He was helping the farmer to clear an oat-stubble of charlock-seeds at the moment, and bending down. That is to say, he was doing inestimable good, for which he got no credit. The next moment, and the next, and for many more, he was still bending down. In fact, from the instant he got sight of that head, it was as if a Hand had come down and turned him by magic into a big model of a bird cast in bronze. All life in him appeared to have dried up and fled. He looked as if you could have picked him up and put him upon a bracket in your drawing-room without his ever moving again. But that was only because of the head he had seen--and its reputation. Moreover, the head was not alone. At least, it had multiplied itself half-a-dozen times in less than half-a-dozen seconds, and even a stoat, which the head belonged to, cannot be in two places at once--though for sheer quickness of movement it, and far more its cousin the weasel, comes very near to it.
Just at this moment it seemed that about the roost unhealthful thing he could do would be to be seen in the air. Wherefore did this innocent and guileless old bird affect not to see the stoats, but made out that he was feeding his way along, quite and absolutely intent upon that yellow devil of a weed whose other name is charlock. He did not even hurry, and each deliberate step was taken with almost a proud daintiness. The only thing was, he never lifted his head; he was almost too obviously unwary--for him. And he gave the impression that every step would be his last out into the field; that he was always going to turn back next instant or the next, as he had done before when the stoats were not there.
On and on he kept till he had crossed the field, going faster and faster, till he ended at the far hedge with a run. And there, so far as he was concerned, was an end of the stoats. He put them aside. He forgot all about them.
They, however, had not forgotten about him.
It was half-an-hour later, and he was patiently gleaning such food as the rooks and the sparrows and the larks had left behind them, when something, he could not tell what, caused him to straighten up, with that beautiful, proud bearing that seems part of the pheasant's heritage from the gorgeous East.
And he was only just in time.
The stoat that had come up behind him, unseen, turned on its heels as it charged, changing its mind at the last moment, as if it saw he saw, and was gone again before you could click a finger, diving superbly back into long grass.
They were following him, then, those little hounds of death; tracking him; running him down. And why? He did not know, perhaps, yet--maybe he did. Blood is a dangerous thing to have on you in the wild--a flaming signal of distress for eye and nose to detect--and they are not often rescuers who hurry to the scene. He had blood on his back, that cock-pheasant, and just every now and then a single bright drop fell by the way. The .22-bore bullet had only grazed him. 'Twas nothing--but it bled more than you would expect. And that explained it. The tracking stoats thought he was wounded.
But even then the old cock-pheasant would not rise.
The firing in the covert had risen suddenly to a fierce crescendo, breaking out afresh from another quarter. Here, however, was silence--the absolute, deadly silence in which all the weasel tribe hunt. But they were there, though he could not see them. He knew that, invisible even in the sunlight--they were closing in, tracking him fast, those stoats.
Then he ran. He ran not so much for his life, but for the right to keep on the ground. If the worst came to the worst, he could always fly; but he would do anything rather than that.
He turned and ran away from the woods--raced like a fowl, but quicker, lower, much harder to see. A sudden gleam of bright-chestnut fur dead ahead, however, stopped him, and he turned back, keeping always to the hedge--towards the covert. He could hear no sound around him, only the burst and the bang of the guns in the woods, and he might have been alone; but directly he came to another hedge, and swung down to it at right angles, a furry tail with a paint-brush tip, vanishing round a holly-stem, fetching him up all standing. They were there, too, those stoats. He seemed to be surrounded on all sides save one, and that the one towards the woods. So he swung back into his original path.
Then, very soon, as he ran up the hedge-ditch, it seemed to him as if the dead leaves collected there were beginning to whisper behind him.
But there was no wind to move them. Moreover, it grew closer, till it seemed at his very tail, that whisper of dead leaves.
Then, in a flash, he had stopped, spun about like a top, and struck with his spurs twice--whack, whack--more than instantly, and a long, low, brown body--close behind him, that had risen as he turned, so that its spotlessly clean shirt-front offered him a fine mark, went over sideways--with a grunt and all the wind knocked out of it, as well as an inch-and-a-half gash to remember friend pheasant by. That was one stoat; but it was not alone. He had a vision of chestnut forms sliding and rippling in and out of the shadows and the long copper gleams of the westering sun.
As he turned again, and the whispering began once more behind, the firing in front broke out afresh, and much nearer. Still he would not rise, however. It was this fact, probably, which kept the stoat-pack at his heels. They seemed convinced that he was badly wounded and unable to fly.
Then came the road. He was on it before he knew. There was the wedge-shaped, low-browed head of a stoat racing up along one side of him, with murder plainly written in the gleam of its beady eyes; there was the hot breath of another beating on his opposite flank; there was one with feet out and all brakes on, trying its best to pull out one of the feathers of his long and beautiful tail; and--there was the road dead ahead.
It was one of three--the road, the air, or death where he was. He chose the road, and crossed, like a hunted cat crossing a back-yard.
His feet seemed scarcely to touch the dust as he negotiated the open, yet he had time to take in a fact or two. One was that the stoats had stopped--a little bunch of peering heads on a group of craning necks on the edge of the ditch behind him. Another was that several people and a motor-car were standing still in the road quite close, watching the shooting. I don't think any of them saw him, but he felt as if all of them did.
Arrived in the hedge on the far side of the road, he clapped down, panting. The hedge ran along the road. On the other side of it was the grass of the park-land, stretching away two hundred yards or so to the edge of the covert, which came down to a point here. He could hear the tapping of sticks in the covert--beaters' sticks. He could hear an occasional shout. Men in tweeds stood motionless on the edge of the covert, and suddenly moved.
Then came the infernal crash of the guns again, and he saw a hen-pheasant pitch sickeningly on her head from a height, and a cock-pheasant, flaming like a rocket in the sinking sun, run the gauntlet of four shots, only to turn over and slide down at a fifth.
Then--and then, he jumped.
Something had pushed past him. In the din he had not heard it. He turned as he crouched, and saw that it was a hen-pheasant, with blood on her breast and one wing trailing alongside. And in the same instant he was aware of a man--an under-keeper--crackling about in the hedge only ten yards away, looking for that hen-pheasant.
And the unwounded old cock, crouching almost till he looked like a tortoise, followed the blundering, staggering, wounded hen. It was the only thing he dared do.
It was a strange creep, and an erratic one, with many stops, those two hunted ones took together, meeting, so strangely, too--not for the first time, since she had been one of his wives in the dim peaceful past--with the guns thundering away so close, and their sons and their daughters being slain almost all around them. They had, however, little time to think about it, for they came, after about twenty yards, to a gap spanned by barbed wire, and they stopped, the cock about a foot behind the hen's tail, in cover scarcely enough to hide them.
But that was not all. Two men in fawn overcoats stood in the road by the gap, looking through it at the shooting; and a boy with a bicycle stood close to them, interested in the same thing.
It was the boy with the bicycle that did it; or, rather, it was the unhappy hen-pheasant that made him. She, being _in extremis_, had made some noise among the stiff dead leaves. It was not much of a noise, but it caught the boy's young ear, and he bent forward to peer at the hedge.
One of the men saw him, said something, to which the boy nodded, jumped down into the ditch, and thrusting in a long arm, began to feel with a purposeful hand. The hen-pheasant, whose nerves were already shattered to little pieces, struggled to get out of reach, and in a second had given the whole show away.
But I like to think of what our cunning old cock-pheasant did then. He did nothing--absolutely nothing at all. Crouching as flat as an overturned saucer, just, behind the hen-pheasant's tail, he remained stiller than a bunch of dead leaves, and far more silent. And this, mark you, when the hen-pheasant was pulled out, frantically fluttering and helpless, and there and then had her neck wrung in front of his very eyes. That, my masters, needed a nerve, after all that he had gone through. What?
The two men, seeming to think that they had got enough for one quiet walk, departed, not quickly, but without unnecessary delay. The man who had been looking for the hen-pheasant, and had seen nothing of what took place at the gap, gave it up, and went away over the grass to the shooters. The shooting ended with one last double shot, at one last old cock-pheasant driven reluctantly from the last hush of the covert; the dogs were out, galloping all over the ground for the wounded and the slain; the watchers in the road departed; the shooters gradually merged into groups, and drew farther and farther away up the park; and the boy, who was shy, mounted his bicycle and rode off into the sad blue-gray of the gathering dusk.
The big day was over, and the old cock-pheasant was alone with the melancholy song of a single robin, and a chaffinch calling "Chink!"
And the cold breath of the sunset wind, shuddering and sighing all to itself across the face of the empty scene, touched the feathers that were left by the hen-pheasant attached to thorns and twigs in her last struggle, so that they danced and wavered and flickered before the old cock's eyes, as a reminder of all that had been for them in the past--the past, which for him, but never for her, might be again.
That night he roosted in the covert, as usual.
THE END