198 MY NATURE NOTEBOOK. 



wilderness, void of life, though a minute earlier it 

 may have been thronged with busy, twittering flocks. 

 Wherever he passes the horizon is ringed with 

 feathered fugitives ; but it is a horizon which widens 

 from him wherever he turns his course. Now and 

 then, rising suddenly above a favouring belt of trees, 

 he may see scattering wild life almost beneath him, 

 and, shooting earthwards like a thunderbolt towards 

 some vainly fleeing wretch, he may wet his hooked 

 bill with warm blood ; but those moments of pursuit 

 and feeding are short, and for all the rest of the day 

 one cannot help thinking from the human point of 

 view that the hawk's lonely life in winter, shunned 

 and hated by all, must be desolate and wretched. 



A HUNTER'S LIFE. 



Evidently, however, the hawk does not regard 

 himself from the human point of view ; for there is 

 no reason why he should not have a companion if 

 he chose, instead of spending the first winter of his 

 life in solitude, like a wandering spirit of evil. His 

 parents, though they seldom co-operated in hunting, 

 and as a rule pursued different kinds of quarry the 

 female sparrow-hawk, indeed, is commonly called the 

 "pigeon-hawk," because her larger size enables her 

 to fly at stronger prey yet they were generally 

 within hail of each other, so to speak, and returned 

 to the same home at night. So the young hawk, 

 when his father drove him at last from home, had had 

 no example of loneliness in life before his eyes ; yet 

 it is the instinct of his race at any rate in youth 

 to wander separate and solitary all the winter, seldom 



