United States or Georgia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Crouching as flat as an overturned saucer, just, behind the hen-pheasant's tail, he remained stiller than a bunch of dead leaves, and far more silent. And this, mark you, when the hen-pheasant was pulled out, frantically fluttering and helpless, and there and then had her neck wrung in front of his very eyes. That, my masters, needed a nerve, after all that he had gone through. What?
And the cold breath of the sunset wind, shuddering and sighing all to itself across the face of the empty scene, touched the feathers that were left by the hen-pheasant attached to thorns and twigs in her last struggle, so that they danced and wavered and flickered before the old cock's eyes, as a reminder of all that had been for them in the past the past, which for him, but never for her, might be again.
He turned as he crouched, and saw that it was a hen-pheasant, with blood on her breast and one wing trailing alongside. And in the same instant he was aware of a man an under-keeper crackling about in the hedge only ten yards away, looking for that hen-pheasant. And the unwounded old cock, crouching almost till he looked like a tortoise, followed the blundering, staggering, wounded hen.
Then came the infernal crash of the guns again, and he saw a hen-pheasant pitch sickeningly on her head from a height, and a cock-pheasant, flaming like a rocket in the sinking sun, run the gauntlet of four shots, only to turn over and slide down at a fifth. Then and then, he jumped. Something had pushed past him. In the din he had not heard it.
The hen-pheasant was a solitary bird, having strayed away from the pheasant copses near the Itchen and found a nesting-place a mile away, on the other side of the valley, among the tall grasses and sedges on its border. I was the bird's only human neighbour, as I was staying in a fishing-cottage near the spot where the bird had its nest.
It was evidently as I had thought, and some secret meaning must lie buried in this strange combination of words. Or could it be that there was a prearranged significance to such phrases as 'fly-paper' and 'hen-pheasant'? Such a meaning would be arbitrary and could not be deduced in any way.
Wilson describes observing a hen-pheasant depart from this usual custom. He came suddenly upon one with a young bird in her company.
I will conclude this digression and dissertation on a bird's instinct by relating the action of a hen-pheasant I once witnessed, partly because it is the most striking one I have met with of that instantaneous recovery of a bird from an extremity of distress and terror, and partly for another reason which will appear at the end.
The hen-pheasant, whose nerves were already shattered to little pieces, struggled to get out of reach, and in a second had given the whole show away. But I like to think of what our cunning old cock-pheasant did then. He did nothing absolutely nothing at all.
Two men in fawn overcoats stood in the road by the gap, looking through it at the shooting; and a boy with a bicycle stood close to them, interested in the same thing. It was the boy with the bicycle that did it; or, rather, it was the unhappy hen-pheasant that made him. She, being in extremis, had made some noise among the stiff dead leaves.
Word Of The Day