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.