246 SUMMER 



other took the water as if they were akin to air and water 

 from their birth. The shooting of grouse is one of the most 

 attractive of all sports beyond doubt. It is amazing at a 

 first experience to \vatch the coveys, flying as if they were in 

 a picture with set wings, appear over the heather ridge, grow 

 to a vast size in your eyes as if on a sudden, and then 

 vanish behind you like a streak as if they had been dissipated 

 into the moorland, and returned to the heather from which 

 they were created. As so seen you are conscious chiefly of 

 a shape endowed with singular momentum tearing past you 

 like a shell in action. You note no colour. It is very 

 different to flush a cock grouse as you walk across a moor 

 with or without dogs. Every colour on his handsome body 

 leaps to the eye, and you think what a splendid bird he is, 

 too splendid to kill, belonging like the heather indisseverably 

 to the hill. He does, in fact, so belong in a very real 

 sense. The red grouse is the one exclusively British bird. 

 The one food on which he flourishes is the purple heather, 

 and if the succulent shoots are not there at the due season 

 he dies, as the young wild-duck die, when hatched before 

 the insects have multiplied. He seems, too, to keep some- 

 thing of both the rich and dusky colours of the heath : 

 he is subdued to that he works in. The willow grouse 

 of other countries and the ptarmigan, that love the heights, 

 change their heather colours for the snow colours. But 

 the grouse is always constant to the tawny shades of the 

 moor. 



No signal of the seasons is obeyed with such headlong 

 promptitude as the coming of August. Under the dark and 

 grimy canopy of glass on a North London terminus you may 

 infer the season with more certainty than most expert 

 naturalists in the country. The war with the grouse is the 

 occasion, but no one who has ever escaped from the stale 



