Up one trunk it went like a brown flash, and a moment later, out, cackling from its top, flew two partridges.

Down to the ground, sinuous, graceful, incessantly active flashed the marten.

Along a log it raced in undulating leaps; in the middle it stopped as though frozen, to gaze intently into a bed of sedge; with three billowy bounds its sleek form reached the sedge, flashed in and out again with a mouse in its snarling jaws; a side leap now, and another squeaker was squeakless, and another.

The three were slain, then thrown aside, as the brown terror scanned a flight of ducks passing over.

Into a thicket of willow it disappeared and out again like an eel going through the mud, then up a tall stub where woodpecker holes were to be seen.