54 A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 



the level at which you stand, when you catch a glimpse, scuttling round the base of the 

 knoll, of the old cock, going at railroad pace, with head down and tail straight out, and 

 you arrest his career (if you are sharp enough) then and there. 



" Then comes the work below ; the dogs are called close to heel, and following the 

 shouted directions of the markers, you move about here and there, now finding a dead 

 bird, now having a wounded one brought you by a dog, and now getting nearly knocked 

 down by one whose tail absolutely brushes your face as it rises under your feet from the 

 centre of a small patch of cover, which, on the persistent outcries of the markers, you 

 have been vainly hunting through, backwards and forwards, for the ten previous 

 minutes. 



" But you do not account for all, unless you are a better shot than I ever yet saw, 

 though in these days of breech-loaders far fewer ought to escape — some wounded birds, 

 and many of the unwounded will have given leg bail, and the distances they will then 

 go is surprising. I have, quite by accident, recovered by a dog pouncing on it a Cheer, 

 with pinion broken, the blood still fresh on it, fully three miles down a valley at the 

 upper part of which two or three hours previously I had had a beat. 



" The sport is very exhilarating, but you are generally lower down than in koklass- 

 shooting; you are more closed in ; the air is not so fresh and bright ; there are no superb 

 wide-reaching views, changing as you move ; a glimpse of the snows is rarely to be 

 caught ; you have no magnificent forest about you, and when brought to bag your bird 

 is very poor eating compared with koklass or woodcock. 



"The force with which Cheer descend is almost incredible. Other pheasants in 

 descending keep the wings a little open ; these birds pass one at such a fearful pace that 

 it is impossible to be certain, but it always appeared to me that Cheer quite closed their 

 wings, and I attribute their power to do this to their enormous tails sufficing to guide 

 them. When within a hundred feet — I speak by guess — of the level at which they intend 

 to light, suddenly out go the wings, the tail is spread to its fullest expanse, the bird looks 

 double the size it did a second before, and sweeps off in graceful curves right or left, shortly 

 dropping suddenly, almost as if shot, into some patch of low cover. If no shots have 

 been fired, you may walk straight down, and ten to one find him exactly where you 

 marked him. 



"At times you get them on the hillsides, where the trees are thin, but there is no 

 great sport to be got there. The whole covey is scattered over an endless distance ; you 

 must make a line ; the birds willgti up in front of any one but the gunner, and run down- 

 hill in a most provoking manner. If you get two brace in such a situation after five or 

 six hours' fagging you may be well pleased, unless the covey happens to have an 

 antipathy to dogs, as they occasionally seem to have in out-of-the-way places. Then 

 almost every bird that is found by these flies straight up into the nearest tree, and thence, 

 standing almost on tip-toe on some horizontal bough, with feathers erected and tail 

 spread, chuckles or crows, or whatever you like to call it, at the barking and yelping 

 cockers below, till you walk up and (tell it not to your friends when you return to camp) 

 solemnly pot him or her then and there. 



" I was once nearly killed by a Cheer. I was standing in a rather awkward place, the 

 extreme outer edge of a plateau jutting out for twenty or thirty yards near the base of a 

 patch of precipitous ground ; behind me was a sheer fall of about forty feet ; a Cheer was 



