Any one can go to a meet, but to know all the peculiarities of the covers is only given to those who have ridden over the country these forty years.

In this corner a detached copse of spruce fir keeps off the wind--the direction of which they have noted--and in this shelter it is almost warm.
The distant crack of a whip, the solitary cry of a hound, a hollow shout, and similar sounds, come frequently, and now and then there is an irrepressible stir in the little group as they hear one of the many false alarms that always occur in drawing a great wood.

To these noises they are keenly sensitive, but utterly ignore the signs of other life around them.
A pheasant, alarmed by the hounds, comes running quietly, thinking to escape into the line of isolated copses that commences here; but, suddenly confronted by the horsemen just outside, rises with an uproar, and goes sailing down over the fields.

Two squirrels, happy in the mild weather, frisk out of the copse into the dank grass, till a curvet of one of the horses frightens them up into the firs again.
Horses and men are becoming impatient.

'That dalled keeper has left an earth open,' remarks one of the riders.