166 BIRD LIFE IN ENGLAND. 



stances. But we are getting our guns into the coppices a 

 culpable trespass, as they are reserved for a great occasion. 

 Already a dozen or so of pheasants have met their fate, and 

 the keeper's face begins to wear a dubious expression as he 

 witnesses the untimely destruction of his proteges, when the 

 sportsmen who have been peppering their ground game pull 

 up a little reluctantly, emerging into the open once more. 



If they get a chance of trying a willowy watercourse or 

 some reed beds, so much the better, as game is found in such 

 places now winter is close at hand that lends a variety to the 

 bag. Walking quietly down the brook sides where the trees 

 lean over, and the water rats make devious tracks in the soft 

 mud amongst the arcades of pendent coral-red rootlets, they 

 are sure to disturb something sooner or later. It may be a 

 heron that fowl that seems to have learnt preternatural 

 shyness in the early centuries, when the sky was full of 

 hawks and " pasties " full of his kind a bird that rises half 

 a mile away and sails up stream majestically ; or, perhaps, 

 it will be a fussy moorhen, as careless as the other is wary, 

 that springs from under the foot and flutters away over the 

 water meadows with both legs down a comfortably easy 

 victim, were we so minded. 



But a duck is what we desire and hope for down here ; 

 and out yonder, where the stream has overrun a marshy 

 corner and sown itself a garden of ragged watercress and 

 kingcups, we may safely look to a find. The guns take 

 either bank, and with the dogs in the slips we move quietly 

 down. It is just such a feeding-place as the mallard loves. 

 Amongst the deep soft growths the water has cut channels 

 a foot or so deep, and runs quietly through them, rolling 

 over the light gravel and playing about the jaws of the long, 

 grey pike, lying silent in wait in the sub-aqueous glades for 

 gudgeon and bleak which flash and frolic outside. A score 

 or so partially submerged willows dot the swamp, and have 

 collected amongst their branches tangles of reeds and grass 

 on which coots build, and hassocks of water-rush that 



