174 Autumn 



land path, and you may follow it to its hole a hundred 

 yards off by merely listening to the rustle of dead 

 leaves. Indeed, this is a signal worth attention, for it 

 shows that the stoat did not go straight home but, like 

 a Red Indian scouting an enemy, skirted from cover 

 to cover from the ferns to a bunch of nettles, thence 

 to a horrent elm-root, crossing from that to where a 

 holly's low leaves rest on the grass, and so to its 

 citadel. The same noise betrays the snake slyly 

 gliding away from the sunny opening where he was 

 asleep, the pheasant trotting along its high-road 

 through the ferns, the squirrel amassing his hoard, 

 the woodmouse playing hide-and-seek below a mush- 

 room. 



If you walk about quietly and alone in a forest 

 where wild deer run, you may have opportunities to 

 see the ' dappled fool ' to as good advantage . as 

 Jaques. The doe comes down the green rides with 

 her easy springing gallop that carries her away like a 

 dark shadow under the loose and melancholy boughs. 

 Sometimes you may watch her for a long time as she 

 is feeding, but her majestic, wide-antlered mate is more 

 wary. At a single suspicious noise or movement his 

 ears are pricked, and if frightened he is off like a 

 thunderbolt, making splendid leaps over fallen trunks 

 and low boskage ; but if only slightly alarmed he trots 

 gently off till his form is lost among the dark limbs 

 and waving branches of the forest. 



