to name the field-mouse, or the dormouse, or the water-vole, that
quaint miniature beaver in his sealskin-coloured coat, sitting erect on
the streamlet’s margin busily nibbling at the pale end of a polished
rush stalk which he has cut off at the root and is now holding clasped
to his breast with his little hands. Any one who had thus seen him, the
brown sunlit bank, with its hanging drapery of foliage and flowers for
background, reflected in the clear water below, could well be pardoned
for praising his beauty and giving him the palm. Another would
champion the squirrel, that pretty, passionate creature, most birdlike
of mammals; and some white-haired veteran sportsman would perhaps speak
in glowing terms of the wild cat as seen in a tearing rage. A word,
too, would be spoken for the otter, and the weasel, and the hare, and
the harvest-mouse, and the white Chillingham bull, and the wild goat
on the Welsh mountains. These two last, after some discussion, would
doubtless be disqualified, and the roe and fallow deer entered instead;
but no person would say a word about the wolf and wild boar, the last
of these noble quadrupeds having been slain by some Royal hunter half
a thousand or more years ago. And no one would mention the marten, or
even know whether or not, like the wolf and boar, it had become “part
and parcel of the dreadful past.” Some one would, however, put in a
plea for the hermit badger--one with sharper sight or more patient than
the others, or perhaps more fortunate; and the company would be highly
amused.
The rough, grizzled brock, our little British bear, would perhaps be
better described as a fearsome or sublime than a beautiful beast. At
all events, I lately had a singular instance of the terrifying effect
of a badger related to me by a rural policeman in West Cornwall, a
giant six feet six in height, a mighty wrestler, withal a sober,
religious man, himself a terror to all evil-doers in the place. His
beat extends on one side to the border of a wide, level moor, and one
very dark night last winter he was at this desolate spot when he heard
the distant sound of a horse cantering over the ground. The heavy rains
had flooded the land, and he heard the splash of the hoofs as the horse
came towards him. “Who could this be out on horseback at twelve o’clock
on a dark winter night?” he asked himself; and listened and waited
while the sound grew louder and louder and came nearer and nearer, and
he strained his eyes to see the figure of a man on horseback emerging
from the gloom, and could see nothing. Then it suddenly came into his
mind that it was no material horseman, but a spirit accustomed to
ride at that hour in that place, and his hair stood up on his head
like the bristles on a pig’s back. “It almost lifted my helmet off,”
he confessed, and he would have fled, but his trembling legs refused
to move. Then, all at once, when he was about to drop, fainting with
extreme terror, the cause of the sound appeared--an old dog badger
trotting over the flooded moor, vigorously pounding the water with his
feet, and making as much noise as a trotting horse with his hoofs. The
badger was seven or eight yards away when he first caught sight of
him, and the badger, too, then saw a sublime and terrifying creature
standing motionless before him, and for a few moments they stared
at one another; then the badger turned aside and vanished into the
darkness.
To return. It was the sight of a fox that set me speculating on this
subject. I have seen more foxes than I can remember, but never one
that was the equal of this one; yet he was, I daresay, an ordinary
specimen, with nothing to distinguish him from any other large dog fox
in good condition with a fine coat of hair and a thick brush. It was
in Savernake Forest that, on emerging from a beech-wood, I noticed at
a distance of seventy to eighty yards away on the wide green level
open space before me a number of rabbits sitting up at the mouths
of their burrows, all staring in wide-eyed alarm in one direction.
Not at me, but towards a patch of dead rust-red bracken, some clumps
of which were still standing, although the time was now the end of
March. At intervals some of the rabbits would drop their fore-feet
down and begin nibbling at the grass; then in a moment they would
all start up and stare once more at the patch of bracken. I walked
slowly to this red patch, and when I approached it a large fox got up
and moved reluctantly away. The rough red fern on which he had been
lying had made him invisible to me until he moved; but he had been
plainly visible to the rabbits all the time. He trotted quietly away
to a distance of about forty yards, then stopped, and half turning
round, stood regarding me for some time. Standing on that carpet of
vivid green spring grass, with the clear morning sunlight full on
him, his red colour took an intensity and richness never previously
seen. In form he appeared no less distinguished than in colour. His
sharp, subtle face, large, leaf-shaped pointed ears, black without and
white within, and graceful bushy tail, gave him the appearance of a
dog idealised and made beautiful; and he was to the rough brown or
red common dog what the finest human type--a model for a Phidias or a
Praxiteles--is to a Connemara peasant or a Greenlander.
V
A SENTIMENTALIST ON FOXES
It was inevitable in these tremendous times that among the many voices
suggesting various drastic measures for our salvation, those of Mr.
Brown and Mr. Smith, the poultry farmers, should be heard loud as any
advocating the extirpation of foxes, a measure, they say, which would
result in a considerable addition to the food supply of the country in
the form of eggs and chickens. Even so do the fruit-growers remind us
in each recurring spring that it would be an immense advantage to the
country if the village children were given one or two holidays each
week in March and April, and sent out to hunt and destroy queen wasps,
every wasp brought in to be paid for by a bun at the public cost. That
the wasp, an eater of ripe fruit, is also for six months every year
a greedy devourer of caterpillars and flies injurious to plant life,
is a fact the fruit-grower ignores. The fox, too, has his uses to the
farmer, seeing that he subsists largely on rats, mice, and voles, but
he has a greater and nobler use, as the one four-footed creature left
to us in these islands to be hunted, seeing that without this glorious
sport we should want horses for our cavalry, and men of the right kind
on their backs, to face the Huns who would destroy us.
Apart from all these questions and considerations, which humanitarians
would laugh at, the fox is a being one cannot help loving. For he is,
like man’s servant and friend the dog, highly intelligent, and is to
the good honest dog like the picturesque and predatory gipsy to the
respectable member of the community. He is a rascal, if you like, but
a handsome red rascal, with a sharp, clever face and a bushy tail,
and good to meet in any green place. This feeling of admiration and
friendliness for the fox is occasionally the cause of a qualm of
conscience in even the most hardened old hunter. “By gad, he deserved
to escape!” is a not uncommon exclamation in the field, or, “I wish we
had been able to spare him!” or even, “It was really hardly fair to
kill him.”
Here let me relate an old forgotten fox story--a hunting incident of
about eighty years ago--and how it first came to be told. When J.
Britton, a labourer’s son in a small agricultural village in Wiltshire,
and in later life the author of many big volumes on the “Beauties of
England and Wales,” came up to London to earn a precarious living as
bottle-washer, newspaper office boy, and in various other ways, it was
from the first his ambition to see himself in print, and eventually,
because of his importunity, he was allowed by a kindly editor to write
a paragraph relating some little incident of his early years. What
he wrote was the fox story--a hunting incident in the village that
had deeply impressed his boy mind. The fox, hard pressed, and running
for dear life, came into the village and took refuge in a labourer’s
cottage, and entering by the kitchen door, passed into an inner room,
and, jumping into a cradle where a baby was sleeping, concealed himself
under the covering. The baby’s mother had gone out a little way, but
presently seeing the street in a commotion, full of dogs and mounted
men, she flew back to her cottage and rushed to the cradle, and
plucking off the coverlet saw the fox snugly curled up by the side of
her child, pretending to be, like the baby, fast asleep. She snatched
the sleeping child up, then began screaming and beating the fox, until,
leaping out of the cot, he fled from that inhospitable place, only to
encounter the whole yelling pack at the threshold, where he was quickly
worried to death.
The editor was so pleased with the anecdote that he not only printed it
but encouraged the little rustic to write other things, and that is how
his career as a writer began.
Now, albeit a sentimentalist, I would not say that the fox took refuge
in a cradle with a sleeping baby and pretended to be asleep just to
work on the kindly, maternal feelings of the cottage woman and so save
his life, but I do say, and am pretty sure that not one of the Hunt and
not a villager but felt that the killing of that particular fox was
not quite the right thing to do, or not altogether fair.
This incident has served to remind me of another from South America,
told to me by an Anglo-Argentine friend as we sat and talked one
evening in Buenos Ayres, comparing notes about the ways of beasts and
birds. The fox of that distant land is not red like his English cousin;
his thick coat is composed of silver white and jet black hairs in
about equal proportion, resulting in an iron grey colour, with fulvous
tints on the face, legs and under parts. If not as pretty as our red
fox, he is a fine-looking animal, with as sharp a nose and as thick a
brush, and, mentally, does not differ in the least from him. He is not
preserved or hunted in that country, but being injurious to poultry, is
much persecuted.
My friend had been sheep farming on the western frontier, and one
winter evening when he was alone in his ranch he was sitting by the
fire whiling away the long hours before bed-time by playing on his
flute. Two or three times he thought he heard a sound of a person
pressing heavily against the door from the outside, but being very
intent on his music, he took no notice. By and by there was a distinct
creaking of the wood, and getting up and putting down his flute he took
up the gun, and, stepping to the door, seized the handle and pulled
it open very suddenly, when down at his feet on the floor of the room
tumbled a big dog fox. He had been standing up on his hind legs,
his fore feet pressed against the door and his ear at the keyhole,
listening to the dulcet sounds. The fox rolled on the floor, frightened
and confused by the light; then, picking himself up, dashed out, but
before going twenty yards he pulled up and looked back just when the
gun was at my friend’s shoulder. There had been no time for reflection,
and in a moment Reynard, or Robert as we sometimes call him, was on the
ground bleeding his life out.
I did not like the end of his story, and I fancied, too, from his look
that he rather hated himself for having killed that particular fox, and
regretted having told me about it.
In another instance which remains to be told, the fox, in England this
time, who had got into trouble, and was in dire danger, was saved not
once, but twice, just because there was time for reflection. It was
told to me at Sidmouth by an old fisherman well known to the people
in that town as “Uncle Sam,” a rank sentimentalist, like myself, to
whom birds and beasts were as much as human beings. It chanced that in
1887 he was occupied in collecting materials for a big bonfire on the
summit of Barrow Hill, a high hill on the coast west of the town, in
preparation for Queen Victoria’s first Jubilee, when one day, on coming
down from his work, he met a band of excited boys, all armed with long,
stout sticks, which they had just cut in the adjacent wood.
Uncle Sam stopped them and told them he knew very well what they were
after; they had got their sticks to beat the bushes for birds, and he
was determined to prevent their doing such a thing. The boys all cried
out, denying that they had any such intention, and told him they had
found a fox caught in a steel trap with one of its fore legs crushed,
and as it would perhaps be a long time before the keeper would come
round, they were going to kill the fox with their sticks to put it out
of its misery. Uncle Sam said it would be better to save its life,
and asked them to take him to the spot. This they did willingly, and
there, sure enough, was a big fine fox held by one leg, crushed above
the knee. He was in a savage temper, and with ears laid back and teeth
bared he appeared ready to fight for his life against the crowd. Uncle
Sam made them place themselves before the tortured beast, and tease
him with their sticks, pretending to aim blows at his head. He in the
meantime succeeded in setting the end of his stick on the shaft of the
gin, and, pressing down, caused the teeth to relax their grip, and in
a moment the fox was free, and, darting away, disappeared from their
sight in the wood.
A year or so later, Uncle Sam heard of his rescued fox, a three-legged
one, the crushed limb having fallen or been gnawed off. He had been
seen near that spot where he had been caught. This was close to the
highest part of the wall-like cliff, and he had a refuge somewhere
among the rocks in the face of it some forty or more feet below the
summit. Those, too, who walked on the sands beneath the cliff sometimes
saw his tracks--the footprints of a three-legged fox. Doubtless he
had modified his way of life, and subsisted partly on small crabs and
anything eatable the sea cast up on the beach, and for the rest on
voles and other small deer obtainable near the cliff. At all events
he was never met with at any distance from the sea, and was in no
danger from the Hunt, as he was always close to his fortress in the
precipitous cliff.
One day a farmer, the tenant of the land at that spot, who was out
with his gun and walking quickly on the narrow path in the larch wood
close to the cliff, looking out for rabbits, came face to face with the
three-legged fox. He stopped short, and so did the fox, and the gun was
brought to the shoulder and the finger to the trigger, for it is a fact
that foxes _are_ shot in England by farmers when they are too numerous,
and in any case here was a useless animal for hunting purposes, since
he had but three legs. But before the finger touched the trigger, it
came into the man’s mind that this animal had done him no harm, and he
said, “Why should I kill him? No, I’ll let him keep his life,” and so
the fox escaped again.
More was heard from time to time about the three-legged fox, and that
went on until quite recently--about four years ago, I was told. If we
may suppose the fox to have been two or three years old when caught in
a trap, and that he finished his life four or five years ago, he must
have lived about twenty-six years. That would be a much longer period
than the domestic dog has, and for all I know the fox may be living
still, or, if dead, he may have ended his life accidentally.
VI
THE DISCONTENTED SQUIRREL
Hurrying along the street the other day, intent on business, I was
brought to a sudden full stop by the sight of a heap of old books in
tattered covers outside a second-hand furniture shop. I didn’t want
old books, and had no time to spare; the action was purely automatic,
like that of the old horse ridden or driven by a traveller who often
refreshes himself, in stopping short on coming to a public-house on the
roadside. On the top of the heap was a small pamphlet or booklet in
blue covers, entitled _The Discontented Squirrel_, and this attracted
my attention. It seemed to touch a chord, but a chord of what I did not
know. I picked it up, and, opening it, saw on the first page an ancient
rude woodcut of a squirrel eating a nut.
The old picture looked familiar, but I was still at a loss until I read
the first few lines of the letter-press, and then I immediately dropped
the booklet and hastened on faster than ever, to make up for a wasted
minute.
Why, of course, the Discontented Squirrel, that dear little ancient
beastie! The whole of the child’s tale came back with a rush to
memory, for I had read and re-read it when my age was seven; though
I had never since met with it in the hundreds of boxes of old books
turned over in my time, or in any collection of children’s books of
the early nineteenth century. I once made a small collection of such
literature myself, and others have collected and still collect it in a
large way. I sometimes wonder why some enterprising publisher doesn’t
start an Every Child’s Library, and rescue many of the most charming of
these small publications from total oblivion. Undoubtedly he would find
the best period was from 1800 to about 1840.
Once upon a time--so ran the story as I remembered it, and retold
it to myself while walking on--a squirrel lived in a wood, as plump
and playful and happy a squirrel as one would wish to see. He had a
favourite tree, an old giant oak, which was his home, and when summer
was nearing its end he began to amuse himself by making a warm nest in
a cavity down at the roots; also by hoarding a quantity of hazel-nuts,
which were plentiful just then in the wood. This he did, not because he
had any reason for doing it, or thought there was any use in it, but
solely because it was an old time-honoured custom of the squirrel tribe
to do these things.
While occupied in this way he all at once became aware of a new
restlessness and excitement among the birds, and when he asked his
feathered neighbours what it was all about, they were surprised at
his innocence, and answered that it was about migration. And what
was migration? A funny question to put to a bird! However, they
condescended to inform their ignorant young friend that migration meant
going away from the country in order to escape the winter. For now
winter was coming, that sad season of leafless trees and of short, dark
days; of wet and wind and bitter, bitter cold, when lakes and streams
would be frozen over, and the earth buried in white, awful snow.
And where would they go to escape these awful changes?
They would go to a land where there was no winter; where the trees were
green all the year round, with flowers always blooming, and fruit and
nuts always ripening.
“Oh beautiful land! oh happy birds!” thought the squirrel. “But where
is that desirable country?” he asked.
“Over that way,” replied the birds, pointing to the south, just as if
it were a place quite near. “It was,” they added, “beyond the ridge of
blue hills one could see on that side.”
These tidings threw the squirrel into a great state of excitement, and
he spent his whole time running after and questioning every bird he
knew. “When,” he asked, “would the migration begin?”
They laughed at the question, and said it had begun some time ago, and
was going on at the present moment. The swift had long been gone; so
had the night-jar; the cuckoo too; and others were beginning to follow.
The cuckoo--his own neighbour and familiar friend! Ah, that was why he
hadn’t seen him for some days past! And then began an unhappy time for
the squirrel, and every day and every hour increased his discontent.
The yellowing leaves, the chillier evenings, and long nights filled him
with apprehension of the coming change, and at last he resolved that he
would not endure it. For why should he stay in such a land when all his
feathered neighbours and friends were now hurrying away to a better one?
Having made up his mind to migrate, he set out at dawn of day, and
travelled many miles toward those blue hills in the south, which turned
out to be much farther than he had thought. It was not until the late
afternoon that he arrived at the foot of the ridge, feeling more tired
and sore-footed than he had ever been in his life. Nevertheless he
was determined not to give in, but to cross the hills before dark,
and in crossing them perhaps view from the summit that beautiful land
to which he was travelling. And so up and ever up he went, finding it
more fatiguing every minute, until he began to despair of ever reaching
the summit. And he never did; it was too high, and he was now spent
with hunger and weakness after his long fatiguing day. Furthermore,
the hillside grew more and more barren and desolate as he got higher,
until he found himself in a place where it was all stony, without trees
and bushes or even grass; and there was no food to be found, and no
shelter from the cold, violent wind.
He could go no farther, and the summit was still far, far above him.
Hunching himself up on the stony ground, with his nose down between his
paws and his bushy tail spread along his back, he began to reflect on
his condition.
Why had he not taken into account that he could not travel like a bird
with wings to bear him through the air, and over hills and rivers and
long stretches of rough country? And when he asked the birds how long
it would take them to reach that happy land of everlasting sunshine
beyond the blue ridge, had they not answered in a careless way, as if
they thought little of it, “Oh, not long; two or three weeks, according
to one’s powers”? And it never occurred to him that a bird can fly
farther in half an hour than a squirrel can travel in a whole day! Now,
when it was too late, when he could not go forward, and his home was
too far, far behind him, he remembered and considered these things. Oh
poor squirrel! Oh miserable end of all your happy dreams!
And while he was sitting hunched up, shivering with cold and thinking
these bitter, desponding thoughts, a passing kite spied him, and
swooping down, snatched him up in his talons and carried him off.
Little strength had he now to struggle, and at his least movement
the sharp, crooked claws tightened their grasp; and even if he had
been able to free himself, it would only have been to fall that vast
distance through the void air and be crushed on the earth.
Then all at once the bird’s flight grew swifter and rose higher, for
now a second kite had appeared, and had given chase to the first to
deprive him of his prey.
The first, burdened with the squirrel, could not escape from his
persecutor, and they were soon at close quarters. The marauding bird
now began making furious swoops at the other, aiming blows at his back
with his claws, and every time he swooped down he uttered savage cries
and mockings. “Aha!” he cried, “you can’t save yourself with all your
speed and all your doublings. Drop that squirrel if you don’t want
your back cut into strips. Do you remember, you red rascal, that you
found me carrying home a duckling I had picked up at a farm, and made
me drop it? Do you remember what you said on that occasion--that I was
burdened while you were free, so that you had the advantage of me, and
would claw my back to ribbons unless I dropped the duckling? Well,
robber--pirate! who has the advantage now?”
It was awful, that battle in the sky; the blows, the shrieks, the
dreadful imprecations they hurled at one another; but in the end the
kite was obliged to drop the squirrel to defend himself with his claws,
and the poor little beastie fell earthward like a stone, and would
have been crushed if he had fallen upon the ground; but, luckily, he
first struck a close mass of twigs and foliage on the top of a large
tree. This broke the violence of the fall, and he came down gently to
the branches beneath, when he managed to catch hold of a twig and come
to a stop. He was bruised and bleeding, and half-dead with the shock;
but by and by he revived, and then what was his relief and joy to
discover that he was at home--that he had fallen into his own favourite
old oak-tree! On recovering a little strength he crept down the trunk,
and after satisfying his hunger with two or three hazel-nuts from his
store, he crawled into his unfinished nest, where he coiled himself
up, and drawing the blankets over his ears, mused drowsily on his
unspeakable folly in having forsaken so comfortable a home. And as to
migration--well, “Never again!” he murmured as he dropped off to sleep.