The mystery was solved in a sudden manner. The keeper had been setting baited traps--of the “gin” variety--tempting the unknown with the entrails of rabbits. But he caught nothing save a mangy stoat, blind in one eye and the other filming over with age. The gins were of no avail. The keeper kept fowls in his garden. One day he was sitting in the porch of his cottage, smoking after the midday meal, and ruminating on what the squire had said about giving up the rearing of pheasants. His fowls were strutting and scratching: one had recently produced an egg and was proclaiming the fact with unmelodious insistency. There came a hissing as of something falling: an alarmed curse from a hen. The keeper jumped up, swearing at the bluish tumbling of narrow wings that had gone over the hedge. One of his fowls was kicking the air spasmodically. There was blood on the path. He picked the hen up--it was headless. The keeper swore; he knew what had caused the mischief among his longtails and duck. It was a big hawk--of a kind never seen before. So swiftly had it come that the fowl was decapitated by those dagger spikes on the hind claw of the raider’s feet. * * * * * One day a journalist was walking in a meadow. The meadow was near to a copse containing a dozen tall elm trees. In the elms were nearly a hundred black patches--a colony of rooks at their old nests. The rookery had been deserted in June, when old and young birds took to the fields and made local migrations. That morning a mist had lain in the meadow and the rooks had known that it was time to return to the colony. As the journalist, happy in the October sunshine, passed near the rookery, he was surprised to see the whole flock--some hundreds of birds--rise with harsh imperative cries into the air. The beating of many jet wings caused a vast soughing, and the leaves below the trees rose and flitter-fluttered with the winnowing. As suddenly as it had begun, the outcry ceased. Yet still the birds climbed higher. Soon they were just specks against the blue, wheeling like a ring of smoke in one great circle. Then the agitated cries came again. One segment of the circle broke into falling and diving, zooming and slipping, birds, as though a strong wind had scattered them every way. The journalist was mystified. He sat down to watch, and to discover the reason. Two of the rooks had left the circle, and were diving to earth. As they came nearer he saw that their wings hung limp. They fell a hundred yards away, and he ran over to them. They were dead. Picking one up, it was warm, the sunlight gleaming on the hues of its wings, glinting green and purple. Their backs were bare of feathers, and gaping with a terrible wound. He was more mystified, then thought that for some inexplicable reason the other rooks had pecked them to death. But why? He was more puzzled as he thought. He was well known for his puzzles.