NEIGHBOURS OF THE WINTER NIGHT 119 



his game preserve with English pheasants, which have 

 now spread over the county. The pheasant is a 

 walker. You cannot mistake his tracks, for he puts one 

 foot neatly down directly in front of the other, making a 

 clean impression, as if he had picked it up again very 

 carefully. One morning I found close to the house the 

 end of a pheasant's trail. Something had evidently 

 scared him and he had risen from the ground, brushing 

 the snow on both sides with the first flap of his wings. 

 Curious to see how far he had walked, I put on my 

 pedometer and followed that trail. It led me through 

 my little swamp, up the hill through a neighbour's yard, 

 across the road, through a spruce hedge, across the great 

 lawn of a big summer estate, into the woods behind. I 

 put on my snow-shoes in the woods and kept on. The 

 trail finally ceased in a brush-heap, where the snow was 

 tracked all about and in one place scratched through to 

 the brown leaves. That pheasant had walked exactly 

 one mile and a quarter a long walk for a bird ! And in 

 all that distance there was no sign that he had stopped 

 to scratch for food. It was as if he had set out deliber- 

 ately to walk to my house. I could not flatter myself 

 that such was the case; doubtless some sense of his had 

 told him it was useless to scratch, or perhaps he had fed 

 from the bushes through which he had walked. But 

 his trail was without a break. 



My collie tracks like a fox, making, that is, but two 

 marks instead of four. But of course his stride is 



