or struggle, he had seized its hind legs in his other hand, stretched its body, and cracked its neck upon his knee. I could not have imagined such quickness of eye and action. It could only be done, he told me, in cold weather, when the frost gets in the animals’ brains and makes them stupid. They are sort of fascinated by the hat thrown down, watching for it to move; and when the steps return, finding themselves, as it were, between two fires, they can think of nothing but to crouch close. I have seen Harry bring out rats from a rick in the same way. It was just a question of unwincing nerve; but I never had the courage to try it myself. They say that if one has the resolution to hold one’s hand unmoved to a snapping dog, the beast’s teeth will close on it without inflicting an injury. It may be true; only the first time I put it to the test will be in boxing-gloves.
A more legitimate poaching of ours—but that was later, in the spring—was on the preserves of a beautiful unfamiliar sea-bird, which came nesting upon our coasts, driven there by storms probably. We were on the Mitre one day, when we saw it fly out from the top of the Abbot’s well, and swoop down upon the shore, where, no one being by, it gorged itself on a heap of dead dog-fish. We immediately fell flat on the cliff edge to watch for its return. The broken top of the well was perhaps thirty feet below us, but the ground sloping obtusely from where we lay, prevented us from seeing far into it. Presently the bird came back and settled on the rim, so that we could mark it plainly. It was gull-shaped, but unlike any of the species we knew—white-waistcoated, yellow-beaked, and a tender ash colour on the wings—a St. Kilda’s petrel, in fact, we came to learn, which had likely been driven down from the Orkneys. It hopped into the well and disappeared.