42 EEMINISCENCES OF A SPORTSMAX. 



He should, therefore, sleep in an outhouse where the 

 door is well secured, aud where he would be able to give 

 the alarm should any one enter the yard. Frequent 

 visits should be made by the keeper to those places in 

 the woods where he feeds his pheasants, more par- 

 ticularly to the buckwheat stacks; and he should examine 

 closely whether any footsteps can be discovered in the 

 small paths leading to these spots. It is a good plan to 

 tie across them, about twelve inches high, a small thin 

 worsted thread, nearly the colour of the ground, and 

 if any of them should be found broken you may be 

 quite certain that some one has been visiting the feed- 

 ing places of the birds with some evil intent; most 

 probably to set fine wire snares or some made of horse- 

 hair, fixed at a height to catch the pheasants by the 

 neck, and one on the ground to entangle their legs. The 

 gamekeeper, with one or two assistants, should watch in 

 moonlight nights about the time the pheasants go to 

 perch (when doing this the cocks always crow, which 

 may be heard at a considerable distance), to drive them 

 off the perch.* Poachers who intend to make a night 

 attack on them with their guns, often conceal them- 

 selves in the woods, and ascertain by this crowing where 

 the pheasants have perched for the night, which 

 saves them much trouble in looking out for them. A 

 very good outside covering for a keeper is a skin of an 

 ass dressed, with holes for the arms and loops in front ; 

 and thus, with a good skull-cap covered with the same, 

 he may lie down wherever he chooses, his body being 

 impervious to the rain and damp. On some large es- 



* If there are many foxes in the covers, in making the pheasants 

 thus roost on the gi-ound rather increases their danger, and it may be 

 said " that they go out of the frying-pan into the fire." 



