The Gamekeeper At Home Part 2

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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s in the adjacent fields often break in and gnaw the young ash-shoots. In this way a trespa.s.sing 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 "b.u.t.t" 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 flouris.h.i.+ng, 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 n.o.ble-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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s the white, smooth, round k.n.o.b-like tops of several young mushrooms which are pus.h.i.+ng 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 n.o.ble 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.s 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 gra.s.s-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 s.h.i.+ne 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 a.s.sociated with peace and pleasure, yet even here there is one spot where the pa.s.sions 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 superst.i.tious, 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sa.s.sinations 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 s.p.a.ce 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 tomt.i.t, or t.i.tmouse, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gra.s.s; so that there is no place without its especial cla.s.s 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, gra.s.s 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 ma.s.s of briar and bramble climbs nearly to them, with many a stout thistle flouris.h.i.+ng 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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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 a.s.suredly 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 quant.i.ty 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 pa.s.sing 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.