Page:The Life of the Fields, Jefferies, 1884.djvu/179

Rh hair of the head is somewhat odd. By all these signs a fish knows a man immediately, and as certainly as any creature moving on land would know him. There is no instinctive or hereditary fear of man at all—it is acquired by observation (which a thousand facts demonstrate); so that we are quite justified in believing that a fish really does notice some or all of these attributes of its enemy. What the poacher or wild hunter has to do is to conceal these attributes. To hide the two-step, he walks as slowly as possible, not putting the foot down hard, but feeling the ground first, and gradually pressing it. In this way progress may be made without vibration. The earth is not shaken, and does not communicate the sound to the water. This will bring him to the verge of the place where the fish is basking. Very probably not only fish, but animals and some birds hear as much by the vibration of the earth as by the sound travelling in the atmosphere, and depend as much upon their immediate perception of the slightest tremor of the earth as upon recognition by the ear in the manner familiar to ourselves. When rabbits, for instance, are out feeding in the grass, it is often possible to get quite close to them by walking in this way, extremely slowly, and carefully placing the foot by slow degrees upon the ground. The earth is then merely pressed, and not stepped upon at all, so that there is no jar. By doing this I have often moved up within gunshot of rabbits without the least aid from cover. Once now and then I have walked across a field straight at them. Something, however, depends on the direction of the wind, for then the