12 A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 
the bear discovered the pheasant, stretched out his nose, sniffed, and went on with his 
grubbing. The bird went behind a bush, and immediately there came forth a great 
scratching and scuffling among the dead leaves. I marvelled at the recklessness of this 
usually wary bird, but the noise was explained when a single small babbler appeared, 
still scratching up the debris, or picking the leaves up one by one and hurling them over 
its back, after the manner of ant-thrushes in the South American jungles. This one 
small bird made a far greater disturbance than the pheasant and bear together. 
When the kaleege again came out it walked slowly past the bear, making a slight 
detour, but within twenty feet, and actually, when a few yards uphill, leaped upward at a 
panicle of blossoms and caught some insect. So accurately do the wilderness folk gauge 
one another’s possibilities of harmfulness ! 
But at this point the pheasant saw my tent, and though there was no sudden alarm, 
yet a long, searching scrutiny left a suspicion, which dominated all other feelings, and 
with tail and head raised, with graceful, dignified steps, it made its way ten yards or more 
along the slope of the hill before it ventured to pass the tent. On the summit the bird 
hesitated a moment, standing silhouetted against the distant peaks and the sky, a 
beautiful symbol of alert eyesight and poised body. 
In the never-ceasing warfare of the Himalayan jungles, this individual was a 
success ; it had pitted its weak form, but keen eyes and ears, against the powerful 
muscles and delicate power of scent of the beasts of prey. As this thought came to 
mind a fox barked in the distance. The bear gave a last snort, left his field of manna 
and ambled slowly over the ridge beyond me. He had not descended twenty feet before 
he stopped, as if blocked by some insurmountable, material wall. For one instant his 
nose was stretched out toward me, distorted with the agony of supreme endeavour, and 
then, whirling in his tracks, he fled over rocks and turf, tearing through shrubs and 
bushes headlong, recklessly, from the dread hidden danger. I wished him luck in his 
strange life—a creature who by teeth and relationship should be meat-eating and 
animal-slaying, but who prefers berries and roots and a fat, easy life, seldom or never 
molesting the hunter unless wounded or in defence of cubs. How did the pheasant 
know this? How too did the pheasant read danger in the first retrogade movement of 
the bear, for no warning scent had come to its all but dead nostrils, and only the vaguest 
of suspicions through eyesight? Yet at the sudden turn of the bear the kaleege leaped 
into the air with a single subdued note, and after a few rapid wing-beats sailed in a 
beautiful long, descending curve far down into the valley, almost to the stream for which 
it had been headed. ‘Thus was a bird’s thirst quenched the quicker, and that of a bear 
delayed by my hidden presence on the ridge top. 
In the shadow of the hill I began my long walk back to camp, passing through the 
favourite feeding-grounds of the White-crested Kaleege. The slight breeze had died 
down, and as I reached the zone where rain had fallen, the air became heavy with scent. 
In passing through the pleasant gloom of the conifer forest each glade seemed to have 
its particular dominant perfume, governed by the predominating blossom of this lush 
season of the year. One was starred with a myriad long-stemmed strawberry blooms ; 
in another the pale blue faces of a multitude of violets showed faintly—more noticeable 
by the sweetness of their odour than their colour. The dominant hue of the forest 
blossoms was white, and in another glade was a host of large anemones, many splashed 
