258 Wald Life in a Southern County. 
branch, much as if he were fighting it. He is nota 
hundred yards off; it would be easy to get nearer, 
surely, by stalking him carefully, gliding from tree- 
trunk to tree-trunk under the beeches. 
At the first step the squirrel darts to the nearest 
beech ; and although it seems to have no boughs or 
projections low down, he is up it in a moment, going 
round the trunk in a spiral. A startling clatter re- 
sounds overhead: it is a wood-pigeon that had come 
quietly and settled on a tree close by, without being 
noticed, and now rises in great alarm. But it is a 
sound to which the deer are so accustomed that they 
take no notice. There is little underwood here be- 
neath the beeches, but the beechmast lies thick, and 
there are dead branches, which if stepped on will crack 
loudly. 
A weasel rushes past almost under foot ; he has 
been following his prey so intently as not to have 
observed where he was going. He utters a strange 
startled ‘yap,’ or something between that and the 
noise usually made by the lips to encourage a horse, 
and makes all speed into the fern. These are the 
happy hunting-grounds of the weasels. 
During spring and summer—so long as the grass, 
clover, and corn-crops are standing, and are the cover 
in which partridges and other birds have their nests 
—the weasels and stoats haunt the fields, being safe 
from observation (while in the crops) and certain of 
finding a dinner. Then, if you watch by a gap in the 
