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“All right, sir,” said Giles, “I’ll go, and I prays you’ll find some one what will keep your hares which you must have, and your pheasants which you must have, and your partridges which you must have, without killing these varmints of foxes what eats the lot.”

The Red-faced Man descended from the tree holding his nose and looked at Giles. Giles sucked his bleeding hand and looked at him.

“Foxes are very destructive animals,” said the Red-faced Man to Giles, “especially when one shoots and keeps harriers.”

“They are that, sir,” said Giles to the Red-faced Man, “as only those know what has to do with them.”

“Put the other in, Giles,” said the Red-faced man, “and when you have time, throw some soil on to the top of the lot. This place smells horrible. And look you here, Giles,” he added in a voice of thunder, “if ever I find you killing a fox upon this property, you will be dismissed at once, as I have often told you before. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Squire, I understand,” answered Giles, “and I’ll see to the burying of them this same afternoon, if the pain in my hand will suffer it.”

“Very well,” said the Red-faced Man, “that’s done with–except the cubs. As you have killed the vixen you had better stink the cubs out of the earth. I daresay they are old enough to look after themselves–at any rate I hope so. And now, Giles, we must shoot some of these hares when we begin on the partridges next week. There are too many of them, the tenants are complaining, ungrateful beggars as they are, seeing that I keep them for their sport.”

At this point I thought that I had heard enough, and slipped away when their backs were turned. For, friend Mahatma, I had just seen a fox shot, and now I knew what shooting meant.

*****

About a week later I knew better still. It came about thus. By that time the turnips I have mentioned, those that grew in the big field, had swelled into fine, large bulbs with leafy tops. We used to eat them at nights, and in the daytime to lie up among them in our snug forms. You know, Mahatma, don’t you, that a form is a little hollow which a hare makes in the ground just to fit itself? No hare likes to sleep in another hare’s form. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I answered, “I understand. It would be like a man wearing another man’s boots.”

“I don’t know anything about boots Mahatma, except that they are hard things with iron on them which kick one out of one’s form if one sits too close. Once that happened to me. Well, my form was under a particularly fine turnip that had some dead leaves beneath the green ones. I chose it because, like the brown earth, they just matched the colour of my back. I was sleeping there quite soundly when my sister came and woke me.

“There are men in the field,” she said, her eyes nearly starting out of her head with fear, for she was always very timid.

“I’m off.”

“Are you?” I answered. “Well, I think I shall stop here where I shan’t be noticed. If we begin jumping over those turnips they will see us.”

“We might run down the rows, keeping our ears close to our backs,” she remarked.

“No,” I said, “there are too many bare patches.”

At this moment a gun went ‘bang’ some way off; and my sister, like a wise hare, scuttled away at full speed for the wood. But I only made myself smaller than usual and lay watching and listening.

There was a good deal to see and hear; for instance, a covey of partridges, troublesome birds that come scratching and fidgeting about when one wants to sleep, were running to and fro in a great state of concern.

“They are after us,” said the old cock.