The pheasants revolt (almost)
On the two or three days leading up to High Park’s shoot, I hadn’t seen many pheasants while doing the round of the feed rides each morning. This inevitably made me suspect that we were short of birds.
Perhaps the mild weather of recent days had persuaded some of them to forget their solemn duty to stay contentedly at home, helping themselves to my generous daily ration of corn and, as an expression of their gratitude, feeling ready and willing to fly over my friends — at a decent height, of course — when invited from time to time to do so by the proximity of hunting spaniels.
A shortage of birds was not all that I feared, because the
