234 The Amateur Poacher 



sheep, very slowly driven, move on with a gentle 

 ' tinkle, tinkle.' Wild creatures show no fear of what 

 they are accustomed to, and the use of which they 

 understand. 



If a solitary hurdle be set up in a meadow as a 

 hiding-place from behind which to shoot the rabbits 

 of a burrow, not one will come out within gun-shot 

 that evening. They know that it is something strange, 

 the use of which they do not understand and therefore 

 avoid. When I first began to shoot, the difficulty 

 was to judge the distances, and to know how far a 

 rabbit was from a favourite hiding-place. I once 

 carefully dropped small green boughs, just broken 

 off, at twenty, thirty, and forty yards, measuring by 

 paces. This was in the morning. 



In the evening not a rabbit would come out any- 

 where near these boughs ; they were shy of them 

 even when the leaves had withered and turned brown ; 

 so that I took them away. Yet of the green boughs 

 blown off by a gale, or the dead grey branches that 

 fall of their own weight, they take no notice. 



First, then, they must have heard me in their 

 burrows pacing by ; secondly, they scented the 

 boughs as having been handled, and connected the 

 two circumstances together and, thirdly, though 

 aware that the boughs themselves were harmless, they 



