I watches everything as
goes on, and marks the hare's tracks and the rabbit buries, and the
double mounds and little copses as the pheasants wanders off to in the
autumn. I keeps a 'nation good look-out after the keeper and his men,
and sees their dodges--which way they walks, and how they comes back
sudden and unexpected on purpose. There's mostly one about with his eyes
on me--when they sees me working on a farm they puts a man special to
look after me. I never does nothing close round where I'm at work, so he
waits about a main bit for nothing.
'You see by going out piece-work I visits every farm in the parish. The
other men they works for one farmer for two or three or maybe twenty
years; but I goes very nigh all round the place--a fortnight here and a
week there, and then a month somewhere else. So I knows every hare in
the parish, and all his runs and all the double mounds and copses, and
the little covers in the corners of the fields. When I be at work on one
place I sets my wires about half a mile away on a farm as I ain't been
working on for a month, and where the keeper don't keep no special
look-out now I be gone. As I goes all round, I knows the ways of all the
farmers, and them as bides out late at night at their friends', and they
as goes to bed early; and so I knows what paths to follow and what
fields I can walk about in and never meet nobody.
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