Upstate

I

IF the astrologer knew his business, he would n’t have bothered with the stars. He would merely have said that July 15, 1903, was the day on which the last decent mess of trout was caught out of Edmonds Pond. I was the cause of it, and some people still hold it against me.

In those days (consult Mark Sullivan) young men were not insulted at being born at home. I was born in Boonville in the east bedroom. It was a terrible mistake.

My mother’s doctor was a young and able man. He had just finished his hospital training and I was his first job. He accompanied the family for a modest fee, board and lodging, and a vacation in our pure air.

He spent two solid months fishing our pond. Luckily there was a strong northeast wind on the fifteenth, so he had to stay in the house all day. But the other sixty days were enough. The pond never recovered. They say I bit his hand, and I wish I had had teeth.

They came in due course, though my governess used to say they looked as if they had wandered in. But they were quite serviceable except for one almost tragic instance. That did n’t involve a human hand, unluckily, but two complacent Holstein cows.

You should know that we ran a large farm with forty head of milking cattle. Mornings, these, to their accompaniment of bells, went up a hill called the sand hill to day pasture. Evenings they went up a hill called the clay hill to night pasture. (The two roads were twenty feet apart on the same hill, one going to the right, one to the left, and each had a clay stretch and a sand stretch. Who it was that first called the one hill two, or selected the names, is not recorded in the history of the farm. They were so called.) Anyway at night the cows went up the clay hill, a narrow dugway, and quite steep. At the age of nine, it was my job, together with the farmer’s boy, to escort them to the pasture bars.

We rather enjoyed the task, walking slowly along the creek behind the trailing, easy-going cows. They gave even small boys a feeling of relief, of the day done, the dreamy feeling that comes before supper, when ideas expand and talk gets large, and grown-up people have their cocktails as a blind. We did not mind the hill, because there were two cows who unfailingly stayed at the rear of the herd and who had no objection, as soon as we were out of sight of the barn, to our climbing aboard their broad backs. We always sat on the hips, facing aft, which gave us an exhilarating view of the ground toilsomely dropping away behind.

One of these cows was the big producer of the herd. She was blue blood from her cud to her tail tip. She was registered, she was nearly all white, with beautiful black markings on each side of her face, uncut horns, and an udder that had all the dignity of the front elevation of a dowager duchess. Her name in the books was Lady Colantha Wayne Dexter Paladin DeKol, but she was known in the dairy as Grace. Her number on the milk sheet, which is the box score of a dairy, was 1. Her pal, Gladys, was a plain cow, mostly black, with a rusty tinge that brought a blush to the farmer’s cheek. Her hips were high, her horns had been cut by a plumber, apparently, for one was still three inches long. She had a rolling eye and was given to fat in the places where a cow should be thin. Nobody knew why she stayed in the herd. Perhaps nobody would buy her. Her number was 39.

I’m sure I don’t know why Grace picked out Gladys to pal with. But I guess it was the old story: Grace probably felt that she could afford to be seen in any company, and Gladys, I fear, must have been a social climber. As for ourselves, I expect they thought of us as just boys.

George was the farmer’s boy. He was a year younger, but he was a good deal larger than I. And I admired all his accomplishments except the way he had of tying knots. Knot, I should say, for, no matter how he figured, it always ended up as a granny. At the time of the Occurrence he had fallen back on the old dodge of affecting that it made no difference what you tied. I was holding out for the square knot, which I had only mastered the day before. It could n’t slip. You did n’t have to be told, you had only to see it with the naked eye.

George was scornful. It was all very well to say so, but how did I know? He even doubted whether I could tie the thing. ‘Give me a piece of string,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you now.’ He fished through his pocket, producing a brokenbladed knife, the rabbit-foot the Welshman had lost the year before, a puffball in the afternoon of its life, a tadpole with the legs half grown (it had died of natural causes), and a Bull Durham sack without the strings. ‘I hain’t got any,’ he said, ‘ but if I had I bet you could n’t tie it. I bet you could n’t anyway, even if I had all the string in the universe.’ ‘ I bet I could,’ I replied. ‘I bet your neck.’

I suppose it was fate that at that moment a fly stuck Gladys in some tender spot. She gave a flourishy switch to her tail, and the end of it landed across my knee. The inspiration of the devil, always at a small boy’s left hand, prompted mine. I grabbed the tail. ’I’ll show you,’ I said. ‘Pass me Grace’s tail.’

After a little fishing, George got up Grace’s tail and handed it across. His scorn was beyond words. ‘Here,’ he said. I laid them side by side, I twisted them properly. I made the knot and pulled it tight. ‘There,’ I said. ‘See for yourself.’

‘Aw,’ said George, ‘that don’t prove nothing.’

‘Why n’t you pull it?’ I said. ‘Pull it as hard as you’re mind to. She won’t feel nothing.’

George pulled and I pulled against him. The knot was unbudging. With the triumph swelling my chest that a successful engineer must feel when the bridge members meet properly in the middle, I watched the dawn of recognition in his face. For once I was one up. He said, ‘That’s right.’

We examined the knot with interest. It was a beautiful thing, so simple, so square; even in the tail of a cow it worked.

‘The best part about it,’ I explained, ‘is the easy way you can untie it.’

‘Gee,’ said George. Then he threw his head up. ‘Gee,’ he repeated. ‘You better had.’ From up at the top of the dugway came a spattering of bell notes as the cows flowed through the bars and separated over the grass. ’Shucks,’I said.

But though a square knot will set in strands of hair, try and untie it! I still had things to learn. I worked as I have never worked to this day. My mind was nimble, my hands and fingers alert. I used my teeth. But human ingenuity cannot in a hurry master such a knot tied in hair. Beneath me I felt the hips of Gladys gathering momentum. She too was eager to be free in the pasture. There was something almost poetic in the eager way she rushed to meet the night. Grace, however, with her position to maintain, would not hurry for anyone. That difference gave us a forethought of what would happen. Grace’s tail arose like a Florentine lion’s, over her back, pushing George to the ground. The vulgar Gladys’s streamed out behind her like a Valkyrie’s hair. I stuck to my guns, I must say, waiting for a final feverish effort as Grace, at last impelled beyond her normal pace, came up abreast. I did succeed in loosening the side hairs. Then, all three, we passed through the bars.

I heard George’s voice, faint and small: ‘You’d better get off, I think.’

I abandoned ship. I joined George by the bars. I don’t know why, but we lay down on our stomachs, and stared with terrified eyes at bovine character in conflict.

Grace walked out with the air of having forgotten a rude contretemps. She headed majestically for her favorite stand of clover. For a half-dozen steps, Gladys accompanied her. Then, with the effervescent lightsomeness that always distinguished her, she swung left for some redtop.

At the first rise of their united tails, Grace did not pause. The dignity of the DeKols would not allow her to notice such a vulgar trick of fate. She would not even bend to the pressure. Her eye may have steeled — I could not see it. Deliberately she stretched her nose to the clover.

But Gladys was surprised. She made no bones of showing her amazement. She stopped short. For the moment she was conscious of the stronger will, the years of breeding. An instinct made her step backward, as Grace enjoyed her first soupçon.

Gladys looked around. She studied the situation. She gave a few tentative pulls. The tails went up and down. She switched hers gently, and saw Grace’s switch in unison. She stepped ahead again. At last she was annoyed. She gave a deliberate lurch.

It was enough to raise Grace’s head from the grass. The two cows stood quite still, staring north and south. Their tails were stretched between them. There came a faint tense overtone from their bells that was echoed somewhere down below my vitals.

Then they looked at each other, or tried to, for each looked to right. But finally they worked it out and stared. There was no longer any question of friendship, or even tolerance. They looked away and toed the mark and tugged. George and I made simultaneous moans.

But the time for moaning was past. I had proved that the square knot will not slip under any circumstances. In their own way the cows must have realized something of the sort. They must have thought that they were doomed for life to a sort of Siamese twinship. And they had just discovered that they really had nothing in common! A slight vibration was visible in the tails.

Oddly, it was Grace who first cracked under the strain. She gave a short roar, — like a bellow, I suppose, — put down her head, and ran. Gladys, who had not considered such drastic action, refused to be dragged. Her pride came to her aid. She dug her feet in the grass and ran for herself. Neither made progress.

For a moment the old adage of the immovable object and the irresistible force was enacted in the flesh. Then it was over. Believe it or not, it was Grace’s tuft that gave way.

George and I stole out. We spent as long as we dared trying to catch Gladys to remove the evidence, but she had had enough of boys. We had to creep home with the awful knowledge of what would happen in the morning. We did not mention knots for the rest of the summer. The blame fell on me — where I suppose it belonged — and it fell in those sharp stinging spanks which make one sit tenderly for a day after. Grace, I might add, never dropped off in her milking, even for a day.

II

’I don’t know what the country’s coming to,’ said John. ‘Here is a Republican concern putting in electricity for lower rates than the Democrats can afford (look at how they are fighting it in the courts) and then I go to a fan dancer that had her Blue Eagle put on her in the great days and now she can’t get rid of it. All the rest of the country has got rid of it, but one poor fan dancer is condemned for life to be a Roosevelt remnant. It would be a lesson to the female vote, but the women was n’t allowed to go in.’

‘Where did you see her?’ I asked.

‘At the circus,’ he replied. ‘It cost me fifty cents. I always was a sucker.’

‘How did they work it?’ I inquired.

‘Well, after you got on the grounds, they had the tent marked for “Men Only” set up back of the Exhibit Hall on the Fair grounds — you ought to know the place. And I thought I would go and see what it was to be a fan dancer, so I paid a quarter and went in and there we was with ten men, which they said was all they could handle, so I thought I would see something good.

‘The spieler said we should stand still, and a gal came out on a platform with a blue pair of tights and a red fan and she sung a song and then she did a dance. It was n’t a bad dance,’ John said; ‘the way she had it fixed she could make the eagle flap its wings.’

‘Where was the eagle?’ I wished to be informed.

‘On her shoulder,’ John answered, blushing.

‘How did you lose the other quarter?‘

‘Then,’ he informed me, ‘the spieler said, “Now, gentlemen, if you want to see something really hot and snappy and right out of the World’s Fair, you can drop another quarter in the hat and get around on the back side of that partition.”

‘Well, we all done it, and then they dropped the partition and there we all was in the same tent with the girl and she did the same dance on the same platform, only she went without the fan.’

‘Was that all?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I could have shot a doe for 5 per cent of that money. Did I ever tell you,’ he continued, ‘how I shot a buck with a bicycle?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘and I would rather not know. Is it another fan dance?’

‘No, it is not,’ he said, looking brighter all the time. ‘I went up on the beech ridge above Birch Pond. It was a long time ago when I was working in the woods. I got up there with my old shotgun and I set down on the ridge and waited till a buck come out. I aimed at him right between the eyes, but he only sneezed at me and went away. I was puzzled some, so I looked at my cartridges and discovered I’d brought along the birdshot, number tens. Now was n’t that an awful thing to have happen to a man?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was. What did you do?’

‘ Do you know where Birch Pond is? ’ he asked me.

I did not.

‘Well,’ said John, ‘I used to know where it was myself. It was nineteen miles north of Forestport. It used to be a great deer country. But nineteen miles is a long way to walk back to get a buckshot to get a deer with. And I was kind of meat-hungry, so I sat down on the ridge and remembered that there was a camp belonged to Millard Rumble down on Beech Pond. Did you ever hear of Beech Pond?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, it was eight miles from Birch Pond. Beech Pond sets in about the nicest stand of yellow birch you ever saw. It was a good place for deer, too. I thought I ’d go down to Millard’s and see did he leave a buckshot cartridge behind him maybe.’

‘Had he done that?’ I asked with some interest.

‘No, he never left nothing behind. But I found a bicycle in the woodshed,’ said John. ‘ And that gave me an idea.’

‘It was a long way from home to find one,’ I observed.

‘I’m apt to get them most anywhere,’ said John, modestly. ‘I was n’t much of a mechanic, but I knew that a bicycle has balls in it somewhere, and pretty soon I figured out where they’d be, and I took the wheel apart and got the bearings out.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then,’ said John, ‘I found some paper, — I think it was the Christian Visitant, — and I stuck a number ten in the breech and put in the bearings, and put the paper on top of them, and then I went back to Birch Pond and up onto the ridge.’

‘Was the buck still there?’

‘Yes, he was. He was looking around for me. I put up the gun and I let him have that right barrel just about in the brisket. You could see them balls entering into that deer. He just wheeled around and went over. I did too. I never knew a gun to kick so. He lay one way and I lay the other, but he never come to.’

‘Where was the gun?’ I asked.

‘Back of me somewheres. I looked at it. It had got grooved in the right barrel. I don’t shoot it any more.’

‘What do you kill deer with?’

‘Buckshot,’ said John, ‘in the left barrel.‘

‘Did you get the deer out?’

‘I got him down to Beech Pond by dragging him. It’s mostly all downhill. But I could n’t get him no further. I could n’t hoist him on my back, my shoulder was that lame. So then I thought of the bicycle.’

‘You mean to tell me you took him out on that? You could n’t make the thing go without bearings.’

John looked hurt.

‘Ain’t I said I dragged the deer down there? It was quite an operation, though.’

‘You never told me that story before,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I had n’t thought of it before. But it goes to show what life used to be like in this country. A man had to have ideas to get along. Take Capitola Nutt.’

III

‘All right,’ I said. I had begun to see that the manure would n’t get onto the garden that day. ‘I’ll take her.’

‘Him,’ said John. ‘He was a camp cook. One fall he hired out with a party of sportsmen from Brooklyn. He got the pay he asked for because he was the last cook left in Forestport that season when they got there. He said he was an A Number 1 cook.

‘Well, they traveled in to a camp up above Honnedaga, and that’s quite a ways, too. Soon as they got there those sports went right out after meat, leaving Cappy to get the supper. They wanted biscuits and maple syrup. He had told them he baked the best biscuits in the North Woods. But Capitola, he’d never been outside a lumber camp before and he could n’t get those biscuits to rise. He was n’t much of a hand at remembering recipes anyway. What he had to offer when they come back you might have swallowed but you could n’t chew.

‘Well, they was mad. But Capitola was a poor-looking old man and he begged them to give him another day to remember how to make biscuits raise themselves. So they agreed.

‘Well, he did n’t do much better next day, either. He got some of the edges a little lifted, but that was about all. That night they told him he was fired.

‘“Well,” says Capitola, “I am sorry. If I had my recipe book along it would be different.”

“‘Why did n’t you bring it?” they asked him.

“‘Because I had a heavy pack already,” he says. “But,” he says, “if you will give me the day off to-morrow I will go and see Rosmerel Clancy who cooks for Baker’s camp. Maybe he will lend me his.”

‘“OK,” they says. And the next morning Capitola starts off. They figured they would n’t see him any more. He was n’t home for lunch. But along by suppertime they come back and there was a smell of A Number 1 biscuits in the woods. They piled in and et. They’d been going pretty gant for two days. And they did n’t say a word till the four pans was finished. They then see Capitola had fainted on the floor.’

‘ What did he faint for?’ I demanded.

‘ From bringing the recipe book. He come to after a while and they asked him the same durned-fool question and he told them what I have just told you. They said, “How far off was it?” And he said it was only eighteen mile each way. But it was n’t the distance, it was the heft of the damn thing. It weighed twice what his did, if he’d only been able to bring it.

‘They asked, just the way you would, “What are you talking about?" “My recipe book,” says Capitola. “That one over there is Rosmerel’s. He always went in for big ones.”

‘They looked where he pointed and seen that the old eighty-year-old twerp had carried in a kitchen door, eighteen miles through timber. Those old camp cooks always wrote recipes on the doors.

‘Times,’ said John, ‘have surely changed.’

IV

Times surely have.

Only five years ago I got married for the first time. It was a good thing she liked our country, for she has had to see a lot of it. She did n’t know much about our variety of people, but she took to them, too.

There was just one thing I had on my mind, and that was Adam.

Adam was one of the curly-coated kind of cocker spaniels, with a topknot on his head, like the genuine breed. They have gone out of fashion, and I got him cheap, but he was a good dog with some fancy ancestry. He was coal black, and he learned to hunt birds in the henyard. Right from the start he took an interest in the lady goose.

That bird was a freethinker. Every morning she used to come out of the henhouse and look at the weather, brace her feet on the sloped runway, lean back on her tail, and make as nice a three-point landing as you ever saw. Then she would start on a tour of the premises. And sometime in the course of the morning, like any active lady goose, she would lay an egg. The point about her, though, was that she never troubled her head about it. If she was walking, she went on walking; if she was having a bath, she’d never stop washing. She would let the darned thing go no matter what she was doing. Adam discovered this interesting fact, and the minute she came out of the henhouse and slid down the runway he would start stalking her. You would see her, a big gray goose, slapping her flat feet all over the world with her head in the clouds, going one place or another. And just about forty feet behind would be Adam, on his six-inch wheelbase, with his nose to the spoor and his tail on a parallel. You could n’t get that animal to do anything until the goose had performed. The days she missed a bet, he would be a pretty tired pup, but he would n’t give up till she went into the henhouse again.

I don’t think it ever occurred to him that it was immoral to get that egg, or that I might have some sort of vested interest in her. He just looked on her the way we are supposed to look on any public utility, and it did n’t cost him a cent anyway.

Well, as Adam went on in life, he showed that he had probably the best nose of any dog that had ever been on the farm. But — perhaps it was from eating so many of the goose eggs — he turned into something of a freethinker himself.

He and I would start out in the morning after pheasants, say, just about as coöperative as a dog and a man can ever get to be, digesting our breakfasts in unison and hoping for a good day. It was when we started said day’s work that our differences began to show. Adam’s idea was to make a broadcast through the field at his equivalent of eighty miles an hour, and try to catch every pheasant by the tail. It would take him less than two shakes to get every bird out of the alfalfa and into the next field, not one of them, of course, going up reasonably in gunshot. But he would n’t stop there. He would mark down the cocks and beat me over the fence and have them out of the next field before I even got to it, and by the time I was shaking loose from the barbed wire he would have done a job in the third field.

Well, I generally managed to put that down to natural exuberance, and we would march handsomely on to new territory. In this our experience would be repeated; and then I would overtake him and lick him. He never stopped panting while I licked him, but when I was done he would get up and shake himself and go off on a new spree. He never had any hard feelings. With him it was his whole soul for the sport, as he saw it — viz., he to have all the fun.

It took me a whole season to get over trying to break him of these marvelous careerings, first by lengths of clothesline, then by a choke, and always by thrashings.

The second season I gave up. I let him start off on his first real flight and then I went in the other direction and hunted for myself. He was laughing all over when we came home simultaneously by separate ways. It was only when I produced a cock pheasant that he saw there was something to this cooperative idea after all. It got him so badly that for one whole day he kept in shooting distance and we dropped our limit.

They did n’t look like much — because Adam had discovered a new way to amuse himself. He had been taught to retrieve anything, from a glove to a stick or a ball. He was fast and unerring. He once even brought in a crow at the age of eight months, by the ears. The crow, that is, had got his claws tangled in Adam’s ears. Anyway, Adam brought him back. But when it came to pheasants, Adam would find them like lightning and I would have the next thing to heart failure, after the first experience, trying to get there before he had taken out the feathers and the breast. And as a pheasant is an expert at hiding himself, and as Adam was black, I found I had to keep him in view from the moment of firing until I had got the bird in my pocket.

It was the same way when we transferred our attention to grouse, only perhaps just a little worse. Our woods are thick with underbrush. If you are going to see the bird at all, you have to get plenty of time — put him up close; and even then you are lucky if you get a pot shot as he hits an opening.

Adam does n’t lack brains. Like many clever people, he chooses to appear like a fool for his own purposes. But I did n’t know that then. I would come home telling the family how Adam would sneak in the brush and come behind me and put a whole covey off to my right rear where I could n’t possibly see them. I had caught him lying on the ground waiting for me to get by; I had n’t said anything at the time, and sure enough the birds had gone off and Adam had emerged and looked at me as much as to say, ‘ Why did n’t you let your gun go off, anyway?’ and then he had shaken himself all over, shrugged, and turned off with the obvious thought, ‘Well, I don’t believe it would have made much difference if you had.’

My mother said, ‘I don’t think he means to act that way. He’s just so effervescent he can’t hold himself in,’ and my brother, ‘Adam’s just a natural-born fool.’ I was willing, by then, to agree. It was the only thing I could do gracefully.

But when I got married my wife brought with her a little white-and-orange cocker bitch, who, though she had never hunted before, turned out a paragon. I had lots of fun and fair luck, and as a result I started leaving Adam behind. But the way he took it made me feel sorry for him. You would have thought he had been betrayed, disillusioned, and knocked on the head, not to mention having been poisoned.

Then, one morning, my wife wanted me to take her along. Naturally I was pleased. We would take Kate. It would be a good day.

It was a lovely day, with a hard white frost, and a clear thin sunlight, and not a breath of wind. The one hitch was that Kate, the bitch, had come down with a bad case of rheumatism. It would have been cruel to take her out. So I said we would take no dog at all, but still-hunt.

But, passing the dog yard, our eyes fell on Adam, as he undoubtedly intended they should, for he was seated on the roof of his kennel and looking like death.

‘Let’s take Adam,’ said my wife.

‘We’ll never see a bird,’ I said.

‘Never mind. I can’t bear to leave him looking so miserable.’

Well, I relented. Adam bounced like a phœnix from the ashes. ‘Heel!’ I said sternly, expecting to see him make a cut for the woods. But Adam heeled. He not only heeled, he stayed with his nose so close to the shoe leather that I kept hitting it. Even when we got into the woods he behaved as wonderfully as any dog could. I began to have an uneasy feeling.

I put Adam into a stand of hemlock. We got no flushes there; but my wife said, ‘I think he hunts very nicely, does n’t he?’ ‘Yes,’ I admitted, savagely. ‘I don’t understand him.’ My wife said nothing. But I have never seen a dog cover a piece more honestly and conscientiously both to bird and to gun. It went on the same way at the next cover. Adam was perfection. He kept a poker face and a serious eye on me. He put up a bird with a clear shot, and I missed by a mile. It was to be expected. I realized that Adam was really making a monkey of me. But he went even further. Not a shrug, not a lift of one ear, no shaking where we could see him.

I missed five birds in a row, the best shots I had had in a year. My wife said sympathetically, ‘I think you have been working too hard. Your eyes must be tired.’

’I do not think so,’ I replied, trembling inside my shooting jacket. ‘It is just plain lousy shooting.’

But I had no idea what was in store for me. In spite of misses, Adam went right on dishing them up like a patient chef. Finally we came to a little brook in a steep valley with cover on the far side and goldenrod on ours. I sent Adam over.

Down he went with a gay twitch of his rear, swam the brook, climbed the bank, began at the top of the valley, and worked down again toward us. The bird went out, a clear crossing shot, and even I could not miss him. He dropped below us right into the brook. I rushed out of habit to the rescue. I could see the dead bird slipping away down the brook. Before I could reach him he had floated under an overhanging bank, completely out of sight. The brook must have gone in for five or six feet and there was no way for me to reach after. Nor did the bird float out again.

‘Oh, what bad luck,’ my wife said loyally from the bank over my head. I admitted that she was right. Then came Adam! He had followed the drop of the bird clear down the valley and he came like a black bullet. ‘Fetch,’ I said in a despondent voice.

Without seeming to draw breath, Adam plunged himself into the icy current. He swam down with his nose out like an aquaplane, and expelling noble long breaths. He passed me without a glance and went right into the darkness under the bank. I heard his desperate splashing, then silence. And then I felt like cheering as he emerged a rod below me with the bird held out of the water, as a seal might balance a ball. ‘ Fetch,’ I said. ’Good dog. Good dog. Good dog! ’

Question: Did Adam look at you?

Answer: No.

Q: Did he retrieve the bird?

A: No.

Q: No?

A: Not to me.

Q: What did Adam do? Please tell me in your own words.

A: Adam climbed out laboriously on the far side of the brook. He with great difficulty, being wet, and having a large cock partridge in his mouth, hauled himself up the bank. He walked over to my wife. He sat down and lifted up the bird with not a feather mussed, except from riding in the brook.

Q: What did your wife do?

A: She did not know enough to accept the bird, so Adam lowered his head and placed it at her shoe tips. Then he backed away. And then he shook himself and then he looked at me; and then like a perfect dog he came to heel.

My wife said, ‘I thought he did n’t hunt well? Or should n’t he have brought me the bird?’

I could make, naturally, only one reply: ‘He did the proper thing.‘

Adam met my eye, with his brown serious ones, so melting, so damnably foolish.

Foolish? I will never let myself believe that again. Next day I took him out by myself. I wanted to make myself believe that the miracle had occurred.

Q: Had it?

A: Oh, yes!

Q: How did you reach that conclusion?

A: I shot a bird in ten minutes out. He fell on the other side of a hemlock. Adam traced him down perfectly. ‘Fetch,’ said I. ‘Good dog.’ No dog, no sign, no noise. I took my time and then moseyed over to the tree. Adam had removed the tail. He had eaten the insides. He was just starting on the breast.

I cut a switch; we were back on the old footing.