, however keen, could catch more than a glimpse of a
gray tail before he was gone. Other grouse make short straight flights,
and can be followed and found again; but he always drove away on strong
wings for an incredible distance, and swerved far to right or left; so
that it was a waste of time to follow him up. Before you found him he
had rested his wings and was ready for another flight; and when you did
find him he would shoot away like an arrow out of the top of a pine tree
and give you never a glimpse of himself.

He lived most of the time on a ridge behind the 'Fales place,' an
abandoned farm on the east of the old post road. This was his middle
range, a place of dense coverts, bullbrier thickets and sunny open spots
among the ledges, where you might, with good-luck, find him on special
days at any season. But he had all the migratory instincts of a
Newfoundland caribou. In winter he moved south, with twenty other
grouse, to the foot of the ridge, which dropped away into a succession
of knolls and ravines and sunny, well-protected little valleys, where
food was plenty. Here, fifty years ago, was the farm pasture; but now it
had grown up everywhere with thickets and berry patches, and wild apple
trees of the birds' planting. All the birds loved it in their season;
quail nested on its edges; and you could kick a brown rabbit out of
almost any of its decaying brush piles or hollow moss-grown logs.

In the spring he crossed the ridge northward again, moving into the
still dark woods, where he had two or three wives with as many broods of
young partridges; all of whom, by the way, he regarded with astonishing
indifference.

Across the whole range--stealing silently out of the big woods, brawling
along the foot of the ridge and singing through the old pasture--ran
a brook that the old beech partridge seemed to love. A hundred times
I started him from its banks. You had only to follow it any November
morning before eight o'clock, and you would be sure to find him. But why
he haunted it at this particular time and season I never found out.

I used to wonder sometimes why I never saw him drink. Other birds had
their regular drinking places and bathing pools there, and I frequently
watched them from my hiding; but though I saw him many times, after I
learned his haunts, he never touched the water.

One early summer morning a possible explanation suggested itself. I was
sitting quietly by the brook, on the edge of the bi