THE HARE
LIFE STORY OF THE JACK OF BARTINNEY
IT is difficult to imagine a wild creature making a harder struggle for
existence than a hare in West Penwith. From beginning to end its life is
one of persecution. As a leveret it can hardly escape falling a victim
to the stoat, carrion crow, or magpie; or, when full grown, becoming the
prey of the polecat or the fox. If it be objected that puss has to run
the gauntlet of these enemies elsewhere, it may be answered that in few
parts of England is vermin so abundant. This is only in a measure due to
the many strongholds which this wild country affords. In the Land’s End
district game is not preserved, and the absence of the gamekeeper and
his traps accounts for the prevalence of predatory creatures, furred and
feathered. It is curious too, to note how interest in the hare and the
protection afforded it, have declined before the popularity of
fox-hunting. Time was when it was highly esteemed as a beast of the
chase, and when money was freely spent on the destruction of its
enemies, though to a much less extent than is now lavished on
poultry-funds for the perservation of the fox. In those days, as parish
registers attest, the churchwardens paid with an easy conscience five
shillings for a fox, a shilling for an otter, a shilling for a grey or
badger, twopence for a fitcher or marten, and a penny for a hedgebore or
kite. Whether the register of Buryan Church contains entries referring
to the payments of these fees, I do not know; but there is evidence that
in this, the largest parish of the Land’s End district, the hare
formerly flourished, its pursuit forming the chief diversion of the
local gentry. Of these, Squire Levelis of Trewoofe was, perhaps, the
most enthusiastic sportsman, and it is related of him in an old Cornish
romance, that one day after a very arduous chase, at the moment his
hounds were on the point of running into a hare, the astonished Squire
suddenly found himself confronted, on the spot where the scent failed,
by a witch. The belief that witches at times assumed the shape of a hare
lingered in West Cornwall at least as late as the early part of the last
century, for it is related of Sir Rose Price that on his entering a
cottage into which his hounds had driven their quarry, he found to his
astonishment not a hare but a haggard old woman, whose torn hands and
face removed all doubt as to what he had been in pursuit of. This
occurred at Kerrow in the parish of Zennor. Squire Levelis’ uncanny
adventure took place in the Lamorna valley; and within the memory of
those still living, this wild “bottom” has resounded with the merry
music of “hare-hounds.” No pack of harriers exists in West Penwith
to-day, but the greyhound is very much in evidence; and all things
considered, the latter state of poor puss is far worse than the first.
What with “long dogs,” foxes, vermin, snares, and cheap guns, this most
timid of creatures lives in a state of perpetual apprehension.
Nevertheless, it makes a stubborn struggle for existence on the lone
upland wastes, where it enjoys partial immunity from its natural
four-footed enemies, which, for the most part, harbour in the wild
overgrown valleys that tin-streaming has rendered worthless for
agricultural purposes. It says something for the keenness of the miner
and the crofter that they should search miles and miles of bleak
moorland on the remote chance of finding a hare which will, if found, in
all probability run their dogs to a standstill. Small wonder that to
these men the few surviving hares should seem to bear a charmed life,
and that those remarkable for stamina and endurance and recognisable by
some slight distinguishing mark, should be as well known as a bob-tailed
fox to the members of a hunt.
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[Illustration: ST BURYAN CHURCH. [_Face page 130._]
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Of such none was more famous than the little Jack of Bartinney, whose
life history was typical of that of his race. His first home was amidst
a clump of rushes bordering a lonely pool on the high ground between two
of the Cornish heights. Even when maternal instinct is strongest, fear
of detection kept doe and leveret apart during the day; but she never
failed to suckle him at nightfall and before sunrise, on her way back
from the feeding-ground on the lowland. From dawn to dusk the leveret
lay in the snuggest of couches in the trough between the hills, and when
not asleep would watch the reeds waving over the shallows, or the
moor-hen, whose nest was on the opposite bank, swim on the open water.
One morning he saw her issue from the reed-bed with four fluffy little
red-billed creatures following in her wake. This novel sight aroused his
curiosity, and when the moor-hen and her brood skirted the little bay
near him, he jumped out of the nest and ran to the edge of the water. At
that instant a raven flying overhead, on the look-out for food for its
young in Bosigran Cliffs, espied him, and the next minute the ominous
shadow of the marauder darkened the bright grassy margin, scaring the
leveret and making him flee for his life. Quick as the moor-hen and her
chicks had dived, before the depredator could transfix him with its
powerful beak, he made for the thickest of the rushes, squatted and,
though the raven made careful search, escaped. This was the one fright
of the happy days spent by the side of the pool. There he got to know
the varied voices of nature—the carol of the lark, the scream of the
gull, the hum of the insects, the murmur of the wind, and the music of
the ripple in the reed-bed; the chief sounds that broke the silence of
the upland. From below came faintly at times the bark of the dog, the
crowing of the cock, and at night the yelp of the fox, the snarl of the
badger, the whurring of the night-jar, and the song of the
sedge-warbler. Once he heard, from the direction of the Land’s End
cliffs, that mysterious roaring of the sea, which when the farmers hear
they say “G’envor is callin’.” His growth was very rapid, and when a
month old, a spirit of restlessness and a desire to roam possessed him,
and thrice he accompanied the doe in her night rounds and got a
knowledge of the lay of the country.
One day at dusk he left the nest and the narrow grassy green amidst the
rushes where he had gambolled, and made his way down to the tableland
alone. He soon learnt that the country over which he roamed was full of
enemies, finding to his surprise that even the rabbits were unfriendly
to him. His first form was on a pile of earth in the middle of a field
from which the hay had recently been carried. Wild growth luxuriated
there, and before he abandoned the heap it was gay with the golden
corymbs of the harvest-flower. Thence he could hear the voices of the
hoers in the turnip-fields, the rumble of wheels in the near lane, and
morning and evening Shep’s bark as he drove the cows to the
milking-shed. Lying there all day, his long black-tipped ears flat on
his back, and his dark, hazel-rimmed eyes that never wholly closed
watchful of every movement in the life around him, the hare was a
timorous spy on the ongoings of the farm where he was an unknown guest.
For nearly two months he occupied the form undisturbed, but when the
clover had grown again bullocks were turned into the pasture to graze,
and one morning a lurcher dog that accompanied the farmer on his round,
found him in his seat and pursued him so closely across three fields
that he would not have escaped its jaws but for the wiles he
instinctively used. He did not return to the seat for some days and
then, detecting that the stale scent of a dog tainted the ragwort, he
abandoned the field altogether, and resorted to another form he had but
rarely used in the valley below Sancreed Beacon. It was made amongst
withering bracken on a mound skirting a small stream, and dawn always
found him sitting in it. To baffle any enemy that might follow his
trail, he would run past his form, keeping some twenty feet wide of it,
and then double on his foil. When opposite his seat he made a sidelong
spring, and then another which took him across the stream to the mound.
His eyes, ears, and nostrils satisfying him that no enemy shadowed him,
he crept under the arch formed by the drooping fronds and lay concealed
until evening. He never failed to take these precautions, and he soon
had proof of their necessity. Once, shortly after he was esconced, he
heard a slight rustling in some brambles on the opposite bank a little
way down stream. Presently a long-bodied creature with dark fur emerged
from it. Though short of leg its agility was remarkable, and with its
nose to the ground it was evidently in quest of some victim’s trail. It
was a polecat, which, on hitting the scent of the hare at the spot
whence he had taken his second spring, became terribly excited. As if
familiar with the wiles of its favourite prey, the blood-thirsty
creature began at once to quarter the ground in its attempt to discover
the track. At length in making a wide cast it hit the line, but followed
it in a direction contrary to that of the hare and, running heel,
disappeared with long bounds through the gap where the Jack had passed
less than half an hour before. Soon afterwards the light crept down the
hillside, and the hare knew that the chattering, archbacked fiend would
not return, that the danger was past. During the time he watched his
enemy he never stirred, and had the polecat discovered him he could not
have escaped, so helpless were his limbs from a strange terror that
possessed them—one which he had not experienced when found by the
lurcher. Fortunately for the Jack, his greatest trials did not overtake
him until he came to his full strength and had a perfect knowledge of
the hills, where in order to avoid his enemies he now made his forms.
These he never left—not even during the breeding season—before
sundown, when he stole down to the tableland.
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[Illustration: STONE CIRCLE AT BOSCAWEN-UN. [_Face page
138._]
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One dark night he was cropping clover in a field at Boscawen-un, near a
circle of stones belonging to a grey past of which no man knows the
history. Whilst browsing, he stopped now and again to listen, as was his
wont, and anon he heard a cry that made his blood run cold. At first he
thought that two stoats were fighting on the other side of the stone
wall that bounded the field, but as the horrid noise drew near the gap
through which he had come not long before, he stood up on his hind legs
and looked towards it. Then he saw not two but five stoats come between
the stone pillars where a gate had once hung, and knew at a glance it
was his trail they were following. The dread of the weasel is so
paralysing that some hares—for, like men, all hares have not the same
courage—would have crouched on the ground, or dragged their limbs in
lessening circles until their fate overtook them; but not so this little
Jack. He was away at once at full speed, and the pack of fiends,
sighting him as he passed the rubbing-post near the middle of the field,
extended themselves at full gallop and, as they seldom fail, when
hunting together, to run down their prey, reckoned they would soon be
sucking his blood. If the hare had had only the danger behind to fear,
his greater speed would soon have enabled him to out-distance his
pursuers, astoundingly fleet of foot though they are for their size. It
was far otherwise; for at every gap, at every gate, he paused and
snuffed the air for tainted snare or lurking fox, and this allowed the
stoats to lessen the space that would else have separated them. So that
it gladdened the Jack’s eyes, when he had left the hamlets of Brahan and
Crowz-an-Wra behind, to see at last the murky cone of Chapel Cairn Brea
rising before him against the scarcely less black sky. Once free of the
cultivated land he breasted the hill at his best pace, but on reaching
the summit paused near a ruined chantry, to listen. His long ears were
pricked to catch the slightest sound that should break the unusual
silence.
The night was still as death, as if nature held its breath at witnessing
this tragic chase of its own ordering, and before very long the hare
heard the weasel-cry coming from the direction where his ascending track
lay. At first it fascinated him as it does all his tribe, and he felt
inclined to stay and await his fate; but the love of life was too strong
within him, and shaking off the paralysing feeling that was numbing his
limbs, he set his head in the direction of Bartinney. With his back to
the danger, terror seemed to add wings to his feet, and like the wind he
went down the eastern slope of Chapel Cairn Brea until he reached the
margin of the Lidden’s Pool. Instantly he dashed through the shallows
and, losing foothold where the water deepened, swam across it in a
slanting direction as he had more than once seen the doe, his mother,
do. Having landed, he repeated his usual ruse, and then squatted in a
seat in some sedgy growth not a stone’s throw from the clump of rushes
where he was born. With the sheet of water, which is some fifty yards
wide, between him and his pursuers, he believed he was safe. Indeed, it
did not much disturb him to hear them coming down the hill, but when he
saw them take to the water, on the black surface of which their glowing
eyes showed like green beads, he was filled with dismay. They landed
near him, for they had swum straight across the pool, and at once,
without staying to shake their wet fur, strove to pick up the lost line,
two working the margin one way, and three the other. Presently one
succeeded, at the spot where the hare had landed, near the extremity of
a finger-like creek, and making a cry, called the rest of the pack,
which flew to it. Then together they followed the scent through the belt
of rushes and over the sable face of the heather, and coming to the end,
spread out like a fan, the while making a chattering noise, and
displaying an activity more fiendish than hound-like in their
ineffectual attempts to recover it beyond. A stoat which seemed to be
the leader, for he it was that came first through the gap and afterwards
led the others across the pool, returned on the trail, making short
casts on each side of it, and only just failed to find where the hare
had landed from his first spring. Wearying at last of his efforts, or
fearful of being discovered at daybreak on such a bare expanse of
moorland, he uttered a strange cry which summoned the well-disciplined
band around him. Less than a minute later the terror-stricken hare, who
had watched their every movement, saw the baulked marauders steal away
over the shoulder of the hill by a path slightly barer than the ground
about it, where a much-used bridle-track had been in the days of
pack-mules, before wheels rumbled over the roads that now “ribbon” the
countryside.
After this horrible experience it was long before the hare ventured down
to the lowlands. Save for an occasional raid on a labourer’s garden at
the foot of the hill, he contented himself with the less succulent fare
of a farm on the barren upland between Bartinney and Caer Bran. The
harder life was not without its compensations. By journeying over the
hills in search of food—for at times he would wander far to browse on
wild thyme and other tender herbage in sheltered spots of the waste—he
got to know his beats as well as the Earthstopper knew every step of the
rough ways between the fox-holts. To this knowledge, and to his powers
of endurance thus strengthened, he owed his many escapes from
greyhounds, which he led by paths that gave him the advantage.
His favourite seat at this time, when persecution had driven him from
his old ones, was amongst the sere grasses that grew on an ancient
earthwork or “gurgoe” near the summit of Bartinney. In winter-time few
bleaker spots can be found than the crest of this Cornish height, to
which the scanty herbage clings close like a skull-cap, and on which
stonecrop and lichen make nearly as hard a struggle for existence as the
hare. Yet for one thing the spot is favoured, inasmuch as it catches the
earliest rays of the sun when the slopes are yet grey and the lowlands
lie in gloom. This advantage the hare did not fail to utilise. Returning
wet from the dew-drenched grasses in the troughs of the hills, he would,
before entering his form, stand on the boulder crowning the crest, and
dry his fur as a cormorant dries his wings after fishing.
During the great frost before the blizzard he clung to the hilltop, and
lay there under the snow, with just a breathing-hole in the side of his
white hut. For three days he fed on the shoots of the furze, but at
last, hunger dispelling his fears, he ventured down to a mowhay and had
his fill of clover from a stack near a dog-kennel. Fortunately, snow
fell that night and hid his tracks, so that he was not followed next
morning by poachers, as he had been once before despite the long round
he took and the various shifts he resorted to for the purpose of
throwing them off his track.
“The many musets through the which he goes,
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.”
In snow, storm, and sunshine, the hare clung to the summit of the
upland, and but rarely used the form near the pool. Its solitude and the
great silence that brooded over it were almost as sweet to him as life
itself. Rarely did anything move across the broad slopes he overlooked
save the fleeting shadows of the clouds. All the summer through but one
man came up the hill—an aged botanist he was, of world-wide fame—who
more than once toiled to the top, and the hare got accustomed to the
gleam of his big spectacles and the flapping of his long coat-tails, and
somehow knew that he was harmless, though his eyes, like those of the
men who had sought him with dogs, were always on the ground.
On the dry bank, with the thick grasses to screen him from the hot rays
and the sea breezes to fan him, he would sleep through the noontide heat
when the lizard left the sparse brake to bask in the sun, and
“king-crowner” butterflies flitted above the crest, or settled on the
outcropping rocks to open and close their gorgeous wings though there
was no eye to admire their beauty. In these neighbours the hare had
nothing to fear, nor in the kestrel that hovered over the hill, nor now,
in the raven that winged its way high overhead as it crossed from the
northern to the southern cliffs.
This happy time lasted until the splendour of the dwarf furze faded, and
chill October stripped the storm-bent thorns of foliage; with the advent
of the black month (as the ancient Cornish styled November) it came to
an end, and the hare was called upon to bear the greatest trial of his
life.