Chapter Three.
In the Fields.
Much other work besides preventing poaching falls upon the keeper, such as arranging for the battue, stopping fox “earths” when the hounds are coming, feeding the young birds and often the old stock in severe weather, and even some labour of an agricultural character.
A successful battue requires no little finesse and patience exercised beforehand; weeks are spent in preparing for the amusement of a few hours. The pheasants are sometimes accustomed to leave the wood in a certain direction chosen as specially favourable for the sport—some copses at a little distance are used as feeding places, so that the birds naturally work that way. Much care is necessary to keep a good head of game together, not too much scattered about on the day fixed upon. The difficulty is to prevent them from wandering off in the early morning; and men are stationed like sentinels at the usual points of egress to drive them back. The beaters are usually men who have previously been employed in the woods and possess local knowledge of the ground, and are instructed in their duties long before: nothing must be left to the spur of the moment. Something of the skill of the general is wanted to organise a great battue: an instinctive insight into the best places to plant the guns, while the whole body of sportsmen, beaters, keepers with ammunition, should move in concert.
The gamekeeper finds his work fall upon him harder now than it used to do: first, sportsmen look for a heavier return of killed and wounded; next, they are seldom willing to take much personal trouble to find the game, but like it in a manner brought to them; and, lastly, he thinks the shooting season has grown shorter. Gentlemen used to reside at home the greater part of the winter and spread their shooting over many months. Now, the seaside season has moved on, and numbers are by the beach at the time when formerly they were in the woods. Then others go abroad; the country houses now advertised as “to let” are almost innumerable. Time was when the local squire would have thought it derogatory to his dignity to make a commodity of his ancient mansion; now there seems quite a competition to let, and absenteeism is a reality of English as well as Irish country life. At least, such is the gamekeeper’s idea, and he finds a confirmation of it in the sudden rush, as it were, made upon his preserves. Gentlemen who once spent weeks at the great house, and were out with him every day till he grew to understand the special kind of sport which pleased them most, and could consequently give them satisfaction, are now hardly arrived before they are gone again. With all his desire to find them game he is often puzzled, for game has its whims and fancies and will not accommodate itself to their convenience.
Then the keeper thinks that shooting does not begin so early as it once did. Partridges may be found in the market on the morning of the glorious First of September; but if you ask him how they get there, your reply is a pod and a wink. Nobody gets up early enough in the morning for that now: very often the first day passes by without a single shot being fired. The eagerness for the stubble and its joys is not so marked. This last season the late harvest interfered very much with shooting; you cannot walk through wheat or barley, and while the crops are standing the partridges have too much cover.
Many gentlemen again keep their pheasants till nearly Christmas: October goes by frequently without a bird being brought down in some preserves. Early in the new year, if the weather be mild, as it has been so often latterly, the birds begin to show signs of a disposition to pair off, and in consequence the guns are laid aside before the certificates expire. So that the keeper thinks the actual shooting season has grown shorter and the sport is more concentrated, and taken in rushes, as it were. This causes additional work and anxiety. If the family are away they still require a regular and sometimes a large supply of game for the table, which he has to keep up himself—assistants could hardly be trusted: the opportunity is too tempting.
Though a loyal and conscientious man, in his secret heart he does not like the hounds: and though of course he gets tipped for stopping the earths, yet it is a labour not exactly to his taste. The essence of game preserving is quiet, repose; the characteristic of the hunt is noise, horn, whoop, whip, the cry of the hounds, and the crash of the bushes as the field takes a jump. Students and bookworms like the quiet dust which settles in their favourite haunts—the housemaid’s broom is fatal to retrospective thought: so the gamekeeper views the squadrons charging through his cherished copses, “poaching” up the greensward of the winding “drives,” breaking down the fences, much as the artist views the sacrilegious broom “putting his place to rights.” Pheasant, and hare, and rabbit all are sent helter-skelter anywhere, and take a day or two to settle down again.
Yet it is not so much the real genuine hunt that he dislikes: it is the loafers it brings together on foot. Roughs from the towns, idle fellows from the villages, cobblers, tinkers, gipsies, the nondescript “residuum,” all congregate in crowds, delighted at the chance of penetrating into the secret recesses of woods only thrown open two or three times a year. It is impossible to stay the inroad—the gates are wide open, the rails pulled down, and trespass is but a fiction for the hour. To see these gentry roaming at their ease in his woods is a bitter trial to the keeper, who grinds his teeth in silence as they pass him with a grin, perfectly aware of and enjoying his spleen. Somehow or other these fellows always manage to get in the way just where the fox was on the point of breaking cover; if he makes a clear start and heads for the meadows, before he has passed the first field a ragged jacket appears over the hedge, and then the language of the huntsman is not always good to listen to.
The work of rearing the young broods of pheasants is a trying and tedious one. The keeper has his own specific treatment, in which he has implicit faith, and laughs to scorn the pheasant-meals and feeding-stuffs advertised in the papers. He mixes it himself, and likes no one prying about to espy his secret, though in reality his success is due to watchful care and not to any particular nostrum. The most favourable spot for rearing is a small level meadow, if possible without furrows, which has been fed off close to the ground and is situated high and dry, and yet well sheltered with wood all round. Damp is a great enemy of the brood, and long grass wet with dew in the early morning sometimes proves fatal if the delicate young birds are allowed to drag themselves through it.
Besides the coops, here and there bushes, cut for the purpose, are piled in tolerably large heaps. The use of these is for the broods to run under if a hawk appears in the sky; and it is amusing to watch how soon the little creatures learn to appreciate this shelter. In the spring the greater part of the keeper’s time is occupied in this way: he spends hours upon hours in the hundred and one minutiae which ensure success. This breeding-time is the great anxiety of the year: on it all the shooting depends. He shakes his head if you hint that perhaps it would save trouble to purchase the pheasants ready for shooting from the dealers who now make a business of supplying them for the battue. He looks upon such a practice as the ruin of all true woodcraft, and a proof of the decay of the present generation.
In addition to the pheasants, the partridges, wild as they are, require some attention—the eggs have to be looked after. The mowers in the meadows frequently lay their nests bare beneath the sweep of the scythe: the old bird sometimes sits so close as to have her legs cut off by the sharp steel. Occasionally a rabbit, in the same way, is killed by the point of the blade as he lingers in his form. The mowers receive a small sum for every egg they bring, the eggs being placed under brood hens, kept for the purpose. But as a partridge’s egg from one field is precisely like one from another field, the keeper may find, if he does not look pretty sharp after the mowers on the estate, that they have been bribed by a trifle extra to carry the eggs to another man at a distance. A very unpleasant feeling often arises from suspicions of this kind.
His agricultural labour consists in superintending the cultivation of the small squares left for the growth of grain in the centre of the copses, to feed and attract the pheasants, and to keep them from wandering. These have to be dug up with the spade—there would be no room for using a plough—and spade-husbandry is rather slow work. An eye has therefore to be kept on the labourers thus employed lest they get into mischief. The grain (on the straw) is sometimes given to the birds laid across skeleton trestles, roughly made of stout ash sticks, so as to raise it above the ground and enable them to get at it better.
Ash woods are cut every year, or rather they are mapped out into so many squares, the poles in which come to maturity in succession—while one is down another is growing up, and thus in a fixed course of years the entire wood is thrown and renovated. A certain time has, of course, to be allowed for purchasers to remove their property, and, as the roads through the woods are often axle-deep in mud, in a wet spring it has frequently to be extended. So many men being about, the keeper has to be about also: and then when at last the gates are nailed up, the cattle turned out to grass in the adjacent fields often break in and gnaw the young ash-shoots. In this way a trespassing herd will throw back acres of wood for a whole year, and destroy valuable produce. Properly speaking, this should come under the attention of the bailiff or steward of the demesne; but as the keeper and his men are so much more likely to discover the cattle first, they are expected to be on the watch.
After spending so many years of his life among trees, it is natural that the keeper should feel a special interest, almost an affection for them. A branch ruthlessly torn down, a piece of bark stripped from the trunk with no possible object save destruction, a nail driven in—perhaps to break the teeth of the saw when at last the tree comes to be cut up into planks—these things annoy him almost as much as if the living wood were human and could feel. For this reason, he too, like the members of the hunt, cordially detests the use of wire for fencing, now becoming so frequent. It cuts into the trees, and checks their growth and spoils their symmetry, if it does not actually kill them.
Sometimes the wire, which is stout and strong, is twisted right round the stem of a young oak, say a foot or more in diameter, which is thus made to play the part of a post. A firmer support could not be found; but as the tree swells with the rising sap, and expands year by year, the iron girdle circling about it does not “give” or yield to this slow motion. It bites into the bark, which in time curls over and so actually buries the metal in the growing wood. Now this cannot but be injurious to the tree itself, and it is certainly unsightly.
One wire is seldom thought enough. Two or three are stretched along, and each of these causes an ugly scar. If allowed to remain long enough, the young wood will solidify and harden about the wire, which then cannot be withdrawn; and in consequence when taken finally to the sawpit, some three or four feet of the very “butt” and best part of the trunk will be found useless. No sawyer will risk his implement—which requires some hours’ work to sharpen—in wood which he suspects to contain concealed iron. So that, besides the injury to the appearance of the tree, there is a pecuniary loss. Even when the wires are not twisted round, but merely rub against one side of the bark, the same scars are caused there, though not to such an extent. Rough and strong as the bark seems to the touch, it speedily abrades under the constant pressure of the metal.
The keeper thinks that all those owners of property who take a pleasure in their trees should see to this and prevent it. There is nothing so detestable as this wire fencing in his idea. You cannot even sit upon it for rest, as you can on the old-fashioned post and rails. The convenient gaps which used to be found in every hedge at the corner are blocked now with an ugly rusty iron string stretched across, awkward to get over or under; while as for a horseman getting by, you cannot pull it down as you could “draw” a wooden rail, and if you try to uncoil it from the blackthorn stem to which it is attached the jagged end is tolerably certain to scrape the skin from your fingers.
The keeper looks upon this simply as another sign of the idleness and dislike of taking trouble characteristic of the times. To set up a line of posts and rails requires some little skill; a man must know his business to stop a gap with a single rail or pole, fixing the ends firmly in among the underwood; even to fit thorn bushes in properly, so as to effectually bar the way, needs some judgment: but anybody can stretch a wire along and twist it round a tree. Hedge-carpentering was, in fact, a distinct business, followed by one or two men in every locality; but iron now supplants everything, and the hedges themselves are disappearing.
When the hedgers and ditchers were put to work to cut a hedge—the turn of every hedge comes round once in so many years—they used to be instructed, if they came across a sapling oak, ash, or elm, to spare it, and cut away the bushes to give it full play. But now they chop and slash away without remorse, and the young forest-tree rising up with a promise of future beauty falls before the billhook. In time the full-grown oaks and elms of the hedgerow decay, or are felled; and in consequence of this careless destruction of the saplings there is nothing to fill their place. The charm of English meadows consisted in no small degree in the stately trees, whose shadows lengthened with the declining sun and gave such pleasant shelter from the heat. Soon, however, if the rising generation of trees is thus cut down, they must become bare, open, and unlovely.
There is another mistake, often committed by owners of timber, who go to the other extreme, and in their intense admiration of trees refuse to permit the felling of a single one. Now in the forest or the woodlands, away from the park or pleasure-grounds, the old hollow trees are things of beauty, and to cut them down for firewood seems an act of vandalism. But it is quite another thing with an avenue or those groups which dot the surface of a park. Here, if a tree falls and there is no other to take its place, a gap is the result, which cannot be filled up, perhaps, under fifty or sixty years.
Let any one stroll along beneath a stately avenue of elm or beech, such as are not difficult to find in rural districts, and are the pride and boast—and justly so—of this country, and, examining the trees with critical eye, what will he see? Three or four elms, I will say, are passed, and are evidently sound; but the fifth—a careless observer might go by it without remarking anything unusual—is really rotten to the centre. At the foot of the huge trunk, and growing out of it, is a bunch of sickly-looking fungi. Thrust your walking-stick sharply against the black wood there and it penetrates easily, and with a little pushing goes in a surprising distance; the tree seems undermined with rottenness. This decay really runs up the trunk perpendicularly: look, there are signs of it above at the knot-hole, thirty feet high, where more fungus is flourishing, as it always does in dead damp wood. The rain soaks in there, and filtrates slowly down the trunk, whose very heart as it were is eaten away, while outside all is fair enough.
Presently there arises a mighty wind, the tree snaps clean off twenty feet above the ground, and the upper part falls, a ponderous ruin, carrying with it one of the finest boughs of its nearest companion, and destroying its symmetry also. When examined, it appears that the trunk is totally useless as timber: this noble-seeming elm is fit for nothing but fuel. Or, perhaps, if there be water meadows on the estate, the farmers may be glad of it to act as a huge pipe to convey the fertilising stream across a ditch, or over a brook lying at a lower level. For this purpose, of course, the rotten part is scooped out: often the trunk is sawn down the middle, so as to make a double length.
But what a gap it has left in the great avenue! In a minute the growth of a century gone, the delight of generations swept away, and no living man, hardly the heir in his cradle, can hope to see that unsightly gap filled up.
The keeper does not hesitate to say that of the great trees in the avenues numbers stand in constant danger of such overthrow; and so it is that by slow degrees so many of the kings of the forest have disappeared without leaving successors. No care is taken to plant fresh saplings, no care is taken to select and remove the trees which have passed the meridian of their existence, and the final result is the extinction of the avenue or group. Perhaps the temper of the times is to blame for this neglect: men look only to the day and live fast. There is a sense of uncertainty in the atmosphere of the age: no one can be sure that the acorns he plants will be permitted to reach their prime, the hoofs of the “iron horse” may trample them down as fresh populations grow. So the avenues die out, and the keeper mourns to think that in the days to come their place will be vacant.
Suddenly he pauses in his walk, stoops, and points out to me in the grass the white, smooth, round knob-like tops of several young mushrooms which are pushing their way up. He carefully covers these with some pieces of dead bark and desiccated dung, so that none of “them lurching fellows as comes round shan’t see ’em”—with a wink at his own cunning—so as to preserve them till they have grown larger. He advises me never to partake of mushrooms unless certain that they have not grown under oak trees: he will have it that even the true edible mushroom is hurtful if it springs beneath the shadow of the oak. And he is not singular in this belief.
Chatting about trees, he points out one or two oaks, not at all rotten, but split half-way up the trunk—the split is perfectly visible—yet they have not been struck by lightning; and he cannot explain it. Looking back upon the wood as we leave it with intense pride in his trees, he gives me a rough version of the old story: how a knight of ancient days, who had done the king some great service, was rewarded with a broad tract of land which he was to hold for three crops. He sowed acorns, and thus secured himself and descendants a tenure of almost 3,000 years, at least, according to Dryden:—
The monarch oak, the patriarch of trees,
Shoots, rising up, and spreads by slow degrees;
Three centuries he grows, and three he stays
Supreme in state, and in three more decays.
The keeper wishes he had such an opportunity. The knight, in his idea, reached the acme of wisdom with his three crops of nearly a thousand years each.
His own kingdom may be said to begin with the park, and the land “in demesne” to quote the quaint language of the Domesday Book: a record not without its value as an outline picture of English scenery eight centuries ago, telling us that near this village was a wood, near that a stretch of meadow and a mill, here again arable land and corn waving in the breeze, and everywhere the park and domain of the feudal lords. The beauty of the park consists in its “breadth” as an artist would say—the meadows with their green frames of hedges are cabinet pictures, lovely, but small; this is life size, a broad cartoon from the hand of Nature. The sward rises and rolls along in undulations like the slow heave of an ocean wave. Besides the elms there is a noble avenue of limes, and great oaks scattered here and there, under whose ample shade the cattle repose in the heat of the day.
In summer from out the leafy chambers of the limes there falls the pleasant sound of bees innumerable, the voice of whose trembling wings lulls the listening ear as the drowsy sunshine weighs the eyelid till I walk the avenue in a dream. It leads out into the park—no formal gravel drive, simply a footpath on the sward between the flowering trees: a path that becomes less and less marked as I advance, and finally fades away, where the limes cease, in the broad level of the opening “greeny field.” These honey-bees seem to fly higher and to exhibit much more activity than the great humble-bee: here in the limes they must be thirty feet above the ground. Wasps also frequently wing their way at a considerable elevation, and thus it is that the hive-bee and the wasp so commonly enter the upper windows of houses. When its load of honey is completed, the bee, too, returns home in a nearly straight line, high enough in the air to pass over hedges and such obstacles without the labour of rising up and sinking again.
The heavy humble-bee is generally seen close to the earth, and often goes down into the depths of the dry ditches, and may there be heard buzzing slowly along under the arch of briar and bramble. He seems to lose his way now and then in the tangled undergrowth of the woods; and if a footstep disturbs and alarms him, it is amusing to see his desperate efforts to free himself hastily from the interlacing grass-blades and ferns.
When the sap is rising, the bark of the smaller shoots of the lime-tree “slips” easily—i.e. it can be peeled in hollow cylinders if judiciously tapped and loosened by gentle blows from the back of a knife. The ploughboys know this, and make whistles out of such branches, as they do also from the willow, and even the sycamore in the season when the sap comes up in its flood-tide.
It is difficult to decide at what time of the year the park is in its glory. The may-flower on the great hawthorn trees in spring may perhaps claim the pre-eminence, filling the soft breeze with exquisite odour. These here are trees, not bushes, standing separate, with thick gnarled stems so polished by the constant rubbing of cattle as almost to shine like varnish. The may-bloom, pure white in its full splendour, takes a dull reddish tinge as it fades, when a sudden shake will bring it down in showers. A flowering tree, I fancy, looks best when apart and not one of a row. In the latter case you can only see two sides and not all round it. Here tall horse-chestnut trees stand single—one great silvery candelabrum of blossom. Wood-pigeons appear to have a liking for this tree. Nor must the humble crab-tree be forgotten; a crab-tree in bloom is a lovely sight.
The idea of a park is associated with peace and pleasure, yet even here there is one spot where the passions of men have left their mark. As previously hinted, the gamekeeper, like most persons with little book-learning and who take their impressions from nature, is somewhat superstitious, and regards this place as “unkid”—i.e. weird, uncanny. One particular green “drive” into the wood opening on the park had always been believed to be a part of a military track used many ages ago, but long since ploughed up for the greater part of its length, and only preserved here by the accident of passing through a wood. At last some labourers grubbing trees near the mouth of the drive came upon a number of human skeletons, close beneath the surface, and in their confused arrangement presenting every sign of hasty interment, as if after battle. Since then the keeper avoids the spot; nor will he, hardy as he is, go near it at night; not even in the summer moonlight, when the night is merely a prolongation of the day.
There is nothing unusual in such a discovery: skeletons are found in all manner of places. I recollect seeing one dug out from the bank of a brook within two feet of the stream. The place was perhaps in the olden time covered with forest (traces of forest are to be found everywhere, as in the names of hamlets), and therefore more concealed than at present. Or, possibly, the stream, in the slow passage of centuries, may have worn its way far from its original bed.
It is strange to think of, yet it is true enough, that, beautiful as the country is, with its green meadows and graceful trees, its streams and forests and peaceful homesteads, it would be difficult to find an acre of ground that has not been stained with blood. A melancholy reflection this, that carries the mind backwards, while the thrush sings on the bough, through the nameless skirmishes of the Civil War, the cruel assassinations of the rival Roses, down to the axes of the Saxons and the ghastly wounds they made. Everywhere under the flowers are the dead.
Not this park in particular, but others as well form pages of history. The keeper, in fact, can claim an ancient origin for his office, dating back to the forester with a “mark” a year and a suit of green as his wages, and numbering in his predecessors Joscelin, the typical keeper in Scott’s novel of “Woodstock,” who aided the escape of King Charles. Ever since the days of the Norman King who loved the tall deer as if he were their father—in the words of his contemporary—and set store by the hares that they too should go free, the keeper has not ceased out of the land.
There are always more small birds at the edge or just outside a wood than inside it; so that after leaving a meadow with blackbird, thrush, and finches merry in the hedges, the wood seems quite silent and deserted save by a solitary robin. This is speaking of the smaller birds. The great missel-thrush especially delights in the open space of the park dotted with groups of trees. The missel-thrush is a lonely bird, and somehow seems like an outlaw—as if, though not precisely dangerous, he was looked upon with suspicion by the other birds, which will frequently quit a bush or tree directly he alights upon it. Yet he builds near houses, and year after year in the same spot. I knew a large yew-tree which stood almost in front and within a few yards of a sitting-room window in which the missel-thrush had regularly built its nest for twelve successive years. These birds are singularly bold in defence of the nest, flying round and chattering at those who would disturb it.
In the ha-ha wall of the park, which is made of loose stones or without mortar, the tomtit, or titmouse, has his nest. He creeps in between the stones, following the crannies for a surprising distance. Near here the partridges roost on the ground; they like an open space far from hedges, afraid, perhaps, of weasels and rats. On the other side, where the wood comes up, if you watch quietly, the pheasants step in lordly pride out into the grass; so that there is no place without its especial class of life.
Perhaps with the exception of our parks and hills, there is scarcely any portion of southern England now where a grand charge of cavalry could take place—scarcely any open champaign country fit for operations of that kind with horse. In the Civil War even, how constantly we read of “lining the hedge with match,” and now with enclosures everywhere the difficulty would apparently be great, despite good roads.
Park-fed beef is thought by many to be superior, because the cattle run free—almost wild—the entire year through, winter and summer, and have nothing but their natural food, grass and hay: in strong contrast with the bullocks shut up in stalls and forced forward with artificial food. A great number of parks have been curtailed in size as land became more valuable—the best ground being selected and hedged off for purely agricultural purposes; so that it not uncommonly happens that the actual park is the poorest soil in the district, having for that reason remained longest in a condition nearly resembling the original state of the country. So that when agitators of Communistic views lay stress upon the waste of land used for pleasure purposes they frequently declaim in utter ignorance of the facts, which are in exact opposition to their theories.
Like animals and birds, plants have their favourite haunts: violets love a bank with a southern aspect, especially if there be a hedge at the back for further shelter. Where you have by chance lighted upon a wild flower once you may generally reckon upon finding it again next year—such as the white variety of the bluebell or wild hyacinth, for which, unless you mark the place, you may search in vain amid the crowded blue bloom of the commoner sort. The orchis, with its purple flower and dark green spotted leaf, in the virtue of whose roots as a love-potion the old people still believe, the strange-looking adder’s tongue, the modest wild strawberry, with its tiny but piquant flavoured fruit, all have their special resorts. Even the cowslips have their ways: by brooks sometimes a larger variety grows; nor is there a sweeter flower than its delicate yellow with small velvety brown spots, like moles on beauty’s cheek.
In autumn, when the leaves turn colour, the groups of trees in the park are more effective in an artistic point of view than those in the woods (unless overlooked from a hill close by, when it is like glancing along a roof of gold), because they stand out clear, and are not confused or lost in the general glow. But it is evening now; and see—yonder the fox steals out from the cover, wending his way down into the meadows, where he will follow the furrows along their course, mousing as he goes.
Chapter Four.
His Dominions:—the Woods—Meadows—and Water.
There is a part of the wood where the bushes grow but thinly and the ash-stoles are scattered at some distance from each other. It is on a steep slope—almost cliff—where the white chalk comes to the surface. On the edge above rise tall beech trees with smooth round trunks, whose roots push and project through the wall of chalk, and bend downwards, sometimes dislodging lumps of rubble to roll headlong among the bushes below. A few small firs cling half-way up, and a tangled, matted mass of briar and bramble climbs nearly to them, with many a stout thistle flourishing vigorously.
To get up this cliff is a work of some little difficulty: it is done by planting the foot on the ledges of rubble, or in the holes which the rabbits have made, holding tight to roots which curl and twist in fantastic shapes, or to the woodbine hanging in festoons from branch to branch. The rubble under foot crumbles and slips, the roots tear up bodily from the thin soil, the branches bend, and the woodbine “gives,” and the wayfarer may readily descend much more rapidly than he desires. Not that serious consequences would ensue from a roll down forty feet of slope; but the bed of briar and bramble at the bottom is not so soft as it might be. The rabbits seem quite at home upon the steepest spot; they may be found upon much higher and more precipitous chalk cliffs than this, darting from point to point with ease.
Once at the summit under the beeches, and there a comfortable seat may be found upon the moss. The wood stretches away beneath for more than a mile in breadth, and beyond, it winds the narrow mere glittering in the rays of the early spring sunshine. The bloom is on the blackthorn, but not yet on the may; the hedges are but just awakening from their long winter sleep, and the trees have hardly put forth a sign. But the rooks are busily engaged in the trees of the park, and away yonder at the distant colony in the elms of the meadows.
The wood is restless with life: every minute a pigeon rises, clattering his wings, and after him another; and so there is a constant fluttering and motion above the ash-poles. The number of wood-pigeons breeding here must be immense. Later on, if you walk among the ash, you may find a nest every half-dozen yards. It is formed of a few twigs making a slender platform, on which the glossy white egg is laid, and where the bird will sit till you literally thrust her off her nest with your walking-stick. Such slender platforms, if built in the hedgerow, so soon as the breeze comes would assuredly be dashed to pieces; but here the wind only touches the tops of the poles, and causes them to sway gently with a rattling noise, and the frail nest is not injured. When the pigeon or dove builds in the more exposed hedgerows the nest is stronger, and more twigs seem to be used, so that it is heavier.
Boys steal these eggs by scores, yet it makes no difference apparently to the endless numbers of these birds, who fill the wood with their peculiar hoarse notes, which some country people say resemble the words “Take two cows, Taffy.” The same good folk will have it that when the weather threatens rain the pigeon’s note changes to “Joe’s toe bleeds, Betty.” The boys who steal the eggs have to swarm up the ash-poles for the purpose, and in so doing often stain their clothes with red marks. Upon the bark of the ash are innumerable little excrescences which when rubbed exude a small quantity of red juice.
The keeper detests this bird’s-nesting; not that he cares much about the pigeons, but because his pheasants are frequently disturbed just at the season when he wishes them to enjoy perfect quiet. It is easy to tell from this post of vantage if any one be passing through the section of the wood within view, though they may be hidden by the boughs. The blackbirds utter a loud cry and scatter; the pigeons rise and wheel about; a pheasant gets up with a scream audible for a long distance, and goes with swift flight skimming away just above the ash-poles; a pair of jays jabber round the summit of a tall fir tree, and thus the intruder’s course is made known. But the wind, though light, is still too cold and chilly as it sweeps between the beech trunks to remain at this elevation; it is warmer below in the wood.
At the foot of the cliff a natural hollow has been further scooped out by labour of man, and shaped into a small cave large enough for three or four to sit in. It is partly supported by strong wooden pillars, and at the mouth a hut of slabs, thickly covered by furze-faggots, has been constructed, with a door, and with roof thatched with reeds from the lake. A rude bench runs round three sides; against the fourth some digging tools recline—strong spades and grub-axes for rooting out a lost ferret, left here temporarily for convenience. The place, rough as it is, gives shelter, and, throwing the door open, there is a vista among the ash-poles and the hazel bushes overtopped with great fir trees and more distant oaks. In the later spring this is a lovely spot, the ground all tinted with the shimmering colour of the bluebells, and the hazel musical with the voice of the nightingale.
Outside the wood, where the downland begins to rise gradually there stretches a broad expanse of furze growing luxuriantly on the thin barren soil, and a mile or more in width. It has a beauty of its own when in full yellow blossom—a yellow sea of flower, scenting the air with an almost overpowering odour as of a coarser pineapple, and full of the drowsy hum of the bees busy in the interspersed thyme. It has another beauty later on when the thick undergrowth of heath is in bloom, and a pale purple carpet spreads around. Here rabbits breed and sport, and hares hide, and the curious furze-chats fly to and fro; and lastly, but not leastly, my lord Reynard the Fox loves to take his ease, till he finally meets his fate in the jaws of clamouring hounds, or is assassinated with the aid of “villainous saltpetre.” He is not easily shot, and will stand a charge fired broadside at a short distance without the slightest injury or apparent notice, beyond a slight quickening of his pace. His thick fur and tough skin turn the pellets. Even when mortally wounded, life will linger for hours.
The ordinary idea of the fox is that of a flying frightened creature tearing away for bare existence; he is really a bold and desperate animal. The keeper will tell you that once when for some purpose he was walking up a deep dry ditch his spaniel and retriever suddenly “chopped” a fox, and got him at bay in a corner, when he turned, and in an instant laid the spaniel helpless and dying and severely handled the retriever. Seeing his dogs so injured and the fox as it were under his feet, the keeper imprudently attempted to seize him, but could not retain his hold, and got the sharp white teeth clean through his hand.
Though but once actually bitten, he recollects being snapped at viciously by another fax, whom he found in broad daylight asleep in the hollow of a double mound with scarcely any shelter and within sixty yards of a house. Reynard was curled up on the ivy which in the hedges trails along the ground. The keeper crawled up on the bank and stopped, admiring the symmetry of the creature, when, purposely breaking a twig, the fox was up in a second, and snarled and snapped at his face, then slipped into the ditch and away. The fox is, in fact, quite as remarkable for boldness as for cunning. Last summer I met a fine fox on the turnpike road and close to a tollgate, in the middle of the day. He came at full speed with a young rabbit in his jaws, evidently but just captured, and did not perceive that he was observed till within twenty yards, when, with a single bound he cleared the sward beside the road, alighting with a crash in the bushes, carrying his prey with him.
Hares will sometimes, in like manner, come as it were to meet people on country roads. Is it that the eyes, being placed towards the side of the head, do not so readily catch sight of dangers in front as on the flanks, especially when the animal is absorbed in its purpose? Hares are peculiarly fond of limping at dusk along lonely roads.
Foxes, when they roam from the woods into the meadow-land, prefer to sleep during the day in those osier-beds which are found in the narrow corners formed by the meanderings of the brooks. Between the willow-wands there shoots up a thick undergrowth of sedges, long coarse grass, and reeds; and in these the fox makes his bed, turning round and round till he has smoothed a place and trampled down the grass; then reclining, well sheltered from the wind. A dog will turn round and round in the same way before he lies down on the hearthrug.
These reeds sometimes grow to a great height, as much as ten or twelve feet. Along the Thames they are used, bound in bundles, to pitch the barges; when the hull has been roughly coated with pitch, one end of the bundle of reeds (thickest end preferred) is set on fire and passed over it to make it melt and run into the chinks. So, mayhap, the Saxon and Danish rovers may have used them to pitch the bottoms of their “ceols” when worn from constantly grounding on the shallows and eyots.
Here in the furze too is the haunt of the badger. This animal becomes rarer year after year—the disuse of the great rabbit-warrens being one cause; still he lingers, and may be traced in the rabbit “buries,” where he enlarges a hole for his habitation, sleeps during the day, and comes forth in the gloaming. In summer he digs up the wasps’ nests, not, as has been supposed, for the honey, but for the white larvae they contain: the wasp secretes no honey at all, and her nest is simply a series of cells in which the grubs mature. Some credit the fox with a fondness for the same food; and even the hornet’s nest is said to be similarly ravaged. It is the nest of the humble-bee which the badger roots up for the honey. The humble-bee uses a tiny hole in a dry bank, sometimes a crack made by the heat in the earth, and really deposits true honey in the comb. It is very sweet, like that of the hive-bee, but a little darker in colour and much less in quantity. The haymakers search for these nests along the hedgerows in their dinner-hour, and eat the honey. There seem to be several sub-species of humble-bee, differing in size and habit. One has its nest as deep as possible in a hole; another makes a nest with scarcely any protection beyond the thick moss of the bank, almost on the surface of the ground. The badger’s hole has before it a huge quantity of sand, which he has thrown out, and upon which the imprint of his foot will be found, a mark, perhaps, more like the spoor of the large game of tropical forests than that left by any other English animal. When seen it can ever afterwards be instantly identified by the most careless observer.
In the meadows lower down, bounding the wood, the hay is gone or is piled in summer ricks, which lean one one way and another the other, and upon whose roofs, sloping at an obtuse angle, the green snakes lie coiled in the sunshine. Often when the waggon comes, and the little rick is loaded, the “pitch” of hay on the prong as it is flung up carries with it a snake whirling in the air. He falls on the sward and is instantly pounced upon by the farmer’s dog, who worries him, seizes him by the middle and shakes him, while the snake twists and hisses in vain. Some dogs will not touch snakes, others seem to enjoy destroying them; but it is noticeable that a dog which previously has passed or avoided snakes, if once he kills one, never passes another without slaughtering it. A slime from the snake’s skin froths over the dog’s jaws, and the sight is very unpleasant.
I have often tried to discover how the snakes get upon these summer ricks. Solomon could not understand the “way of a serpent upon the rock,” and the way of a common snake up the summer rick seems almost as inexplicable. Though the roof or “top” is often very much out of the proper conical shape, and sometimes sinks down nearly to a level, the sides for a height of three or four feet are generally perpendicular, affording no projection of any kind whatever; hay is slippery, and the rick is, of course, too large for the snake to encircle it. Yet there they are commonly found to the intense alarm of the labouring women, who never can get over their dislike of snakes, though they see them so frequently. The only way I can imagine by which they climb up is by means of the holes, or galleries, used by field-mice. In summer ricks there are sometimes many mice, and in pursuit of these the snake may find its way up through their “runs.” Toads are also occasionally found on these ricks, and it is not exactly clear how they get there either; but their object is plain—i.e. the insects which swarm on the hay.
The thick hedgerows of these woodland meads are full of trees, and others stand out in groups in the grass, some of them hollow. Elms often become hollow, and so do oaks; the latter have such large cavities sometimes that one or more persons may easily crouch therein. This is speaking of an ordinary-sized tree; there are many instances of patriarchs of the forest within whose capacious trunks a dozen might stand upright.
These hollow trees, according to woodcraft, ought to come down by the axe without further loss of time. Yet it is fortunate that we are not all of us, even in this prosaic age, imbued with the stern utilitarian spirit; for a decaying tree is perhaps more interesting than one in full vigour of growth. The starlings make their nests in the upper knot-holes; or, lower down, the owl feeds her young; and if you chance to pass near, and are not aware of the ways of owls, you may fancy that a legion of serpents are in the bushes, so loud and threatening is the hissing noise made by the brood. The woodpecker comes for the insects that flourish on the dying giant; so does the curious little tree-climber, running up the trunk like a mouse; and in winter, when insect-life is scarce, it is amusing to watch there the busy tomtit. He hangs underneath a dead branch, head downwards, as if walking on a ceiling, and with his tiny but strong bill chips off a fragment of the loose dead bark. Under this bark, as he well knows, woodlice and all kinds of creeping things make their home. With the fragment he flies to an adjacent twig, small enough to be grasped by his claws and so give him a firm foothold. There he pecks his morsel into minute pieces and lunches on the living contents. Then, with a saucy chuckle of delight in his own cleverness, he returns to the larger bough for a fresh supply. As the bough decays the bark loosens, and is invaded by insects which when it was green could not touch it.
For the acorns the old oak still yields come rooks, pigeons, and stately pheasants, with their glossy feathers shining in the autumn sun. Thrushes carry wild hedge-fruit up on the broad platform formed by the trunk where the great limbs divide, and, pecking it to pieces, leave the seeds. These take root in the crevices which widen out underneath into a mass of soft decaying “touchwood;” and so from the crown of the tree there presently streams downwards long trailing briars, bearing in June the sweet wild roses and in winter red oval fruit. Ivy comes creeping up, and in its thick warm coverts nests are built. Below, among the powdery “touchwood” which lines the floor of this living hut, great fungi push their coloured heads up to the light. And here you may take shelter when the rain comes unexpectedly pattering on the leaves, and listen as it rises to a roar within the forest. Sometimes wild bees take up their residence in the hollow, slowly filling it with comb, buzzing busily to and fro; and then it is not to be approached so carelessly, though so ready are all creatures to acknowledge kindness that ere now I have even made friends with the inhabitants of a wasp’s nest.
A thick carpet of dark green moss grows upon one side of the tree, and over it the tall brake fern rears its yellow stem. In the evening the goat-sucker or nightjar comes with a whirling phantom-like flight, wheeling round and round: a strange bird, which will roost all day on a rail, blinking or sleeping in the daylight, and seeming to prefer a rail or a branch without leaves to one that affords cover. Here also the smaller bats flit in the twilight, and, if you stand still, will pursue their prey close to your head, wheeling about it so that you may knock them down with your hand if you wish. The labouring people call the bat “bat-mouse.” Here also come many beetles; and sometimes on a summer’s day the swallows will rest from their endless flight on the dying upper branches, for they too like a bough clear or nearly clear of leaves. All the year through the hollow tree is haunted by every kind of living creature, and therefore let us hope it may yet be permitted to linger awhile safe from the axe.
The lesser roots of the elm are porous like cane, and are sometimes smoked as cigars by the ploughboys. The leaf of the coltsfoot, which grows so luxuriously in many places and used to be regularly gathered and dried by the lower classes for the pipe, is now rarely used since the commoner tobaccos have become universally accessible.
Often and often, when standing in a meadow gateway partly hidden by the bushes, watching the woodpecker on the ant-hills, of whose eggs, too, the partridges are so fond (so that a good ant year, in which their nests are prolific, is also a good partridge year) you may, if you are still, hear a slight faint rustle in the hedge, and by-and-by a weasel will steal out. Seeing you he instantly pauses, elevates his head, and steadily gazes: move but your eyes and he is back in the hedge; remain quiet, still looking straight before you as if you saw nothing, and he will presently recover confidence, and actually cross the gateway almost under you.
This is the secret of observation: stillness, silence, and apparent indifference. In some instinctive way these wild creatures learn to distinguish when one is or is not intent upon them in a spirit of enmity; and if very near, it is always the eye they watch. So long as you observe them, as it were, from the corner of the eyeball, sideways, or look over their heads at something beyond, it is well. Turn your glance full upon them to get a better view, and they are gone.
When waiting in a dry ditch with a gun on a warm autumn afternoon for a rabbit to come out, sometimes a bunny will suddenly appear at the mouth of a hole which your knee nearly touches. He stops dead, as if petrified with astonishment, sitting on his haunches. His full dark eye is on you with a gaze of intense curiosity; his nostrils work as if sniffing; his whiskers move; and every now and then he thumps with his hind legs upon the earth with a low dull thud. This is evidently a sign of great alarm, at the noise of which any other rabbit within hearing instantly disappears in the “bury.” Yet there your friend sits and watches you as if spell-bound, so long as you have the patience neither to move hand or foot nor to turn your eye. Keep your glance on a frond of the fern just beyond him, and he will stay. The instant your eye meets his or a finger stirs, he plunges out of sight.
It is so also with birds. Walk across a meadow swinging a stick, even humming, and the rooks calmly continue their search for grubs within thirty yards; stop to look at them, and they rise on the wing directly. So, too, the finches in the trees by the roadside. Let the wayfarer pass beneath the bough on which they are singing, and they will sing on, if he moves without apparent interest; should he pause to listen, their wings glisten in the sun as they fly.
The meadows lead down to the shores of the mere, and the nearest fields melt almost insensibly into the green margin of the water, for at the edge it is so full of flags, and rushes, and weeds as at a distance to be barely distinguishable there from the sward. As we approach, the cuckoo sings passing over head; “she cries as she flies” is the common country saying.
I used to imagine that the cuckoo was fond of an echo, having noticed that a particular clump of trees overhanging some water, the opposite bank of which sent back a clear reply, was a specially favourite resort of that bird. The reduplication of the liquid notes, as they travelled to and fro, was peculiarly pleasant: the water, perhaps, lending, like a sounding-board, a fulness and roundness to her song. She might possibly have fancied that another bird was answering; certainly she “cried” much longer there than in other places. Morning after morning, and about the same time—eleven o’clock—a cuckoo sang in that group of trees, from noting which I was led to think that perhaps the cuckoo, though apparently wandering aimlessly about, really has more method and regularity in her habits than would seem.
Country people will have it that cuckoos are growing scarcer every year, and do not come in the numbers they formerly did; and, whether it be the chance of unfavourable seasons or other causes, it is certainly the fact in some localities. I recollect seeing as many as four at once in a tall elm—a tree they love—all crying and gurgling, as it were, in the throat together; this was some years since, and that district is now much less frequented by these birds.
There was a superstition that where or in whatever condition you happened to be when you heard the cuckoo the first time in the spring, so you would remain for the next twelvemonth; for which reason it was a misfortune to hear her first in bed, since it might mean a long illness. This, by-the-by, may have been a pleasant fable invented to get milkmaids up early of a morning.
The number of coarse fish in the brook which flows out of the shallow mere bounding one edge of the keeper’s domain of woods has, he thinks, very much decreased of recent years. When he first came here the stream seemed full of fish, notwithstanding very little care had till then been taken with their preservation. They used to net it once now and then, and he has seen a full hundredweight of fair-sized jack, perch, tench, etc, taken out of the water in a very short time, besides quantities of smaller fry which were put back again. But although the brook, so far as his jurisdiction goes, has since been comparatively well preserved, yet he feels certain the fish have diminished.
There are no chemical works to account for this with the subtle poison of their waste, neither are there mills to prevent the fish coming up—perhaps it would be better if there were some mills, as they would stop the fish going down. I have noticed that where old water-wheels have ceased working the fish have almost disappeared. This, of course, may be but a purely local phenomenon, but it is certainly the case in some districts. Comparatively little wheat now is ground in rural places; the greater portion is carried away to the towns and turned into flour by steam. So that in walking up a brook you will now and then come upon an ancient mill whose business has departed: the fabric itself is tenanted by two or three cottage families, and their garden covers the site of the old mill-pond. In the depths of that pool there were formerly plenty of fish, with deep, dark spots in which to hide. Their natural increase was not swept away by floods; neither could they wander, because of the dam and grating. They were also under the eye of the miller, and so preserved. But when the dam was levelled and the stream allowed to follow its course, this resting-place, so to say, was abolished, and the fish dispersed were lost or captured.
Upon the particular brook which I have now in view there are no mills; but there used to be several large ponds—distinct from the stream, yet communicating by a narrow channel. These likewise sheltered the fish, and were favourable to their propagation. Improvements, however, have swept them away; they are filled up, every inch of ground having become valuable for agricultural purposes. Then there were vast ditches running up beside the hedgerows, and ending in the brook; perfect storehouses these of all aquatic life. Fish used to go up them for shelter (they were as deep or deeper than the brook itself, and it was a good jump for a man across) and to feed on the insects blown off the overhanging trees and bushes or brought down by the streamlet draining the field above. Wild duck made their nests among the rushes, sitting there while their beautiful consorts, the mallards, swam lonely in the mere. Moorhens were busy in the weeds, or came out to feed upon the sward.
Such great ditches are now filled up, and drains take their place. It is better so, no doubt, in a purely utilitarian sense, but the fish haunt the spot no more. Some of the reaches of the brook, where the ground was flat and boggy, used to resemble a long narrow lake, extremely shallow, with the deeper current running yards away from the shore: and here the snipe came in the winter. But the banks are now made up higher by artificial means, and the marsh is dry. All these changes diminish those aquatic nooks and corners in which fish love to linger.
Finally came the weed said to have been imported from America, pushing its way up-stream, and filling it with an abominable mass of vegetable matter that no fish could enter. Hereabouts, however, this pest has of late shown signs of exhaustion—it does not grow with its former vigour, and its progress seems checked. The brook, after winding for several miles, the lower course being beyond the keeper’s boundaries, empties itself into a canal; before the canal was made it ran much further, and itself increased in volume almost to a river. Now this canal is fished day and night by people on the tow-path: there is nominally a close time, but no one observes it, and the riparian owners, having discovered that they had a right so to do, net it mercilessly. The consequence is that the fish which go down the stream and enter the canal are speedily destroyed, while the canal on its part sends no fish to the upper waters. This is how the decrease of fish is accounted for, and it is the same with perhaps half-a-dozen other brooks in the same locality, all of which now fall into the canal, which is so incessantly plied with rod and net and nightline that little escapes.