that I would be glad to know, I had invited him cordially
to join me. But he only withered me with the contempt in his hawk eyes,
and wiggled his toe as if holding back a kick from my honest dog with
difficulty.

"Go hunting with ye? Not much, Mister. Scarin' a pa'tridge to death with
a dum dog, and then turnin' a handful o' shot loose on the critter, an'
call it huntin'! That's the way to kill a pa'tridge, the on'y decent
way"--and he pulled a bird out of his pocket, pointing to a clean hole
through the head where the eyes had been.

When he had gone I kicked the hedge to pieces quickly, cut the
twitch-ups at the butts and threw them with their wire nooses far into
the thickets, and posted a warning in a cleft stick on the site of the
last gibbet. Then I followed Wally to a second and third line of snares,
which were treated in the same rough way, and watched him with curiously
mingled feelings of detestation and amusement as he sneaked down the
dense hillside with tread light as Leatherstocking, the old gun over his
shoulder, his pockets bulging enormously, and a string of hanged rabbits
swinging to and fro on his gun barrel, as if in death they had caught
the dizzy motion and could not quit it while the woods they had loved
and lived in threw their long sad shadows over them. So they came to the
meadow, into which they had so often come limping down to play or feed
among the twilight shadows, and crossed it for the last time on Wally's
gun barrel, swinging, swinging.

The leaves were falling thickly now; they formed a dry, hard carpet over
which it was impossible to follow game accurately, and they rustled a
sharp warning underfoot if but a wood mouse ran over them. It was of
little use to still-hunt the wary old buck till the rains should soften
the carpet, or a snowfall make tracking like boys' play. But I tried
it once more; found the quarry on a ridge deep in the woods, and
followed--more by good-luck than by good management--till, late in the
afternoon, I saw the buck with two smaller deer standing far away on a
half-cleared hillside, quietly watching a wide stretch of country below.
Beyond them the ridge narrowed gradually to a long neck, ending in a
high open bluff above the river.

There I tried my last hunter's dodge--manoeuvered craftily till near the
deer, which were hidden by dense thickets, and rushed straight at them,
thinking they would either break away down the open hillside, and so
give me a ru