lighter in winter, like the rabbit. When he lives in dark woods
he becomes a glossy red-brown; and when his haunt is among the
birches he is often a decided gray.

This was certainly true of the old beech partridge. When he
spread his tail wide and darted away among the beeches, his color
blended so perfectly with the gray tree trunks that only a keen
eye could separate him. And he knew every art of the dodger
perfectly. When he rose there was scarcely a second of time
before he had put a big tree between you and him, so as to cover
his line of flight. I don't know how many times he had been shot
at on the wing. Every hunter I knew had tried it many times; and
every boy who roamed the woods in autumn had sought to pot him on
the ground. But he never lost a feather; and he would never stand
to a dog long enough for the most cunning of our craft to take
his position.

When a brood of young partridges hear a dog running in the woods,
they generally flit to the lower branches of a tree and kwit-kwit
at him curiously. They have not yet learned the difference
between him and the fox, who is the ancient enemy of their kind,
and whom their ancestors of the wilderness escaped and tantalized
in the same way. But when it is an old bird that your setter is
trailing, his actions are a curious mixture of cunning and
fascination. As old Don draws to a point, the grouse pulls
himself up rigidly by a stump and watches the dog. So both stand
like statues; the dog held by the strange instinct which makes
him point, lost to sight, sound and all things else save the
smell in his nose, the grouse tense as a fiddlestring, every
sense alert, watching the enemy whom he thinks to be fooled by