One day as Bobby and Mr. Kincaid were walking along looking for squirrels in the high open woods, Duke, who was always required to trail at heel for fear of alarming the game, became very uneasy. He dropped back a few steps, and attempted to escape from control on either side; he tried to get ahead--with always a deprecating side-glance at his masters; he begged in his best dog fashion.

"He acts like birds," said Mr. Kincaid. "Hie on, Duke!"

Immediately Duke sprang away, the impulse of his suddenly released energy projecting him ten feet at a bound. But at once he slowed down. Step by step he drew ahead, his beautiful feathered tail sweeping slowly from side to side, his delicate nostrils expanding and contracting, his fine intelligent eye roving here and there. He stopped. His head dropped to the level of his back and stretched straight out ahead. His tail stiffened. Gently he raised one hind leg just off the ground. His eye glazed with an inner concentration, and the trace of slaver moistened the edges of his black and shining lips.

Mr. Kincaid cocked his gun and stepped forward.

"He's just beyond that dead log, Bobby," he said quietly.

Bobby watched with all his eyes. One, two, three steps Mr. Kincaid advanced. Now he was abreast of Duke. The setter merely stiffened a trifle more. Bobby's heart was beating rapidly. The whole sunlit autumn world of woodland seemed waiting in a breathless suspense. The little boy found space for a fleeting resentment against a nuthatch on a tree-trunk near at hand for the calm, indifferent and noisy manner in which he went about his everyday business.

Suddenly a mighty roar shattered the stillness. Beyond Duke something swift and noisy and brown and explosive seemed to fill the air. So startling was the irruption that Bobby was powerless to gather his scattered senses sufficiently to see clearly what was happening. Mr. Kincaid's gun bellowed; a cloud of white powder smoke hung in the mottled sunshine. And down through the trees a swift, brown, bullet-like flight crumpled and fell, whirling and twisting in a long slanting line until it hit the earth with a thump! Bobby heard Mr. Kincaid berating Duke.

"Down, you villain! Don't you try to break shot on me!"

And Duke, his hindquarters trembling with eagerness, his head turned beseechingly toward the man, crouched awaiting the signal.

Quite deliberately Mr. Kincaid reloaded.

"Fetch dead!" he then commanded.

Duke sprang away in long elastic leaps. After a moment of casting back and forth, he returned. His head was held high, for in his mouth he carried the limp brown bird. Straight to Mr. Kincaid he marched. The man stooped and laid hands on the game. At once the dog released it, not a feather ruffled by his delicate mouthing.

"Good dog, Duke," Mr. Kincaid commended him. "Old cock bird," he told Bobby.

Bobby spread out the broad brown fan of a tail; he inserted his finger under the glossy ruffs; he stroked the smooth, brown, mottled back.

"This is more fun than squirrels," said he with conviction.

Mr. Kincaid glanced at him in surprise.

"But you can't hunt these fellows," said he, "It takes a shotgun to get 'pats.' You wouldn't have much fun at this game."

"I'd rather watch you--and Duke," replied Bobby, "than to shoot squirrels. Are there many of them?"

"Not up on the ridges," said Mr. Kincaid. "This fellow's rather a straggler. But there's plenty in the swamps and popples. Want to go after them?"

"Yes," said Bobby.

After that the two used often to follow the edges of the hardwood swamps, the creek bottoms, the hillsides of popples, and--later in the season--the sumac and berry-vine tangles of the old burnings, looking for that king of game-birds, the ruffed grouse.

Bobby became accustomed to the roar as the birds leaped into the air, so that he was able to follow with intelligent interest all the moves in the game, but never did his heart fail to leap in response. In later years, when he too owned a shotgun, this sudden shock of the nerves seemed to be the required stimulant to key him instantly to his best work. A sneaker--that is to say, a bird that flushed without the customary whirr--he was quite apt to miss.

Little by little, as he followed Mr. Kincaid, he learned the habits of his game: where it was to be found according to time of day and season of year. Strangely enough this he never analyzed. He did not consciously say to himself; "It is early in the day, and cold for the time of year, _therefore_ we'll find them in the brush points just off the swamps, _because_ they will be working out to the hillsides for the sun after roosting in the swamps." His processes of judgment were more instinctive. By dint of repeated experience of finding birds in certain cover, that kind of cover meant birds to him. "A good place for 'pats,'" said he to himself, and confidently expected to find them. That is the way good hunters are made.

All day long thus they would tramp, forcing their way through the blackthorn thickets; clambering over and under the dead-falls and debris of the slashings; climbing the side hills with the straight, silvery shafts of the poplars; wandering down the narrow aisles of the old logging roads; plodding doggedly across the unproductive fields that lay between patches of cover; always lured on in the hope of more game farther on, picking up a bird here, a bird there, each an adventure in itself. And occasionally, once in a great while, they ran against a glorious piece of luck, when the grouse rose in twos and threes, this way, that, and the other, until the air seemed full of them. Mr. Kincaid, very intent, shot and loaded as fast as he was able. Sometimes things went right, and the bag was richer by two or three birds. Again they went wrong. The first grouse to rise might be the farthest away. Mr. Kincaid would snap-shoot at it, only to be overwhelmed, after his gun was empty, by a half dozen flushing under his very feet. Or a miss at an easy first would spell humiliation all along the line. Then Bobby and Duke would be much cast down.

"Thing to do," said Mr. Kincaid, "is to shoot one bird at a time. If you get to thinking of the second before you've killed the first, you won't get either. It's a hard thing to learn. I haven't got it down pat yet."

* * * * *

The short autumn days went fast. Before they knew it the pale sun had touched the horizon and the world was turning cold and gray. Then came the long laden tramp back to old Bucephalus, or perhaps to town, if they had started out afoot. They were always very tired; but, as to Bobby, at least, very............