THE ENDED TRUCE 223 



above the reach of shot. You had not thought the slow and 

 sleepy coot — a sort of moorhen, after all — would make such 

 pace and reach such height. Here the peaceful summer is 

 clean forgot, and a wilder season begun, though elsewhere 

 August is heavy with heat and summer sleep. 



But this is not the scene of which most naturalists and 

 sportsmen think when August comes. By what strange 

 calculation the 12th became the day of the grouse no man 

 can tell ; but it is a better day for the shooting of grouse 

 than the 1st of Sep- 

 tember for shooting 

 partridges. It is 

 very seldom that the 

 grouse are not strong 

 on the wing, and 

 few birds seem to 

 develop wing -power 

 quite so quickly. 

 Pheasants are 

 hatched a month be- 

 fore partridges, and 

 are not strong fliers even by October 1st when they may be 

 shot, though they seldom are. They are the slowest to 

 develop. Young partridges top the grasses in low flight at 

 as young an age as the young moorhens slip over the surface 

 of the water as if they were balls of fluff blown by the wind. 

 But the grouse are even quicker than the partridges to attain 

 real power of wing ; and, of course, the young are very 

 early fliers. One of those sights, not in themselves perhaps 

 remarkable, which make a permanent impact on the mind, 

 and remain ineffaceable, was a grouse's nest almost alongside 

 an eider-duck's on a little isle in a West Highland loch. The 

 young from the one crossed the water, and the young of the 





YOUNG GROUSE 



