138 BIRDS, BEASTS, AND FISHES 



river walls and heaps of stinking keel-muck, sitting solemnly 

 round the open waters on the frozen ice, or by the edges of 

 running rills, near the snipe, when all else is bound in icy 

 fetters, all on the alert for food, for living prey or carrion. 

 Let a wounded duck fall on the clear hard ice, and the old 

 Kentishman will fly up and seize it before the gunner can 

 break a way to his prey, and, turning it over, the bird will 

 bury his powerful bill in its living, bleeding breast, just above 

 the breast-bone, and tear open its quivering wind-pipe; and if 

 the angry gunner is not revengeful, he will pick the duck clean 

 as a party of ants, even to his eyes, leaving only his head. 

 No bird can pick a raw bone cleaner than a Kentishman. Or 

 if there be no ice, and the stricken bird is not dead, he will 

 seize him, and carrying him to the shallows, amongst the 

 formless dead gladen stalks, he will " strip him out," as the 

 Broadsmen say. Rats in the stacks, mice on the marshes, 

 all have felt the force of that cruel bill, as they were pulled 

 to bits ; and rabbits on the sandhills, hares drowned in the 

 icy dikes or left dead in snares, the old saddle-back crow 

 cleans them all up, and polishes his shining bill complacently 

 afterwards upon some bare branch by the water. And 

 horses drowned in the icy ditches, he and the pick-cheeses 

 will clean them up and leave their bones mouldering on the 

 marshland ; dead and swollen fish turned up and killed by 

 the "salts," and left putrefying on the ronds with filth and 

 drift weed, he and the rats clean them all up. Any carrion 

 he takes ; he is not particular, as you may see by watching 

 him at a stinking heap of keel-muck that breathes pestilence 

 by the river-side. 



Nor are they shy. They frequent stack bottoms often, 

 hunting for rats and mice, which they will eat dead or 

 alive; and should you throw them bread in hard weather, 

 they will eat it ; and when the weather is very hard, you 

 may see them, along the frozen roads, pulling the steaming 

 horse-dung about, extracting food, after which they will 

 beat heavily over the marshes in search of carrion or mice, 



