minutes without stirring or even winking. 



Then, outdone at his own game, he glides 



away. A rustle of little feet on leaves, a faint 



kwit-kwit, with a question in it, and he is S^eOfBeech 



gone. Nor will he come back, like the fox, jPafrithfe 



to watch from the other side and find out 



what you are. 



Civilization, in its first advances, is good 

 to the grouse, providing him with an abun- 

 dance of food and driving away his enemies. 

 Unlike other birds, however, he grows wilder 

 and wilder by nearness to men's dwellings. 

 Once, in the wilderness, when very hungry, 

 I caught two partridges by slipping over their 

 heads a string noose at the end of a pole. 

 Here one might as well try to catch a bat in 

 the twilight as to hope to snare one of our up- 

 land partridges by any such invention, or even 

 to get near enough to meditate the attempt. 



But there was one grouse — and he the 

 very wildest of all that I have ever met in 

 the woods — who showed me, unwittingly, 

 many bits of his life, and with whom I grew 

 to be well acquainted after a few seasons' 

 watching. All the hunters of the village 



