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 passed 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 woodcock, 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; woodcock 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 pass, 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.