heavily among the thickets near the stream, with now and then a
crash of branches. The noise draws nearer. Some red deer are
making their way down to the water. The light wind is blowing
straight this way. There is nothing to warn them. The leader
pauses, not five yards away, fetlock deep in the soft green morass
along one of the small streams that vein the hill. His shape is
dark and indistinct, yet there is just light enough to see that he
has antlers still. Behind him is a troop of hinds, a mingled mass
of stately, slow-moving, shadowy figures, leisurely crashing
through the thickets. One strolls idly this way, closer still,
pausing to browse on the leaves of the very willow that spreads
its long boughs overhead. Another follows, and another. There are
ten of them, at least, and not one aware of danger. Like Ajax, one
longs for daylight. Yet daylight must have revealed the ambush.
They are passing on. Another moment and they will have taken the
alarm. Stand up and shout. What headlong rush, what wild stampede,
what thunder of swift hoofs, what gallop of flying feet. Away they
go, crashing through the underwood, up the slope, into the black,
impenetrable shadows--sanctuary as safe as the very densest covert
of the forest.
[Illustration: HORNER BRIDGE.]
HORNER WATER.
The man who knows Exmoor only in the pride of its summer beauty,
who has, it may be, followed the staghounds over its far-reaching
slopes through a splendour of heath and ling and blossomed furze,
who has never seen the broad shoulders of Dunkery save when they
were wrapped about with royal purple, would find the moorland now
in very different mood, would think it even now, far on towards
the summer, desolate and sad-coloured and forlorn. The gorse,
indeed, is in its prime. Its fragrant gold is as full of beauty as
when the mingled mob of horse and foot and carriages gathers, for
the first Meet of the season, on the smooth crown of Cloutsham
Ball.
The gorse is a flower of the year. It is in bloom even in January.
There is an old saw that declares it to be, like kissing, never
out of season. But the heather that covers so much of the slopes
of Dunkery wears at this moment its very somberest of hues.
Standing on the fringe of the moorland, on the brink of one of the
deep glens that run into the heart of the hills, and looking up
the slope towards the dark summit, one might think that winter was
not over even yet. There is a touch of vivid green here and there,
round the birthplace of some mountain stream. There is colour on
the young birches that one by one are feeling their way up out of
the hollow. But in the sober brown of the heather, in the pearl
grey of the peat moss, in the dark hue of the gaunt and twisted
pines scattered at far intervals in front of the advancing forest,
there is no sign of the sweet influences of the spring.
A lonely spot. There is not a house in sight, no farm, no
hedgerow, no sign of man's dominion anywhere, beyond faint traces
of bridle paths, like dark lines along the heath, or a broader
track whose warm red shows a moment as it climbs some rising of
the moor. A solitary skylark sings over the brown heather. At
times a buzzard wails, as on broad wings he drifts in mighty
circles overhead, a dark spot against the pale blue heaven. Sounds
like these but deepen the sense of loneliness. But there is charm
in the very solitude. There is charm in the dark heath and in the
golden furze--in the play of the cloud-shadows that each moment
change the tones of brown and green and grey. There is charm in
the sweet breath of the gorse, and above all, in the bright, fresh
air of the open moorland. And however bare and voiceless these
sombre slopes, each hollow that wanders away into the hills is
filled to overflowing with a sea of mingled foliage, all astir
with life and movement.
The path that leads down from the highland to the hollow looks
upon a different world. The steep sides of the glen are green to
the very brim, are covered, right up to the brown fringe of
heather, with noble oaks in the pride of fresh, young foliage,
among whose golden green, all shimmering in a haze of sunlight,
shows the shadowy grey of boughs still bare, and in the open
spaces are all carpeted with the rich red of dead bracken, or the
vivid green of bilberry leaves. From far below, out of the mist of
green and grey, rises the song of a swift mountain stream, whose
pools and white cascades and brawling rapids gleam among the trees
like scattered links of silver.
There is a sudden clatter of stones upon the farther slope. Two
stags and four attendant hinds are making their way up from Horner
Water. They pause and look this way; the head of the leader
lifted, his antlers clear against the foliage behind him. This is
Exmoor. Here the red deer are on their native heath. This is their
last stronghold south of the Border. And it is in glens like this
that they find the sanctuary they love. The noble beasts stand
long at gaze. At last the leader turns, and moves slowly up the
slope, the others falling into line behind him. They quicken the
pace as they gain more easy ground, and breaking into a canter,
wind in gallant style across the heath. They pause for a last look
as they reach the summit of the ridge, their figures darkly cut
against the sky.
The road sinks lower, lower yet, down into the green heart of the
glen. Noble trees they are that fill the hollow. Some have long
since passed their prime. Their mighty branches are thick with
moss and lichen, and fringed with green tongues of fern. In rifts
that time and storm have carved in their huge columns, rowan and
bramble and young holly trees are rooted. Grey arms of ivy, almost
as broad and vigorous as they, are twined with fatal clasp about
their sturdy stems. Where the pathway crosses at the ford, there
stands a blasted tree: a giant oak, whose top, wrecked and
shattered though it is, rises high above its forest brothers. Its
bark has all fallen away. Its bare limbs glimmer ghost-like
through the green gloom.
The whole glen is full of life. Solitude there may be, but not
silence. The air is musical with the ripple of the stream, and
with the songs of sweet-voiced warblers. Over the tree tops
clamorous daws are passing, and the light wings of homeward-flying
doves. Among the boulders that winter floods have heaped along the
torrent--that even now, before the patient, eternal, resistless
chafing of the water, are moving slowly down the stream--you may
startle a heron from his noonday dreaming. Or you may come
unaware upon a pair of wild ducks, paddling softly on one of the
smooth and sheltered reaches, the mallard still splendid in the
nuptial plumage he is so soon to lose. Only a few weeks longer
will he wear it. Summer will find him in a quiet-coloured garb, a
suit of brown and grey as plain and unpretending as the dress of
his sober-tinted mate.
This, too, is the dipper's haunt. Again and again you will meet
him on his way up stream, flying swift and straight, with sharp
note of warning on spying a stranger near his fishing grounds. Or
you may watch him as he stands on some small island in the
torrent, his white breast gleaming like a patch of silver in the
water under him, bowing and calling, and now breaking off into
that sweet, wild song so dear to the soul of the fisherman. The
dipper's nest of moss and leaves and withered sedges, hidden
deftly in some old stump by the shore, is empty and deserted. His
mate and he are out all day on the river with their little mob of
dusky children.
It is a pleasant path that winds leisurely along the glen, now
wandering with the stream, now passing it by a ford, now loitering
among the trees, now fenced on either hand with tall thickets of
gorse and briar and hawthorn, now keeping close by the grey
willows that overhang the water. It is not a wide stream to cross,
for all the rain. The deer, whose fresh footmarks are printed deep
in the moist earth all along its banks, can easily leap over it.
The squirrels on their airy highway along meeting oak boughs far
above it, have no need to think of it at all. But for the rabbits
there is no way over but through the stream itself. And here, a
few days since, a rabbit, startled from the herbage on the brink,
took to the water without a moment's hesitation; a mere baby of a
rabbit, so small and slight that it was carried along for yards by
the swift current before it could get into shallow water and
struggle up the bank.
Suddenly two birds rise soaring from the trees, better seen when
they are clear of the valley, and sharply drawn against the sky.
One slow-winged and heavy, one quick and active, and deft in every
movement. A crow and a sparrow-hawk. They are fighting. Sounds of
battle float downwards through the air--the fierce defiance of the
hawk, the hoarse answer of his black antagonist. Round and round
they go, wheeling, sinking, soaring, now the hawk uppermost, and
now the crow. To watch the skilful man[oe]uvres of the hawk, one
might think there was little doubt about the issue. How easily he
sweeps past his lumbering enemy, how he clutches at him with
talons, how he flouts him with his strong wings. Yet the crow, for
all his awkwardness, is armed with no mean weapon. The hawk knows
well the value of that black dagger of a bill. And so they drift
over the rim of the valley to the open moorland, fighting to the
last.
[Illustration: WHERE RED DEER HIDE.]
ON EXMOOR: WHERE RED DEER HIDE.
High up on the moorland, in a wilderness of dead heather--surely
beyond all power of spring-time to call back to life--with dead
gorse bushes scattered over it, gaunt and spectral, unlighted by
any touch of golden bloom, there stands an ancient grave-mound. It
is the merest flaw in the wide landscape. A roadway passes near
it. But from elsewhere, unless it chanced to cut the sky line, you
might search for it in vain. Looking across the grassy rim of the
hollow space within it, a space like the crater of some spent
volcano, you see nothing but the pale summer sky above you, and,
stretching away on every side, a waste of desolate, far-reaching
undulations, to whose wintry hues the scanty patches of grass and
the tender tone of the late bilberry plants have hardly, even yet,
lent any tinge of green.
This is the very heart of the wilderness. There is not a house in
sight. There are no fields, no fences, no horses, no red cattle,
not a sheep even; no single moving figure, save of a bird that
flits restlessly among the gorse. This is almost as bleak and bare
a landscape as the haunt of the "Dead Drummer" upon Salisbury
Plain.
Yet it is a beautiful landscape, still and lonely though it be.
There is no gold of blossomed gorse, no rich Tyrian of early
heather. But there is marvellous wealth of colour even in these
sheets of dead ling, whose varied greys and browns are
strengthened here to deep shades of purple, and there,--by a
carpet of withered brake fern, beaten down by wind and rain, and
with stout young fronds but just beginning to uncurl,--are fairly
kindled into red. At one point a belt of dry sedges gleams like a
grey river. At another a patch of vivid green betrays the
birthplace of some moorland stream. Round the old hawthorns,
dotted here and there over the waste, a green mist is gathering.
But the starved and stunted trees of this high upland country are
slow to answer to the sunshine, and there are hardly leaves enough
yet to hide the shaggy tufts of lichen, silver grey and golden
yellow, that hang so thickly on the boughs. In the thorny depths
of these storm-beaten trees, even carrion crows venture to build
fastnesses, fearing nothing, though with thresholds not six feet
above ground, short of an avenging volley from the keeper's gun.
As the hours go by you grow conscious, by degrees, of companions
of your solitude. You hear notes of larks and pipits as they flit
here and there among the heather. You catch the faint far call of
a wandering cuckoo. A stone-chat settles near, on a tall, dead
furze bush, and sings over and over his brief roundelay. There are
few dwellers on the heath more smart than he, with his coal-black
head, his neat white collar, and his ruddy breast. This, too, is
the native heath of yonder curlews, wheeling idly across the sky,
sounding now and then that musical, clear call, that is one of the
most characteristic voices of the moorland.
The black-cock, the true children of the wilderness, are lying
close among the heather. The grey dawn is the time to see them
best, when they come down to drink and bathe at favourite points
along the streams. Towards nightfall, too, you will hear on all
sides, but especially on the fringe of the wooded valleys where
they come to feed, their strange, hoarse crying, which it is hard
to credit is the note of bird at all. In the twilight each old
black-cock will take his stand on some hillock, or even on the
level ground, and spreading wide his splendid tail, drooping his
wings, and sinking his head, like a stag preparing to give battle,
will utter strange, almost weird, sounds, which, as you watch his
odd figure, and fantastic attitudes, you would hardly think were
meant as notes of challenge to his rivals, intended to be full of
defiance and contempt.
Beyond the white cart-track, that just shows for a moment before
it sinks behind a rising in the heath, runs a deep valley--a great
hollow filled almost to the brim with oaks and beeches and tall
larch trees;--they, at least, are in the full pride of their
magnificent young beauty, with long branches thickly hung with
tufts of fragrant green. It is a valley of streams, that, drawn in
silver threads from every hill-slope near, set all along with
alder and willow, with ferns and rushes, and cool water plants, go
plunging through at last out of the narrow gateway of the glen, to
widen farther down into a broad, smooth flood, that sweeps in
silence among the worn stepping-stones of a village way.
The valley is full of life; full as the moorland here is bare of
it. In the great bank that skirts the wood badgers have their
holt. Hard by it is a famous "earth," to which every hunted fox
for miles round flees for sanctuary. The woodmen have been busy
here. The ground is strewn with red larch chips, whose sweet,
resinous fragrance hangs heavy on the air. And from the welcome
rest of some new-felled tree, whose shorn plumes lie heaped about
it in well-ordered faggots, you may listen to the pleasant voices
of the doves, and the blithe notes of warblers in the boughs above
you. You may watch the pheasants stalking solemnly among the
underwood, may see the brown squirrels romping on the grass, or
playing follow the leader up and down the smooth-stemmed beech
trees. A charméd spot. A spot such as the poet sang of, who
"... heard the cushies croon
Through the gowden afternoon,
And the Quhair burn singing on its way down to the Tweed."
The red deer love this quiet glen. You may see their sharp
footprints along every woodman's path, and by the oozy marge of
every stream. Their hour is not yet. Like the fox and the badger,
they are lovers of the twilight. It is not till evening darkens
that they leave their lairs in the cool depths of the larch copse
or the shadowy heart of the oak plantation, and cross the high
dyke that parts the farm lands from the cover, and sally out to
raid the young corn and the turnips in outlying fields. This is
the Red Deer Country. Empty as the landscape is at noon, there are
times when this wild heath is all alive with moving figures, horse
and hound, and all the bravery of the shouting chase. Many a time
has the hunt swept past this solitary tumulus, the gallant stag
seen for a moment, perhaps, upon the sky line, as
"With anxious eye he wandered o'er
Mountain and meadow, moss and moor."
There is no hamlet for miles around but has its legends, old and
new, of a sport that is dear to all the country side. In one of
the moorland churches it is recorded how, some six hundred years
since, a villager slew one of the King's deer; how the culprit was
"not found," and how, in the end, four neighbouring parishes paid
fine to the royal foresters. It is but a mile as the crow flies to
a hamlet, lying deep in a hollow of the hills, where last year,
when the chase went thundering through the quiet street, the stag,
in his despair, sought refuge in the inn, and was pulled down by
the hounds within the doorway of the hostelry. It is the most
picturesque of inns, with its rambling buildings, its thatched
roofs, mossed and lichen stained, its tiny dormer windows, and a
sign that has puzzled many an idler on the village
green;--uncertain whether, as some would have it, the figure in
scarlet is meant for a woman seated on a stile; whether it is a
nabob mounted on an elephant; or whether, as the words that run
above it would suggest, it is a Roundhead trooper drawing rein
under the oak of Boscobel.
[Illustration: TORR STEPS.]
TORR STEPS: A MOORLAND RIVER.
Down a deep valley in the West Country winds a swift moorland
stream. Mile after mile of sombre, heath-clad solitudes stretch
away on either side of it, broken with gorse and bracken, and with
here and there a few stunted and storm-beaten trees. Well-ordered
farm lands slope down to it. At far intervals it roars under the
ancient bridges of solitary hamlets. Here, in the heart of the
great hills, it runs between wooded slopes, covered with thick
growth of sturdy oak trees--leafless still, but with purple of
fast opening blossoms that, with the rich red brown of dead
leaves and withered fern about their feet, lends to the whole glen
a glow of warmth and colour.
Here the red deer steal out after sundown over the ruinous wall
and through the untended hedgerow to the broad meadow that for a
space divides the river from the wood. Here in the twilight the
otters play, rolling over and over in the water like great grey
cats. The beautiful moorland sheep that lift their horned heads to
watch the solitary wayfarer, with half-curious, half-supercilious
gaze, seem hardly less the true creatures of the wild than the
grey rabbit that you startle from his noonday dreaming among the
long grass by the hedgerow, or than the brown squirrel, coming
down for a frolic on the soft, green turf.
Below the wooded slope runs the river, here foaming over great
blocks of stone lying prostrate in its bed, there eddying round a
jutting bar of rock, now loitering in quiet backwaters, where dead
leaves and tufts of grass and all the smaller flotsam of the
stream spin slowly on the tranquil surface. At one point it roars
through a narrow channel between two ponderous stones, which lie
calm and unmoved in all the headlong rush; at another it pauses,
silent, in a deep, dark pool. Now it is broken all across in a
tumultuous cataract, and now again it widens to a broad sheet of
waving glass. At a bend in the river bank--a little hollow worn by
the floods of many winters--three alders overhang. And at their
feet, close to the margin of the stream, sheltered by a screen of
strong young branches growing upward from the base of the trees,
is a pleasant resting-place from which to watch unseen the life
and movement of this bird-haunted hollow--the warblers that throng
the thickets by the shore, the dippers that on swift wings pass
and repass along the watery highway, the graceful wagtails that
with dainty steps run up and down upon the strips of sand.
Looking down from the edge of the slope at the far end of the
meadow, framed by the broad arms of giant trees, show the
buildings of a farm, that with its wide eaves and crested gables,
its deep-sunk dormer windows, its rows of hives, and its ruinous
sheds, is a picture in itself. Close by it one of the moorland
highways, a narrow country lane, slopes steeply down, crossing the
river by a ford. And by the road, its grey masonry clearly drawn
against the shadowy spires of thick-growing alder trees, is an old
stone bridge--so old that no clue remains, no legend even, to its
history or its builders. Two thousand years, perhaps, has the
river run beneath these ponderous slabs of stone, laid flat across
rude, unmortared piers.
Beyond the bridge, through a purple mist of branches, show silver
glimpses of the river, then a broad stretch of meadow with dark
pine woods above it, among which the young larch foliage floats in
feathery clouds of green, and above these again, the brown and
desolate moorland. Near the bridge a little party of wanderers
have made their camp. The blue smoke of their fire drifts slowly
this way, with the pleasant scent of burning pine wood, the
pleasanter voices of girls and the shouts of children. It is a
perfect day for camping in the open; with warm air, and blue sky,
and soft white clouds sailing slowly over,--a day of clear shining
after rain.
The air over the stream is full of insect life, of flies of many
shapes and various hues, of browns, and drakes, and duns, so dear
to the brown river trout; and, in counterfeit presentment at any
rate, almost dearer to the soul of the trout-fisher. And as you
watch the myriad wingèd things that sail along the water, that
settle on the warm stones, or on the alder boughs, or even on your
hand, you will think it small ground for wonder that the thickets
by the stream should be so full of birds.
One might think that the roar of the river would be enough to
drown all other sounds. But, clear above it rise the notes of tits
and finches and warblers. The breezy chatter of the swallows, the
call of the dipper, the woodwren's hasty little stave of song, the
whistle of the blackbird, the mellow call of the cuckoo, are as
plain as if the great voice of the river were not heard at all. In
the next tree two finches have alighted; their restless movements
and sharp challenge of alarm betraying only too plainly what they
are so anxious to conceal, that their nest is somewhere near. Two
beautiful birds they are; one with the red flush on his breast,
the broad bar of white in either wing, the slate-blue feathers of
his lifted crest. The other, hardly less charming, with all her
colours pitched in soberer key. With anxious and persistent
iteration of their one shrill note of protest, they flit from
branch to branch; and when you rise, and peer into the tangle of
ivy-mantled boughs above you, the birds grow more clamorous still.
There is the nest, its mossy cup woven deftly among the slender
twigs, studded all over with lichen points of silver--as ever, a
miracle of beauty.
There are many birds preparing for the great event of the year. It
is not for nothing, you may be sure, that that old blackbird has
stayed out at the same corner of the hedge every day for a week
past; there is some good reason for his stealing towards it now
across the wood, a moving shadow, quiet for once. We can read the
signs of the times in the notes of the birds no less than in the
heightened colours of their plumage. It is a love-song pure and
simple that yonder hedge sparrow, poised on a straying spray of
bramble, is singing so softly to himself. The ringing call of an
oxeye overhead never was more clear, and blithe, and musical. But
the soft notes of a flock of long-tailed tits, not yet disbanded,
have a still softer tone to-day. Their light-hearted gossip seems
subdued and low, as if they knew the days were near when every
woodlander will go about his work with all the stealth he may.
There is a gold-crest rummaging among the ivy that clings about an
old elm hard by, almost within arm's length, so near that the
touch of vivid yellow on his crown gleams like very gold.
Smoke is still rising from the white ashes of the fire, but it is
proof enough that the little group has moved away, and that no one
is visible from the highway of the river, when a kingfisher
flashes across the bridge, straight up the stream, a swift gleam
of azure through the sunlit air. As you follow its flight to the
bend where the river vanishes behind its fringing alders, you are
aware of a moving point of light on one of the great boulders far
out from shore. Then the shape of a dipper shows clearly on the
top of the stone. A moment later it dives straight down into the
water, reappearing some yards nearer this way, pausing on another
great block of sandstone, to bow and curtsey, uttering now and
then a loud, clear note, its white gorget glowing like a star,
whiter even than the very foam of the river. Now it swims lightly
across a smooth backwater. Now it works its way sidelong across a
rapid rush of the current, stooping now and then to pick some
dainty morsel from among the stones, and all the while moving
slowly with the stream, until at last it stands on a stone in
mid-channel, not thirty yards away--a graceful, charming, dainty
little figure, the very naiad of the mountain stream.