A Commentary by John Galsworthy — Read

Often in the ride of some Scotch wood I used to stand, clutching my gun, with eyes moving from right to left, from left to right. Every nerve and fibre of my body would receive and answer to the slightest movements, the smallest noises, the faintest scents. The acrid sweetness of the spruce-trees in the mist, the bite of innumerable midges, the feel of the deep, wet, mossy heather underfoot, the brown-grey twilight of the wood, the stillness -- these were poignant as they never will be again. And slowly, back of that stillness, the noises of the beaters would begin. Gentle and regular, at first -- like the ending of a symphony rather than its birth -- they would swell, then drop and fade away completely. In that unexpected silence a squirrel scurried out along a branch, sat a moment looking, and scurried back; or, with its soft, blunt flight, an owl would fly across.

Then, with a shrill, far "Mar-r-rk! " the beaters' chorus would rise again, drowned for an instant by the crack of the keepers' guns; louder and louder it came, rhythmically, inexorably nearer. In the ride little shivers of wind shook the drops of warm mist off the needles of the spruce, and a half-veiled sun faintly warmed and coloured everything. Stealing through heather and fern would come a rabbit, confiding in the space before him and the ride where he was wont to sun himself. At a shot he flung his mortal somersault, or disappeared into a burrow, reached too soon. To see him lie there dead in the brown-grey twilight of the trees would give one a strange pleasure -- a feeling such as some casual love affair will give a man, the pleasure of a primitive virility expressed -- but to watch him disappear into the earth would irritate, for he had got his death, and, dead within the earth, he would not do one any sort of credit. Nor was it nice to think that he was dying slowly, so one forbore to think.