"Wait and perhaps you'll find that you have a few primitive instincts left in you. You may be free of them; some people are. It isn't only the passion to kill, though. It's the passion to get over obstacles and do something immensely difficult. That's why walking-up birds is better than driving. When I've got a gun I want to hit an object which is incidentally a bird. It isn't the killing that matters."
"But why don't you shoot at targets or clay pigeons?"
"There you have me. I suppose at that point the savagery comes in. It isn't the same to shoot at disappearing targets, and that's all one can say. Hullo, they're starting, we'd better stop talking."
Far away at the back of the covert arose the noise of cracking twigs and trampled leaves: closer and closer it came until the sounds were distinguishable, now the tapping of a stick on a tree, the beating of a bush, the long-drawn cries of "Mark" and "Forward," the swift whir of wings, and at last the sharp crack of guns. The woods, once awful with still silence, were all sound and movement. The gun, behind whom Martin and Freda were standing, had only one chance and took it—a beautiful right and left. The second bird fell close to them, crashing through branches to a soft bed of leaves. Freda gasped and jumped forward. The drive was over.
"You wanted it to fall?" said Martin, taking up the warm, motionless body.
"I think I did," she confessed. "But only for a moment."
"It seemed right, didn't it?"
"I suppose so. But I couldn't touch it." She paused. "Yes, I was glad when he hit them both," she added. "The strain of waiting and looking and listening seemed to make it all different. And he was so quick. I can't think how he could have got round to the second. It was all wonderful in a horrible, alluring kind of way."
"I was right," said Martin. "There is something in it, you see."
He was glad that she understood: it gave them another point in common. The next beat would take them some way from home, out to the bleaker side of the woods. Martin proposed that they should wait until the guns returned and Freda was willing. They went to the pines where the ground was clean and firm and there on a bank they waited.