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Not three steps aside from the path, moveless as a stone and invisible among the spotted weeds and twigs, a crafty old cock-partridge stood with head erect and unwinking eyes and watched the dangerous intruder stride by. Approaching the edge of the open, the young hunter kept himself carefully hidden behind the fringing leafage and looked forth upon the little meadow.
In a moment the sound was repeated. It was a sharp, impatient tapping against the under side of the crust. To the rabbit's ears the sound conveyed no threat, so he hopped nearer to investigate. What he saw beneath the clear shell of ice was a cock-partridge, his wings half-spread, his head thrown back in the struggle to break from his snowy grave.
Then, giving fuller vent to this expression of vigor, just as a colt frisks to show how well he feels, he whirred yet more loudly, until, unwittingly, he found himself drumming, and tickled with the discovery of his new power, thumped the air again and again till he filled the near woods with the loud tattoo of the fully grown cock-partridge.
His curiosity satisfied, the rabbit bounded away again, and fell to nibbling the young birch-twigs. Of small concern to him was the doom of the imprisoned bird. At dusk of the preceding evening, when the cock-partridge went to roost, there had been no suggestion of rain, but a bitter air from the northwest searching through the woods.
Behind me I heard Dorothy dismount, dropping to the ground lightly as a tree-lynx; the next moment she laid her hand on my shoulder and bent over where I was kneeling. "Can you read me that sign?" she asked, mischievously. "Something has rolled and squatted in the dry wood-dust some bird, I think." "A good guess," she said; "a cock-partridge has dusted here; see those bits of down?
And as the sleigh wallowed near him, suddenly, with an immense scattering of snow and a startling roar, an old cock-partridge burst from beneath the surface of the snow and hurtled away through the frozen trees. Some days when the wind blew keen and sharp as knives across the broad reaches, it was almost impossible for the boys to keep warm.
They hitched the placid Bobby Junior to the top rail of a "snake-fence" climbed it, and headed toward a scrub-oak and popple thicket thrown like a blanket over the long slope of a hill. They walked cautiously, for by experience they had learned that at the very edge, and in the lea of an old burned log, it was possible a fine big cock-partridge might be sunning himself.
Then, giving fuller vent to this expression of vigor, just as a colt frisks to show how well he feels, he whirred yet more loudly, until, unwittingly, he found himself drumming, and tickled with the discovery of his new power, thumped the air again and again till he filled the near woods with the loud tattoo of the fully grown cock-partridge.
He journeyed on, his horse ambling or walking as it suited him, or sometimes veering to stretch a long glossy neck and nip at a bunch of leaves. The cock-partridge stood on his drumming-log and defied the forest rider, all unseen; rabbit and squirrel sat bolt upright with palpitating flanks and moist bright eyes at gaze; overhead the slow hawks sailed, looking down at him as he rode.
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