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"The green bowmen, señor," said Gonzalez. "Ah, Shadow Valley!" "We left it yesterday," said Rodriguez. When Gonzalez heard this he poured forth questions. "The forest, señor; how is it now with the forest? Do the boars still drink at Heather Pool? Do the geese go still to Greatmarsh? They should have come early this year. How is it with Larios, Raphael, Migada? Who shoots woodcock now?"

The old man had, as Madge prophesied, come home very drunk the night before, and had lain in bed later than usual, so that, when he came to breakfast, he found George, gun in hand, ready to go out. "Going shooting, my lad?" said the father. "Where be going?" "Down through the hollies for a woodcock. I'll get one this morning, it's near full moon."

Other denizens of these swamps are woodcock, snipe, deer, and occasionally racoons and wild cats, which follow the pheasants, so that a mixed bag is frequently the product of a successful day, when twenty-five head, including seven or eight brace of pheasants, would represent a fair average per gun.

Partridges drummed there, rabbits darted along their beaten runways, and Joe had seen a woodcock, that shyest of all shy birds, disappear in glancing, shadowy flight, a ghostly, silent denizen of the ghostly, silent spaces of the forest.

I like better than most things a day with my own dogs in scattered covers, when I know not what may rise a woodcock, an odd pheasant, a snipe in the out-lying willow-bed, and perhaps a mallard or a teal. A hare or two falls in agreeably when the mistress of the house takes an interest in the bag. I detest battues and hot corners, and slaughter for slaughter's sake.

After remaining some ten days at this place, word came from Squire Woodcock, requiring Israel's immediate return, stating the hour at which he must arrive at the house, namely, two o'clock on the following morning. So, after another night's solitary trudge across the country, the wanderer was welcomed by the same three gentlemen as before, seated in the same room.

At the same moment, the rattle of a distant wagon on the hard road, and a loud cheer replying to the last shot, announced the Commodore; who pulled up at the tavern door just as they crossed the stepping-stones, having made a right good morning's work, with a dead certainty of better sport in the afternoon, since they had marked two untouched bevies, thirty-five birds at least, beside some ten or twelve more stragglers into the alder brakes, which Harry knew to hold moreover, thirty woodcock, as he said, at the fewest.

The idiotic-looking woodcock, inspired by the grand passion, rises upon whistling wings in the early spring twilight, and floats and circles at an altitude of a hundred feet or more, and in rapid smackering and chippering notes unburdens his soul.

Another is a kind of spring bow made of bamboo which is laid on the ground in marshy places, such as are frequented by snipe and woodcock. This form of snare is unfortunately most common. A third is a cage into which birds are lured by means of a bait, the cage being hidden in the grass, and the entrance being so contrived that the birds can hop in but not out again. This is called ka riam sim.

Up started Adam Woodcock, his wrath no way appeased by the cold immersion, and seizing on a truncheon which stood by, would have soon requited the injury he had received, had not Roland laid his hand on his poniard, and sworn by all that was sacred, that if he offered a stroke towards him, he would sheath the blade in his bowels.