Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
Something like a bee in a violent hurry hummed past his ear, and a rock near his right foot was struck a tremendous blow by an unseen agency. He liked this. It would be a battle, not a battue. The fifth Dyak crumpled into the distortion of death, and then their leader took deliberate aim at the kneeling marksman who threatened to wipe him and his band out of existence.
He would have enjoyed the battue of punishment under ordinary circumstances; but he knew that Miss Molly Mackinder would be humiliated and indignant at the half-savage penalty they meant to exact. He had determined that O'Ryan should marry her; and this might be an obstruction in the path.
The struggle is over; no sound is heard, save the hoof-stroke of the guanacos, llamas, and alpacos, that cover the plain in their wild flight. Leon could no longer restrain his curiosity; but ran off to the scene of the slaughter. There he counted no less than nineteen vicuñas lying dead, each one stabbed in the ribs! The Indian assured him that it was not the first battue of the kind he had made.
It may be well to explain, that birds are always to be found hovering about a native camp; they act as scavengers, and their presence in the sky is always an indication that an encampment is somewhere in the vicinity. These birds are especially on the spot when the blacks set fire to the bush and organise a big battue.
Of course," he added, "I eliminate the English, who deem the day misspent unless they have killed something, and who give infinite pains and tenderness to the raising of pheasants, that they may slaughter a record number of them at a battue. Aside from a hunting-leopard and a hunting- Englishman, I know of no being so cruel as Mirza; no being that takes such delight in mere extermination.
In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible. On the day of the sixth of June, a battue of the sewers had been ordered.
And every night after a battue the beast, as if to avenge himself, attacked some traveller or killed some one's cattle, always far from the place where they had looked for him. Finally, one night he stole into the pigpen of the Chateau d'Arville and ate the two fattest pigs. The brothers were roused to anger, considering this attack as a direct insult and a defiance.
Some of these sought safety by a dash through the guns, while the greater number struggled and even laid about with their sabres to hew their way out of this battue. Elsewhere the British artillery was too exposed to be defended, and the gunners again fled back to the squares.
I was first disgusted with that species of rational recreation at a battue, where, instead of bagging anything, I was nearly bagged, having been inserted, like wine in an ice pail, in a wet ditch for three hours, during which time my hat had been twice shot at for a pheasant, and my leather gaiters once for a hare; and to crown all, when these several mistakes were discovered, my intended exterminators, instead of apologizing for having shot at me, were quite disappointed at having missed.
Conspicuous among them he would observe a giddy sexagenarian, whose random attempts to share in the sport made her the laughing-stock of the circle. And as he surveyed the battue he would gradually discern its tactics. The beautiful beings in tulle he would feel, by instinct, were a lure and a decoy.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking