But cows
will feed steadily in front, and a flock of sheep, very slowly driven,
move on with a gentle 'tinkle, tinkle.' Wild creatures show no fear of
what they are accustomed to, and the use of which they understand.
If a solitary hurdle be set up in a meadow as a hiding-place from behind
which to shoot the rabbits of a burrow, not one will come out within
gun-shot that evening. They know-that it is something strange, the use
of which they do not understand and therefore avoid. When I first began
to shoot, the difficulty was to judge the distances, and to know how far
a rabbit was from a favourite hiding-place. I once carefully dropped
small green boughs, just broken off, at twenty, thirty, and forty yards,
measuring by paces. This was in the morning.
In the evening not a rabbit would come out anywhere near these boughs;
they were shy of them even when the leaves had withered and turned
brown; so that I took them away. Yet of the green boughs blown off by a
gale, or the dead grey branches that fall of their own weight, they take
no notice.
First, then, they must have heard me in their burrows pacing by;
secondly, they scented the boughs as having been handled, and connected
the two circumstances together; and, thirdly, though aware that the
boughs themselves were harmless, they felt that harm was intended. The
pheasant had been walking about in the corner where the hedges met, but
now he went in; still, as he entered the hedge in a quiet way, he did
not appear to be alarmed.
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