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Cattle very seldom rush at night when they are on their own feeding-grounds, and though Mick took no chances, and double-watched them all night, he did not expect anything unpleasant to happen. "It's better to be sure than sorry," he told the boys at breakfast.
The ground beneath the trees is covered with a luxuriant crop of grasses, chiefly triticum, bromus, and calamagrostis, with purple spikes and panicles arching to one's shoulders; while the open meadow patches glow throughout the summer with showy flowers, heleniums, goldenrods, erigerons, lupines, castilleias, and lilies, and form favorite hiding and feeding-grounds for bears and deer.
The branches they resort to soon become almost divested of leaves, these being stripped off by the action of the bats, attaching and detaching themselves by means of their hooked feet. At sunset, they fly off to their feeding-grounds, probably at a considerable distance, as it requires a large area to furnish sufficient food for such multitudes.
And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly without prospect of a meeting.
At one time more pilchards were taken here than at any other spot, but the pilchard is a fickle fish, and has no consideration beyond the choice of feeding-grounds; if better satisfied elsewhere, no sentiment interferes with its migrations.
Here the brood grew and were trained by their father just as his mother had trained him; though wider knowledge and experience gave him many advantages. He knew so well the country round and all the feeding-grounds, and how to meet the ills that harass partridge-life, that the summer passed and not a chick was lost.
One March day some seasons before, Major Falconer had brought down with his rifle from out the turquoise sky a young lone-wandering swan. In those early days the rivers and ponds of the wilderness served as resting places and feeding-grounds for these unnumbered birds in their long flights between the Southern waters and the Northern lakes.
"Miller says they pulled down deer last winter and tore them to shreds. Everything in the forest is afraid of them; they drive the deer from the feeding-grounds, and I don't believe a lynx or even any of the bear that climb over the fence would dare attack them." Kathleen said: "You really ought to ask some men up here to shoot, Scott. I don't wish to be chased about by a boar."
At that I laughed aloud and he got uneasy. Had he been deceived? Was there no farm within walking distance? "I laughed more and more. He was on foot, and of course the first bunch of cattle he came across would have stamped him to rags under their hoofs. A dismounted man caught on the feeding-grounds hasn't got the ghost of a chance.
Before the hunter in the sedge could get fresh cartridges into his gun, the diminished flock was out of range, making desperate haste to safer feeding-grounds. Of the two birds thus suddenly smitten by fate, the younger, shot through the heart, lay motionless where he had dropped, a sprawl of black and white, and ashen feathers tumbled by the little ripples of the pool.
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