"Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life"

Preface.

Those who delight in roaming about amongst the fields and lanes, or have spent any time in a country house, can hardly have failed to notice the custodian of the woods and covers, or to observe that he is often something of a “character.” The Gamekeeper forms, indeed, so prominent a figure in rural life as almost to demand some biographical record of his work and ways. From the man to the territories over which he bears sway—the meadows, woods, and streams—and to his subjects, their furred and feathered inhabitants, is a natural transition. The enemies against whom he wages incessant warfare—vermin, poachers, and trespassers—must, of course, be included in such a survey.

Although, for ease and convenience of illustration, the character of a particular Keeper has been used as a nucleus about which to arrange materials that would otherwise have lacked a connecting link, the facts here collected are really entirely derived from original observation.

R.J.

Chapter One.

The Man Himself—His House, and Tools.

The keeper’s cottage stands in a sheltered “coombe,” or narrow hollow of the woodlands, overshadowed by a mighty Spanish chestnut, bare now of leaves, but in summer a noble tree. The ash wood covers the slope at the rear; on one side is a garden, and on the other a long strip of meadow with elms. In front, and somewhat lower, a streamlet winds, fringing the sward, and across it the fir plantations begin, their dark sombre foliage hanging over the water. A dead willow trunk thrown from bank to bank forms a rude bridge; the tree, not even squared, gives little surface for the foot, and in frosty weather a slip is easy. From this primitive contrivance a path, out of which others fork, leads into the intricacies of the covers, and from the garden a wicket gate opens on the ash wood. The elms in the meadow are full of rooks’ nests, and in the spring the coombe will resound with their cawing; these black bandits, who do not touch it at other times, will then ravage the garden to feed their hungry young, despite ingenious scarecrows. A row of kennels, tenanted by a dozen dogs, extends behind the cottage: lean retrievers yet unbroken, yelping spaniels, pointers, and perhaps a few greyhounds or fancy breeds, if “young master” has a taste that way.

Beside the kennels is a shed ornamented with rows upon rows of dead and dried vermin, furred and feathered, impaled for their misdeeds; and over the door a couple of horseshoes nailed for luck—a superstition yet lingering in the by-ways of the woods and hills. Within are the ferret hutches, warm and dry; for the ferret is a shivery creature, and likes nothing so well as to nozzle down in a coat-pocket with a little hay. Here are spades and billhooks, twine and rabbit nets, traps, and other odds and ends scattered about with the wires and poacher’s implements impounded from time to time.

In a dark corner there lies a singular-looking piece of mechanism, a relic of the olden times, which when dragged into the light turns out to be a man-trap. These terrible engines have long since been disused—being illegal, like spring-guns—and the rust has gathered thickly on the metal. But, old though it be, it still acts perfectly, and can be “set” as well now as when in bygone days poachers and thieves used to prod the ground and the long grass, before they stepped among it, with a stick, for fear of mutilation.

The trap is almost precisely similar to the common rat-trap or gin still employed to destroy vermin, but greatly exaggerated in size, so that if stood on end it reaches to the waist, or above. The jaws of this iron wolf are horrible to contemplate—rows of serrated projections, which fit into each other when closed, alternating with spikes a couple of inches long, like tusks. To set the trap you have to stand on the spring—the weight of a man is about sufficient to press it down; and, to avoid danger to the person preparing this little surprise, a band of iron can be pushed forward to hold the spring while the catch is put into position, and the machine itself is hidden among the bushes or covered with dead leaves. Now touch the pan with a stout walking-stick—the jaws cut it in two in the twinkling of an eye. They seem to snap together with a vicious energy, powerful enough to break the bone of the leg; and assuredly no man ever got free whose foot was once caught by these terrible teeth.

The keeper will tell you that it used to be set up in the corner of the gardens and orchard belonging to the great house, and which in the pre-policemen days were almost nightly robbed. He thinks there were quite as many such traps set in the gardens just outside the towns as ever there were in the woods and preserves of the country proper. He recollects but one old man (a mole-catcher) who actually had experienced in his youth the sensation of being caught; he went lame on one foot, the sinews having been cut or divided. The trap could be chained to its place if desired; but, as a matter of fact, a chain was unnecessary, for no man could possibly drag this torturing clog along.

Another outhouse attached to the cottage contains a copper for preparing the food for both quadrupeds and birds. Some poultry run about the mead, and perhaps with them are feeding the fancy foreign ducks which in summer swim in the lake before the hall.

The cottage is thatched and oddly gabled—built before “improvements” came into fashion—yet cosy; with walls three feet thick, which keep out the cold of winter and the heat of summer. This is not solid masonry; there are two shells, as it were, filled up between with rubble and mortar rammed down hard.

Inside the door the floor of brick is a step below the level of the ground. Sometimes a peculiar but not altogether unpleasant odour fills the low-pitched sitting room—it is emitted by the roots burning upon the fire, hissing as the sap exudes and boils in the fierce heat. When the annual fall of timber takes place the butts of the trees are often left in the earth, to be afterwards grubbed and split for firewood, which goes to the great house or is sold. There still remain the roots, which are cut into useful lengths and divided among the upper employés. From elm and oak and ash, and the crude turpentine of the fir, this aromatic odour, the scent of the earth in which they grew, is exhaled as they burn.

The ceiling is low and crossed by one huge square beam of oak, darkened by smoke and age. The keeper’s double-barrelled gun is suspended from this beam: there are several other guns in the house, but this, the favourite, alone hangs where it did before he had children—so strong is habit; the rest are yet more out of danger. It has been a noble weapon, though now showing signs of age—the interior of the breech worn larger than the rest of the barrel from constant use; so much so that, before it was converted to a breech-loader, the wad when the ramrod pushed it down would slip the last six inches, so loosely fitting as to barely answer its purpose of retaining the shot; so that when cleaned out, before the smoke fouled it again, he had to load with paper. This in a measure anticipated the “choke-bore,” and his gun was always famous for its killing power. The varnish is worn from the stock by incessant friction against his coat, showing the real grain of the walnut-wood, and the trigger-guard with the polish of the sleeve shines like silver. It has been his companion for so many years that it is not strange he should feel an affection for it; no other ever fitted the shoulder so well, or came with such delicate precision to the “present” position. So accustomed is he to its balance and “hang” in the hand that he never thinks of aiming; he simply looks at the object, still or moving, throws the gun up from the hollow of his arm, and instantly pulls the trigger, staying not a second to glance along the barrel. It has become almost a portion of his body, answering like a limb to the volition of will without the intervention of reflection. The hammers are chased and elegantly shaped—perfectly matching: when once the screw came loose, and the jar of a shot jerked one off among the dead leaves apparently beyond hope of recovery, he never rested night or day till by continuous search and sifting the artistic piece of metal was found. Nothing destroys the symmetry of a gun so much as hammers which are not pairs; and well he knew that he should never get a smith to replace that delicate piece of workmanship, for this gun came originally from the hands of a famous maker, who got fifty, or perhaps even seventy guineas for it years ago. It did not shoot to please the purchaser—guns of the very best character sometimes take use to get into thorough order—and was thrown aside, and so the gun became the keeper’s.

These fine old guns often have a romance clinging to them, and sometimes the history is a sad one. Upstairs he still keeps the old copper powder-flask curiously chased and engraved, yet strong enough to bear the weight of the bearer, if by chance he sat down upon it while in his pocket, together with the shot-belt and punch for cutting out the wads from cardboard or an old felt hat. These the modern system of loading at the breech has cast aside. Here, also, is the apparatus for filling empty cartridge-cases—a work which in the season occupies him many hours.

Being an artist in his way, he takes a pride in the shine and polish of his master’s guns, which are not always here, but come down at intervals to be cleaned and attended to. And woe be to the first kid gloves that touch them afterwards; for a gun, like a sardine should be kept in fine oil, not thickly encrusting it, but, as it were, rubbed into and oozing from the pores of the metal and wood. Paraffin is an abomination in his eyes (for preserving from rust), and no modern patent oil, he thinks, can compare with a drop of gin for the locks—the spirit never congeals in cold weather, and the hammer comes up with a clear, sharp snick. He has two or three small screwdrivers and gunsmith’s implements to take the locks to pieces; for gentlemen are sometimes careless and throw their guns down on the wet grass, and if a single drop of water should by chance penetrate under the plate it will play mischief with the works, if the first speck of rust be not forthwith removed.

His dog-whistle hangs at his buttonhole. His pocket-knife is a basket of tools in itself, most probably a present from some youthful sportsman who was placed under his care to learn how to handle a gun. The corkscrew it contains has seen much service at luncheon-time, when under a sturdy oak, or in a sheltered nook of the lane, where the hawthorn hedge and the fern broke the force of the wind, a merry shooting party sat down to a well-packed hamper and wanted some one to draw the corks. Not but what the back of the larger blade has not artistically tapped off the neck of many a bottle, hitting it gently upwards against the rim. Nor must his keys be forgotten. The paths through the preserves, where they debouch on a public lane or road, are closed with high-sparred wicket gates, well pitched to stand the weather, and carefully locked, and of course he has a key. His watch, made on purpose for those who walk by night, tells him the time in the densest darkness of the woods. On pressing a spring and holding it near the ear, it strikes the hour last past, then the quarters which have since elapsed; so that even when he cannot see an inch before his face he knows the time within fifteen minutes at the outside, which is near enough for practical purposes.

In personal appearance he would be a tall man were it not that he has contracted a slight stoop in the passage of the years, not from weakness or decay of nature, but because men who walk much lean forward somewhat, which has a tendency to round the shoulders. The weight of the gun, and often of a heavy game-bag dragging downwards, has increased this defect of his figure, and, as is usual after a certain age, even with those who lead a temperate life, he begins to show signs of corpulency. But these shortcomings only slightly detract from the manliness of his appearance, and in youth it is easy to see that he must have been an athlete. There is still plenty of power in the long sinewy arms, brown hands, and bull-neck, and intense vital energy in the bright blue eye. He is an ash-tree man, as a certain famous writer would say; hard, tough, unconquerable by wind or weather, fearless of his fellows, yielding but by slow and imperceptible degrees to the work of time. His neck has become the colour of mahogany; sun and tempest have left their indelible marks upon his face; and he speaks from the depths of his broad chest, as men do who talk much in the open air, shouting across the fields and through the copses. There is a solidity in his very footstep, and he stands like an oak. He meets your eye full and unshirkingly, yet without insolence; not as the labourers do, who either stare with sullen ill-will or look on the earth. In brief, freedom and constant contact with nature have made him every inch a man; and here in this nineteenth century of civilised effeminacy may be seen some relic of what men were in the old feudal days when they dwelt practically in the woods. The shoulder of his coat is worn a little where the gun rubs, and so is his sleeve; otherwise he is fairly well dressed.

Perfectly civil to every one, and with a willing manner towards his master and his master’s guests, he has a wonderful knack of getting his own way. Whatever the great house may propose in the shooting line, the keeper is pretty certain to dispose of in the end as he pleases; for he has a voluble “silver” tongue, and is full of objections, reasons, excuses, suggestions, all delivered with a deprecatory air of superior knowledge which he hardly likes to intrude upon his betters, much as he would regret to see them go wrong. So he really takes the lead, and in nine cases in ten the result proves he is right, as minute local knowledge naturally must be when intelligently applied.

Not only in such matters as the best course for the shooting party to follow, or in advice bearing upon the preserves, but in concerns of a wider scope, his influence is felt. A keen, shrewd judge of horseflesh—(how is it that if a man understands one animal he seems to instinctively see through all?)—his master in a careless way often asks his opinion before concluding a bargain. Of course the question is not put direct, but “By-the-by, when the hounds were here you saw so-and-so’s mare; what do you think of her?” The keeper blurts out his answer, not always flattering or very delicately expressed; and his view is not forgotten. For when a trusted servant like this accompanies his master often in solitary rambles for hours together, dignity must unbend now and then, however great the social difference between them; and thus a man of strong individuality and a really valuable gift of observation insensibly guides his master.

Passing across the turnips, the landlord, who perhaps never sees his farms save when thus crossing them with a gun, remarks that they look clean and free from weeds; whereupon the keeper, walking respectfully a little in the rear, replies that so-and-so, the tenant, is a capital farmer, a preserver of foxes and game, but has suffered from the floods—a reply that leads to inquiries, and perhaps a welcome reduction of rent. On the other hand, the owner’s attention is thus often called to abuses. In this way an evilly-disposed keeper may, it is true, do great wrongs, having access to the owner and, in familiar phrase, “his ear.” I am at present delineating the upright keeper, such as are in existence still, notwithstanding the abuse lavished upon them as a class—often, it is to be feared, too well deserved. It is not difficult to see how in this way a man whose position is lowly may in an indirect way exercise a powerful influence upon a large estate.

He is very “great” on dogs (and, indeed, on all other animals); his opinion is listened to and taken by everybody round about who has a dog, and sometimes he has three or four under treatment for divers ills. By this knowledge many “tips” are gained, and occasionally he makes a good thing by selling a pup at a high price. He may even be seen, with his velveteen jacket carefully brushed, his ground-ash stick under his arm, and hat in hand, treading daintily for fear of soiling the carpet with his shoe, in the anteroom, gravely prescribing for the ailing pug in which the ladies are interested.

At the farmhouses he is invited to sit down and take a glass, being welcome for his gossip of the great house, and because, having in the course of years been thrown into the society of all classes, he has gradually acquired a certain tact and power of accommodating himself to his listener. For the keeper, when he fulfils his duty in a quiet way as a man of experience does, is by no means an unpopular character. It is the too officious man who creates a feeling among the tenants against himself and the whole question of game. But the quiet experienced hand, with a shrewd knowledge of men as well as the technicalities of his profession, grows to be liked by the tenantry, and becomes a local authority on animal life.

Proud, and not without reason, of his vigour and strength, he will tell you that though between fifty and sixty he can still step briskly through a heavy field-day, despite the weight of reserve ammunition he carries. He can keep on his feet without fatigue from morn till eve, and goes his rounds without abating one inch of the distance. In one thing alone he feels his years—i.e. in pace; and when “young master,” who is a disciple of the modern athletic school, comes out, it is about as much as ever he can do to keep up with him over the stubble. Never once for the last thirty years has he tossed on a bed of sickness; never once has he failed to rise from his slumber refreshed and ready for his labour. His secret is—but let him tell it in his own words:

“It’s indoors, sir, as kills half the people; being indoors three parts of the day, and next to that taking too much drink and vittals. Eating’s as bad as drinking; and there ain’t nothing like fresh air and the smell of the woods. You should come out here in the spring, when the oak timber is throwed (because, you see, the sap be rising, and the bark strips then), and just sit down on a stick fresh peeled—I means a trunk, you know—and sniff up the scent of that there oak bark. It goes right down your throat, and preserves your lungs as the tan do leather. And I’ve heard say as folk who work in the tan-yards never have no illness. There’s always a smell from trees, dead or living—I could tell what wood a log was in the dark by my nose; and the air is better where the woods be. The ladies up in the great house sometimes goes out into the fir plantations—the turpentine scents strong, you see—and they say it’s good for the chest; but, bless you, you must live in it. People go abroad, I’m told, to live in the pine forests to cure ’em: I say these here oaks have got every bit as much good in that way. I never eat but two meals a day—breakfast and supper: what you would call dinner—and maybe in the middle of the day a hunch of dry bread and an apple. I take a deal for breakfast, and I’m rather lear (hungry) at supper; but you may lay your oath that’s why I’m what I am in the way of health. People stuffs theirselves, and by consequence it breaks out, you see. It’s the same with cattle; they’re overfed, tied up in stalls and stuffed, and never no exercise, and mostly oily food too. It stands to reason they must get bad; and that’s the real cause of these here rinderpests and pleuro-pneumonia and what-nots. At least that’s my notion. I’m in the woods all day, and never comes home till supper—’cept, of course, in breeding-time, to fetch the meal and stuff for the birds—so I gets the fresh air, you see; and the fresh air is the life, sir. There’s the smell of the earth, too—’specially just as the plough turns it up—which is a fine thing; and the hedges and the grass are as sweet as sugar after a shower. Anything with a green leaf is the thing, depend upon it, if you want to live healthy. I never signed no pledge; and if a man asks me to take a glass of ale, I never says him no. But I ain’t got no barrel at home; and all the time I’ve been in this here place, I’ve never been to a public. Gentlemen give me tips—of course they does; and much obliged I be; but I takes it to my missus. Many’s the time they’ve axed me to have a glass of champagne or brandy when we’ve had lunch under the hedge; but I says no, and would like a glass of beer best, which I gets, of course. No; when I drinks, I drinks ale: but most in general I drinks no strong liquor. Great coat!—cold weather! I never put no great coat on this thirty year. These here woods be as good as a topcoat in cold weather. Come off the open field with the east wind cutting into you, and get inside they firs and you’ll feel warm in a minute. If you goes into the ash wood you must go in farther, because the wind comes more between the poles.” Fresh air, exercise, frugal food and drink, the odour of the earth and the trees—these have given him, as he nears his sixtieth year, the strength and vitality of early manhood.

He has his faults: notably, a hastiness of temper towards his undermen, and towards labourers and wood-cutters who transgress his rules. He is apt to use his ground-ash stick rather freely without thought of consequences, and has got into trouble more than once in that way. When he takes a dislike or suspicion of a man, nothing will remove it; he is stubbornly inimical and unforgiving, totally incapable of comprehending the idea of loving an enemy. He hates cordially in the true pagan fashion of old. He is full of prejudices, and has some ideas which almost amount to superstitions; and, though he fears nothing, has a vague feeling that sometimes there is “summat” inexplicable in the dark and desolate places. Such is this modern man of the woods.

The impressions of youth are always strongest with us, and so it is that recollecting the scenes in which he passed his earlier days he looks with some contempt upon the style of agriculture followed in the locality; for he was born in the north, where the farms are sometimes of a great area, though perhaps not so rich in soil, and he cannot forgive the tenants here because they have not got herds of three or four hundred horned cattle. Before he settled down in the south he had many changes of situation, and was thus brought in contact with a wonderful number of gentlemen, titled or otherwise distinguished, whose peculiarities of speech or appearance he loves to dwell upon. If the valet sees the hero or the statesman too closely, so sometimes does the gamekeeper. A great man must have moments when it is a relief to fling off the constant posturing necessary before the world; and there is freshness in the gamekeeper’s unstudied conversation. The keeper thinks that nothing reveals a gentleman’s character so much as his “tips.”

“Gentlemen is very curious in tips,” he says, “and there ain’t nothing so difficult as to know what’s coming. Most in general them as be the biggest guns, and what you would think would come out handsome, chucks you a crown and no more; and them as you knows ain’t much go in the way of money slips a sovereign into your fist. There’s a deal in the way of giving it too, as perhaps you wouldn’t think. Some gents does it as much as to say they’re much obliged to you for kindly taking it. Some does it as if they were chucking a bone to a dog. One place where I was, the governor were the haughtiest man as ever you see. When the shooting was done—after a great party, you never knowed whether he were pleased or not—he never took no more notice of you than if you were a tree. But I found him out arter a time or two. You had to walk close behind him, as if you were a spaniel; and by-and-by he would slip his hand round behind his back—without a word, mind—and you had to take what was in it, and never touch your hat or so much as ‘Thank you, sir.’ It were always a five-pound note if the shooting had been good; but it never seemed to come so sweet as if he’d done it to your face.”

The keeper gets a goodly number of tips in the course of the year, from visitors at the great house, from naturalists who come now and then, from the sportsmen, and regularly from the masters of three packs of hounds; not to mention odd moneys at intervals in various ways, as when he goes round to deliver presents of game to the chief tenants on the estate or to the owner’s private friends. Gentlemen who take an interest in such things come out every spring to see the young broods of pheasants—which, indeed, are a pretty sight—and they always leave something behind them. In the summer a few picnic parties come from the town or the country round about, having permission to enter the grounds. In the winter half a dozen young gentlemen have a turn at the ferreting; a great burrow is chosen, three or four ferrets put in at once without any nets, so that the rabbits may bolt freely, and then the shooting is like volleys of musketry fire. For sport like this the young gentlemen tip freely. After the rook-shooting party in the spring from the great house, with their rook-rifles and sometimes crossbows, have had the pick of the young birds, some few of the tenants are admitted to shoot the remainder—a task that spreads perhaps over two or even three days, and there is a good deal of liquor and silver going about. Then gentlemen come to fish in the mere, having got the necessary permission, and they want bait and some attention, which the keeper’s lad, being an adept himself, can render better than any one else; and so he too gets his share. Besides which, being swift of foot, and with a shrewd idea which way the fox will run when the hunt is up, he is to the fore when a lady or some timid gentleman wants a gate opened—a service not performed in vain. For breaking-in dogs also the keeper is often paid well; and, in short, he is one of those fortunate individuals whom all the world tips.

Chapter Two.

His Family and Caste.

The interior of the cottage is exquisitely clean; it has that bright pleasant appearance which is only possible when the housewife feels a pride in her duties, and goes about them with a cheerful heart. Not a speck of dust can be seen upon the furniture, amongst which is a large old-fashioned sofa: the window panes are clear and transparent—a certain sign of loving care expended on the place, as on the other hand dirty windows are an indication of neglect, so much so that the character of the cottager may almost be guessed from a glance at her glass. The keeper’s wife is a buxom vivacious dame, whose manners from occasional contact with the upper ranks—the ladies from the great house sometimes look in for a few minutes to chat with so old a servant of the family—are above what are usually found in her station. She receives her callers—and they are many—with a quiet, respectful dignity: desirous of pleasing, yet quite at her ease.

Across the back of the sofa there lies a rug of some beautiful fur which catches the eye, but which at first the visitor cannot identify. Its stripes are familiar, and not unlike the tiger’s, but the colour is not that of the forest tyrant. She explains that this rug comes within her special sphere. It is a carriage-rug of cat-skin; the skins carefully selected to match exactly, and cured and prepared in the same way as other more famous furs. They have only just been sewn together, and the rug is now spread on the sofa to dry. She has made rugs, she will tell you, entirely of black cat skins, and very handsome they looked; but not equal to this, which is wholly of the tabby. Certainly the gloss and stripe, the soft warmth and feel to the hand, seem to rival many foreign and costly importations. Besides carriage-rugs, the gamekeeper’s wife has made others for the feet—some many-coloured, like Joseph’s coat.

All the cats to which these skins belonged were shot or caught in the traps set for vermin by her husband and his assistants. The majority were wild—that is, had taken up their residence in the woods, reverting to their natural state, and causing great havoc among the game. Feasting like this and in the joys of freedom, many had grown to a truly enormous size, not in fat, as the domestic animal does, but in length of back and limb. These afforded the best skins; perhaps out of eight or nine killed but two would be available or worth preserving.

This gives an idea of the extraordinary number of cats which stray abroad and get their living by poaching. They invariably gravitate towards the woods. The instance in point is taken from an outlying district far from a town, where the nuisance is comparatively small; but in the preserves say from ten to twenty miles round London the cats thus killed must be counted by thousands. Families change their homes, the cat is driven away by the new comer and takes to the field. In one little copse not more than two acres in extent, and about twelve miles from Hyde Park Corner, fifteen cats were shot in six weeks, and nearly all in one spot—their favourite haunt. When two or three wild or homeless animals take up their abode in a wood, they speedily attract half a dozen hitherto tame ones; and, if they were not destroyed, it would be impossible to keep either game or rabbits.

She has her own receipts for preserving furs and feathers, and long practice has rendered her an adept. Here are squirrels’ skins also prepared; some with the bushy tail attached, and some without. They vary in size and the colour of the tail, which is often nearly white, in others more deeply tinged with red. The fur is used to line cloaks, and the tail is sometimes placed in ladies’ hats. Now and then she gets a badger-skin, which old country folk used to have made into waistcoats, said to form an efficacious protection for weak chests. She has made rugs of several sewn together, but not often.

In the store-room upstairs there are a few splendid fox-skins, some with the tails tipped with white, others tipped with black. These are used for ladies’ muffs, and look very handsome; the tail being occasionally curled round the muff. This sounds a delicate matter, and dangerously near the deadly sin of vulpecide. But it is not so. In these extensive woods, with their broad fringes of furze and heath, the foxes now and then become inconveniently numerous, and even cub-hunting will not kill them off sufficiently, especially if a great “head” of game is kept up, for it attracts every species of beast of prey.

Besides the damage to game, the concentration of too many foxes in one district is opposed to the interest of the hunt—first, because the attendant destruction of neighbouring poultry causes an unpleasant feeling; next, because when the meet takes place the plethora of foxes spoils the sport. The day is wasted in “chopping” them at every corner; the pack breaks up into several sections, despite whip, horn, and voice; and a good ran across country cannot be obtained. So that once now and then a judicious thinning-out is necessary; and this is how the skins come into the hands of the keeper’s wife. The heads go to ornament halls and staircases; so do the pads and occasionally the brush. The teeth make studs, set in gold; and no part of Reynard is thrown away, since the dogs eagerly snap up his body.

Once or twice she has made a mole-skin waistcoat for a gentleman. This is a very tedious operation. Each little skin has to be separately prepared, and when finished hardly covers two square inches of surface. Consequently it requires several scores of skins, and the work is a year or more about. There is then the sewing together, which is not to be accomplished without much patience and skill. The fur is beautifully soft and glossy, with more resemblance to velvet than is possessed by any other natural substance; and very warm. Mittens for the wrists are also made of it, and skull-caps. Mole-skin waistcoats used to be thought a good deal of, but are now only met with occasionally as a curiosity.

The old wooden mole-trap is now almost extinct, superseded by the modern iron one, which anybody can set up. The ancient contrivance, a cylinder of wood, could only be placed in position by a practised hand, and from his experience in this the mole-catcher—locally called “oont-catcher”—used to be an important personage in his way. He is now fast becoming extinct also—that is, as a distinct handicraftsman spending his whole time in such trapping. He was not unfrequently a man who had once occupied a subordinate place under a keeper, and when grown too feeble for harder labour, supported himself in this manner: contracting with the farmers to clear their fields by the season.

Neither stoats’ nor weasels’ skins are preserved, except now and then for stuffing to put under a glass case, though the stoat is closely allied to the genuine ermine. Polecats, too, are sometimes saved for the same purpose; in many woods they seem now quite extinct. The otter skin is valuable, but does not often come under the care of the keeper’s wife. The keeper now and then shoots a grebe in the mere where the streamlet widens out into a small lake, which again is bordered by water meadows. This bird is uncommon, but not altogether rare; sometimes two or three are killed in the year in this southern inland haunt. He also shoots her some jays, whose wings—as likewise the black-and-white magpie—are used for the same decorative purposes. Certain feathers from the jay are sought by the gentlemen who visit the great house, to make artificial flies for salmon-fishing. Of kingfishers she preserves a considerable number for ladies’ hats, and some for glass cases. Once or twice she has been asked to prepare the woodpecker, whose plumage and harsh cry entitle him to the position of the parrot of our woods. Gentlemen interested in natural history often commission her husband to get them specimens of rare birds; and in the end he generally succeeds, though a long time may elapse before they cross his path. For them she has prepared some of the rare owls and hawks. She has a store of peacocks’ feathers—every now and then people, especially ladies, call at the cottage and purchase these things. Country housewives still use the hare’s “pad” for several domestic purposes—was not the hare’s foot once kept in the printing-offices?

The keeper’s wife has nothing to do with rabbits, but knows that their skins and fur are still bought in large quantities. She has heard that geese were once kept in large flocks almost entirely for their feathers, which were plucked twice a year, she thinks; but this is not practised now, at least not in the south. She has had snakes’ skins, or more properly sloughs, for the curious. It is very difficult to get one entire; they are fragile, and so twisted in the grass where the snake leaves them as to be generally broken. Some country folk put them in their hats to cure headache, which is a very old superstition; but more in sport than earnest. There are no deer now in the park. There used to be a hundred years ago, and her husband has found several cast antlers in the wood. The best are up at the great house, but there is one on her staircase. Will I take a few chestnuts? It is winter—the proper time—and these are remarkably fine. No tree is apparently so capricious in its yield as the chestnut in English woods: the fruit of many is so small as to be worthless, or else it does not reach maturity. But these large ones are from a tree which bears a fine nut: her husband has them saved every year. Here also are half-a-dozen truffles if I will accept them: most that are found go up to the great house; but of late years they have not been sought for so carefully, because coming in quantities from abroad. These truffles are found, she believes, in the woods where the soil is chalky. She used to gather many native herbs; but tastes have changed, and new seasonings and sauces have come into fashion.

Out of doors in his work the assistant upon whom the gamekeeper places his chief reliance is his own son—a lad hardly taller than the gun he carries, but much older than would be supposed at first sight.

It is a curious physiological fact that although open-air life is so favourable to health, yet it has the apparent effect of stunting growth in early youth. Let two children be brought up together, one made to “rough” it out of doors, and the other carefully tended and kept within; other things being equal, the boy of the drawing-room will be taller and to all appearance more developed than his companion. The labourer’s children, for instance, who play in the lonely country roads and fields all day, whose parents lock their cottage doors when leaving for work in the morning so that their offspring shall not gain entrance and get into mischief, are almost invariably short for their age. In their case something may be justly attributed to coarse and scanty food; but the children of working farmers exhibit the same peculiarity, and although their food is not luxurious in quality, it is certainly not stinted in quantity. Some of the ploughboys and carters’ lads seem scarcely fit to be put in charge of the huge cart-horses who obey their shouted orders, their heads being but a little way above the shafts—mere infants to look at. Yet they are fourteen or fifteen years of age. With these, and with the sons of farmers who in like manner work in the field, the period of development comes later than with town-bred boys. After sixteen or eighteen, after years of hesitation as it were, they suddenly shoot up, and become great, hulking, broad fellows, possessed of immense strength. So the keeper’s boy is really much more a man than he appears, both in years and knowledge—meaning thereby that local intelligence, technical ability, and unwritten education which is the resultant of early practice and is quite distinct from book-learning.

From his father he has imbibed the spirit of the woods and all the minutiae of his art. First he learned to shoot; his highest ambition being satisfied in the beginning when permitted to carry the double-barrel home across the meadow. Then he was allowed occasionally to fire off the charges left in after the day’s work, before the gun was hung against the beam. Next, from behind the fallen trunk of an oak he took aim at a sitting rabbit which had raised himself on his hind-quarters to listen suspiciously—resting the heavy barrels on the tree, and made nervous by the whispered instructions from the keeper kneeling on the grass out of sight behind, “Aim at his shoulder, lad, if he be sitting sidelong; if a’ be got his back to ’ee aim at his poll.” From this it was but a short step to be trusted with the single-barrel, and finally with the double; ultimately having one of his own and walking his own distinct rounds.

He is now a keen shot, even better than his father; for it is often observed that at a certain age young beginners in most manual arts reach an excellence which in later years fails them. Perhaps the muscles are more elastic, and respond instantaneously to the eye. This mere boy at snap-shooting in the “rough” will beat crack sportsmen hollow. At the trap with pigeons he would probably fail; but in a narrow lane where the rabbits, driven out by the ferrets, just pop across barely a yard of open ground, where even a good shot may miss repeatedly, he is “death” itself to the “bunnies.” So, too, with a wood-hare—i.e. those hares that always lie in the woods as others do in the open fields and on the uplands. They are difficult to kill. They slip quietly out from the form in the rough grass under the ashstole, and all you have for guidance is the rustling and, perhaps, the tips of the ears, the body hidden by the tangled dead ferns and “rowetty” stuff. When you try to aim the barrel knocks against the ash-poles, which are inconveniently near together, or the branches get in the way, and the hare dodges round a tree, and your cartridge simply barks a bough and cuts a tall dead thistle in twain. But the keeper’s lad, who had waited for your fire, instantly follows, as it seems hardly lifting his gun to his shoulder, and the hare is stopped by the shot.

Rabbit-shooting, also, in an ash wood like this is trying to the temper; they double and dodge, and if you wait, thinking that the brown rascals must presently cross the partially open space yonder, lo! just at the very edge up go their white tails and they dive into the bowels of the earth, having made for hidden burrows. There is, of course, after all, nothing but a knack in these things. Still it is something to have acquired the knack. The lad, if you ask him, will proudly show off several gun tricks, as shooting left-handed, placing the butt at the left instead of the right shoulder and pulling the trigger with the left finger. He will knock over a running rabbit like this; and at short distances can shoot with tolerable certainty from under the arm without coming to the “present,” or even holding the gun out like a pistol with one hand.

By slow degrees he has obtained an intimate acquaintance with every field on the place, and no little knowledge of natural history. He will decide at once, as if by a kind of instinct, where any particular bird or animal will be found at that hour.

He is more bitter than his father against poachers, and would like to see harder measures dealt out to them; but his chief use is in watching or checking the assistants, who act as beaters, ferreters, or keep up the banks and fences about the preserves, etc. Without a doubt these men are very untrustworthy, and practise many tricks. For instance, when they are set to ferret a bank, what is to prevent them, if the coast is clear, from hiding half a dozen dead rabbits in a burrow? digging has frequently to be resorted to, and thus they can easily cast earth over and conceal the entrance to a hole. Many a wounded hare and pheasant that falls into the hands of the beaters never makes it appearance at the table of the sportsman; and doubtless they help themselves to the game captured in many a poacher’s wire before giving notice of the discovery to the head man.

Some of these assistants wear waistcoats of calfskin with the hair on it. The hair is outside, and the roan-and-white colour has a curious appearance: the material is said to be very warm and durable. Such waistcoats were common years ago; but of late the looms and spindles of the manufacturing districts have reduced the most outlying of the provinces to a nearly dead uniformity of shoddy.

One pair of eyes cannot be everywhere at once; consequently the keeper, as his son grew up, found him a great help in this way: while he goes one road the lad goes the other, and the undermen never feel certain that some one is not about. Perhaps partly for this reason the lad is not a favourite in the village, and few if any of the other boys make friends with him. He is too loyal to permit of their playing trespass—he looks down on them as a little lower in the scale. Do they ever speak, even in the humblest way, to the proprietor of the place? In their turn they ostracise him after their fashion; so he becomes a silent, solitary youth, self-reliant, and old for his years.

He is a daring climber: as after the hawk’s nest, generally made in the highest elms or pines—if that species of tree is to be found—taking the young birds to some farmhouse where the children delight in living creatures. Some who are not children, or are children of “a larger growth,” like to have a tame hawk in the garden, clipping the wings so that it shall not get away. Hawks have most amusing tricks, and in time become comparatively tame, at least to the person who feeds them. The beauty of the hawk’s eye can hardly be surpassed: full, liquid, and piercing. In this way the keeper’s boy often gets a stray shilling; also for young owls, which are still kept in some country houses, in the sheds or barns, to destroy the mice. When the corn was threshed with the flail, and was consequently exposed to the ravages of these creatures (if undisturbed they multiply in such numbers as would scarcely be credited) owls were almost domestic birds, being domiciled in every barn. Now they are more objects of curiosity, though still useful when large teams of horses are kept and require grain.

The keeper’s boy sells, too, young squirrels from time to time, and the eggs of the rarer birds. In short, he has imbibed all the ways of the woods, and is an adept at everything, from “harling” a rabbit upwards. By-the-bye, what is the etymology of “harling,” which seems to have the sense of entangling? It is done by passing the blade of the knife between the bone of the thigh and the great sinew—where there is nothing but skin—and then thrusting the other foot through the hole thus made. The rabbit or hare can then be conveniently carried by the loop thus formed, or slung on a stick or the gun-barrel across the shoulder. Of course the “harling” is not done till the animal is dead.

The book-learning of the keeper’s boy is rather limited, for he was taught by the parish clerk and schoolmaster before the Education Acts were formulated. Still, he can read, and pores over the weekly paper of rural sports, etc, taken for the guests at the great house and when out of date sent down to the keeper’s cottage. In fact, he shows a little too much interest in the turf columns to be quite satisfactory to his father, who is somewhat anxious about his acquaintance with the jockeys from the training-stables on the downs hard by—an acquaintance he discourages as tending to no good. Like his father, he is never seen abroad without a pair of leathern gaiters, and, if not a gun, a stout gnarled ground-ash stick in his hand.

The gamekeeper’s calling naturally tends to perpetuate itself and become hereditary in his family. The life is full of attraction to boys—the gun alone is hardly to be resisted; and, in addition, there are the animals and birds with which the office is associated, and the comparative freedom from restraint. Therefore one at least of his lads is sure to follow in his father’s steps, and after a youth and early manhood spent out of doors in the woods it is next to impossible for him ever to quit the course he has taken. His children, again, must come within reach of similar influences, and thus for a lengthened period there must be a predisposition towards this special occupation.

Long service in one particular situation is not so common now as it used to be. Men move about from place to place, but wherever they are they still engage in the same capacity; and once a gamekeeper always a gamekeeper is pretty nearly true. Even in the present day instances of families holding the office for more than one or two generations on the same estate may be found; and years ago such was often the case. Occasionally the keeper’s family has in this way by the slow passage of time become in a sense associated with that of his employer; many years of faithful service sensibly abridging the social gulf between master and servant. The contrary holds equally true; and so at the present day short terms of service and constant changes are accompanied by a sharp distinction separating employer and employé.

In such cases of long service the keeper holds a position more nearly resembling the retainer of the olden time than perhaps any other “institution” of modern life. Pensioned off in his old age in the cottage where he was born, or which, at any rate, he first entered as a child, he potters about under his own vine and fig-tree—i.e. the pear and damson trees he planted forty years before—and is privileged now and then to give advice on matters arising out of the estate. He can watch the young broods of pheasants still, and superintend the mixing of their food: his trembling hand, upon the back of which the corded sinews are so strongly marked now the tissue has wasted, and over which the blue veins wander, can set a trap when the vermin become too venturesome.

He is yet a terror to evil-doers, and in no jot abates the dignity of more vigorous days; so that the superannuated ancients whose task it is to sweep the fallen leaves from the avenue and the walks near the great house, or to weed the gravel drive in feeble acknowledgment of the charitable dole they receive, fall to briskly when they see him coming with besom and rusty knife wherewith to “uck” out the springing grass. He daily gossips with the head gardener (nominal), as old or older than himself; but his favourite haunt is a spot on the edge of a fir plantation where lies a fallen “stick” of timber. Here, sheltered by the thick foliage of the fir and the hawthorn hedge at his back from the wind, he can sit on the log, and keep watch over a descending slope of meadow bounding the preserves and crossed by footpaths, along which loiterers may come. His sturdy son now sways the sceptre of ash over the old woods, and other descendants are employed about the place.

Sometimes in the great house there may be seen the counterfeit presentment of such a retainer limned fifty years ago, with dog and gun, and characteristic background of trees. His wife has perhaps survived till recently—strong and hale almost to the last; the most voluble gossip of the hamlet, full of traditions relating to the great house and its owners; a virago if crossed. It is recorded that upon one occasion in her prime she confronted a couple of poachers, and, by dint of tongue and threats of assistance close at hand, forced them to retire. It was at night that, her husband being from home and hearing shots in the wood, she sallied forth armed with a gun, faced the poachers, and actually drove them away, doubtless as much from fear of recognition as of bodily injury, though even that she was capable of inflicting, being totally fearless.

Nothing can be more natural than that when a man has shown an earnest desire to give satisfaction and proved himself honest and industrious, his employer should exhibit an interest in the welfare of his family. Now and then a small farm may be found in the hands of a man descended from or connected with a keeper. To successfully work a tenancy of such narrow limits it is necessary that the occupier should himself labour in the field from morn till dewy eve—the capacity to work being even more essential than capital; and so it happens that the smaller farms are occasionally held by men who have risen from the lower classes. The sons of keepers also become gentlemen’s servants, as grooms, etc, in or out of the house.

A proposal was not long since made that gentlemen who had met with misfortune or were unable to obtain congenial employment should take service as gamekeepers—after the manner in which ladies were invited to become “helps.” The idea does not appear to have received much practical support, nor does it seem feasible looking at the altered relations of society in these days. A gentleman “out of luck,” and with a taste for outdoor life and no objection to work, could surely do far better in the colonies, where he could shoot for his “own hand,” and in course of time achieve an independence, which he could never hope to attain as a gamekeeper.

In the olden times, no doubt, younger brothers did become, in fact, gamekeepers, head grooms, huntsmen, etc, to the head of the family. There was less of the sense of servitude and loss of dignity when the feeling of clanship was prevalent, when the great house was regarded as the natural and proper resource of every cadet of the family. But all this is changed. And for a man of education to descend to trapping vermin, filling cartridges, and feeding pheasants all his life would be a palpable absurdity with Australia open to him and the virgin soil of Central Africa eager for tillage.

Neither is every man’s constitution capable of withstanding the wear and tear of a keeper’s life. I have delineated the more favourable side already; but it has its shadows. Robust health, power of bearing fatigue, and above all of sustaining constant exposure in our most variable climate, are essential. No labourer is so exposed as the keeper: the labourer does not work in continued wet, and he is sure of his night’s rest. The keeper is often about the best part of the night, and he cannot stay indoors because it rains.

The woods are lovely in the sunshine of summer; they are full of charm when the leaves are bursting forth in spring or turning brown with the early autumn frosts; but in wet weather in the winter they are the most wretched places conceivable in which to stroll about. The dead fern and the long grass are soaked with rain, and cling round the ankles with depressing tenacity. Every now and then the feet sink into soddened masses of decaying leaves—a good deal, too, of the soil itself is soft and peaty, being formed from the decomposed vegetation of years; while the boughs against which the passer-by must push fly back and send a cold shower down the neck. In fog as well as in rain the trees drip continuously; the boughs condense the mist and it falls in large drops—a puff of wind brings down a tropical shower.

In warm moist weather the damp steam that floats in the atmosphere is the reverse of pleasant. But a thaw is the worst of all, when the snow congealed on the branches and against the trunks on the windward side, slips and comes down in slushy, icy fragments, and the south-west or south-east wind, laden with chilling moisture, penetrates to the very marrow. Even Robin Hood is recorded to have said that he could stand all kinds of weather with impunity, except the wind which accompanies a thaw. Wet grass has a special faculty for saturating leather. The very boots with which you may wade into a stream up to your ankles in perfect comfort are powerless to keep out the dew or raindrops on the grass-blades. The path of the keeper is by no means always strewn with flowers.

Probably the number of keepers has much increased of recent years, since the flood-tide of commercial prosperity set in. Every successful merchant naturally purchases an estate in the country, and as naturally desires to see some game upon it. This necessitates a keeper and his staff. Then game itself—meaning live game—has become a marketable commodity, bought and sold very much as one might buy a standing crop of wheat.

Owners of land, whose properties are hardly extensive enough to enable them to live in the state which is understood by the expression “country seat,” frequently now resort to certain expedients to increase their incomes. They maintain a head of game large in comparison with the acreage: of course this must be attended to by a resident keeper; and they add to the original mansion various attractive extra buildings—i.e. a billiard-room, conservatories, and a range of modern stabling. The object, of course, is to let the house, the home farm, and the shooting for the season; including facilities for following the hunt. The proprietor is consequently only at home in the latter part of the spring and in the summer—sometimes not even then.

Again, there are large properties, copyhold, or held under long leases from corporate bodies, the tenants having the right to shoot. Instead of exercising the power themselves, they let the shooting. It consists mainly of partridges, hares, and rabbits; and one of their men looks after the game, combining the keeping a general watch with other duties. Professional men and gentlemen of independent income residing in county towns frequently take shooting of this kind. The farmers who farm their own land often make money of their game in the same way.

Gentlemen, too, combine and lease the shooting over wide areas, and of course find it necessary to employ keepers to look after their interests. The upper class of tradesmen in county and provincial towns where any facilities exist now sometimes form a private club or party and rent the shooting over several farms, having a joint-stock interest in one or more keepers. Poor land which used to be of very little value has, by the planting of covers and copses and the erection of a cottage for the keeper and a small “box” for temporary occupation, in many cases been found to pay well if easily accessible from towns. Game, in short, was never so much sought after as at present; and the profession of gamekeeping is in no danger of falling into decay from lack of demand for the skill in woodcraft it implies.

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.