WANDERING over moor and heath, and through the deep woods, Skewbald
while yet a foal got to know the wild life of the forest, for, as with
all young things, life to him was more than mere eating, and he was full
of curiosity about everything that went on around him.
In the evenings he would see the rabbits, first little and then big,
come out of their holes, their white scuts flashing as they gambolled.
If they “froze,” their quiet umber tint assimilated with the surrounding
hues, so that their outline was lost, and sometimes the colt, going
towards a patch of herbage, saw nothing but a great black eye gazing at
him, until, on a nearer approach, a young rabbit materialized, and loped
away. On summer mornings when the dew was heavy, the bunnies looked
almost black because of their drenched fur. They would have all day to
comb and smooth it out underground. Early one morning he saw a doe
rabbit with a mouthful of grass, sticking out on both sides of her
muzzle, like a great green moustache; she went below with it, her two
little ones following.
Hares he did not see so often, and they sat so quietly in their “forms,”
that he was not aware of their presence until he nosed up against them.
But he once saw a hare anything but quiet. On a bare patch of gravel
near the railway, where hares were in the habit of crossing, a big jack
hare was writhing and squirming without moving from the spot, and
Skewbald went up to see this strange sight. The creature, of course, was
in a gin, though the foal was not to know that. Not being afraid of
hares, he got quite close, and, as the entrapped one did not move off,
but still strained and struggled, he gave a mischievous little stamp to
drive him away. Now, the poor hare was caught by a fore toenail only,
and Skewbald happening to press with his hoof on the spring the jaw
opened, and the prisoner was set free; but his fore-leg was so strained
by the tension, that when he put weight on it, he fell over, and
squirmed as before.
Skewbald, very interested, touched him, and the hare made off on to the
track, where again he fell and writhed, Skewbald watching through the
railings, until the noise of an oncoming train reminded the stricken one
that he still had three legs to run on. The following spring Skewbald
again witnessed the hare in motion, and this time there were two. The
pair were on a level stretch, and indulging in an orgy of violent
movement. They chased one another, turning and doubling, taking turns to
be pursued and pursuer, till one stopped and crouched, the other jumping
over its back. Then they ran apart in tangential circles which brought
them face to face, whereupon they stood up on their hind-legs, and
thumped one another with their forepaws like boxers. They acted as madly
as any other pair of March hares.
Instinct and his mother taught Skewbald to notice all that was going on,
to keep his eyes “skinned.” When they were in the woods, the harsh notes
of the jays made him start, and from his mother’s movements, he learned
that someone was about. Once in spring, browsing on the young shoots of
a hawthorn-bush, he almost nosed against two dormice fresh from their
long rest, sleek and tawny bright, among the green tufts.
The squirrels he could not help seeing, and when he stopped, and looked
at them sitting on the low boughs of a fir, making short work of the
cones, they stamped peevishly with their hind-feet, making quite a
noise, as the rabbits did on the ground. Once he witnessed a curious and
beautiful sight which lasted but a moment. A squirrel pursued another,
going round and round a tree-trunk as they descended, so quickly that
they left on the eye the impression of a reddish streak, drawn spirally
round the trunk. This again was in spring, and, like the mad antics of
the hares, a love chase.
Sometimes a fox trotted by, or sat up and looked at him impudently, and,
as it happened, he got tolerably familiar with a family of foxes. The
lair was in a bank between the roots of an old oak. Skewbald’s mother,
as she went by, snuffed the air, and indeed, the smell, whether of fox
or high viands, was perceptible even to human nostrils. So Skewbald
snuffed too, and whenever he passed the hole, the odour reminded him of
what dwelt there. One fine evening, as he idled at a little distance, he
perceived movement outside the hole. It was not rabbits, so he went
closer, and saw the little fox cubs, lithe and furry. One lay on its
back gnawing at a moorhen’s wing, two were engaged in a tussle, and one
curled into a ball with his tail over his nose, pretending to be asleep;
but when the vixen came up, and, after looking round, sat down calmly
amidst her family, the mischievous cub got up, came behind her and
worried her tail, until she turned, and seized him in her jaws, so that
he yelped.
After this, Skewbald, when his company came that way, looked out for the
cubs, but he saw little more of them, for the older they grew, the later
they came out, until it was night before they emerged, and then it was
not for play but work, learning to hunt for their living.
Skewbald and his mother sometimes sunned themselves by a bank crowned
with lichened thorns. It was quite a badger fortress, being honeycombed
with passages. A certain family which camped by it one August must have
occasioned the badger some inconvenience, for they used the great holes
as dustbins, stuffing down newspapers, tins, tea-leaves and coffee
grounds, and other rubbish. But they never set eyes on him, not even on
moonlight nights. Probably he used an exit on the other side of the bank
while the campers were about. But Skewbald sometimes saw him after dusk,
coming or going with his rolling gait, or appearing at the mouth of his
den with sniffing snout and uplifted paw. Once the foal came upon him in
broad day, and sunny at that. He was fast asleep, nearly hidden in a
great nest of dried grass and bracken in a sheltered corner.
Sometimes, though probably he was unaware of it, the colt walked over
little sharply pitted tracks which were the slots of the deer. Only once
did he see that rare and shy British mammal, the roedeer. Skewbald was
strolling in a forest ride, when, all at once, a delicate fawn-coloured
shape with two uplifted sharp horn spikes emerged from a fern brake, and
paused with raised fore-foot and twitching ears before venturing across
the grassy space, and like a shadow his mate followed him.
In the thick woods, he sometimes saw the other deer, mostly fallow, the
buck with widely branching palmate antlers, but occasionally a great red
deer.
One September midday, mother and foal were wandering down a wide drive
in the woods, when strange noises came to the foal’s ears, people
shouting, baying of hounds and blowing of horns. He ran close to his
mother, who, though not alarmed, raised her head and snuffed the air
with interest. People with horns no longer hunted ponies, and she had no
apprehensions of capture.
Presently a buck topped the bank, and shot across the drive, a mere
rusty brown streak, gone as soon as seen. The noise of the hounds
wavered, and grew fainter. The buck had eluded them. Then in the
distance a huntsman appeared coming up the drive on a tall white horse.
He was a fine sight in his black velvet cap, dark green coat with brass
buttons, and his horn ready to hand. He stopped by a gate watching the
drive, not knowing he was too late. On the hill out of sight were the
three men in brown velveteen, each holding a team of the leashed hounds;
young and swift these, waiting to be put on the track of the quarry when
the slow old hounds, or “tufters,” had got the scent, and mounted
hunting folk waiting or patrolling the forest glades. But the noise and
the sight of the buck was all that Skewbald experienced, that day, of a
forest buck-hunt.
After being warned by his mother, Skewbald kept as respectful a distance
from harmless grass-snakes and slow-worms as from vipers. He even jumped
when the little brown lizard ran across the path in front of him. And
doubtless he sometimes found the open door of the home of the
underground wasp, and quickly removed his nose and himself from its
proximity. More rarely he saw the brown paperish globe of the wood-wasp
hung from a low branch, with a hovering swarm of wasps like a yellow
halo round it.
As for “stoats,” heathflies, and the tickling, crawling New Forest fly,
they are, in hot weather, the torment of a forest pony’s life, and the
less said about them the better.
Of birds, he knew most familiarly the stonechat, always on the topmost
spray of a gorsebush, both in summer and in winter, with his little
jerking tail and monotonous “tick-tack” note. Sometimes he would see the
stonechat’s relative, the wheatear, standing on a stone or clod of
earth, with the same flirting of the tail; the attitude alert and
vigilant, his black eye-streak emphasizing his suspicious glance.
In the evening he heard the “hoo-hoo” of the tawny owl, and might have
seen him sitting upright on the low branch of a willow, close to the
trunk; and once in broad daylight, as he was nibbling at the bark of the
branches of a stubby hollow holly, a blotched form appeared at the
opening as if in response to the noise he made before her door; then
with a couple of wing-beats, the little owl flew up into the higher
branches and looked at him with fierce gold-rimmed eyes, and irritable
movements of her head.
Now and then he came across a small covey of partridges dusting
themselves in a sandy patch, or sunning on a bank. Once in May, as he
put his nose to a tussock, a sitting partridge gave it a sharp peck. All
that season he looked into tussocks warily, and one day he came upon
what looked like two partridges sitting together; but the one outside
the nest was a cock-bird, as could be seen by his red ear-lobes and
absence of cross-bars on his wings. As Skewbald looked, a little head
peeped out from under his father’s wing and piped. Then there was more
chirping, and from under the mother emerged a tiny chick, and in a
moment was lost in his male parent’s feathery recesses. That faithful
husband and father was on duty, receiving each little chick as it
hatched, and “drying them off.”
One of Skewbald’s most interesting glimpses of his bird neighbours
concerned another family party. He was standing one evening in June by a
great brake of gorse on a bank, near a little stream, when he heard a
flutter of wings, and a great bird alighted, a shelduck, glorious in her
black, white, and chestnut plumage, crimson neb, and coral legs—a bird
which one associates with the sandy shores of North Wales or the dunes
of Norfolk. Yet here she was, and after looking round, she walked
towards a rabbit-hole at the foot of a gorsebush, put her head in, and
vanished.
A little later the foal and his mother were drinking at the stream very
early in the morning, when a subdued but anxious croaking was heard,
accompanied by a “cheeping” from tiny throats, and the shelduck came
into view marshalling a long line of the prettiest, fluffy, pied little
ducklings, negotiating all sorts of obstacles. And not one parent only,
for the father, larger and still more resplendent than his mate, and
quite as concerned and anxious, brought up the rear of the procession.
Once or twice he whistled shrilly, as he intercepted an errant ball of
down, and sent it into the right path. When they tumbled into the tiny
stream, at once the youngsters were at home and self-confident. The
drake saw them all afloat, and again the procession re-formed to paddle
down-stream to the sea. What adventures were they to meet with, and how
many would the parents bring safely to the seashore, to run along the
margin of the tide, in their pied down indistinguishable from the foamy
froth washing over the seaweed? It was perhaps ten miles to their
destination, with many enemies in wait—hawks, foxes, badgers, pike, and
man.
Later in the season a naturalist, not a sportsman or collector, armed
only with his monocular prismatic, passed the shelduck’s burrow, and a
feather caught his eye. He stooped, and picking it up, scrutinized it
closely. By its white, black and chestnut, he knew at once from what
bird it had fallen and that doubtless this was her nesting site.
But perhaps one of the most thrilling sights to be seen in the forest by
a lover of birds was what Skewbald first beheld one cold April morning.
A rough untidy yearling after his winter outdoors, he wandered down to
the brook, where on a muddy patch broad three-toed footprints had been
freshly impressed. Loose feathers, white, black, and brown, caught his
eye, and as he sniffed at them he heard a strange musical phrase, with a
humming vibratory timbre—
[Illustration]
—which seemed to fill the air, and was repeated again and again.
Skewbald looked around, and on a little rise crowned by a grove of
birches were several birds about the size of pheasants. Two were a deep
blue-black, and there were several smaller, mottled grey and brown. The
black grouse still lives in the New Forest, though sadly depleted in
numbers, and what the yearling saw was the spring assembly, or
“lekking.” The two cock-birds were going through some strange manœuvres.
One which had been sitting in the fork of a tree, with his beautiful
lyre-shaped tail showing to advantage, flew to the ground. He drooped
his wings, lowered his outstretched neck, which, with every feather on
end, looked twice its usual size, then brought up his middle tail
vertically with the curved extremities hanging down, so that from the
front it looked somewhat like an admiral’s cocked hat. His silvery-white
undertail coverts were raised, and expanded like a fan. It was this view
he displayed to the presumably admiring hens, though as far as one could
see, they took not the least notice of their admirers. Meanwhile he
hummed the song already indicated. Then the other bird came forward, got
up like the first, and the real business commenced. With outstretched
necks and distended crimson eyebrows, they fenced with each other, until
one, taking courage, flew at his rival, and there was a rough-and-tumble
struggle, only ended when one had had enough. Then the victor strutted
about, and renewed his song.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]