The American Woodcock 319 



to visit the fields the next morning, bright and 

 early. The birds know that the rain will bring 

 up the erstwhile deeply buried worms, and that 

 the corn lands will offer the fattest of foraging. 



It is possible to make good woodcock ground 

 in an afternoon, or even within a couple of hours, 

 if you are sufficiently energetic. A teaspoonful 

 of whiting and some water in a handy bottle — 

 well shaken before takin' — makes most excellent 

 droppings, while a pencil, or stiff twig, cannot be 

 beaten in the line of borings. Once there was a 

 man, a highly conceited, extremely self-assertive 

 man, the kind of man to whom nobody on earth 

 can teach anything, and he knew all about wood- 

 cock. One day he happened to flush a cock in 

 a field quite near town, and he swore he flushed 

 six. Early next morning another man, and an 

 evil man withal, slipped to that field and killed 

 the lone bird before half-past seven. There were 

 about enough borings to make one colander, 

 which showed that a solitary bird had happened 

 into the field, and not six, as the fork-tongued man 

 had sworn. Whereupon the misled man waxed 

 wroth, and he took a small cold bottle and the 

 hottest kind of a hot bird, i.e. a foot of fence- 

 wire, and he made that corn-field look as if a 

 hundred thousand ten-ounce woodcock were given 

 to boring and chalking the same. And after 

 office-hours came the fork-tongued man cautiously 



