A hedge-cutter marks the sleeping-place in the
withies where the fox curls up by day; and with his rusty gun, that
sometimes slaughters a roaming pheasant, sends the shot through the red
side of the slumbering animal. Then, thrust ignobly into a sack, he
shoulders the fox and marches round from door to door, tumbling the limp
body rudely down on the pitching stones to prove that the fowls will now
be safe, and to be rewarded with beer and small coin. A dead fox is
profit to him for a fortnight. These evil deeds of course are cloaked as
far as possible.
Leaving now the wood for the lane that wanders through the meadows, a
mower comes sidling up, and, looking mysteriously around with his hand
behind under his coat, 'You med have un for sixpence,' he says, and
produces a partridge into whose body the point of the scythe ran as she
sat on her nest in the grass, and whose struggles were ended by a blow
from the rubber or whetstone flung at her head. He has got the eggs
somewhere hidden under a swathe.
The men that are so expert at finding partridges' eggs to sell to the
keepers know well beforehand whereabouts the birds are likely to lay. If
a stranger who had made no previous observations went into the fields to
find these eggs, with full permission to do so, he would probably wander
in vain. The grass is long, and the nest has little to distinguish it
from the ground; the old bird will sit so close that one may pass almost
over her.
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