It was the jester of a jay, whom, in spite of his painted plumage, no one seemed to have noticed, that first gave the alarm that carried the cock-pheasant’s suspicious temperament a step farther upon the path of independent action.  Up till then you will note that, though he had left the vicinity of his own people, he had not yet left the realm that was peculiarly their own—­the woods.

“W-a—­r-k, w-a-a-r-k!” gasped out the jay suddenly, and fled, a half-seen vision of pinkish, of black and white, upon uncertain, almost fluttering, wings.

It was like striking a gong.  Instantly all motion was suspended, and dotted thrushes, clustered rooks, and deprecating pigeons remained at rigid attention.  The old cock-pheasant, too, erect as an armored warrior, unseen just within the covert, stood promptly at gaze.

Then, in no more time than one would take to inhale one puff from a cigarette, the fields were empty—­stark, cold, and deserted in the eye of the morning sun.  The birds had not so much gone, exactly, as simply faded out—­dissolved, as a picture may at a cinema-show.  The cock-pheasant did not go.  He was in cover, and had a good view, a strategic position of some moment.

Followed a pause.  Then a man in tweeds entered one of the fields by the gate.  Followed him two more, then a fourth, then two not in tweeds, then dogs, black and big, to the number of three, not to mention the bar-like gleam given off by the barrels of the guns that the first four carried.  The whole procession passed silently, as they thought—­but to the waiting, watching, wild-folk unpardonably noisily—­diagonally across the field, and out of sight round a bend of the wood.  They had an air about them.  I don’t know what it was exactly, but you could feel they were going to do something serious that had not been done there for a long time.  Perhaps the old cock-pheasant felt it too, but—­well, there now!  Where had the old “varmint” gone?

Half-way down the hedge, very low and long, the cock-pheasant was sneaking.  He seemed suddenly anxious to mind his own business, and that everybody else should mind theirs.  He was going away from the wood, which the books tell us is the realm, the sanctuary, the all, to a pheasant, and he had no desire to answer questions by the way.  For this reason, then, and a few others, he felt no special delight in sighting, about two hundred yards farther on—­at a place where two stacks surrounded by rails stood and sheltered a fowlhouse—­a baker’s dozen of fowls sunning themselves on the hedge-bank.  He held for fowls all the wild creatures’ contempt for the tame or domestic.  All the same, he saw no health in risking the open just then, and would not turn back, so there was nothing for it but the fowls.

Low as low he crouched, and ran very quickly, and hoped for the best; and there is no bird that can wish itself out of sight in this fashion better than friend pheasant.  But he forgot the odd cockerel out.  He shot right on to the wretched thing—­a gawky red youth—­messing about all alone in a nettle-clump, and it dashed into the field, racing on long yellow legs, and squawking fit to wake the dead.