On the next morning, under a clear sky, I wound my way on foot under the limbs of kalmia and rhododendrons to the Linville falls. It is a wild approach. Over the hedges tower ancient hemlocks with mossed trunks. The blue-jay screamed through the forest, and around the boles of the trees and along the branches, squirrels, known as mountain boomers, chased each other, halting in their scampers to look down on the disturber of the solitude. Once, a brilliant-breasted pheasant, roused by my footsteps, from a bed of fern-crested rocks, sprung in air close before me, and with a startled whirr, sailed up a shaded ravine. A sportsman, with a shot-gun, could easily have winged the bird in its flight, thereby securing a valuable trophy for the taxidermist. The cock pheasant of the mountains has not a shabby feather on his body: They are found in many sections of the mountains, but not in great numbers. The hollow drum-like sound caused by beating their wings against their bodies, is in most instances their death tattoo. At its sound from the neighboring cove, the hunter takes down his rifle, creeps near the favorite log, and generally makes a dead shot. An old mountaineer, famous as a narrator of bear and fish stories, was particularly fond of telling one relating to pheasant shooting. One autumn day, having already marked the forest locality from which the drum of a pheasant resounded every morning, he crept near with his rifle. The bird had just jumped in place and was drumming within his sight. He took deliberate aim and fired. On running to the log he discovered a red fox struggling in his death throes on the opposite side of the log, and in his mouth a dead pheasant. Reynard, as the mountaineer explained, marking the frequented log, had secreted himself close beside it, and, while the mountaineer was aiming, was preparing to seize the bird, and did so at the moment the trigger was pulled.