He made me a mask with tinfoil off chocolate smoothed out and gummed on cardboard; but I had no weapons, and he said I had better not try and get any.
We started for the usual walk. Chaps were allowed to go through a public pine-wood to Merivale; but half through, by a place where was a board which warned us to keep the path, Freckles branched off into some dead bracken, and squatted down and put on his mask. I also put on mine. Then he fastened his air-gun together and loaded it, and told me to walk six paces behind him and do as he did. His eyes were awfully keen, and now and then he pointed to a feather on the ground, or an old nest or a patch of rum fungus or a crab-apple still hanging on the tree, though all the leaves were off.
Once he fired at a jay and missed it, then fell down in the fern as if he was shot himself, and remained quite motionless for some time. He told me that he always did so after firing, that he might hear if anybody had been attracted by the sound. It was a well-known bushman’s dodge. Once we saw a keeper through a clearing, and Freckles lay flat on his stomach, and so did I. He knew the keeper well, and told me that he had many times escaped from him. We waited half an hour, and turned to go back a different way from that of the keeper.
Then, where a glade sloped down to some water and the grass was all dewy and covered with mole-hills, Freckles went to inspect a trap he had set a week before. He was collecting skins for a mole-skin waistcoat, but he said skinning moles was one of the beastliest tasks a hunter ever had. However, there was a mole caught, and he skinned it and wrapped up the skin in leaves and put it in his hat.
Then we had some real sport, for on the other side of the glade we saw rabbits lopping about, and Freckles stalked them through the fern while I waited motionless, and finally he shot a young one. I wanted to take it back and get cook to do it for us, but he said I was a fool.
“If you want any you must have it now. It’s about the time I take a meal,” he said, “and that’s a part of my ranging and hunting you haven’t seen yet.”
He knew the country well, and said we were in one of the most carefully preserved places anywhere about, which must have been true, for there were an awful lot of pheasants calling in the glades. But Freckles got down into a drain and showed me a hollow he had scooped out under a lot of ivy where it fell over a bank.
“This is one of my caves,” he said, “and here we can feed and drink in safety; but you mustn’t talk or I sha’n’t be able to hear if anything is stirring in the woods.”
He took off his mask, set down his gun, and lighted his spirit-stove.
“Skin the rabbit and cut off his hind-legs while I make tea,” he said.