“No oil,” said Mark. “I wanted to rub the gun with some and looked, but there is none—we forgot it.”
“Yellow-hammers,” said Bevis, turning to his journal again; “what are yellow-hammers?”
“Unknown birds,” said Mark. “We don’t know half the birds—nobody has ever put any name to them, nobody has ever seen them: call them, let’s see—gold-dust birds—”
“And greenfinches?”
“Ky-wee—Ky-wee,” said Mark, imitating the greenfinches’ call.
“That will do capital—Ky-wees,” said Bevis.
“There’s a horse-matcher here,” said Mark. The horse-matcher is the bold hedge-hawk or butcher bird. “The one that sticks the humble-bees on the thorns.”
“Bee-stickers—no, bee-killers: that’s down,” said Bevis. Besides which he wrote down nettle-creepers (white-throats), goldfinch, magpie, chaffinch, tree-climber, kestrel-hawk, linnets, starlings, parrots, and parrakeets. “I shall get up early to-morrow morning,” he said. “I’ll load the matchlock to-night, I want to shoot a heron.”
He loaded the matchlock with ball, and soon afterwards they let the curtain down at the door, and went to bed, Bevis repeating “Three o’clock, three o’clock, three o’clock,” at first aloud and then to himself, so as to set the clock of his mind to wake him at that hour. Not long after they were asleep, Pan as usual went out for his ramble.
Bevis’s clock duly woke him about three, and lifting his head he could see the light through the chinks of the curtain, but he was half inclined to go to sleep again, and stayed another quarter of an hour. Then he resolutely bent himself to conquer sleep, slipped off the bed, and put on his boots quietly, not to wake Mark. Taking the matchlock, he went out and found that it was light, the light of the moon mingling with the dawn, but it was misty. A dry vapour, which left no dew, filled the wood so that at a short distance the path seemed to go into and lose itself in the mist.