The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

Then, in no more time than one would take to inhale one puff from a cigarette, the fields were empty—stark, cold, and deserted in the eye of the morning sun. The birds had not so much gone, exactly, as simply faded out—dissolved, as a picture may at a cinema-show. The cock-pheasant did not go. He was in cover, and had a good view, a strategic position of some moment.

Followed a pause. Then a man in tweeds entered one of the fields by the gate. Followed him two more, then a fourth, then two not in tweeds, then dogs, black and big, to the number of three, not to mention the bar-like gleam given off by the barrels of the guns that the first four carried. The whole procession passed silently, as they thought—but to the waiting, watching, wild-folk unpardonably noisily—diagonally across the field, and out of sight round a bend of the wood. They had an air about them. I don't know what it was exactly, but you could feel they were going to do something serious that had not been done there for a long time. Perhaps the old cock-pheasant felt it too, but—well, there now! Where had the old "varmint" gone?

Half-way down the hedge, very low and long, the cock-pheasant was sneaking. He seemed suddenly anxious to mind his own business, and that everybody else should mind theirs. He was going away from the wood, which the books tell us is the realm, the sanctuary, the all, to a pheasant, and he had no desire to answer questions by the way. For this reason, then, and a few others, he felt no special delight in sighting, about two hundred yards farther on—at a place where two stacks surrounded by rails stood and sheltered a fowlhouse—a baker's dozen of fowls sunning themselves on the hedge-bank. He held for fowls all the wild creatures' contempt for the tame or domestic. All the same, he saw no health in risking the open just then, and would not turn back, so there was nothing for it but the fowls.

Low as low he crouched, and ran very quickly, and hoped for the best; and there is no bird that can wish itself out of sight in this fashion better than friend pheasant. But he forgot the odd cockerel out. He shot right on to the wretched thing—a gawky red youth—messing about all alone in a nettle-clump, and it dashed into the field, racing on long yellow legs, and squawking fit to wake the dead.

Down clapped the pheasant as if the noise had pierced his heart, and remained stiller than the crawling roots around him, and not half so easy to see. But it was no good. Up shot the dozen heads above the herbage, and two dozen vacuous eyes regarded his vicinity with empty-headed inquisitiveness.

He almost melted into the ground, but it was useless. An old, old hen—who perhaps was ignored by the lord of the harem, and hoped for an adventure—waddled up, stood within a yard of his crouched, rounded shape without seeing him, saw him, shot straight up in the air at least one foot, screaming for help, and promptly charged blindly into the hedge, where she as promptly got held up among roots and twigs.

The old pheasant got to his feet just as the rooster who owned the outfit came racing up, panting and red. He had heard a wife scream for help. Perhaps it was the odd bird out; or, anyway, some one who had to be abolished. And he never waited to think. He saw what might have been a small cockerel (if it had been large he might have thought twice) crouching, and—he just sailed right in.

Then something happened. The two met, going up breast to breast. For a moment or two the cock-pheasant showed on or about that big rooster. Some feathers hung in the air. The rooster sat on his heels, met by a blow in the chest that seemed to take all the wind from his sails, so to speak, and would have drawn off to reconsider things if he had not promptly become more busy than ever before in his life.

It was over ere any one knew quite what was happening. The old cock-pheasant had passed through the crowd and vanished at the double down the hedge, and the big rooster was slowly subsiding into a pool of his own blood, from which he was destined never to rise again.

But those who make, instead of following, their own destiny do not get let off thus lightly in the wild. The pheasant had not gone a hundred yards, when a most intolerable blast, an almost unbearable blast, of shrill, nerve-racking noise throbbed through his head. The bird fell in his tracks where he ran, as if some one had jerked his legs from under him, and he peered out.