As he went there burst forth, at the opposite end of the big covert to that at which he had come out, a sudden, quick shot.  It echoed away and away back among the woods, clattering and banging like great doors shutting.  The old cock-pheasant stopped to listen; he cocked his green head on one side; he stood with one foot daintily uplifted:  and in the same instant there burst upon the air a rending, crashing succession of shots, worse than ragged volley-firing, which almost made him jump.  It had begun—­the big shoot over his covert, the largest, the best, the richest in pheasants, which had been saved for this—­“the day” had begun.  When it ended very few pheasants would be left alive, for word had gone forth that it was to be thinned down, almost shot out, and that not a cock must escape.

He, our own cock-pheasant, might have chuckled—­as a cock-pheasant can, and will, very low and softly to himself, if you are close enough to hear him—­if something had not very suddenly and very mysteriously said “phtt!” just like that, close beside him.  The old bird’s head snicked round, right round, almost hindpart before; but he made no other movement.  The sound was new to him, and of a strangely sinister import.  Also, there was a little splayed hole in the ground, as if a walking-stick had been poked in there, close beside him, which had not been there before.

He was still staring when something, singing a little, high-pitched song in a minor key to itself, came romping through the silent air, and, with an oddly emphasized and emphatic “phtt!” landed between his feet.  It bored a hole just like the first thing, and it spat dirt up into his face.

The third mystery thing clipped three feathers from his back as he ran, bolted for dear life, crouching low—­even then he would not rise—­for the hedge.  He got there alive, if not quite whole; while a fourth nameless object cut twigs off above him.  Then he kept on running, always hugging the hedges, till he was two fields away.  He was upset and overstrained, for Fate had given him plenty of deaths to circumvent as it was, in the ordinary course of business, and this addition was a bit too much.

There are other forms of shooting pheasants than the orthodox one, which begins with smoking a cigarette on a comfortable shooting-seat, and ends with a wild and furious fusillade, using three guns as fast as you can.  So thought the farmer’s son, who took the chance to test his new American .22-bore repeating-rifle, now that all the keepers were well out of the way.  And he had come mighty close to bagging the old cock-bird, too.  “As near as made no odds,” he said, which was true, but only the old bird himself knew quite the closeness of the call.

In the far field the bronze king of the woods found peace for a bit.  The stunning reports in the covert not far away, and the thought that his companions of yesterday, his lady-loves of last spring, were even then being butchered by the hundred, made no difference to his digestion.  He fed on with that imperturbability that must have come to him straight through his ancestors from the East—­Kismet!  It was sufficient.