“It caps me,” Pete used to say, as he stared with open mouth when I carefully skinned the tiny creatures to preserve them.
Then came the day when, after a long tramp along with Pete, we found ourselves at the end of a narrow valley, with apparently no farther progress to be made.
We had started, after an early breakfast in the boat, and left my uncle there to finish off the drying of some skins ready for packing in a light case of split bamboo which the carpenter had made; and with one gun over my shoulder, a botanist’s collecting-box for choice birds, and Pete following with another gun and a net for large birds slung over his shoulder, we had tramped on for hours, thinking nothing of the heat and the sun-rays which flashed off the surface of the clear shallow stream we were following, for the air came down fresh and invigorating from the mountains.
We had been fairly successful, for I had shot four rare humming-birds; but so far we had seen no specimens of the gorgeous quetzal, and it was for these that our eyes wandered whenever we reached a patch of woodland, but only to startle macaws, parroquets, or the clumsy-looking—but really light and active—big-billed toucans, which made Pete shake his head.
“They’re all very well, with their orange and red throats, or their pale primrose or white, Master Nat; but I don’t see no good in birds having great bills like that.”
We had a bit of an adventure, too, that was rather startling, as we slowly climbed higher in tracking the course of the little stream towards its source in the mountain. As we toiled on where the rocks rose like walls on either side, and the ground was stony and bare, the rugged glittering in the sunshine, Pete had got on a few yards ahead through my having paused to transfer a gorgeous golden-green beetle to our collecting-box.
I was just thinking that the absence of grass or flowers was probably due to the fact that the flooded stream must at times run all over where we were walking, the narrow valley looking quite like the bed of a river right up to the rocks on either side, when Pete shouted to me—
“Come and look, Master Nat. What’s this here? Want to take it?”
I looked, and then fired the quickest shot I ever discharged in my life. I hardly know how I managed it; but one moment I was carrying my gun over my shoulder, the next I had let the barrels fall into my left hand and fired.
Pete leapt off the ground, uttering a yell which would have made anyone who could have looked on imagine that I had shot him. He dropped the gun he carried and turned round to face me.