he could out of
getting them. Shooting quail in Egyptian corn is, comparatively
speaking, not much fun. We joked each other, and whistled and sang, and
trudged manfully along, gun over shoulder. The pale sun was
strengthening; the mountains were turning darker as they threw aside the
filmy rose of early day; in treetops a row of buzzards sat, their wings
outspread like the heraldic devices of a foreign nation. Thousands of
doves whistled away; thousands of smaller birds rustled and darted
before our advancing lines; tens of thousands of blackbirds sprinkled
the bare branches of single trees, uttering the many-throated multitude
call; underneath all this light and joyous life the business-like little
quail darted away in their bullet flight.

Always they bore across our front to the left; for on that side,
paralleling our course, ran a long ravine or "dry slough." It was about
ten feet deep on the average, probably thirty feet wide, and was densely
grown with a tangle of willows, berry vines, creepers, wild grape, and
the like. Into this the quail pitched.

By the time we had covered the mile length of that cornfield we had
dumped an unguessable number of quail into that slough.

Then we walked back the entire distance--still with our guns over our
shoulders--but this time along the edge of the ravine. We shouted and
threw clods, and kicked on the trees, and rattled things, urging the
hidden quail once more to flight. The thicket seemed alive with them. We
caught glimpses as they ran before us, pacing away at a great rate,
their feathers sleek and trim; they buzzed away at bewildering pitches
and angles; they sprang into the tops of bushes, cocking their head
plumes forward. Their various clicking undercalls, chatterings, and
chirrings filled the thicket as full of sound as of motion. And in the
middle distance before and behind us they mocked us with their calls.

"You _can't_ shoot! You _can't_ shoot!"

Some of them flew ever ahead, some of them doubled-back and dropped into
the slough behind us; but a proportion broke through the thicket and
settled in the wide fields on the other side. After them we went, and
for the first time opened our guns and slipped the yellow shells into
the barrels.

For this field on the other side was the wide, open plain; and it was
grown over by tiny, half-knee high thickets of tumbleweed with here and
there a trifle of sagebrush. Between these miniature thickets wound
narrow stri