“It’s not likely,” said Professor Warren irritably. “But what is it?”

She looked at him peculiarly as he hesitated. Happening upon the dead rabbits had confirmed his darkest suspicions—even those he would not fully admit to himself. He had no explanation yet, but he had a clue which was completely incredible. If he told anybody what he’d experienced, he’d be thought insane.

He named his profession and his connection with Forest and Field, and explained that he was trying to track down something important to sportsmen. Game animals were being killed in a strange manner. Something new and deadly was responsible. He had an extremely improbable idea about the matter, and he hoped that as a biologist and a scientific observer she might have noticed something.

She regarded him oddly. Then she pointed.

“Is that the sort of thing you mean?”

He looked. There was a tiny, pitiful heap of draggled feathers about a tiny skeleton with a sharp beak. There were eggs, befouled by rain. “A partridge,” he said, “dead on its nest. Yes.” He approved of Professor Warren. She noticed things.

“There are half a dozen others like that,” she said, still regarding him with a peculiar expression, “within a quarter of a mile. It struck me as strange. In fact—” She looked at his hands.

Lane realized that he still gripped the clumps of dead leaves he’d held before his face when leaving the clearing of the dead rabbits. He dropped them and said awkwardly: “I had a good reason for that—just now. But I suppose I look like a lunatic.”

Professor Warren grunted inelegantly. “Not quite,” she said. “Of course, holding bouquets of trash while introducing onesself isn’t normal, but I never heard of a lunatic who thought his actions strange. You do. And if you’re concerned with wild life you may be able to help me in some trouble I’m having with buzzards. This business is part of it,” she added dourly, with a wave of her hand toward the enigmatic arrangement of copper screen wire. “Come down to the trailer and have some coffee. What do you know about the manners and customs of buzzards?”