It still seems so. But of all the dream the most vivid part--more vivid even than the alarm clock, more real than my tumble into wetness--is the vision that remains with me of mist-swept marsh, all gray and green and yellow, with tawny haycocks and glimmerings of water and whirrings of wings and whistling bird notes and the salt smell of the sea. Yes, Jonathan was right. Dawn hunting on the marshes is different, quite different. XIV In the Wake of the Partridge "The kangaroo ran very fast, I ran faster. The kangaroo was very fat, I ate him. Kangaroo! Kangaroo!" This, the hunting-song of the Australian Bushman, is the best one I know. Without disguise or adornment, it embodies the primitive hunting instinct that is in every one of us, whether we hunt people or animals or things or ideas. Jonathan and I do not habitually hunt kangaroos, and our hunting, or at any rate my share in it, is not as uniformly successful as the Bushman's seems to have been. For our own uses we should have to amend the song something as follows:-- "The partridge-bird flew very fast, I missed him. The partridge-bird was very fat, I ate--chicken. Partridge-bird! Partridge-bird!" But we do not measure the success of our hunting by the size of our bag. The chase, the day out of doors, two or three birds at the most out of the dozen we flush, this is all that we ask. But then, we have a chicken-yard to fall back upon, which the Bushman had not. We sit before a blazing open fire, eating a hunter's breakfast--which means, nearly everything in the pantry. Coffee and toast are all very well for ordinary purposes, but they are poor things to carry you through a day's hunting, especially our kind of hunting. For a day's hunt with us is not an elaborate and well-planned affair. It does not mean a pre-arranged course over "preserved" territory, with a rendezvous at noon where the luncheon wagon comes, bringing out vast quantities of food, and taking home the morning's bag of game. It means a day's hunt that follows whither the birds lead, in a section of New England that is considered "hunted out," over ground sometimes familiar, sometimes wholly new, with no luncheon but a few crackers or a sandwich that has been stowed away in one of Jonathan's game pockets all the morning, and perhaps an apple or two, picked up in passing, from some old orchard now submerged in the woods--a hunt ending only when it is too dark to shoot, with perhaps a long tramp home again after that. No, coffee and toast would never do!