hare, I came back on the following evening to my hiding place by the
hedgerow. In the dusk, Puss appeared at the margin of the copse, and
moved down the bank to the edge of the stream. There she paused,
apparently perplexed, and called to her leveret. Presently the young
hare joined her mother at the water's edge, and both hopped along the
brink, seeking a dry place by which they might reach the field on the
slope. Finding none, they adjourned to the mossy bank where I had seen
the leveret's footprints. Then the doe went down boldly to the stream,
called to her companion, waded in, and swam across. Ascending into the
field, she shook the water from her fur, and again called repeatedly.
The young one hesitated, and ran to and fro crying piteously,
"leek--leek." Suddenly, in the excitement, it missed its footfall and
fell into the river. Bewildered, but hearing its mother's call, it swam
down the pool through the still water below the little rapid, and landed
on the opposite bank, where it joined its parent, and, following her
example, shook the water from its downy limbs. Soon both disappeared
within the wood; and, satisfied with my evening's sport, I turned
homewards across the fields.
During the rest of the summer, the hare frequented the rough pastures
skirting the ploughlands, and visited the cornfields only when the
weather was dry. Hares suffer little discomfort in rainy weather, if
only the fine fur beneath the surface of the coat remains dry--after a
shower they can easily shake off any outside moisture. But they dislike
entering damp places where the vegetation is tall and their fur may get
matted and soaked by the raindrops collected on the herbage. In wet
weather hares may often be found in cover, especially near thick
furze-brakes on a well drained hillside, but their presence in such a
situation may imply that they sought shelter before the rain began to
fall.
In September, for the third time during the year, Puss was occupied with
family affairs. Now, three tiny leverets were "kittled," and the nest
occupied an almost bare place on the top of a ridge in the root-field
where last season the succulent carrots grew. The hare had been greatly
distressed by the unusually wet summer, and one of her leverets was in
consequence a weakling; another leveret was killed by a prowling polecat
while the mother wandered from the "form"; and only the third grew up
robust and strong.
The approach of winter brought Puss many strange experiences, from some
of which she barely emerged with her life. When the season was passed,
it had become more than ever difficult to approach her; she would slip
away to cover directly her keen senses detected the presence of a
stranger in the field where she lay in her "form." As she grew older,
her leverets sometimes numbered four or five, but as a rule she gave
birth to three only, her productiveness being probably dependent on the
ease with which she obtained food.
One day in February, just before bringing an early little family into
the world, she almost met her death. A village poacher, ferreting on the
hillside, chanced to see her, as she lay not far off in a patch of
clover. Without waste of time, he proceeded to attempt the capture of
the hare by a well-known trick. Thrusting a stake into the ground, he
placed his hat on it, and strolled unconcernedly away. Then, as though
he had changed his mind, he walked round the clump, in ever narrowing
circles, gradually closing on his prey. Meanwhile, the hare, her
attention wholly diverted by the improvised scarecrow, remained
motionless, baffled by the artifice. Suddenly she felt the touch of the
man's hand. The poacher had thrown himself down on the tuft, hoping to
clutch the hare before she could move. But in endeavouring to look away
from the spot, and, at the same time, measure the distance of his fall,
he had miscalculated the hare's position. She sprang up, and with ears
held low sped away towards the wood, leaving the poacher wild with rage
at the failure of his ruse, and vowing vengeance on the timid creature,
whose life, at such a time, would hardly, even to him, have been worth
an effort.
III.
THE CHASE.
Of all the hounds employed in the chase of the hare, the basset promises
to become the prime favourite among some true-hearted sportsmen who love
sport for its own sake, and not from a desire to kill. He is a loose,
lumbering little fellow--resembling his relative, the dachshund--low and
long, with out-turned legs, sickle-shaped "flag," and features which, in
repose, seem to suggest that he has borne the grief and the care of a
hundred years, but which, when the huntsman comes to open the kennel
doors, are radiant with delight. Mirthfulness and dignity seem to seek
expression in every movement of the quaint, old-fashioned little hound,
and in every line of his face. As for his music--who would expect such a
deep, bell-like note from this queer midget among hunters, standing not
much higher than the second button of the huntsman's legging? Withal, he
is a merry, lively little fellow, with a good nose for the scent of a
rabbit or a hare, and, when in fit condition, is able to follow, follow,
follow, if needed, from earliest dawn till the coming of night. The
chase being ended, he with his companions, Harlequin and Columbine, and
all the stragglers of the panting pack, will surround the tired hare,
and will wait, bellowing lustily, but without molesting the quarry, till
the Master appears and calls them to heel.
If the ten to twenty sportsmen often to be found in a village would
combine, each keeping a basset for the common Hunt, they might derive
the utmost pleasure from following their pets afield, and incidentally
would assist to prevent the extermination of an innocent wildling of our
fields and woodlands. For the sake of the sport shown by the
basset-hounds, many of the farmers near the villages, who dearly love to
hear the deep music of a pack in full cry, would protect Puss from those
more cunning and powerful enemies of hers, who, lurcher in leash or gun
in hand, steal along the hedgerows at nightfall, so that, from a secret
transaction thereafter with some local game-dealer, they may get the
wherewithal for a carouse in the kitchen of the "Blossom" or the "Bunch
of Grapes."
One morning in December, when the rime lay thick on the fields, and the
unclouded sun, rising in the steel-blue sky, cast a radiance over the
glittering countryside, our village basset-hounds found the "cold" scent
of the hare in the woods above the church, where Puss had sheltered
beside a prostrate pine-trunk before returning to her "form" at dawn.
After endeavouring in vain for some time to discover the direction of
her "run," they set off, "checking" occasionally, across the stubble,
through the root-crop field, and down over the fallow to the bottom of
the dingle. There, near a bubbling spring, Puss had hidden since
daybreak. Hearing the far-off music, she slipped out of the field
unobserved, till, reaching the uplands, she was seen to pass leisurely
by in the direction of the furze-brake.
Directly the bassets came to the spring, a chorus of deep sounds
announced that the quarry had been tracked to her recent lair. All
through the morning they continued their quest; they streamed in a long,
irregular line up the hillside, their black and tan and white coats
gaily conspicuous in the sunlight; they trickled over the hedgerows, and
dotted the furrows of the deserted ploughlands; they moved in "open
order" through the copse, and plodded along by the furze-brakes or
through the undergrowth where the sharp-thorned brambles continually
annoyed and impeded them; they worked as if time needed not to be taken
into the slightest account. The least scent met with loud and hearty
recognition; fancy ran riot with the excited puppies; the atmosphere at
every turn seemed to betray the near presence of Puss. But every
condition of weather and fortune was against good sport. The ground was
steadily thawing in the warmth of the sun, and the rising vapour,
trembling in the light, seemed to carry the scent too high for accurate
hunting.
So the hare ambled along her line of flight--a wide, horse-shoe curve
that began and ended in the fallow on the slope. When a considerable
distance had been placed between herself and her pursuers, she ceased
to hurry. Indeed, the music of horn and hounds seemed almost to
fascinate the creature, and frequently she lingered for a few moments to
listen intently to the clamour of her enemies. A farm labourer, who
tried to "grab" her as she passed down the grassy lane, said that she
"was coming along as cool as a cucumber. Sometimes she'd sit down to
tickle her neck with her hind-feet. Then she'd give a big jump,
casual-like, to one side of the path, and sit down again, with her ears
twitching and turning as if she thought there was mischief in every
flutter of a leaf or creak of a bough."
Frightened almost out of her wits by the labourer's sudden and well-nigh
successful endeavour to secure her, Puss rushed back along the lane,
crossed a gap, and sped over the uplands once more, leaving her usual
horse-shoe line of flight, and taking a much greater curve towards the
fallow. But gradually her pace slackened as she discovered she was no
longer followed; and then, not far from her lair by the spring, she
paused to rest. The music of the hounds was faint, distant, and
intermittent; and at last it entirely ceased. Somewhat exhausted
towards the end of her journey, she had withheld her scent, and had thus
completely outwitted her slow but patient pursuers.
Once, and once only, towards the end of January, she found herself
chased by her more formidable foes, the beagles. At first she eluded
them by stealing off without yielding the faintest scent; but she was
"viewed" in crossing the meadow, and the hounds, making a long, wide
cast, "picked up" as soon as a slight, increasing taint in the air was
perceptible, then followed for several miles. But, ultimately, they were
baffled, and Puss made good her escape.
It had happened that, after creeping through a gutter in the hedgerow of
a stubble, she had come in sight of a flock of sheep grazing on the
opposite side. Like Vulp, the fox, she knew how to hinder the chase by
mingling her scent with that of other animals; so without hesitation she
passed through the flock, and made straight for an open gateway in the
far corner of the field. When the beagles, in hot pursuit, appeared on
the scene, the startled sheep, rushing away, took the line of the hunted
hare through the opening, and thus "fouled" the scent so thoroughly
that the hunt came to a "check." After the hare had left the fields
frequented by the sheep, she took the direction of a path leading over a
wide bog towards the woodland. On the damp ground the scent lay so
badly, that when, some time later, the beagles crossed her line, they
were unable, even after repeated "casts," to follow her track. Presently
the impatient huntsman, with hounds at heel, moved away to the nearest
road and relinquished his quest.
Luckily for Puss, the harriers never visited her neighbourhood, and only
on special occasions was coursing permitted on the estate. If at night a
lurcher entered the field in which she grazed amid the clover, her
knowledge of the poacher's artifices immediately prompted her to slip
over the hedge and past the treacherous nets. Her life, beset with
hidden dangers, was preserved by a chain of wonderfully favourable
circumstances, that befriended her even when the utmost caution and
vigilance had been unavailing.
Once, so mild was the winter that the hare's first family for the year
came into the world in January. A few weeks afterwards, when she was
about to separate from her leverets, an incident occurred that might
have been attended with fatal results. A poacher, prowling along the far
side of the hedgerow, and occasionally stopping to peep through the
bushes for partridges "jugging" in the grass-field, caught sight of the
leverets nibbling the clover near a small blackthorn. In the feeble
afterglow, he was uncertain that the objects before him were worth the
risk of a shot, so he crawled towards a gap to obtain a nearer view. To
his astonishment, when he reached the gap nothing was visible by the
thorn-bush; the leverets had vanished in the ferns. But the poacher was
artful and experienced. He hid in the undergrowth of the ditch, where,
after waiting awhile, and seeing no sign of movement in the grass, he
gave utterance to a shrill cry like that of a young hare in distress.
Five minutes passed, and the cry was repeated--tremulous, prolonged,
eloquent of helpless suffering. At intervals, the same artifice was
employed, but apparently without success.
The poacher was about to crawl from his hiding place, when suddenly,
close beside the hedgerow, the head of the doe hare came into sight.
Startled, in spite of expectation, by her sudden appearance, and excited
as he recognised the "slit-eared hare," the poacher involuntarily moved
to grasp his gun. He looked down for an instant to make sure that his
gun was in readiness, but when he lifted his eyes again the hare was
gone. Do what he might, not another glimpse of his quarry was to be
obtained, and so, half believing that he had seen a witch or that he had
dreamed, he stole away into the darkening night.
Deceived by the poacher's cries, the doe-hare had hurried home, but had
found her young alive and well. Then, scenting danger, she had vanished
with her offspring into the nearest bramble-clump, and in the deep
shadow of the hedgerow had led them safely away.
During the last year of her life, she frequented the hawthorn hedges and
the furze brakes of an estate diligently "preserved" by a lover of
Nature as a sanctuary whither the furred and feathered denizens of the
countryside might resort without fear of hounds or poachers, and where a
gun was never fired except at vermin. The winter was severe; on two
occasions snow lay thick on the ground for more than a week. But Puss
was fairly comfortable; she had her "form" on a dry, rough heap of
stones, gathered from the fields and thrown into a disused quarry near
the woods; and for four or five nights she remained at home, the snow
covering her completely but for a breathing hole in the white walls of
her tiny hut. At last, impatient of confinement, and desperately hungry,
she broke through the snow-drift, and sought the nearest root-crop
field, where, after scratching the snow from a turnip, she was able to
make a hearty meal. While returning slowly towards the wood through the
soft, yielding snow that rendered her journey difficult and tiresome,
she unexpectedly discovered, near the hedge beyond the furrows, a tasty
leaf or two of the rest-harrow, together with a few yellow sprouts of
young grass where a stone had been kicked aside by a passing
sheep--these were the tit-bits of her provender.
In the early morning, the hare, too cautious to re-enter the "form,"
which, now that its surroundings were torn asunder, had become a
conspicuous rent in the white mantle of the old quarry, crept over the
hedge into the woods, and, moving leisurely beneath the snow-laden
undergrowth, where her deep footprints could not easily be tracked,
selected a suitable spot for a new "form" in the friendly shelter of a
fallen pine.
But even in this woodland sanctuary she encountered an enemy. A cat from
the farm on the hill, having acquired poaching habits, had strayed, and
taken up her abode among the boulders at the foot of a wooded precipice
adjoining the lower pastures of the estate. In a gallery between these
boulders, she had made her nest of withered grass and oak-leaves, where,
at the time of which I write, she was occupied with a family of kittens.
The wants of the kittens taxed the mother's utmost powers; she prowled
far and wide in search of food, and was as much a creature of the night
as were the fox and the polecat that also lived among the rocks.
There is no greater enemy of game than the renegade cat. She is far more
destructive than a fox. Many animals that can evade Reynard are helpless
in the grip of a foe armed so completely as to seem all fangs and
talons. The special method of slaughter adopted by the cat towards a
victim of her own size is cruel and repulsive in the extreme. Grasping
it with her fore-claws and holding it with her teeth, she lies on her
back and uses her hind-claws with such effect that often her prey is
lacerated to death.
Roaming at night in the shadow, the cat came unexpectedly on the scent
of the hare and traced it to the "form," but the desired victim was not
at home. The cat returned to the spot before dawn, and lurked in hiding
beneath the hawthorns. The hare, however, was not to be easily trapped.
Coming into the wood against the wind, she fortunately detected the
enemy's presence quite as readily as the cat had discovered her "form"
amid the grass-bents. With ears set close, and limbs and tail twitching
with excitement, the cat crouched ready for the deadly leap. But the
hare suddenly sprang aside from her path, climbed the hedgerow, and
disappeared, outpacing with ease the cat's half-hearted attempt at
pursuit.
At length the "slit-eared hare" met her death, in a manner befitting the
wild, free existence she had led among the hills and the valleys. Her
dead body was brought me by the head keeper of the woodland estate, and,
as it rested on my study table, I gazed at it almost in wonder. The
russet coat, turning grey with age, was eloquent of the brown earth, the
sere leaf, and the colourless calm of twilight, and told me of the
creature's times and seasons. The big, dark eyes, their marvellous
beauty and expressiveness dimmed by death, and the long, sensitive ears,
one ripped by the falcon's talon and both slightly bent at the tip with
age, were suggestive of persecution, and of a haunting fear banished
only with the coming of night, when, perchance, the early autumn moon
rose over the corn, and the hare played with her leverets among the
shadowy "creeps." My hands rested on the fine, white down that took the
place of the russet coat where Nature's mimicry was needed not; it was
pure and stainless, like the lonely wildling's inoffensive life.
[Illustration: "WHEN THE EARLY AUTUMN MOON ROSE OVER THE CORN."]
A terrible thunderstorm had raged over the countryside all the evening
and throughout the night. Ben, the carter, coming home to the farm with
his team, had dropped at the very threshold of the stable, blasted in
a lurid furnace of sudden fire. A labourer's cottage had been
wrecked; many a stately forest tree had been rent or blighted; the
withering havoc had spread far and wide over the hills. On the following
morning, the keeper, going his rounds, had found the dead hare beside a
riven oak.
THE BADGER.
I.
A WOODLAND SOLITUDE.
Even in our own densely peopled land, there are out of the way districts
in which human footsteps are seldom heard and many rare wild creatures
flourish unmolested. Near such parts the naturalist delights to dwell,
in touch, on one side, with subjects that deserve his patient study,
and, on the other side, with kindly country folk, who, perhaps, supply
him with food, and are the means of communication between him and the
strenuous world. In this western county, however, the naturalist, in
order to gain expert knowledge, does not need to live on the fringe of
civilisation. Here, among the scattered upland farms around the old
village, creatures that would elsewhere be in daily danger because of
their supposed attacks on game are almost entirely free from
persecution. In several of our woods, polecats seem to be more numerous
than stoats, and badgers are known, but only to the persistent observer,
to be more common than foxes; and both polecats and badgers are seldom
disturbed, though the farmers may regularly pass their burrows.
The immunity of such animals from harm is, to some extent, the result of
the farmer's lack of interest in their doings. He strongly resents the
presence of too many rabbits on his land, "scratching" the soil,
spoiling the hedges, and devouring the young crops, and, therefore,
cherishes no grudge against their enemies so long as his stock is
unmolested. He is no ardent protector of game, and, if a clutch of eggs
disappears from the pheasant's nest he has chanced to discover in the
woods, thinks little about the incident, and concludes that Ned the
blacksmith's broody hen has probably been requisitioned as a
foster-mother, and that some day he will know more of the true state of
affairs when he visits the smithy at the cross-roads.
Another circumstance to which the badger hereabouts is indebted for
security is that terriers are not the favourite dogs of the countryside.
When shooting, the sportsman prefers spaniels, particularly certain
"strains" of black and brown cockers--untiring little workers with a
keen, true power of scent--which for many years have been common in the
neighbourhood; and the farmer's sheep-dog is unfitted for any sport
except rabbiting. Here and there, among the poaching fraternity, may be
found a mongrel fondly imagined by its owner to be a terrier--a good
rabbit "marker," and wonderfully quick in killing rats, but no more
suited than the sportman's spaniel for "lying up" with a badger.
Undoubtedly, however, the security of some of our most interesting wild
animals, and especially of the badger, is to be accounted for by their
extreme shyness. They venture abroad only when the shadows of night lie
over the woods. For countless years, dogs and men have been their
greatest foes, and their fear of them is found to be almost as strong in
remote districts as where, near towns, their existence is continually
threatened. Wild life in our quiet valley will be deemed of unusual
interest when I say that less than six hours before writing these lines
I visited a badger's "set"--a deep underground hollow with several main
passages and upper galleries, where, as I have good reason to believe, a
fox also dwells--an otter's "holt" beneath gnarled alder-roots fringing
the river-bank, and another fox's "earth," all on the outskirts of a
wooded belt not more than a mile from my home, and all showing signs of
having long been inhabited.
Unless systematically persecuted, the fox, the otter, and the badger
cling to their respective haunts with such tenacity that, season after
season, they prowl along the same familiar paths through the woods or by
the river, and rear their young in the same retreats. This is the case
especially with the badger; from the traditions of the countryside, as
well as from the careful observation of sporting landowners, it may be
learned that for generations certain inaccessible "sets" have seldom, if
ever, been uninhabited. Always at nightfall the "little man in grey" has
climbed the slanting passage from his cave-like chamber, ten or--if
among the boulders of some ancient cairn--even from twenty to thirty
feet below the level of the soil, and sniffed the cool evening air, and
listened intently for the slightest sound of danger, before departing on
his well worn trail to hunt and forage in the silent upland pastures.
And with the first glimpse of light, when the hare stole past towards
her "form," and the fox, a shadowy figure drifting through the haze of
early dawn, returned to the dense darkness of the lonely wood, he has
sought his daytime snuggery of leaves and grass industriously gathered
from the littered glades.
In a deep burrow at the foot of a hill, about a quarter of a mile from a
farmstead built on a declivity at a bend of the broad river, Brock, the
badger, was born, one morning about the middle of spring. Three other
sucklings, like himself blind and wholly dependent on their parents'
care, shared his couch of hay and leaves. Day by day, the mother badger,
devoted to their welfare, fed and tended her unusually numerous
offspring, lying beside them on the comfortable litter, while the sire,
occupying a snug corner of the ample bed, dozed the lazy hours away; and
evening after evening, when twilight deepened into darkness as night
descended on the woods, she arose, shook a few seed-husks from her coat,
and with her mate adjourned to an upper gallery leading to the main
opening of the "set," whence, assured that no danger lurked in the
neighbourhood of their home, both stole out to forage in the clearings
and among the thickets on the brow of the hill.