18 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 



If he had said 300 I should not have been sur- 

 prised. The man on the soil does not often see 

 an adder, because for one thing he does not look 

 for it, and still more because of the heavy boots he 

 wears, with which he pounds the earth like a dray- 

 horse with its ponderous iron-shod hoofs. Even 

 men who walk lightly and wear light foot-gear 

 make, as a rule, an amazing noise in walking over 

 dry heathy places with brittle sticks and dry 

 vegetable matter covering the ground. I have had 

 persons thrust their company on me when going 

 for a stroll on ground abounding in adders, and 

 have known at once from their way of walking in 

 an unaccustomed place that the quest would prove 

 an idle one. Their lightest, most cautious tread 

 would alarm and send into hiding every adder a 

 dozen or twenty yards in advance of us. 



In spring the adders are most alert and shyest. 

 Later in the season some adders, as a rule the 

 females, become sluggish and do not slip quickly 

 away when approached ; but in summer the 

 herbage is apt to hide them, and they lie more in 

 the shade than in March, April, and the early part 

 of May. In spring you must go alone and softly, 

 but you need not fear to whistle and sing, or even 

 to shout, for the adder is deaf and cannot hear you ; 

 on the other hand, his body is sensitive in an 

 extraordinary degree to earth vibrations, and the 

 ordinary tread of even a very light man will 

 disturb him at a distance of fifteen or twenty 

 yards. That sense of the adder, which has no 



