By JAMES TURVES.
It is somewhat surprising that none of our present-day novelists,
like Charles Reade or Thomas Hardy, who are always on the outlook
for romantic realism, whether it be in incident or in fact, have had
their eyes directed to the rural poachers who abound in every shire.
Poachers, though neither quite respectable members of the church
nor of society, are more interesting characters than burglars or
ticket-of-leave men, who figure frequently in the novelist’s pages.
And, very strange to say, it has been left to a lady to write the
first accounts of poaching episodes, episodes remarkable for their
masculine touches and their wonderful grip of open-air reality; Harriet
Martineau, in her “Forest and Game Law Tales,” astonishes us by her
graphic realism and her delicacy of treatment; Charles Kingsley wrote
one or two of his pathetic ballads on the subject of a poacher and
his wife; Norman Macleod made a Highland poacher the subject of a
character sketch; and in our own times Mr. Richard Jefferies, a writer
who finds pleasure in minute description and vivid realism, has in his
own style of exact word-painting given us a pleasant book about his
own experiences as an amateur poacher. But the real poacher, the rural
vagabond, the parish character, the ne’er-do-weel, whose life is a
living protest against the game-laws, is of more lasting interest than
any amateur can ever be.
Viewed from the serene vantage-ground of the philosophy of life,
poaching is mean and ignoble, and demoralizing sport to you or me, and
is not worth the powder and shot, while the fines and punishments are
out of all proportion to the joys; yet there are not wanting apologists
for it in this apologetic century. “Poaching! Man, there’s no sin in
catching a rabbit or snaring a hare. They belong to naebody. Bless
you! it’s a gentleman’s trick, shooting.” This is the opinion of any
Northern lowland ploughman’s wife, as she looks from her red-tiled
cottage-door out upon the face of the corn-growing mother earth, which
has given her sweet memories and a host of country neighbors and
friends.
Sixty years ago peasants could use their guns without let or hindrance,
and it was then a common thing for a farm-laborer to go out and have a
shot when no sportsman was in the way. Taking an odd shot now and then
was never, and is not even now, looked upon by them as poaching. But a
noted poacher, nicknamed the Otter, tells me, with a sigh, “Poaching
is not what it once was!” And it is true. Not so very long ago it
was a very profitable occupation, and comparatively respectable,
before railways and telegraph wires and penny newspapers stereotyped
metropolitan ideas into all and sundry. An old farmer is pointed out as
having made all his money by systematic poaching, and an influential
city official is said to have laid his early nest-egg by no other means
than being a good shot where he had no invitation to be. To-day even
rural society would look down upon a young farmer engaged in poaching.
It is no longer sport to gentlemen, says the Otter, and is left to
moral vagabonds, the waifs and strays, the parish loafers. The great
strides of agriculture, the game-laws, and the artificial breeding of
game have driven it into sneaking ways, and robbed it of its robust
picturesque adventures. To excel in it a man must give up his nights
and days to it—in short, he must become a specialist, and even then it
hardly pays.
A genuine poacher has great force of character; he has a genius for
field and woodcraft. He is the eldest survivor of rustic romance. His
wild life is tinged with the love of adventure, the love of moon and
stars, the knowledge of the seasons, the haunts and habits of game, and
the power of trapping rabbits in dark woodland glades. No man knows
more intimately the night-side of Nature between the chilly hours
of midnight and sunrise. In this cold-blooded age there are always
some Quixotic individuals, born in the outwardly sleepy villages and
lifeless farmsteads, with the love of midnight adventure, who wage
long warfare against the game-laws, and who only knuckle under to the
law’s severity when their health gives way or an enemy turns informer.
“Rheumatics plays the mischief with poaching!” exclaims the Otter,
referring to the long night-watches in wet ditches and beside hedges
for hares on the lea fields. Irrespective of all thought of gain, there
is an infatuation to eager spirits in this midnight sport. It appeals
to strong, healthy, brave men. Charles Kingsley, in “The Bad Squire,”
with its strong sympathy and feeling, and its cry of “blood” on all the
squire owned, from the foreign shrub to the game he sold, gives us the
poacher’s wife view, a view we are too apt to ignore or forget, with
the weary eyes and heavy heart, that grow light only with weeping, and
go wandering into the night. We forget too often that in the hearts of
common folk there is the glamor of poetic romance about poaching, and a
bitter hatred toward the game-laws. Like Rizpah’s son, many a lad has
had no other incentive than that “The farmer dared us to do it,” and
that he found it sweetened by the secret sympathy of the people. Too
often, I fear, the game-laws dare a brave rustic into poaching: he has
only this one way left to satisfy the insatiable British thirst for
field sport. It is gravely whispered that some of the most striking
men have tasted its romance; and if all stories be true, the master of
the English drama owes to an unlucky deer-poaching incident the lucky
turn in his career which sent him to London and to writing plays, and
poachers may reasonably claim Shakspere as their patron saint.
When the strong, sweet ale warms his heart, the poacher boasts of
dreadful adventures in the night, of leaping broad mill-dams when
chased, of giving fight in the dark, and discomfiting gamekeepers by
clever tricks. He paints his exploits in such heroical glory, that
the seat next the fire in the ale-house is given him by admiring and
fearing rustics. Honesty he ascribes to practicedness in the world’s
ways, and he looks upon keeping out of jail as the greatest victory
that man can achieve. He is the type of man that makes our best
soldiers, or, as he phrases it, is paid to stop the gun-shots. He
requires no almanac to tell him when the moon is to rise to-morrow,
and he could give the gamekeepers lessons. He is to be envied for his
quick feeling of life and his sympathy for field and forest sport, and
that wild exuberance of spirits which he seems to catch with his hares.
It is this rural vagabond—and not Mr. Commonplace Respectability—who
rivets young folks’ attention; his energy anywhere would achieve
success; and he is free from that unpardonable fault, dulness. In the
rustic drama of life he is the character that takes hold of us in our
best impulses—and is not that the best world of the ideal? He disdains
to shoot starlings or black-birds; he is too much a sportsman to pay
attention to such small game. He can put his hands to various ways
of living; he can collect bird’s eggs, shoot wild rock-pigeons for
a farmers’ club, gather blackberries, or, as they say in Scotland,
“brambles,” pull young ash-saplings in plantations, and sell them to
grooms in the livery stables in town.—_The Contemporary Review._