Still, you may come upon them gathered in social groups, yet each going his own way when flushed. Upon rare occasions you may surprise a grand convention of all the grouse of the region congregated on the sunny lee of a hillside. It is a sight and sound to remember long, though for the moment you forget the gun in your hands, when by ones, twos, and dozens the dusky forms burst away up wind, down wind, across wind, signalling their departure with volleys of intermittent and continuous thunder. Not many times in your life will you see this, yet, if but once, you will be thankful that you have not outlived all the old world's wildness.
XXXIX
TWO SHOTS
A boy of fourteen, alert, but too full of life to move slowly and cautiously, is walking along an old road in the woods, a road that winds here and there with meanderings that now seem vagrant and purposeless but once led to the various piles of cordwood and logs for whose harvesting it was hewn. Goodly trees have since grown up from saplings that the judicious axe then scorned. Beeches, whose flat branches are shelves of old gold; poplars, turned to towers of brighter metal by the same alchemy of autumn; and hemlocks, pyramids of unchanging green, shadow the leaf-strewn forest floor and its inconspicuous dotting of gray and russet stumps. How happy the boy is in the freedom of the woods; proud to carry his first own gun, as he treads gingerly but somewhat noisily over the fallen leaves and dry twigs, scanning with quick glances the thickets, imagining himself the last Mohican on the warpath, or Leather-Stocking scouting in the primeval wilderness.
Under his breath he tells the confiding chickadees and woodpeckers what undreamed-of danger they would be in from such a brave, were he not in pursuit of nobler game. Then he hears a sudden rustle of the dry leaves, the quit! quit! of a partridge, catches a glimpse of a rapidly running brown object, which on the instant is launched into a flashing thunderous flight. Impelled by the instinct of the born sportsman, he throws the gun to his shoulder, and scarcely with aim, but in the direction of the sound, pulls trigger and fires.
On the instant he is ashamed of his impulsive haste, which fooled him into wasting a precious charge on the inanimate evergreen twigs and sere leaves that come dropping and floating down to his shot, and is thankful that he is the only witness of his own foolishness.
But what is that? Above the patter and rustle of falling twigs and leaves comes a dull thud, followed by the rapid beat of wings upon the leaf-strewn earth. With heart beating as fast he runs toward the sound, afraid to believe his senses, when he sees a noble grouse fluttering out feebly his last gasp. He cannot be sure that it is not all a dream that may vanish in a breath, till he has the bird safe in his hand, and then he is faint with joy. Was there ever such a shot? Would that all the world were here to see, for who can believe it just for the telling? There never will be another such a bird, nor such a shot, for him. He fires a dozen ineffectual ones at fair marks that day, but the glory of that one shot would atone for twice as many misses, and he need not tell of them, only of this, whereof he bears actual proof, though he himself can hardly accept it, till again and again he tests it by admiring look and touch.
Years after the killing of grouse on the wing has become a matter-of-course occurrence in his days of upland shooting, the memory of this stands clearest and best. Sixty years later the old wood road winds through the same scene, by some marvel of kindliness or oversight, untouched by the devastating axe, unchanged but by the forest growth of half a century and its seemly and decorous decay. A thicker screen of undergrowth borders the more faintly traced way. The golden-brown shelves of the beech branches sweep more broadly above it, the spires of the evergreens are nearer the sky, and the yellow towers of the poplars are builded higher, but they are the same trees and beneath them may yet be seen the gray stumps and trunks mouldered to russet lines, of their ancient brethren who fell when these were saplings.
The gray-bearded man who comes along the old wood road wonders at the little change so many years have made in the scene of the grand achievements of his youth, and in his mind he runs over the long calendar to assure himself that so many autumns have glowed and faded since that happy day. How can he have grown old, his ear dull to the voices of the woods, his sight dim with the slowly but surely falling veil of coming blindness, so that even now the road winds into a misty haze just before him, yet these trees be young and lusty?