Foggers Know All The Game On
The Places Where They Work; There Is Not A Hare Or A Rabbit, A Pheasant
Or A Partridge, Whose Ways Are Not Plain To Them.
There are no stories
now of stags a century old (three would go back to Queen Elizabeth); they
have gone, like other traditions of the forest, before steam and
breechloader.
Deer lore is all but extinct, the terms of venery known but
to a few; few, indeed, could correctly name the parts of a buck if one
were sent them. The deer are a picture only - a picture that lives and
moves and is beautiful to look at, but must not be rudely handled. Still,
they linger while the marten has disappeared, the polecat is practically
gone, and the badger becoming rare. It is curious that the badger has
lived on through sufferance for three centuries. Nearly three centuries
ago, a chronicler observed that the badger would have been rooted out
before his time had it not been for the parks. There was no great store
of badgers then; there is no great store now. Sketches remain in old
country-houses of the chase of the marten; you see the hounds all yelping
round the foot of a tree, the marten up in it, and in the middle of the
hounds the huntsman in top-boots and breeches. You can but smile at it.
To Americans it must forcibly recall the treeing of a 'coon. The deer
need keep no watch, there are no wolves to pull them down; and it is
quite probable that the absence of any danger of that kind is the reason
of their tameness even more than the fact that they are not chased by
man. Nothing comes creeping stealthily through the fern, or hunts them
through the night. They can slumber in peace. There is no larger beast of
prey than a stoat, or a stray cat. But they retain their dislike of dogs,
a dislike shared by cattle, as if they too dimly remembered a time when
they had been hunted. The list of animals still living within the pale
and still wild is short indeed. Besides the deer, which are not wild,
there are hares, rabbits, squirrels, two kinds of rat, - the land and the
water rat, - stoat, weasel, mole, and mouse. There are more varieties of
mouse than of any other animal: these, the weakest of all, have escaped
best, though exposed to so many enemies. A few foxes, and still fewer
badgers, complete the list, for there are no other animals here. Modern
times are fatal to all creatures of prey, whether furred or feathered;
and so even the owls are less numerous, both in actual numbers and in
variety of species, than they were even fifty years ago.
But the forest is not vacant. It is indeed full of happy life. Every
hollow tree - and there are many hollow trees where none are felled - has
its nest of starlings, or titmice, or woodpeckers. Woodpeckers are
numerous, and amusing to watch. Wood-pigeons and turtle-doves abound, the
former in hundreds nesting here. Rooks, of course, and jackdaws, - daws
love hollow trees, - jays, and some magpies. The magpie is one of the
birds which have partly disappeared from the fields of England. There are
broad lands where not one is to be seen. Once looking from the road at
two in a field, a gentleman who was riding by stopped his horse and
asked, quite interested, 'Are those magpies?' I replied that they were.
'I have not seen any since I was a boy till now,' he said. Magpies are
still plentiful in some places, as in old parks in Somersetshire, but
they have greatly diminished in the majority of instances. There are some
here, and many jays. These are handsome birds, and with the green
woodpeckers give colour to the trees. Night-jars or fern-owls fly round
the outskirts and through the open glades in the summer twilight. These
are some of the forest birds. The rest visit the forest or live in it,
but are equally common to hedgerow and copse. Woodpeckers, jays, magpies,
owls, night-jars, are all distinctly forest and park birds, and are
continually with the deer. The lesser birds are the happier that there
are fewer hawks and crows. The deer are not torn with the cruel tooth of
hound or wolf, nor does the sharp arrow sting them. It is a little piece
of olden England without its terror and bloodshed.
The fawns fed away down the slope and presently into one of the broad
green open paths or drives, where the underwood on each side is lined
with bramble and with trailing white rose, which loves to cling to bushes
scarcely higher than itself. Their runners stretch out at the edges of
the drive, so that from the underwood the mound of green falls aslant to
the sward. This gradual descent from the trees and ash to the bushes of
hawthorn, from the hawthorn to the bramble, thence to the rose and the
grass, gives to the vista of the broad path a soft, graceful aspect.
After the fawns had disappeared, the squire went on and entered under the
beeches from which they had emerged. He had not gone far before he struck
and followed a path which wound between the beech trunks and was entirely
arched over by their branches. Squirrels raced away at the sound of his
footsteps, darting over the ground and up the stems of the trees in an
instant. A slight rustling now and then showed that a rabbit had been
startled. Pheasants ran too, but noiselessly, and pigeons rose from the
boughs above. The wood-pigeons rose indeed, but they were not much
frightened, and quickly settled again. So little shot at, they felt safe,
and only moved from habit.
He crossed several paths leading in various directions, but went on,
gradually descending till the gable end of a farmhouse became visible
through the foliage.
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