The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

Then he ran. He ran not so much for his life, but for the right to keep on the ground. If the worst came to the worst, he could always fly; but he would do anything rather than that.

He turned and ran away from the woods—raced like a fowl, but quicker, lower, much harder to see. A sudden gleam of bright-chestnut fur dead ahead, however, stopped him, and he turned back, keeping always to the hedge—towards the covert. He could hear no sound around him, only the burst and the bang of the guns in the woods, and he might have been alone; but directly he came to another hedge, and swung down to it at right angles, a furry tail with a paint-brush tip, vanishing round a holly-stem, fetching him up all standing. They were there, too, those stoats. He seemed to be surrounded on all sides save one, and that the one towards the woods. So he swung back into his original path.

Then, very soon, as he ran up the hedge-ditch, it seemed to him as if the dead leaves collected there were beginning to whisper behind him. But there was no wind to move them. Moreover, it grew closer, till it seemed at his very tail, that whisper of dead leaves.

Then, in a flash, he had stopped, spun about like a top, and struck with his spurs twice—whack, whack—more than instantly, and a long, low, brown body—close behind him, that had risen as he turned, so that its spotlessly clean shirt-front offered him a fine mark, went over sideways—with a grunt and all the wind knocked out of it, as well as an inch-and-a-half gash to remember friend pheasant by. That was one stoat; but it was not alone. He had a vision of chestnut forms sliding and rippling in and out of the shadows and the long copper gleams of the westering sun.

As he turned again, and the whispering began once more behind, the firing in front broke out afresh, and much nearer. Still he would not rise, however. It was this fact, probably, which kept the stoat-pack at his heels. They seemed convinced that he was badly wounded and unable to fly.

Then came the road. He was on it before he knew. There was the wedge-shaped, low-browed head of a stoat racing up along one side of him, with murder plainly written in the gleam of its beady eyes; there was the hot breath of another beating on his opposite flank; there was one with feet out and all brakes on, trying its best to pull out one of the feathers of his long and beautiful tail; and—there was the road dead ahead.

It was one of three—the road, the air, or death where he was. He chose the road, and crossed, like a hunted cat crossing a back-yard. His feet seemed scarcely to touch the dust as he negotiated the open, yet he had time to take in a fact or two. One was that the stoats had stopped—a little bunch of peering heads on a group of craning necks on the edge of the ditch behind him. Another was that several people and a motor-car were standing still in the road quite close, watching the shooting. I don't think any of them saw him, but he felt as if all of them did.

Arrived in the hedge on the far side of the road, he clapped down, panting. The hedge ran along the road. On the other side of it was the grass of the park-land, stretching away two hundred yards or so to the edge of the covert, which came down to a point here. He could hear the tapping of sticks in the covert—beaters' sticks. He could hear an occasional shout. Men in tweeds stood motionless on the edge of the covert, and suddenly moved.

Then came the infernal crash of the guns again, and he saw a hen-pheasant pitch sickeningly on her head from a height, and a cock-pheasant, flaming like a rocket in the sinking sun, run the gauntlet of four shots, only to turn over and slide down at a fifth.

Then—and then, he jumped.