o particular trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in wait
for them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a
little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed at any rate. It is
Nature's own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink.

In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I sometimes
heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and
yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the
hunting horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The woods
ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the
pond, nor following pack pursuing their Actaeon. And perhaps at evening I
see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from their sleigh
for a trophy, seeking their inn. They tell me that if the fox would
remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if he would
run in a straight line away no foxhound could overtake him; but, having
left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come
up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the
hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many
rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that
water will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a fox
pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered with
shallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the same shore.
Ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Sometimes a
pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and circle round my
house, and yelp and hound without regarding me, as if afflicted by a
species of madness, so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit.
Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a
wise hound will forsake everything else for this. One day a man came to
my hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large
track, and had been hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he
was not the wiser for all I told him, for every time I attempted to
answer his questions he interrupted me by asking, "What do you do here?"
He had lost a dog, but found a man.

One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in Walden
once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked in
upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon and
went out for a cruise in Walden Wood, and as he walked the Wa