The rook went away astern, shouting bad language, and another foe came to take his, or her, place.  Again our thrush discovered that he was not alone.  Little, white, silent, cruel, dancing flakes of white were traveling more or less with him and downwards, upon the following wind.  The snow!  The snow at last!  And he was trapped, for it was to keep ahead of the snow that he had journeyed all that way back again.  Indeed, you can hardly realize, unless you have almost lived their life, what the snow and the frost mean to all the thrush people, but more especially to the common song-thrush and the redwing.  At the worst it means death; at the best, little more than a living death.

However, to race the snow were useless.  Yet he flew on, and on, and on, like a stampeded horse, blindly, one-sidedly, while the ordnance survey map beneath turned from brown, and chocolate, and silver-gray, and dull green, first to pepper and salt, then to freckled white, then all over to the spotless white eider-down quilt of the winter returned, as far as the eye—­even his binocular orbs—­could reach, muffling tree and house, and garden and copse, and farm and field, and fallow and plow and meadow in the one mystical, silent, white disguise of winter.  And the thrush at length came down.

His eye had spotted a little corner of a garden that might have been a spread table in the wilderness.  It was only a small triangle of lawn, with a summer-house at its apex, and a spruce-fir and a house at its base, and privet-hedges marking off the rest.  But it had a “bird-table,” and a swept-clean circle on the grass, and there was sopped bread upon both.  And that place was given over entirely to chaffinches, all hens, tripping, mincing, pecking, feasting, fighting—­because they were chaffinches, I suppose, and must fight—­all over the place.

The thrush came to anchor upon the roof of the summer-house, and—­straightway fell upon his beak!  And that was Fate’s punishment for laziness, one second’s relaxation from vigilance.

Righting himself, he almost overbalanced the other way, and only finally managed to come to an intricate halt on one leg.  The other leg—­the right one—­was twisted back under him, in line with his closed wings and tail; that is to say, it was pointing the wrong way for a bird’s leg, or, rather, so far as could be seen among the feathers, that was how it seemed.  But the leg was not broken; he could still move his toes and expand his foot.  Otherwise he could do nothing with it.  The leg might not have been there, for all the use it was to him; it would have been better if it had not been there, for it hampered his flight, or unbalanced him, or something, so that he was incapable of traveling now beyond the snow, even if he would.  Undoubtedly the air-rifle had done its work.

Now, in the wild it is a fairly sound maxim that an injured wildling is a dead wildling—­that is, unless the injury is quite slight.  There are exceptions, of course.  Flesh-wounds and quick-healing wounds are exceptions.