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"She killed her twenty-first bird straight; it was a handsome cup, too." And after a silence, "So you didn't love her any more, Mr. Siward?" mockingly sweet. They laughed, and at the sound of laughter the tall-stemmed alders echoed with the rushing roar of a cock-grouse thundering skyward. Crack! Crack!
And hard behind the voice leaves shook, and a boy came striding into the sunlight. In one hand he trailed a gun, and at his heels trotted a waggish spaniel of immense importance and infinitesimal size. In his other hand the boy carried by the legs a splendid cock-grouse, ruffled and hunger-compelling.
"The most difficult shot in the world," Alderdene was explaining, "is an incoming pheasant, sailing on a slant before a gale." "A woodcock in alders doing a jack-snipe twist is worse," grunted Mortimer, drenching another apple in port. "Or a depraved ruffed cock-grouse in the short pines; isn't that the limit?" asked Mortimer of Siward.
A tiny falcon a merlin shot up out of the mist, hung for a moment, whilst the sun transformed his wings to purple bronze, and fell again, vanishing instantly. Next, a cock-grouse, somewhere below the amber sea, crowed aloud to proclaim the day, and a raven mocked at him hoarsely. Then, and not till then, the Chieftain awoke.
Guyder Touchett, the burly captain of the watch, clapped him familiarly on the back. "Your legs have saved your skin, master. God's life! but you flashed through the cover like a cock-grouse going down the wind. Yet I trembled lest a cross-bow bolt might be following even faster." "They have come the Doomsmen?" panted Constans.
Master Gerald, who had discharged his first barrel straight into the "brown," succeeded, in obedience to his mentor's admonitions, in covering an old cock-grouse with his second, and carefully following that flustered fowl's course with the point of his gun, pulled the trigger just as it skimmed, low down, with an agitated squawk, between his butt and mine.
Besides being able to whistle, the lynx far surpasses the domestic cat in the range and volume of his evening song; and during the rutting season, at sunrise and sunset, he has a peculiar habit of beating or drumming with his forepaws on the hard snow or earth. No doubt it is a form of challenge, used much in the same way as the drumming of cock-grouse; martens and rabbits do the same.
Then Sagamore, tail wildly whipping, came smack on the trail of an old stager of a cock-grouse on, on over rock, log, wet gully, and dry ridge, twisting, doubling, circling, every wile, every trick employed and met, until the dog crawling noiselessly forward, trembled and froze, and Siward, far to left, wheeled at the muffled and almost noiseless rise.
He shot through the rent, racing down with the sun's rays to earth, and surprised a cock-grouse at his breakfast, nipping off the tender heather-shoots daintily one by one. So swiftly did Chieftain fall that the grouse never knew what had killed him; he was dead in a flash. The great eagle swept on with the grouse in his claws, and, without stopping, beat upwards again.
Charles St. John says that in Scotland the stag you are stalking is sure to be put to flight if it hears the alarm-cry of the cock-grouse. You see it is more important that the wild creatures should understand the danger-signals of one another than that they should understand the rest of their language.
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