"... In a half sleep we dream, And dreaming hear thee still, O singing lark! That singest like an angel in the clouds." The quail (_Oreortyx pictus_) has one long, sweet whistle, with the peculiarity that it is almost impossible to follow up and find the bird by his note; it sounds so close that you expect the bird is standing on the nearest log, but you look in vain; then it calls you from a hundred yards off, among the brush; again from the other side, and you try to drive him out of the left-hand thicket; but all the while your dog is working in the wood twenty yards ahead. You turn your head just in time to see a dark-brown bird flit like a flash across the road and disappear. In the shooting-season the quail is one of the hardest birds to kill. They run in front of the dog in the brushwood with the greatest speed, then rise and fly for fifty or a hundred yards like lightning, and then take to their heels again. In harvest-time the grouse (_Tetrao obscurus_), here called the partridge, come down from the fir-woods to the grain-fields and give good sport. They frequent the corners of the fields, nearest to the brush, and as the brood rise, ten or a dozen in number, and wing quickly across to shelter in the wood, it reminds one of old times and of partridge-shooting in Norfolk or Suffolk ten years ago. When the grain is cleared off, the grouse keep to the slips and corners of brush nearest to the field for some weeks. As the season advances, they take to the fir-woods again, and lose their interest to the sportsmen by becoming in the first place almost impossible to find, and next worthless for the table from their turpentine taste. After the grouse have left the harvest-fields and got back into the woods, the shot-gun sportsman must be quick indeed to shoot as the bird rises and makes for the nearest tall fir. There he perches and defies you. The rifle-shot waits till the bird has taken up its place on the bough and peers over to look after the dog; then he shoots and often kills, though the head and neck of a grouse thirty or forty yards off is not a very big mark. The ruffed grouse (_Bonassa Sabinensis_), here called the pheasant, is a fourth larger than the common grouse, with beautiful bright-brown plumage, dashed with yellow, and a spreading tail. He frequents the oak-grubs and scattering brush of the foot-hills, and is found all through the less dense portions of the woods of the Coast Range. He gives good sport, rising to the dog and giving a longer flight, and offering the sportsman a fairer chance. [Sidenote: _WILD GEESE._]