Clear and cold. This, 18° at sunrise. Off after breakfast taking Shot. Drove up into Prospect St. where I tried and beat the Cotton sums for grain all the forenoon, but did not move anything except two grouse and a bird which puzzled me completely. The latter I came across in this wise: Shot had been following a scent for some distance and I was hurrying through some second growth oak brush trying to keep as near him as possible when a bird apparently of a dark slate color and it seemed to me nearly as large as a turkey buzz with a prodigious whirring & flutter from under my very feet, certainly within 4 feet of me. I was so much startled by its size and near proportion that I fired rather hastily, but a few feathers floating back to me on the wind convinced me that I had not made quite a clean miss; one of those which I picked up was a complete plume & I cannot conjecture what its owner could have been. I made a most careful search all through the woods ahead but was unable to start it again, and think it must have taken to some of the pine trees near. As it was a long distance from any house it could scarcely have been a domesticated bird, though its flight was so slow as rather to suggest that hypothesis. Found one long shot at a grouse and killed a very fine & Coloptes auratus as it was flying over.