Finally his father came and took him to the field, to his great relief; but he did not carry him in his arms; he strode along at his usual pace and let the little fellow run after him, stumbling and falling and picking himself up again and running on. And by and by one of the women in the field cried out, "Be you not ashamed, Isaac, to go that pace and not bide for the little child! I do b'lieve he's no more'n seven year—poor mite!"

"No more'n six," answered Isaac proudly, with a laugh.

But though not soft or tender with his children he was very fond of them, and when he came home early in the evening he would get them round him and talk to them, and sing old songs and ballads he had learnt in his young years—"Down in the Village," "The Days of Queen Elizabeth," "The Blacksmith," "The Gown of Green," "The Dawning of the Day," and many others, which Caleb in the end got by heart and used to sing, too, when he was grown up.

Caleb was about nine when he began to help regularly with the flock; that was in the summer-time, when the flock was put every day on the down and when Isaac's services were required for the haymaking and later for harvesting and other work. His best memories of this period relate to his mother and to two sheepdogs, Jack at first and afterwards Rough, both animals of original character. Jack was a great favourite of his master, who considered him a "tarrable good dog." He was rather short-haired, like the old Welsh sheepdog once common in Wiltshire, but entirely black instead of the usual colour—blue with a sprinkling of black spots. This dog had an intense hatred of adders and never failed to kill every one he discovered. At the same time he knew that they were dangerous enemies to tackle, and on catching sight of one his hair would instantly bristle up, and he would stand as if paralysed for some moments, glaring at it and gnashing his teeth, then springing like a cat upon it he would seize it in his mouth, only to hurl it from him to a distance. This action he would repeat until the adder was dead, and Isaac would then put it under a furze-bush to take it home and hang it on a certain gate. The farmer, too, like the dog, hated adders, and paid his shepherd sixpence for every one his dog killed.

One day Caleb, with one of his brothers, was out with the flock, amusing themselves in their usual way on the turf with nine morris-men and the shepherd's puzzle, when all at once their mother appeared unexpectedly on the scene. It was her custom, when the boys were sent out with the flock, to make expeditions to the down just to see what they were up to; and hiding her approach by keeping to a hedge-side or by means of the furze-bushes, she would sometimes come upon them with disconcerting suddenness. On this occasion just where the boys had been playing there was a low, stout furze-bush, so dense and flat-topped that one could use it as a seat, and his mother taking off and folding her shawl placed it on the bush, and sat down on it to rest herself after her long walk. "I can see her now," said Caleb, "sitting on that furze-bush, in her smock and leggings, with a big hat like a man's on her head—for that's how she dressed." But in a few moments she jumped up, crying out that she felt a snake under her, and snatched off the shawl, and there, sure enough, out of the middle of the flat bush-top appeared the head of an adder, flicking out its tongue. The dog, too, saw it, dashed at the bush, forcing his muzzle and head into the middle of it, seized the serpent by its body and plucked it out and threw it from him, only to follow it up and kill it in the usual way.

Rough was a large, shaggy, grey-blue bobtail bitch with a white collar. She was a clever, good all-round dog, but had originally been trained for the road, and one of the shepherd's stories about her relates of her intelligence in her own special line—the driving of sheep.

One day he and his smaller brother were in charge of the flock on the down, and were on the side where it dips down to the turnpike-road about a mile and a half from the village, where a large flock, driven by two men and two dogs, came by. They were going to the Britford sheep-fair and were behind time; Isaac had started at daylight that morning with sheep for the same fair, and that was the reason of the boys being with the flock. As the flock on the down was feeding quietly the boys determined to go to the road to watch the sheep and men pass, and arriving at the roadside they saw that the dogs were too tired to work and the men were getting on with great difficulty. One of them, looking intently at Rough, asked if she would work. "Oh, yes, she'll work," said the boy proudly, and calling Rough he pointed to the flock moving very slowly along the road and over the turf on either side of it. Rough knew what was wanted; she had been looking on and had taken the situation in with her professional eye; away she dashed, and running up and down, first on one side then on the other, quickly put the whole flock, numbering 800, into the road and gave them a good start.

"Why, she be a road dog!" exclaimed the drover delightedly. "She's better for me on the road than for you on the down; I'll buy her of you."

"No, I mustn't sell her," said Caleb.

"Look here, boy," said the other, "I'll give 'ee a sovran and this young dog, an' he'll be a good one with a little more training."

"No, I mustn't," said Caleb, distressed at the other's persistence.

"Well, will you come a little way on the road with us?" asked the drover.

This the boys agreed to and went on for about a quarter of a mile, when all at once the Salisbury coach appeared on the road, coming to meet them. This new trouble was pointed out to Rough, and at once when her little master had given the order she dashed barking into the midst of the mass of sheep and drove them furiously to the side from end to end of the extended flock, making a clear passage for the coach, which was not delayed a minute. And no sooner was the coach gone than the sheep were put back into the road.

Then the drover pulled out his sovereign once more and tried to make the boy take it.

"I mustn't," he repeated, almost in tears. "What would father say?"

"Say! He won't say nothing. He'll think you've done well."

But Caleb thought that perhaps his father would say something, and when he remembered certain whippings he had experienced in the past he had an uncomfortable sensation about his back. "No, I mustn't," was all he could say, and then the drovers with a laugh went on with their sheep.

When Isaac came home and the adventure was told to him he laughed and said that he meant to sell Rough some day. He used to say this occasionally to tease his wife because of the dog's intense devotion to her; and she, being without a sense of humour and half thinking that he meant it, would get up out of her seat and solemnly declare that if he ever sold Rough she would never again go out to the down to see what the boys were up to.

One day she visited the boys when they had the flock near the turnpike, and seating herself on the turf a few yards from the road got out her work and began sewing. Presently they spied a big, singular-looking man coming at a swinging pace along the road. He was in shirt-sleeves, barefooted, and wore a straw hat without a rim. Rough eyed the strange being's approach with suspicion, and going to her mistress placed herself at her side. The man came up and sat down at a distance of three or four yards from the group, and Rough, looking dangerous, started up and put her forepaws on her mistress's lap and began uttering a low growl.

"Will that dog bite, missus?" said the man.

"Maybe he will," said she. "I won't answer for he if you come any nearer."

The two boys had been occupied cutting a faggot from a furze-bush with a bill-hook, and now held a whispered consultation as to what they would do if the man tried to "hurt mother," and agreed that as soon as Rough had got her teeth in his leg they would attack him about the head with the bill-hook. They were not required to go into action; the stranger could not long endure Rough's savage aspect, and very soon he got up and resumed his travels.

The shepherd remembered another curious incident in Rough's career. At one time when she had a litter of pups at home she was yet compelled to be a great part of the day with the flock of ewes as they could not do without her. The boys just then were bringing up a motherless lamb by hand and they would put it with the sheep, and to feed it during the day were obliged to catch a ewe with milk. The lamb trotted at Caleb's heels like a dog, and one day when it was hungry and crying to be fed, when Rough happened to be sitting on her haunches close by, it occurred to him that Rough's milk might serve as well as a sheep's. The lamb was put to her and took very kindly to its canine foster-mother, wriggling its tail and pushing vigorously with its nose. Rough submitted patiently to the trial, and the result was that the lamb adopted the sheep-dog as its mother and sucked her milk several times every day, to the great admiration of all who witnessed it.



CHAPTER VI

SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE

A noble shepherd—A fighting village blacksmith—Old Joe the collier—A story of his strength—Donkeys poisoned by yew—The shepherd without his sheep—How the shepherd killed a deer

To me the most interesting of Caleb's old memories were those relating to his father, partly on account of the man's fine character, and partly because they went so far back, beginning in the early years of the last century.

Altogether he must have been a very fine specimen of a man, both physically and morally. In Caleb's mind he was undoubtedly the first among men morally, but there were two other men supposed to be his equals in bodily strength, one a native of the village, the other a periodical visitor. The first was Jarvis the blacksmith, a man of an immense chest and big arms, one of Isaac's greatest friends, and very good-tempered except when in his cups, for he did occasionally get drunk, and then he quarrelled with anyone and every one.

One afternoon he had made himself quite tipsy at the inn, and when going home, swaying about and walking all over the road, he all at once caught sight of the big shepherd coming soberly on behind. No sooner did he see him than it occurred to his wild and muddled mind that he had a quarrel with this very man, Shepherd Isaac, a quarrel of so pressing a nature that there was nothing to do but to fight it out there and then. He planted himself before the shepherd and challenged him to fight. Isaac smiled and said nothing.

"I'll fight thee about this," he repeated, and began tugging at his coat, and after getting it off again made up to Isaac, who still smiled and said no word. Then he pulled his waistcoat off, and finally his shirt, and with nothing but his boots and breeches on once more squared up to Isaac and threw himself into his best fighting attitude.

"I doan't want to fight thee," said Isaac at length, "but I be thinking 'twould be best to take thee home." And suddenly dashing in he seized Jarvis round the waist with one arm, grasped him round the legs with the other, and flung the big man across his shoulder, and carried him off, struggling and shouting, to his cottage. There at the door, pale and distressed, stood the poor wife waiting for her lord, when Isaac arrived, and going straight in dropped the smith down on his own floor, and with the remark, "Here be your man," walked off to his cottage and his tea.

The other powerful man was Old Joe the collier, who flourished and was known in every village in the Salisbury Plain district during the first thirty-five years of the last century. I first heard of this once famous man from Caleb, whose boyish imagination had been affected by his gigantic figure, mighty voice, and his wandering life over all that wide world of Salisbury Plain. Afterwards when I became acquainted with a good many old men, aged from 75 to 90 and upwards, I found that Old Joe's memory is still green in a good many villages of the district, from the upper waters of the Avon to the borders of Dorset. But it is only these ancients who knew him that keep it green; by and by when they are gone Old Joe and his neddies will be remembered no more.

In those days—down to about 1840, it was customary to burn peat in the cottages, the first cost of which was about four and sixpence the wagon-load—as much as I should require to keep me warm for a month in winter; but the cost of its conveyance to the villages of the Plain was about five to six shillings per load, as it came from a considerable distance, mostly from the New Forest. How the labourers at that time, when they were paid seven or eight shillings a week, could afford to buy fuel at such prices to bake their rye bread and keep the frost out of their bones is a marvel to us. Isaac was a good deal better off than most of the villagers in this respect, as his master—for he never had but one—allowed him the use of a wagon and the driver's services for the conveyance of one load of peat each year. The wagon-load of peat and another of faggots lasted him the year with the furze obtained from his "liberty" on the down. Coal at that time was only used by the blacksmiths in the villages, and was conveyed in sacks on ponies or donkeys, and of those who were engaged in this business the best known was Old Joe. He appeared periodically in the villages with his eight donkeys, or neddies as he called them, with jingling bells on their headstalls and their burdens of two sacks of small coal on each. In stature he was a giant of about six feet three, very broad-chested, and invariably wore a broad-brimmed hat, a slate-coloured smock-frock, and blue worsted stockings to his knees. He walked behind the donkeys, a very long staff in his hand, shouting at them from time to time, and occasionally swinging his long staff and bringing it down on the back of a donkey who was not keeping up the pace. In this way he wandered from village to village from end to end of the Plain, getting rid of his small coal and loading his animals with scrap iron which the blacksmiths would keep for him, and as he continued his rounds for nearly forty years he was a familiar figure to every inhabitant throughout the district.

There are some stories still told of his great strength, one of which is worth giving. He was a man of iron constitution and gave himself a hard life, and he was hard on his neddies, but he had to feed them well, and this he often contrived to do at some one else's expense. One night at a village on the Wylye it was discovered that he had put his eight donkeys in a meadow in which the grass was just ripe for mowing. The enraged farmer took them to the village pound and locked them up, but in the morning the donkeys and Joe with them had vanished and the whole village wondered how he had done it. The stone wall of the pound was four feet and a half high and the iron gate was locked, yet he had lifted the donkeys up and put them over and had loaded them and gone before anyone was up.

Once Joe met with a very great misfortune. He arrived late at a village, and finding there was good feed in the churchyard and that everybody was in bed, he put his donkeys in and stretched himself out among the gravestones to sleep. He had no nerves and no imagination; and was tired, and slept very soundly until it was light and time to put his neddies out before any person came by and discovered that he had been making free with the rector's grass. Glancing round he could see no donkeys, and only when he stood up he found they had not made their escape but were there all about him, lying among the gravestones, stone dead every one! He had forgotten that a churchyard was a dangerous place to put hungry animals in. They had browsed on the luxuriant yew that grew there, and this was the result.

In time he recovered from his loss and replaced his dead neddies with others, and continued for many years longer on his rounds.

To return to Isaac Bawcombe. He was born, we have seen, in 1800, and began following a flock as a boy and continued as shepherd on the same farm for a period of fifty-five years. The care of sheep was the one all-absorbing occupation of his life, and how much it was to him appears in this anecdote of his state of mind when he was deprived of it for a time. The flock was sold and Isaac was left without sheep, and with little to do except to wait from Michaelmas to Candlemas, when there would be sheep again at the farm. It was a long time to Isaac, and he found his enforced holiday so tedious that he made himself a nuisance to his wife in the house. Forty times a day he would throw off his hat and sit down, resolved to be happy at his own fireside, but after a few minutes the desire to be up and doing would return, and up he would get and out he would go again. One dark cloudy evening a man from the farm put his head in at the door. "Isaac," he said, "there be sheep for 'ee up't the farm—two hunderd ewes and a hunderd more to come in dree days. Master, he sent I to say you be wanted." And away the man went.

Isaac jumped up and hurried forth without taking his crook from the corner and actually without putting on his hat! His wife called out after him, and getting no response sent the boy with his hat to overtake him. But the little fellow soon returned with the hat—he could not overtake his father!

He was away three or four hours at the farm, then returned, his hair very wet, his face beaming, and sat down with a great sigh of pleasure. "Two hunderd ewes," he said, "and a hunderd more to come—what d'you think of that?"

"Well, Isaac," said she, "I hope thee'll be happy now and let I alone."

After all that had been told to me about the elder Bawcombe's life and character, it came somewhat as a shock to learn that at one period during his early manhood he had indulged in one form of poaching—a sport which had a marvellous fascination for the people of England in former times, but was pretty well extinguished during the first quarter of the last century. Deer he had taken; and the whole tale of the deer-stealing, which was a common offence in that part of Wiltshire down to about 1834, sounds strange at the present day.

Large herds of deer were kept at that time at an estate a few miles from Winterbourne Bishop, and it often happened that many of the animals broke bounds and roamed singly and in small bands over the hills. When deer were observed in the open, certain of the villagers would settle on some plan of action; watchers would be sent out not only to keep an eye on the deer but on the keepers too. Much depended on the state of the weather and the moon, as some light was necessary; then, when the conditions were favourable and the keepers had been watched to their cottages, the gang would go out for a night's hunting. But it was a dangerous sport, as the keepers also knew that deer were out of bounds, and they would form some counter-plan, and one peculiarly nasty plan they had was to go out about three or four o'clock in the morning and secrete themselves somewhere close to the village to intercept the poachers on their return.

Bawcombe, who never in his life associated with the village idlers and frequenters of the alehouse, had no connexion with these men. His expeditions were made alone on some dark, unpromising night, when the regular poachers were in bed and asleep. He would steal away after bedtime, or would go out ostensibly to look after the sheep, and, if fortunate, would return in the small hours with a deer on his back. Then, helped by his mother, with whom he lived (for this was when he was a young unmarried man, about 1820), he would quickly skin and cut up the carcass, stow the meat away in some secret place, and bury the head, hide, and offal deep in the earth; and when morning came it would find Isaac out following his flock as usual, with no trace of guilt or fatigue in his rosy cheeks and clear, honest eyes.

This was a very astonishing story to hear from Caleb, but to suspect him of inventing or of exaggerating was impossible to anyone who knew him. And we have seen that Isaac Bawcombe was an exceptional man—physically a kind of Alexander Selkirk of the Wiltshire Downs. And he, moreover, had a dog to help him—one as superior in speed and strength to the ordinary sheep-dog as he himself was to the rack of his fellow-men. It was only after much questioning on my part that Caleb brought himself to tell me of these ancient adventures, and finally to give a detailed account of how his father came to take his first deer. It was in the depth of winter—bitterly cold, with a strong north wind blowing on the snow-covered downs—when one evening Isaac caught sight of two deer out on his sheep-walk. In that part of Wiltshire there is a famous monument of antiquity, a vast mound-like wall, with a deep depression or fosse running at its side. Now it happened that on the highest part of the down, where the wall or mound was most exposed to the blast, the snow had been blown clean off the top, and the deer were feeding here on the short turf, keeping to the ridge, so that, outlined against the sky, they had become visible to Isaac at a great distance.

He saw and pondered. These deer, just now, while out of bounds, were no man's property, and it would be no sin to kill and eat one—if he could catch it!—and it was a season of bitter want. For many many days he had eaten his barley bread, and on some days barley-flour dumplings, and had been content with this poor fare; but now the sight of these animals made him crave for meat with an intolerable craving, and he determined to do something to satisfy it.

He went home and had his poor supper, and when it was dark set forth again with his dog. He found the deer still feeding on the mound. Stealing softly along among the furze-bushes, he got the black line of the mound against the starry sky, and by and by, as he moved along, the black figures of the deer, with their heads down, came into view. He then doubled back and, proceeding some distance, got down into the fosse and stole forward to them again under the wall. His idea was that on taking alarm they would immediately make for the forest which was their home, and would probably pass near him. They did not hear him until he was within sixty yards, and then bounded down from the wall, over the dyke, and away, but in almost opposite directions—one alone making for the forest; and on this one the dog was set. Out he shot like an arrow from the bow, and after him ran Isaac "as he had never runned afore in all his life." For a short space deer and dog in hot pursuit were visible on the snow, then the darkness swallowed them up as they rushed down the slope; but in less than half a minute a sound came back to Isaac, flying, too, down the incline—the long, wailing cry of a deer in distress. The dog had seized his quarry by one of the front legs, a little above the hoof, and held it fast, and they were struggling on the snow when Isaac came up and flung himself upon his victim, then thrust his knife through its windpipe "to stop its noise." Having killed it, he threw it on his back and went home, not by the turnpike, nor by any road or path, but over fields and through copses until he got to the back of his mother's cottage. There was no door on that side, but there was a window, and when he had rapped at it and his mother opened it, without speaking a word he thrust the dead deer through, then made his way round to the front.

That was how he killed his first deer. How the others were taken I do not know; I wish I did, since this one exploit of a Wiltshire shepherd has more interest for me than I find in fifty narratives of elephants slaughtered wholesale with explosive bullets, written for the delight and astonishment of the reading public by our most glorious Nimrods.



CHAPTER VII

THE DEER-STEALERS

Deer-stealing on Salisbury Plain—The head-keeper Harbutt—Strange story of a baby—Found as a surname—John Barter the village carpenter—How the keeper was fooled—A poaching attack planned—The fight—Head-keeper and carpenter—The carpenter hides his son—The arrest—Barter's sons forsake the village

There were other memories of deer-taking handed down to Caleb by his parents, and the one best worth preserving relates to the head-keeper of the preserves, or chase, and to a great fight in which he was engaged with two brothers of the girl who was afterwards to be Isaac's wife.

Here it may be necessary to explain that formerly the owner of Cranbourne Chase, at that time Lord Rivers, claimed the deer and the right to preserve and hunt deer over a considerable extent of country outside of his own lands. On the Wiltshire side these rights extended from Cranbourne Chase over the South Wiltshire Downs to Salisbury, and the whole territory, about thirty miles broad, was divided into beats or walks, six or eight in number, each beat provided with a keeper's lodge. This state of things continued to the year 1834, when the chase was "disfranchised" by Act of Parliament.

The incident I am going to relate occurred about 1815 or perhaps two or three years later. The border of one of the deer walks was at a spot known as Three Downs Place, two miles and a half from Winterbourne Bishop. Here in a hollow of the downs there was an extensive wood, and just within the wood a large stone house, said to be centuries old but long pulled down, called Rollston House, in which the head-keeper lived with two under-keepers. He had a wife but no children, and was a middle-aged, thick-set, very dark man, powerful and vigilant, a "tarrable" hater and persecutor of poachers, feared and hated by them in turn, and his name was Harbutt.

It happened that one morning, when he had unbarred the front door to go out, he found a great difficulty in opening it, caused by a heavy object having been fastened to the door-handle. It proved to be a basket or box, in which a well-nourished, nice-looking boy baby was sleeping, well wrapped up and covered with a cloth. On the cloth a scrap of paper was pinned with the following lines written on it:

Take me in and treat me well, For in this house my father dwell.

Harbutt read the lines and didn't even smile at the grammar; on the contrary, he appeared very much upset, and was still standing holding the paper, staring stupidly at it, when his wife came on the scene. "What be this?" she exclaimed, and looked first at the paper, then at him, then at the rosy child fast asleep in its cradle; and instantly, with a great cry, she fell on it and snatched it up in her arms, and holding it clasped to her bosom, began lavishing caresses and endearing expressions on it, tears of rapture in her eyes! Not one word of inquiry or bitter, jealous reproach—all that part of her was swallowed up and annihilated in the joy of a woman who had been denied a child of her own to love and nourish and worship. And now one had come to her and it mattered little how. Two or three days later the infant was baptized at the village church with the quaint name of Moses Found.

Caleb was a little surprised at my thinking it a laughable name. It was to his mind a singularly appropriate one; he assured me it was not the only case he knew of in which the surname Found had been bestowed on a child of unknown parentage, and he told me the story of one of the Founds who had gone to Salisbury as a boy and worked and saved and eventually become quite a prosperous and important person. There was really nothing funny in it.

The story of Moses Found had been told him by his old mother; she, he remarked significantly, had good cause to remember it. She was herself a native of the village, born two or three years later than the mysterious Moses; her father, John Barter by name was a carpenter and lived in an old, thatched house which still exists and is very familiar to me. He had five sons; then, after an interval of some years, a daughter was born, who in due time was to be Isaac's wife. When she was a little girl her brothers were all grown up or on the verge of manhood, and Moses, too, was a young man—"the spit of his father" people said, meaning the head-keeper—and he was now one of Harbutt's under-keepers.

About this time some of the more ardent spirits in the village, not satisfied with an occasional hunt when a deer broke out and roamed over the downs, took to poaching them in the woods. One night, a hunt having been arranged, one of the most daring of the men secreted himself close to the keeper's house, and having watched the keepers go in and the lights put out, he actually succeeded in fastening up the doors from the outside with screws and pieces of wood without creating an alarm. He then met his confederates at an agreed spot and the hunting began, during which one deer was chased to the house and actually pulled down and killed on the lawn.

Meanwhile the inmates were in a state of great excitement; the under-keepers feared that a force it would be dangerous to oppose had taken possession of the woods, while Harbutt raved and roared like a maddened wild beast in a cage, and put forth all his strength to pull the doors open. Finally he smashed a window and leaped out, gun in hand, and calling the others to follow rushed into the wood. But he was too late; the hunt was over and the poachers had made good their escape, taking the carcasses of two or three deer they had succeeded in killing.

The keeper was not to be fooled in the same way a second time, and before very long he had his revenge. A fresh raid was planned, and on this occasion two of the five brothers were in it, and there were four more, the blacksmith of Winterbourne Bishop, their best man, two famous shearers, father and son, from a neighbouring village, and a young farm labourer.

They knew very well that with the head-keeper in his present frame of mind it was a risky affair, and they made a solemn compact that if caught they would stand by one another to the end. And caught they were, and on this occasion the keepers were four.

At the very beginning the blacksmith, their ablest man and virtual leader, was knocked down senseless with a blow on his head with the butt end of a gun. Immediately on seeing this the two famous shearers took to their heels and the young labourer followed their example. The brothers were left but refused to be taken, although Harbutt roared at them in his bull's voice that he would shoot them unless they surrendered. They made light of his threats and fought against the four, and eventually were separated. By and by the younger of the two was driven into a brambly thicket where his opponents imagined that it would be impossible for him to escape. But he was a youth of indomitable spirit, strong and agile as a wild cat; and returning blow for blow he succeeded in tearing himself from them, then after a running fight through the darkest part of the wood for a distance of two or three hundred yards they at length lost him or gave him up and went back to assist Harbutt and Moses against the other man. Left to himself he got out of the wood and made his way back to the village. It was long past midnight when he turned up at his father's cottage, a pitiable object covered with mud and blood, hatless, his clothes torn to shreds, his face and whole body covered with bruises and bleeding wounds.

The old man was in a great state of distress about his other son, and early in the morning went to examine the ground where the fight had been. It was only too easily found; the sod was trampled down and branches broken as though a score of men had been engaged. Then he found his eldest son's cap, and a little farther away a sleeve of his coat; shreds and rags were numerous on the bramble bushes, and by and by he came on a pool of blood. "They've kill 'n!" he cried in despair, "they've killed my poor boy!" and straight to Rollston House he went to inquire, and was met by Harbutt himself, who came out limping, one boot on, the other foot bound up with rags, one arm in a sling and a cloth tied round his head. He was told that his son was alive and safe indoors and that he would be taken to Salisbury later in the day. "His clothes be all torn to pieces," added the keeper. "You can just go home at once and git him others before the constable comes to take him."

"You've tored them to pieces yourself and you can git him others," retorted the old man in a rage.

"Very well," said the keeper. "But bide a moment—I've something more to say to you. When your son comes out of jail in a year or so you tell him from me that if he'll just step up this way I'll give him five shillings and as much beer as he likes to drink. I never see'd a better fighter!"

It was a great compliment to his son, but the old men was troubled in his mind. "What dost mean, keeper, by a year or so?" he asked.

"When I said that," returned the other, with a grin, "I was just thinking what 'twould be he deserves to git."

"And you'd agot your deserts, by God," cried the angry father, "if that boy of mine hadn't a-been left alone to fight ye!"

Harbutt regarded him with a smile of gratified malice.

"You can go home now," he said. "If you'd see your son you'll find'n in Salisbury jail. Maybe you'll be wanting new locks on your doors; you can git they in Salisbury too—you've no blacksmith in your village now. No, your boy weren't alone and you know that damned well."

"I know naught about that," he returned, and started to walk home with a heavy heart. Until now he had been clinging to the hope that the other son had not been identified in the dark wood. And now what could he do to save one of the two from hateful imprisonment? The boy was not in a fit condition to make his escape; he could hardly get across the room and could not sit or lie down without groaning. He could only try to hide him in the cottage and pray that they would not discover him. The cottage was in the middle of the village and had but little ground to it, but there was a small, boarded-up cavity or cell at one end of an attic, and it might be possible to save him by putting him in there. Here, then, in a bed placed for him on the floor, his bruised son was obliged to lie, in the close, dark hole, for some days.

One day, about a week later, when he was recovering from his hurts, he crawled out of his box and climbed down the narrow stairs to the ground floor to see the light and breathe a better air for a short time, and while down he was tempted to take a peep at the street through the small, latticed window. But he quickly withdrew his head and by and by said to his father, "I'm feared Moses has seen me. Just now when I was at the window he came by and looked up and see'd me with my head all tied up, and I'm feared he knew 'twas I."

After that they could only wait in fear and trembling, and on the next day quite early there came a loud rap at the door, and on its being opened by the old man the constable and two keepers appeared standing before him.

"I've come to take your son," said the constable.

The old man stepped back without a word and took down his gun from its place on the wall, then spoke: "It you've got a search-warrant you may come in; if you haven't got 'n I'll blow the brains out of the first man that puts a foot inside my door."

They hesitated a few moments then silently withdrew. After consulting together the constable went off to the nearest magistrate, leaving the two keepers to keep watch on the house: Moses Found was one of them. Later in the day the constable returned armed with a warrant and was thereupon admitted, with the result that the poor youth was soon discovered in his hiding-place and carried off. And that was the last he saw of his home, his young sister crying bitterly and his old father white and trembling with grief and impotent rage.

A month or two later the two brothers were tried and sentenced each to six months' imprisonment. They never came home. On their release they went to Woolwich, where men were wanted and the pay was good. And by and by the accounts they sent home induced first one then the other brother to go and join them, and the poor old father, who had been very proud of his five sons, was left alone with his young daughter—Isaac's destined wife.



CHAPTER VIII

SHEPHERDS AND POACHING

General remarks on poaching—Farmer, shepherd, and dog—A sheep-dog that would not hunt—Taking a partridge from a hawk—Old Gaarge and Young Gaarge—Partridge-poaching—The shepherd robbed of his rabbits—Wisdom of Shepherd Gathergood—Hare-trapping on the down—Hare-taking with a crook

When Caleb was at length free from his father's tutelage, and as an under-shepherd practically independent, he did not follow Isaac's strict example with regard to wild animals, good for the pot, which came by chance in his way; he even allowed himself to go a little out of his way on occasion to get them.

We know that about this matter the law of the land does not square with the moral law as it is written in the heart of the peasant. A wounded partridge or other bird which he finds in his walks abroad or which comes by chance to him is his by a natural right, and he will take and eat or dispose of it without scruple. With rabbits he is very free—he doesn't wait to find a distressed one with a stoat on its track—stoats are not sufficiently abundant; and a hare, too, may be picked up at any moment; only in this case he must be very sure that no one is looking. Knowing the law, and being perhaps a respectable, religious person, he is anxious to abstain from all appearance of evil. This taking a hare or rabbit or wounded partridge is in his mind a very different thing from systematic poaching; but he is aware that to the classes above him it is not so—the law has made them one. It is a hard, arbitrary, unnatural law, made by and for them, his betters, and outwardly he must conform to it. Thus you will find the best of men among the shepherds and labourers freely helping themselves to any wild creature that falls in their way, yet sharing the game-preserver's hatred of the real poacher. The village poacher as a rule is an idle, dissolute fellow, and the sober, industrious, righteous shepherd or ploughman or carter does not like to be put on a level with such a person. But there is no escape from the hard and fast rule in such things, and however open and truthful he may be in everything else, in this one matter he is obliged to practise a certain amount of deception. Here is a case to serve as an illustration; I have only just heard it, after putting together the material I had collected for this chapter, in conversation with an old shepherd friend of mine.

He is a fine old man who has followed a flock these fifty years, and will, I have no doubt, carry his crook for yet another ten. Not only is he a "good shepherd," in the sense in which Caleb uses that phrase, with a more intimate knowledge of sheep and all the ailments they are subject to than I have found in any other, but he is also a truly religious man, one that "walks with God." He told me this story of a sheep-dog he owned when head-shepherd on a large farm on the Dorsetshire border with a master whose chief delight in life was in coursing hares. They abounded on his land, and he naturally wanted the men employed on the farm to regard them as sacred animals. One day he came out to the shepherd to complain that some one had seen his dog hunting a hare.

The shepherd indignantly asked who had said such a thing.

"Never mind about that," said the farmer. "Is it true?"

"It is a lie," said the shepherd. "My dog never hunts a hare or anything else. 'Tis my belief the one that said that has got a dog himself that hunts the hares and he wants to put the blame on some one else."

"May be so," said the farmer, unconvinced.

Just then a hare made its appearance, coming across the field directly towards them, and either because they never moved or it did not smell them it came on and on, stopping at intervals to sit for a minute or so on its haunches, then on again until it was within forty yards of where they were standing. The farmer watched it approach and at the same time kept an eye on the dog sitting at their feet and watching the hare too, very steadily. "Now, shepherd," said the farmer, "don't you say one word to the dog and I'll see for myself." Not a word did he say, and the hare came and sat for some seconds near them, then limped away out of sight, and the dog made not the slightest movement. "That's all right," said the farmer, well pleased. "I know now 'twas a lie I heard about your dog. I've seen for myself and I'll just keep a sharp eye on the man that told me."

My comment on this story was that the farmer had displayed an almost incredible ignorance of a sheepdog—and a shepherd. "How would it have been if you had said, 'Catch him, Bob,' or whatever his name was?" I asked.

He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and replied, "I do b'lieve he'd ha' got 'n, but he'd never move till I told 'n."

It comes to this: the shepherd refuses to believe that by taking a hare he is robbing any man of his property, and if he is obliged to tell a lie to save himself from the consequences he does not consider that it is a lie.

When he understood that I was on his side in this question, he told me about a good sheep-dog he once possessed which he had to get rid of because he would not take a hare!

A dog when broken is made to distinguish between the things he must and must not do. He is "feelingly persuaded" by kind words and caresses in one case and hard words and hard blows in the other. He learns that if he hunts hares and rabbits it will be very bad for him, and in due time, after some suffering, he is able to overcome this strongest instinct of a dog. He acquires an artificial conscience. Then, when his education is finished, he must be made to understand that it is not quite finished after all—that he must partially unlearn one of the saddest of the lessons instilled in him. He must hunt a hare or rabbit when told by his master to do so. It is a compact between man and dog. Thus, they have got a law which the dog has sworn to obey; but the man who made it is above the law and can when he thinks proper command his servant to break it. The dog, as a rule, takes it all in very readily and often allows himself more liberty than his master gives him; the most highly accomplished animal is one that, like my shepherd's dog in the former instance, will not stir till he is told. In the other case the poor brute could not rise to the position; it was too complex for him, and when ordered to catch a rabbit he could only put his tail between his legs and look in a puzzled way at his master. "Why do you tell me to do a thing for which I shall be thrashed?"

It was only after Caleb had known me some time, when we were fast friends, that he talked with perfect freedom of these things and told me of his own small, illicit takings without excuse or explanation.

One day he saw a sparrowhawk dash down upon a running partridge and struggle with it on the ground. It was in a grass field, divided from the one he was walking in by a large, unkept hedge without a gap in it to let him through. Presently the hawk rose up with the partridge still violently struggling in its talons, and flew over the hedge to Caleb's side, but was no sooner over than it came down again and the struggle went on once more on the ground. On Caleb running to the spot the hawk flew off, leaving his prey behind. He had grasped it in its sides, driving his sharp claws well in, and the partridge, though unable to fly, was still alive. The shepherd killed it and put it in his pocket, and enjoyed it very much when he came to eat it.

From this case, a most innocent form of poaching, he went on to relate how he had once been able to deprive a cunning poacher and bad man, a human sparrowhawk, of his quarry.

There were two persons in the village, father and son, he very heartily detested, known respectively as Old Gaarge and Young Gaarge, inveterate poachers both. They were worse than the real reprobate who haunted the public-house and did no work and was not ashamed of his evil ways, for these two were hypocrites and were outwardly sober, righteous men, who kept themselves a little apart from their neighbours and were very severe in their condemnation of other people's faults.

One Sunday morning Caleb was on his way to his ewes folded at a distance from the village, walking by a hedgerow at the foot of the down, when he heard a shot fired some way ahead, and after a minute or two a second shot. This greatly excited his curiosity and caused him to keep a sharp look-out in the direction the sounds had come from, and by and by he caught sight of a man walking towards him. It was Old Gaarge in his long smock-frock, proceeding in a leisurely way towards the village, but catching sight of the shepherd he turned aside through a gap in the hedge and went off in another direction to avoid meeting him. No doubt, thought Caleb, he has got his gun in two pieces hidden under his smock. He went on until he came to a small field of oats which had grown badly and had only been half reaped, and here he discovered that Old Gaarge had been lying in hiding to shoot at the partridges that came to feed. He had been screened from the sight of the birds by a couple of hurdles and some straw, and there were feathers of the birds he had shot scattered about. He had finished his Sunday morning's sport and was going back, a little too late on this occasion as it turned out.

Caleb went on to his flock, but before getting to it his dog discovered a dead partridge in the hedge; it had flown that far and then dropped, and there was fresh blood on its feathers. He put it in his pocket and carried it about most of the day while with his sheep on the down. Late in the afternoon he spied two magpies pecking at something out in the middle of a field and went to see what they had found. It was a second partridge which Old Gaarge had shot in the morning and had lost, the bird having flown to some distance before dropping. The magpies had probably found it already dead, as it was cold; they had begun tearing the skin at the neck and had opened it down to the breast-bone. Caleb took this bird, too, and by and by, sitting down to examine it, he thought he would try to mend the torn skin with the needle and thread he always carried inside his cap. He succeeded in stitching it neatly up, and putting back the feathers in their place the rent was quite concealed. That evening he took the two birds to a man in the village who made a livelihood by collecting bones, rags, and things of that kind; the man took the birds in his hand, held them up, felt their weight, examined them carefully, and pronounced them to be two good, fat birds, and agreed to pay two shillings for them.

Such a man may be found in most villages; he calls himself a "general dealer," and keeps a trap and pony—in some cases he keeps the ale-house—and is a useful member of the small, rural community—a sort of human carrion-crow.

The two shillings were very welcome, but more than the money was the pleasing thought that he had got the bird shot by the hypocritical old poacher for his own profit. Caleb had good cause to hate him. He, Caleb, was one of the shepherds who had his master's permission to take rabbits on the land, and having found his snares broken on many occasions he came to the conclusion that they were visited in the night time by some very cunning person who kept a watch on his movements. One evening he set five snares in a turnip field and went just before daylight next morning in a dense fog to visit them. Every one was broken! He had just started on his way back, feeling angry and much puzzled at such a thing, when the fog all at once passed away and revealed the figures of two men walking hurriedly off over the down. They were at a considerable distance, but the light was now strong enough to enable him to identify Old Gaarge and Young Gaarge. In a few moments they vanished over the brow. Caleb was mad at being deprived of his rabbits in this mean way, but pleased at the same time in having discovered who the culprits were; but what to do about it he did not know.

On the following day he was with his flock on the down and found himself near another shepherd, also with his sheep, one he knew very well, a quiet but knowing old man named Joseph Gathergood. He was known to be a skilful rabbit-catcher, and Caleb thought he would go over to him and tell him about how he was being tricked by the two Gaarges and ask him what to do in the matter.

The old man was very friendly and at once told him what to do. "Don't you set no more snares by the hedges and in the turmots," he said. "Set them out on the open down where no one would go after rabbits and they'll not find the snares." And this was how it had to be done. First he was to scrape the ground with the heel of his boot until the fresh earth could be seen through the broken turf; then he was to sprinkle a little rabbit scent on the scraped spot, and plant his snare. The scent and smell of the fresh earth combined would draw the rabbits to the spot; they would go there to scratch and would inevitably get caught if the snare was properly placed.

Caleb tried this plan with one snare, and on the following morning found that he had a rabbit. He set it again that evening, then again, until he had caught five rabbits on five consecutive nights, all with the same snare. That convinced him that he had been taught a valuable lesson and that old Gathergood was a very wise man about rabbits; and he was very happy to think that he had got the better of his two sneaking enemies.

But Shepherd Gathergood was just as wise about hares, and, as in the other case, he took them out on the down in the most open places. His success was due to his knowledge of the hare's taste for blackthorn twigs. He would take a good, strong blackthorn stem or shoot with twigs on it, and stick it firmly down in the middle of a large grass field or on the open down, and place the steel trap tied to the stick at a distance of a foot or so from it, the trap concealed under grass or moss and dead leaves. The smell of the blackthorn would draw the hare to the spot, and he would move round and round nibbling the twigs until caught.

Caleb never tried this plan, but was convinced that Gathergood was right about it.

He told me of another shepherd who was clever at taking hares in another way, and who was often chaffed by his acquaintances on account of the extraordinary length of his shepherd's crook. It was like a lance or pole, being twice the usual length. But he had a use for it. This shepherd used to make hares' forms on the downs in all suitable places, forming them so cunningly that no one seeing them by chance would have believed they were the work of human hands. The hares certainly made use of them. When out with his flock he would visit these forms, walking quietly past them at a distance of twenty to thirty feet, his dog following at his heels. On catching sight of a hare crouching in a form he would drop a word, and the dog would instantly stand still and remain fixed and motionless, while the shepherd went on but in a circle so as gradually to approach the form. Meanwhile the hare would keep his eyes fixed on the dog, paying no attention to the man, until by and by the long staff would be swung round and a blow descend on the poor, silly head from the opposite side, and if the blow was not powerful enough to stun or disable the hare, the dog would have it before it got many yards from the cosy nest prepared for its destruction.



CHAPTER IX

THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES

A fox-trapping shepherd—Gamekeepers and foxes—Fox and stoat—A gamekeeper off his guard—Pheasants and foxes—Caleb kills a fox—A fox-hunting sheep-dog—Two varieties of foxes—Rabbits playing with little foxes—How to expel foxes—A playful spirit in the fox—Fox-hunting a danger to sheep

Caleb related that his friend Shepherd Gathergood was a great fox-killer and, as with hares, he took them in a way of his own. He said that the fox will always go to a heap of ashes in any open place, and his plan was to place a steel trap concealed among the ashes, made fast to a stick about three feet high, firmly planted in the middle of the heap, with a piece of strong-smelling cheese tied to the top. The two attractions of an ash-heap and the smell of strong cheese was more than any fox could resist. When he caught a fox he killed and buried it on the down and said "nothing to nobody" about it. He killed them to protect himself from their depredations; foxes, like Old Gaarge and his son in Caleb's case, went round at night to rob him of the rabbits he took in his snares.

Caleb never blamed him for this; on the contrary, he greatly admired him for his courage, seeing that if it had been found out he would have been a marked man. It was perhaps intelligence or cunning rather than courage; he did not believe that he would be found out, and he never was; he told Caleb of these things because he was sure of his man. Those who were interested in the hunt never suspected him, and as to gamekeepers, they hardly counted. He was helping them; no one hates a fox more than they do. The farmer gets compensation for damage, and the hen-wife is paid for her stolen chickens by the hunt, The keeper is required to look after the game, and at the same time to spare his chief enemy, the fox. Indeed, the keeper's state of mind with regard to foxes has always been a source of amusement to me, and by long practice I am able to talk to him on that delicate subject in a way to make him uncomfortable and self-contradictory. There are various, quite innocent questions which the student of wild life may put to a keeper about foxes which have a disturbing effect on his brain. How to expel foxes from a covert, for example; and here is another: Is it true that the fox listens for the distressed cries of a rabbit pursued by a stoat and that he will deprive the stoat of his captive? Perhaps; Yes; No, I don't think so, because one hunts by night, the other by day, he will answer, but you see that the question troubles him. One keeper, off his guard, promptly answered, "I've no doubt of it; I can always bring a fox to me by imitating the cry of a rabbit hunted by a stoat." But he did not say what his object was in attracting the fox.

I say that the keeper was off his guard in this instance, because the fiction that foxes were preserved on the estate was kept up, though as a fact they were systematically destroyed by the keepers. As the pheasant-breeding craze appears to increase rather than diminish, notwithstanding the disastrous effect it has had in alienating the people from their lords and masters, the conflict of interest between fox-hunter and pheasant-breeder will tend to become more and more acute, and the probable end will be that fox-hunting will have to go. A melancholy outlook to those who love the country and old country sports, and who do not regard pheasant-shooting as now followed as sport at all. It is a delusion of the landlords that the country people think most highly of the great pheasant-preserver who has two or three big shoots in a season, during which vast numbers of birds are slaughtered—every bird "costing a guinea," as the saying is. It brings money into the country, he or his apologist tells you, and provides employment for the village poor in October and November, when there is little doing. He does not know the truth of the matter. A certain number of the poorer people of the village are employed as beaters for the big shoots at a shilling a day or so, and occasionally a labourer, going to or from his work, finds a pheasant's nest and informs the keeper and receives some slight reward. If he "keeps his eyes open" and shows himself anxious at all times to serve the keeper he will sometimes get a rabbit for his Sunday dinner.

This is not a sufficient return for the freedom to walk on the land and in woods, which the villager possessed formerly, even in his worst days of his oppression, a liberty which has now been taken from him. The keeper is there now to prevent him; he was there before, and from of old, but the pheasant was not yet a sacred bird, and it didn't matter that a man walked on the turf or picked up a few fallen sticks in a wood. The keeper is there to tell him to keep to the road and sometimes to ask him, even when he is on the road, what is he looking over the hedge for. He slinks obediently away; he is only a poor labourer with his living to get, and he cannot afford to offend the man who stands between him and the lord and the lord's tenant. And he is inarticulate; but the insolence and injustice rankle in his heart, for he is not altogether a helot in soul; and the result is that the sedition-mongers, the Socialists, the furious denouncers of all landlords, who are now quartering the country, and whose vans I meet in the remotest villages, are listened to, and their words—wild and whirling words they may be—are sinking into the hearts of the agricultural labourers of the new generation.

To return to foxes and gamekeepers. There are other estates where the fiction of fox-preserving is kept up no longer, where it is notorious that the landlord is devoted exclusively to the gun and to pheasant-breeding. On one of the big estates I am familiar with in Wiltshire the keepers openly say they will not suffer a fox, and every villager knows it and will give information of a fox to the keepers, and looks to be rewarded with a rabbit. All this is undoubtedly known to the lord of the manor; his servants are only carrying out his own wishes, although he still subscribes to the hunt and occasionally attends the meet. The entire hunt may unite in cursing him, but they must do so below their breath; it would have a disastrous effect to spread it abroad that he is a persecutor of foxes.

Caleb disliked foxes, too, but not to the extent of killing them. He did once actually kill one, when a young under-shepherd, but it was accident rather than intention.

One day he found a small gap in a hedge, which had been made or was being used by a hare, and, thinking to take it, he set a trap at the spot, tying it securely to a root and covering it over with dead leaves. On going to the place the next morning he could see nothing until his feet were on the very edge of the ditch, when with startling suddenness a big dog fox sprang up at him with a savage snarl. It was caught by a hind-leg, and had been lying concealed among the dead leaves close under the bank. Caleb, angered at finding a fox when he had looked for a hare, and at the attack the creature had made on him, dealt it a blow on the head with his heavy stick—just one blow given on the impulse of the moment, but it killed the fox! He felt very bad at what he had done and began to think of consequences. He took it from the trap and hid it away under the dead leaves beneath the hedge some yards from the gap, and then went to his work. During the day one of the farm hands went out to speak to him. He was a small, quiet old man, a discreet friend, and Caleb confided to him what he had done. "Leave it to me," said his old friend, and went back to the farm. In the afternoon Caleb was standing on the top of the down looking towards the village, when he spied at a great distance the old man coming out to the hills, and by and by he could make out that he had a sack on his back and a spade in his hand. When half-way up the side of the hill he put his burden down and set to work digging a deep pit. Into this he put the dead fox, and threw in and trod down the earth, then carefully put back the turf in its place, then, his task done, shouldered the spade and departed. Caleb felt greatly relieved, for now the fox was buried out on the downs, and no one would ever know that he had wickedly killed it.

Subsequently he had other foxes caught in traps set for hares, but was always able to release them. About one he had the following story. The dog he had at that time, named Monk, hated foxes as Jack hated adders, and would hunt them savagely whenever he got a chance. One morning Caleb visited a trap he had set in a gap in a hedge and found a fox in it. The fox jumped up, snarling and displaying his teeth, ready to fight for dear life, and it was hard to restrain Monk from flying at him. So excited was he that only when his master threatened him with his crook did he draw back and, sitting on his haunches, left him to deal with the difficult business in his own way. The difficulty was to open the steel trap without putting himself in the way of a bite from those "tarrable sharp teeth." After a good deal of manoeuvring he managed to set the butt end of his crook on the handle of the gin, and forcing it down until the iron teeth relaxed their grip, the fox pulled his foot out, and darting away along the hedge side vanished into the adjoining copse. Away went Monk after him, in spite of his master's angry commands to him to come back, and fox and dog disappeared almost together among the trees. Sounds of yelping and of crashing through the undergrowth came back fainter and fainter, and then there was silence. Caleb waited at the spot full twenty minutes before the disobedient dog came back, looking very pleased. He had probably succeeded in overtaking and killing his enemy.

About that same Monk a sad story will have to be told in another chapter.

When speaking of foxes Caleb always maintained that in his part of the country there were two sorts: one small and very red, the larger one of a lighter colour with some grey in it. And it is possible that the hill foxes differed somewhat in size and colour from those of the lower country. He related that one year two vixens littered at one spot, a deep bottom among the downs, so near together that when the cubs were big enough to come out they mixed and played in company; the vixens happened to be of the different sorts, and the difference in colour appeared in the little ones as well.

Caleb was so taken with the pretty sight of all these little foxes, neighbours and playmates, that he went evening after evening to sit for an hour or longer watching them. One thing he witnessed which will perhaps be disbelieved by those who have not closely observed animals for themselves, and who still hold to the fable that all wild creatures are born with an inherited and instinctive knowledge and dread of their enemies. Rabbits swarmed at that spot, and he observed that when the old foxes were not about the young, half-grown rabbits would freely mix and play with the little foxes. He was so surprised at this, never having heard of such a thing, that he told his master of it, and the farmer went with him on a moonlight night and the two sat for a long time together, and saw rabbits and foxes playing, pursuing one another round and round, the rabbits when pursued often turning very suddenly and jumping clean over their pursuer.

The rabbits at this place belonged to the tenant, and the farmer, after enjoying the sight of the little ones playing together, determined to get rid of the foxes in the usual way by exploding a small quantity of gunpowder in the burrows. Four old foxes with nine cubs were too many for him to have. The powder was duly burned, and the very next day the foxes had vanished.

In Berkshire I once met with that rare being, an intelligent gamekeeper who took an interest in wild animals and knew from observation a great deal about their habits. During an after-supper talk, kept up till past midnight, we discussed the subject of strange, erratic actions in animals, which in some cases appear contrary to their own natures. He gave an instance of such behaviour in a fox that had its earth at a spot on the border of a wood where rabbits were abundant. One evening he was at this spot, standing among the trees and watching a number of rabbits feeding and gambolling on the green turf, when the fox came trotting by and the rabbits paid no attention. Suddenly he stopped and made a dart at a rabbit; the rabbit ran from him a distance of twenty to thirty yards, then suddenly turning round went for the fox and chased it back some distance, after which the fox again chased the rabbit, and so they went on, turn and turn about, half a dozen times. It was evident, he said, that the fox had no wish to catch and kill a rabbit, that it was nothing but play on his part, and that the rabbits responded in the same spirit, knowing that there was nothing to fear.

Another instance of this playful spirit of the fox with an enemy, which I heard recently, is of a gentleman who was out with his dog, a fox-terrier, for an evening walk in some woods near his house. On his way back he discovered on coming out of the woods that a fox was following him, at a distance of about forty yards. When he stood still the fox sat down and watched the dog. The dog appeared indifferent to its presence until his master ordered him to go for the fox, whereupon he charged him and drove him back to the edge of the wood, but at that point the fox turned and chased the dog right back to its master, then once more sat down and appeared very much at his ease. Again the dog was encouraged to go for him and hunted him again back to the wood, and was then in turn chased back to its master, After several repetitions of this performance, the gentleman went home, the fox still following, and on going in closed the gate behind him, leaving the fox outside, sitting in the road as if waiting for him to come out again to have some more fun.

This incident serves to remind me of an experience I had one evening in King's Copse, an immense wood of oak and pine in the New Forest near Exbury. It was growing dark when I heard on or close to the ground, some twenty to thirty yards before me, a low, wailing cry, resembling the hunger-cry of the young, long-eared owl. I began cautiously advancing, trying to see it, but as I advanced the cry receded, as if the bird was flitting from me. Now, just after I had begun following the sound, a fox uttered his sudden, startlingly loud scream about forty yards away on my right hand, and the next moment a second fox screamed on my left, and from that time I was accompanied, or shadowed, by the two foxes, always keeping abreast of me, always at the same distance, one screaming and the other replying about every half-minute. The distressful bird-sound ceased, and I turned and went off in another direction, to get out of the wood on the side nearest the place where I was staying, the foxes keeping with me until I was out.

What moved them to act in such a way is a mystery, but it was perhaps play to them.

Another curious instance of foxes playing was related to me by a gentleman at the little village of Inkpen, near the Beacon, in Berkshire. He told me that when it happened, a good many years ago, he sent an account of it to the "Field." His gamekeeper took him one day "to see a strange thing," to a spot in the woods where a fox had a litter of four cubs, near a long, smooth, green slope. A little distance from the edge of the slope three round swedes were lying on the turf. "How do you think these swedes came here?" said the keeper, and then proceeded to say that the old fox must have brought them there from the field a long distance away, for her cubs to play with. He had watched them of an evening, and wanted his master to come and see too. Accordingly they went in the evening, and hiding themselves among the bushes near waited till the young foxes came out and began rolling the swedes about and jumping at and tumbling over them. By and by one rolled down the slope, and the young foxes went after it all the way down, and then, when they had worried it sufficiently, they returned to the top and played with another swede until that was rolled down, then with the third one in the same way. Every morning, the keeper said, the swedes were found back on top of the ground, and he had no doubt that they were taken up by the old fox again and left there for her cubs to play with.

Caleb was not so eager after rabbits as Shepherd Gathergood, but he disliked the fox for another reason. He considered that the hunted fox was a great danger to sheep when the ewes were heavy with lambs and when the chase brought the animal near if not right into the flock. He had one dreadful memory of a hunted fox trying to lose itself in his flock of heavy-sided ewes and the hounds following it and driving the poor sheep mad with terror. The result was that a large number of lambs were cast before their time and many others were poor, sickly things; many of the sheep also suffered in health. He had no extra money from the lambs that year. He received but a shilling (half a crown is often paid now) for every lamb above the number of ewes, and as a rule received from three to six pounds a year from this source.



CHAPTER X

BIRD LIFE ON THE DOWNS

Great bustard—Stone curlew—Big hawks—Former abundance of the raven—Dogs fed on carrion—Ravens fighting—Ravens' breeding-places in Wilts—Great Ridge Wood ravens—Field-fare breeding in Wilts—Pewit—Mistle-thrush—Magpie and turtledove—Gamekeepers and magpies—Rooks and farmers—Starling, the shepherd's favourite bird—Sparrowhawk and "brown thrush"

Wiltshire, like other places in England, has long been deprived of its most interesting birds—the species that were best worth preserving. Its great bustard, once our greatest bird—even greater than the golden and sea eagles and the "giant crane" with its "trumpet sound" once heard in the land—is now but a memory. Or a place name: Bustard Inn, no longer an inn, is well known to the many thousands who now go to the mimic wars on Salisbury Plain; and there is a Trappist monastery in a village on the southernmost border of the county, which was once called, and is still known to old men as, "Bustard Farm." All that Caleb Bawcombe knew of this grandest bird is what his father had told him; and Isaac knew of it only from hearsay, although it was still met with in South Wilts when he was a young man.

The stone curlew, our little bustard with the long wings, big, yellow eyes, and wild voice, still frequents the uncultivated downs, unhappily in diminishing numbers. For the private collector's desire to possess British-taken birds' eggs does not diminish; I doubt if more than one clutch in ten escapes the searching eyes of the poor shepherds and labourers who are hired to supply the cabinets. One pair haunted a flinty spot at Winterbourne Bishop until a year or two ago; at other points a few miles away I watched other pairs during the summer of 1909, but in every instance their eggs were taken.

The larger hawks and the raven, which bred in all the woods and forests of Wiltshire, have, of course, been extirpated by the gamekeepers. The biggest forest in the county now affords no refuge to any hawk above the size of a kestrel. Savernake is extensive enough, one would imagine, for condors to hide in, but it is not so. A few years ago a buzzard made its appearance there—just a common buzzard, and the entire surrounding population went mad with excitement about it, and every man who possessed a gun flew to the forest to join in the hunt until the wretched bird, after being blazed at for two or three days, was brought down. I heard of another case at Fonthill Abbey. Nobody could say what this wandering hawk was—it was very big, blue above with a white breast barred with black—a "tarrable" fierce-looking bird with fierce, yellow eyes. All the gamekeepers and several other men with guns were in hot pursuit of it for several days, until some one fatally wounded it, but it could not be found where it was supposed to have fallen. A fortnight later its carcass was discovered by an old shepherd, who told me the story. It was not in a fit state to be preserved, but he described it to me, and I have no doubt that it was a goshawk.

The raven survived longer, and the Shepherd Bawcombe talks about its abundance when he was a boy, seventy or more years ago. His way of accounting for its numbers at that time and its subsequent, somewhat rapid disappearance greatly interested me.

We have seen his account of deer-stealing, by the villagers in those brave, old, starvation days when Lord Rivers owned the deer and hunting rights over a large part of Wiltshire, extending from Cranborne Chase to Salisbury, and when even so righteous a man as Isaac Bawcombe was tempted by hunger to take an occasional deer, discovered out of bounds. At that time, Caleb said, a good many dogs used for hunting the deer were kept a few miles from Winterbourne Bishop and were fed by the keepers in a very primitive manner. Old, worn-out horses were bought and slaughtered for the dogs. A horse would be killed and stripped of his hide somewhere away in the woods, and left for the hounds to batten on its flesh, tearing at and fighting over it like so many jackals. When only partially consumed the carcass would become putrid; then another horse would be killed and skinned at another spot perhaps a mile away, and the pack would start feeding afresh there. The result of so much carrion lying about was that ravens were attracted in numbers to the place and were so numerous as to be seen in scores together. Later, when the deer-hunting sport declined in the neighbourhood, and dogs were no longer fed on carrion, the birds decreased year by year, and when Caleb was a boy of nine or ten their former great abundance was but a memory. But he remembers that they were still fairly common, and he had much to say about the old belief that the raven "smells death," and when seen hovering over a flock, uttering its croak, it is a sure sign that a sheep is in a bad way and will shortly die.

One of his recollections of the bird may be given here. It was one of those things seen in boyhood which had very deeply impressed him. One fine day he was on the down with an elder brother, when they heard the familiar croak and spied three birds at a distance engaged in a fight in the air. Two of the birds were in pursuit of the third, and rose alternately to rush upon and strike at their victim from above. They were coming down from a considerable height, and at last were directly over the boys, not more than forty or fifty feet from the ground; and the youngsters were amazed at their fury, the loud, rushing sound of their wings, as of a torrent, and of their deep, hoarse croaks and savage, barking cries. Then they began to rise again, the hunted bird trying to keep above his enemies, they in their turn striving to rise higher still so as to rush down upon him from overhead; and in this way they towered higher and higher, their barking cries coming fainter and fainter back to earth, until the boys, not to lose sight of them, cast themselves down flat on their backs, and, continuing to gaze up, saw them at last no bigger than three "leetle blackbirds." Then they vanished; but the boys, still lying on their backs, kept their eyes fixed on the same spot, and by and by first one black speck reappeared, then a second, and they soon saw that two birds were swiftly coming down to earth. They fell swiftly and silently, and finally pitched upon the down not more than a couple of hundred yards from the boys. The hunted bird had evidently succeeded in throwing them off and escaping. Probably it was one of their own young, for the ravens' habit is when their young are fully grown to hunt them out of the neighbourhood, or, when they cannot drive them off, to kill them.

There is no doubt that the carrion did attract ravens in numbers to this part of Wiltshire, but it is a fact that up to that date—about 1830—the bird had many well-known, old breeding-places in the county. The Rev. A. C. Smith, in his "Birds of Wiltshire," names twenty-three breeding-places, no fewer than nine of them on Salisbury Plain; but at the date of the publication of his work, 1887, only three of all these nesting-places were still in use: South Tidworth, Wilton Park, and Compton Park, Compton Chamberlain. Doubtless there were other ancient breeding-places which the author had not heard of: one was at the Great Ridge Wood, overlooking the Wylye valley, where ravens bred down to about thirty-five or forty years ago. I have found many old men in that neighbourhood who remember the birds, and they tell that the raven tree was a great oak which was cut down about sixty years ago, after which the birds built their nest in another tree not far away. A London friend of mine, who was born in the neighbourhood of the Great Ridge Wood, remembers the ravens as one of the common sights of the place when he was a boy. He tells of an unlucky farmer in those parts whose sheep fell sick and died in numbers, year after year, bringing him down to the brink of ruin, and how his old head-shepherd would say, solemnly shaking his head, "'Tis not strange—master, he shot a raven."

There was no ravens' breeding-place very near Winterbourne Bishop. Caleb had "never heared tell of a nestie"; but he had once seen the nest of another species which is supposed never to breed in this country. He was a small boy at the time, when one day an old shepherd of the place going out from the village saw Caleb, and calling to him said, "You're the boy that likes birds; if you'll come with me, I'll show 'ee what no man ever seed afore"; and Caleb, fired with curiosity, followed him away to a distance from home, out from the downs, into the woods and to a place where he had never been, where there were bracken and heath with birch and thorn-trees scattered about. On cautiously approaching a clump of birches they saw a big, thrush-like bird fly out of a large nest about ten feet from the ground, and settle on a tree close by, where it was joined by its mate. The old man pointed out that it was a felt or fieldfare, a thrush nearly as big as the mistle-thrush but different in colour, and he said that it was a bird that came to England in flocks in winter from no man knows where, far off in the north, and always went away before breeding-time. This was the only felt he had ever seen breeding in this country, and he "didn't believe that no man had ever seed such a thing before." He would not climb the tree to see the eggs, or even go very near it, for fear of disturbing the birds.

This man, Caleb said, was a great one for birds: he knew them all, but seldom said anything about them; he watched and found out a good deal about them just for his private pleasure.

The characteristic species of this part of the down country, comprising the parish of Winterbourne Bishop, are the pewit, magpie, turtledove, mistle-thrush, and starling. The pewit is universal on the hills, but will inevitably be driven away from all that portion of Salisbury Plain used for military purposes. The mistle-thrush becomes common in summer after its early breeding season is ended, when the birds in small flocks resort to the downs, where they continue until cold weather drives them away to the shelter of the wooded, low country.

In this neighbourhood there are thickets of thorn, holly, bramble, and birch growing over hundreds of acres of down, and here the hill-magpie, as it is called, has its chief breeding-ground, and is so common that you can always get a sight of at least twenty birds in an afternoon's walk. Here, too, is the metropolis of the turtledove, and the low sound of its crooning is heard all day in summer, the other most common sound being that of magpies—their subdued, conversational chatter and their solo-singing, the chant or call which a bird will go on repeating for a hundred times. The wonder is how the doves succeed in such a place in hatching any couple of chalk-white eggs, placed on a small platform of sticks, or of rearing any pair of young, conspicuous in their blue skins and bright yellow down!

The keepers tell me they get even with these kill-birds later in the year, when they take to roosting in the woods, a mile away in the valley. The birds are waited for at some point where they are accustomed to slip in at dark, and one keeper told me that on one evening alone assisted by a friend he had succeeded in shooting thirty birds.

On Winterbourne Bishop Down and round the village the magpies are not persecuted, probably because the gamekeepers, the professional bird-killers, have lost heart in this place. It is a curious and rather pretty story. There is no squire, as we have seen; the farmers have the rabbits, and for game the shooting is let, or to let, by some one who claims to be lord of the manor, who lives at a distance or abroad. At all events he is not known personally to the people, and all they know about the overlordship is that, whereas in years gone by every villager had certain rights in the down—to cut furze and keep a cow, or pony, or donkey, or half a dozen sheep or goats—now they have none; but how and why and when these rights were lost nobody knows. Naturally there is no sympathy between the villagers and the keepers sent from a distance to protect the game, so that the shooting may be let to some other stranger. On the contrary, they religiously destroy every nest they can find, with the result that there are too few birds for anyone to take the shooting, and it remains year after year unlet.

This unsettled state of things is all to the advantage of the black and white bird with the ornamental tail, and he flourishes accordingly and builds his big, thorny nests in the roadside trees about the village.

The one big bird on these downs, as in so many other places in England, is the rook, and let us humbly thank the gods who own this green earth and all the creatures which inhabit it that they have in their goodness left us this one. For it is something to have a rook, although he is not a great bird compared with the great ones lost—bustard and kite and raven and goshawk, and many others. His abundance on the cultivated downs is rather strange when one remembers the outcry made against him in some parts on account of his injurious habits; but here it appears the sentiment in his favour is just as strong in the farmer, or in a good many farmers, as in the great landlord. The biggest rookery I know on Salisbury Plain is at a farm-house where the farmer owns the land himself and cultivates about nine hundred acres. One would imagine that he would keep his rooks down in these days when a boy cannot be hired to scare the birds from the crops.

One day, near West Knoyle, I came upon a vast company of rooks busily engaged on a ploughed field where everything short of placing a bird-scarer on the ground had been done to keep the birds off. A score of rooks had been shot and suspended to long sticks planted about the field, and there were three formidable-looking men of straw and rags with hats on their heads and wooden guns under their arms. But the rooks were there all the same; I counted seven at one spot, prodding the earth close to the feet of one of the scarecrows. I went into the field to see what they were doing, and found that it was sown with vetches, just beginning to come up, and the birds were digging the seed up.

Three months later, near the same spot, on Mere Down, I found these birds feasting on the corn, when it had been long cut but could not be carried on account of the wet weather. It was a large field of fifty to sixty acres, and as I walked by it the birds came flying leisurely over my head to settle with loud cawings on the stocks. It was a magnificent sight—the great, blue-black bird-forms on the golden wheat, an animated group of three or four to half a dozen on every stock, while others walked about the ground to pick up the scattered grain, and others were flying over them, for just then the sun was shining on the field and beyond it the sky was blue. Never had I witnessed birds so manifestly rejoicing at their good fortune, with happy, loud caw-caw. Or rather haw-haw! what a harvest, what abundance! was there ever a more perfect August and September! Rain, rain, by night and in the morning; then sun and wind to dry our feathers and make us glad, but never enough to dry the corn to enable them to carry it and build it up in stacks where it would be so much harder to get at. Could anything be better!

But the commonest bird, the one which vastly outnumbers all the others I have named together, is the starling. It was Caleb Bawcombe's favourite bird, and I believe it is regarded with peculiar affection by all shepherds on the downs on account of its constant association with sheep in the pasture. The dog, the sheep, and the crowd of starlings—these are the lonely man's companions during his long days on the hills from April or May to November. And what a wise bird he is, and how well he knows his friends and his enemies! There was nothing more beautiful to see, Caleb would say, than the behaviour of a flock of starlings when a hawk was about. If it was a kestrel they took little or no notice of it, but if a sparrowhawk made its appearance, instantly the crowd of birds could be seen flying at furious speed towards the nearest flock of sheep, and down into the flock they would fall like a shower of stones and instantly disappear from sight. There they would remain on the ground, among the legs of the grazing sheep, until the hawk had gone on his way and passed out of sight.

The sparrowhawk's victims are mostly made among the young birds that flock together in summer and live apart from the adults during the summer months after the breeding season is over.

When I find a dead starling on the downs ranged over by sparrowhawks, it is almost always a young bird—a "brown thrush" as it used to be called by the old naturalists. You may know that the slayer was a sparrowhawk by the appearance of the bird, its body untouched, but the flesh picked neatly from the neck and the head gone. That was swallowed whole, after the beak had been cut off. You will find the beak lying by the side of the body. In summertime, when birds are most abundant, after the breeding season, the sparrowhawk is a fastidious feeder.



CHAPTER XI

STARLINGS AND SHEEP-BELLS

Starlings' singing—Native and borrowed sounds—Imitations of sheep-bells—The shepherd on sheep-bells—The bells for pleasure, not use—A dog in charge of the flock—Shepherd calling his sheep—Richard Warner of Bath—Ploughmen singing to their oxen in Cornwall—A shepherd's loud singing

The subject of starlings associating with sheep has served to remind me of something I have often thought when listening to their music. It happens that I am writing this chapter in a small village on Salisbury Plain, the time being mid-September 1909, and that just outside my door there is a group of old elder-bushes laden just now with clusters of ripe berries on which the starlings come to feed, filling the room all day with that never-ending medley of sounds which is their song. They sing in this way not only when they sing—that is to say, when they make a serious business of it, standing motionless and a-shiver on the tiles, wings drooping and open beak pointing upwards, but also when they are feasting on fruit—singing and talking and swallowing elderberries between whiles to wet their whistles. If the weather is not too cold you will hear this music daily, wet or dry, all the year round. We may say that of all singing birds they are most vocal, yet have no set song. I doubt if they have more than half a dozen to a dozen sounds or notes which are the same in every individual and their very own. One of them is a clear, soft, musical whistle, slightly inflected; another a kissing sound, usually repeated two or three times or oftener, a somewhat percussive smack; still another, a sharp, prolonged hissing or sibilant but at the same time metallic note, compared by some one to the sound produced by milking a cow into a tin pail—a very good description. There are other lesser notes: a musical, thrush-like chirp, repeated slowly, and sometimes rapidly till it runs to a bubbling sound; also there is a horny sound, which is perhaps produced by striking upon the edges of the lower mandible with those of the upper. But it is quite unlike the loud, hard noise made by the stork; the poor stork being a dumb bird has made a sort of policeman's rattle of his huge beak. These sounds do not follow each other; they come from time to time, the intervals being filled up with others in such endless variety, each bird producing its own notes, that one can but suppose that they are imitations. We know, in fact, that the starling is our greatest mimic, and that he often succeeds in recognizable reproductions of single notes, of phrases, and occasionally of entire songs, as, for instance, that of the blackbird. But in listening to him we are conscious of his imitations; even when at his best he amuses rather than delights—he is not like the mocking-bird. His common starling pipe cannot produce sounds of pure and beautiful quality, like the blackbird's "oboe-voice," to quote Davidson's apt phrase: he emits this song in a strangely subdued tone, producing the effect of a blackbird heard singing at a considerable distance. And so with innumerable other notes, calls, and songs—they are often to their originals what a man's voice heard on a telephone is to his natural voice. He succeeds best, as a rule, in imitations of the coarser, metallic sounds, and as his medley abounds in a variety of little, measured, tinkling, and clinking notes, as of tappings on a metal plate, it has struck me at times that these are probably borrowed from the sheep-bells of which the bird hears so much in his feeding-grounds. It is, however, not necessary to suppose that every starling gets these sounds directly from the bells; the birds undoubtedly mimic one another, as is the case with mocking-birds, and the young might easily acquire this part of their song language from the old birds without visiting the flocks in the pastures.

The sheep-bell, in its half-muffled strokes, as of a small hammer tapping on an iron or copper plate, is, one would imagine, a sound well within the starling's range, easily imitated, therefore specially attractive to him.