particular time and season I never found out.

I used to wonder sometimes why I never saw him drink. Other birds
had their regular drinking places and bathing pools there, and I
frequently watched them from my hiding; but though I saw him
many times, after I learned his haunts, he never touched the
water.

One early summer morning a possible explanation suggested itself.
I was sitting quietly by the brook, on the edge of the big woods,
waiting for a pool to grow quiet, out of which I had just taken a
trout and in which I suspected there was a larger one hiding. As
I waited a mother-grouse and her brood--one of the old beech
partridge's numerous families for whom he provided nothing--came
gliding along the edge of the woods. They had come to drink,
evidently, but not from the brook. A sweeter draught than that
was waiting for their coming. The dew was still clinging to the
grass blades; here and there a drop hung from a leaf point,
flashing like a diamond in the early light. And the little
partridges, cheeping, gliding, whistling among the drooping
stems, would raise their little bills for each shining dewdrop
that attracted them, and drink it down and run with glad little
pipings and gurglings to the next drop that flashed an invitation
from its bending grass blade. The old mother walked sedately in
the midst of them, now fussing over a laggard, now clucking them
all together in an eager, chirping, jumping little crowd, each
one struggling to be first in at the death of a fat slug she had
discovered on the underside of a leaf; and anon reaching herself
for a dewdrop that hung too high for their drinking. So they
passed by within a few yards, a shy, wild, happy little family,