THE DOVECOTE
A favourite climbing tree--The desire to fly--Soaring birds--A
peregrine falcon--The dovecote and pigeon-pies--The falcon's
depredations--A splendid aerial feat--A secret enemy of the dovecote--
A short-eared owl in a loft--My father and birds--A strange flower--
The owls' nesting-place--Great owl visitations.
By the side of the moat at the far end of the enclosed ground there
grew a big red willow, the tree already mentioned in a former chapter
as the second largest in the plantation. It had a thick round trunk,
wide-spreading horizontal branches, and rough bark. In its shape, when
the thin foliage was gone, it was more like an old oak than a red
willow. This was my favourite tree when I had once mastered the
difficult and dangerous art of climbing. It was farthest from the
house of all the trees, on a waste weedy spot which no one else
visited, and this made it an ideal place for me, and whenever I was in
the wild arboreal mood I would climb the willow to find a good stout
branch high up on which to spend an hour, with a good view of the wide
green plain before me and the sight of grazing flocks and herds, and
of houses and poplar groves looking blue in the distance. Here, too,
in this tree, I first felt the desire for wings, to dream of the
delight it would be to circle upwards to a great height and float on
the air without effort, like the gull and buzzard and harrier and
other great soaring land and water birds. But from the time this
notion and desire began to affect me I envied most the great crested
screamer, an inhabitant then of all the marshes in our vicinity. For
here was a bird as big or bigger than a goose, as heavy almost as I
was myself, who, when he wished to fly, rose off the ground with
tremendous labour, and then as he got higher and higher flew more and
more easily, until he rose so high that he looked no bigger than a
lark or pipit, and at that height he would continue floating round and
round in vast circles for hours, pouring out those jubilant cries at
intervals which sounded to us so far below like clarion notes in the
sky. If I could only get off the ground like that heavy bird and rise
as high, then the blue air would make me as buoyant and let me float
all day without pain or effort like the bird! This desire has
continued with me through my life, yet I have never wished to fly in a
balloon or airship, since I should then be tied to a machine and have
no will or soul of my own. The desire has only been gratified a very
few times in that kind of dream called levitation, when one rises and
floats above the earth without effort and is like a ball of
thistledown carried by the wind.
My favourite red willow was also the chosen haunt of another being, a
peregrine falcon, a large handsome female that used to spend some
months each year with us, and would sit for hours every day in the
tree. It was an ideal tree for the falcon, too, not only because it
was a quiet spot where it could doze the hot hours away in safety, but
also on account of the numbers of pigeons we used to keep. The pigeon-
house, a round, tower-shaped building, whitewashed outside, with a
small door always kept locked, was usually tenanted by four or five
hundred birds. These cost us nothing to keep, and were never fed, as
they picked up their own living on the plain, and being strong fliers
and well used to the dangers of the open country abounding in hawks,
they ranged far from home, going out in small parties of a dozen or
more to their various distant feeding-grounds. When out riding we used
to come on these flocks several miles from home, and knew they were
our birds since no one else in that neighbourhood kept pigeons. They
were highly valued, especially by my father, who preferred a broiled
pigeon to mutton cutlets for breakfast, and was also fond of pigeon-
pies. Once or twice every week, according to the season, eighteen or
twenty young birds, just ready to leave the nest, were taken from the
dovecote to be put into a pie of gigantic size, and this was usually
the grandest dish on the table when we had a lot of people to dinner
or supper.
Every day the falcon, during the months she spent with us, took toll
of the pigeons, and though these depredations annoyed my father he did
nothing to stop them. He appeared to think that one or two birds a day
didn't matter much as the birds were so many. The falcon's custom was,
after dozing a few hours in the willow, to fly up and circle high in
the air above the buildings, whereupon the pigeons, losing their heads
in their terror, would rush up in a cloud to escape their deadly
enemy. This was exactly what their enemy wanted them to do, and no
sooner would they rise to the proper height than she would make her
swoop, and singling out her victim strike it down with a blow of her
lacerating claws; down like a stone it would fall, and the hawk, after
a moment's pause in mid-air, would drop down after it and catch it in
her talons before it touched the tree-tops, then carry it away to feed
on at leisure out on the plain. It was a magnificent spectacle, and
although witnessed so often it always greatly excited me.
One day my father went to the _galpon_, the big barn-like building
used for storing wood, hides, and horse-hair, and seeing him go up the
ladder I climbed up after him. It was an immense vacant place
containing nothing but a number of empty cases on one side of the
floor and empty flour-barrels, standing upright, on the other. My
father began walking about among the cases, and by and by called me to
look at a young pigeon, apparently just killed, which he had found in
one of the empty boxes. Now, how came it to be there? he asked. Rats,
no doubt, but how strange and almost incredible it seemed that a rat,
however big, had been able to scale the pigeon-house, kill a pigeon
and drag it back a distance of twenty-five yards, then mount with it
to the loft, and after all that labour to leave it uneaten! The wonder
grew when he began to find more young pigeons, all young birds almost
of an age to have left the nest, and only one or two out of half a
dozen with any flesh eaten.
Here was an enemy to the dovecote who went about at night and did his
killing quietly, unseen by any one, and was ten times more destructive
than the falcon, who killed her adult old pigeon daily in sight of all
the world and in a magnificent way!
I left him pondering over the mystery, gradually working himself up
into a rage against rats, and went off to explore among the empty
barrels standing upright on the other side of the loft.
"Another pigeon!" I shouted presently, filled with pride at the
discovery and fishing the bird up from the bottom. He came over to me
and began to examine the dead bird, his wrath still increasing; then I
shouted gleefully again, "Another pigeon!" and altogether I shouted
"Another pigeon!" about five times, and by that time he was in a quite
furious temper. "Rats--rats!" he exclaimed, "killing all these pigeons
and dragging them up here just to put them away in empty barrels--who
ever heard of such a thing!" No stronger language did he use. Like the
vicar's wonderfully sober-minded daughter, as described by Marjory
Fleming, "he never said a single dam," for that was the sort of man he
was, but he went back fuming to his boxes.
Meanwhile I continued my investigations, and by and by, peering into
an empty barrel received one of the greatest shocks I had ever
experienced. Down at the bottom of the barrel was a big brown-and-
yellow mottled owl, one of a kind I had never seen, standing with its
claws grasping a dead pigeon and its face turned up in alarm at mine.
What a face it was!--a round grey disc, with black lines like spokes
radiating from the centre, where the beak was, and the two wide-open
staring orange-coloured eyes, the wheel-like head surmounted by a pair
of ear-or horn-like black feathers! For a few moments we stared at one
another, then recovering myself I shouted, "Father--an owl!" For
although I had never seen its like before I knew it was an owl. Not
until that moment had I known any owl except the common burrowing-owl
of the plain, a small grey-and-white bird, half diurnal in its habits,
with a pretty dove-like voice when it hooted round the house of an
evening.
In a few moments my father came running over to my side, an iron bar
in his hand, and looking into the barrel began a furious assault on
the bird. "This then is the culprit!" he cried. "This is the rat that
has been destroying my birds by the score! Now he's going to pay for
it;" and so on, striking down with the bar while the bird struggled
frantically to rise and make its escape; but in the end it was killed
and thrown out on the floor.
That was the first and only time I saw my father kill a bird, and
nothing but his extreme anger against the robber of his precious
pigeons would have made him do a thing so contrary to his nature. He
was quite willing to have birds killed--young pigeons, wild ducks,
plover, snipe, whimbrel, tinamou or partridge, and various others
which he liked to eat--but the killing always had to be done by
others. He hated to see any bird killed that was not for the table,
and that was why he tolerated the falcon, and even allowed a pair of
_caranchos_, or carrion-eagles--birds destructive to poultry, and
killers when they got the chance of newly-born lambs and sucking-
pigs--to have their huge nest in one of the old peach-trees for
several years. I never saw him angrier than once when a visitor
staying in the house, going out with his gun one day suddenly threw it
up to his shoulder and brought down a passing swallow.
That was my first encounter with the short-eared owl, a world-
wandering species, known familiarly to the sportsman in England as the
October or woodcock owl; an inhabitant of the whole of Europe, also of
Asia, Africa, America, Australasia, and many Atlantic and Pacific
islands. No other bird has so vast a range; yet nobody in the house
could tell me anything about it, excepting that it was an owl, which I
knew, and no such bird was found in our neighbourhood. Several months
later I found out more about it, and this was when I began to ramble
about the plain on my pony.
One of the most attractive spots to me at that time, when my
expeditions were not yet very extended, was a low-lying moist stretch
of ground about a mile and a half from home, where on account of the
moisture it was always a vivid green. In spring it was like a moist
meadow in England, a perfect garden of wild flowers, and as it was
liable to become flooded in wet winters it was avoided by the
_vizcachas_, the big rodents that make their warrens or villages
of huge burrows all over the plain. Here I used to go in quest of the
most charming flowers which were not found in other places; one, a
special favourite on account of its delicious fragrance, being the
small lily called by the natives _Lagrimas de la Virgin_--Tears
of the Virgin. Here at one spot the ground to the extent of an acre or
so was occupied by one plant of a peculiar appearance, to the complete
exclusion of the tall grasses and herbage in other parts. It grew in
little tussocks like bushes, each plant composed of twenty or thirty
stalks of a woody toughness and about two and a half feet high. The
stems were thickly clothed with round leaves, soft as velvet to the
touch and so dark a green that at a little distance they looked almost
black against the bright green of the moist turf. Their beauty was in
the blossoming season, when every stem produced its dozen or more
flowers growing singly among the leaves, in size and shape like dog-
roses, the petals of the purest, loveliest yellow. As the flowers grew
close to the stalk, to gather them it was necessary to cut the stalk
at the root with all its leaves and flowers, and this I sometimes did
to take it to my mother, who had a great love of wild flowers. But no
sooner would I start with a bunch of flowering stalks in my hand than
the lovely delicate petals would begin to drop off, and before I was
half way home there would not be a petal left. This extreme frailty or
sensitiveness used to infect me with the notion that this flower was
something more than a mere flower, something like a sentient being,
and that it had a feeling in it which caused it to drop its shining
petals and perish when removed from its parent root and home.
One day in the plant's blossoming time, I was slowly walking my pony
through the dark bottle-green tufts, when a big yellowish-tawny owl
got up a yard or so from the hoofs, and I instantly recognized it as
the same sort of bird as our mysterious pigeon-killer. And there on
the ground where it had been was its nest, just a slight depression
with a few dry bents by way of lining and five round white eggs. From
that time I was a frequent visitor to the owls, and for three summers
they bred at the same spot in spite of the anxiety they suffered on my
account, and I saw and grew familiar with their quaint-looking young,
clothed in white down and with long narrow pointed heads more like the
heads of aquatic birds than of round-headed flat-faced owls.
Later, I became even better acquainted with the short-eared owl. A
year or several years would sometimes pass without one being seen,
then all at once they would come in numbers, and this was always when
there had been a great increase in field mice and other small rodents,
and the owl population all over the country had in some mysterious way
become aware of the abundance and had come to get their share of it.
At these times you could see the owls abroad in the late afternoon,
before sunset, in quest of prey, quartering the ground like harriers,
and dropping suddenly into the grass at intervals, while at dark the
air resounded with their solemn hooting, a sound as of a deep-voiced
mastiff baying at a great distance.
As I have mentioned our famous pigeon-pies, when describing the
dovecote, I may as well conclude this chapter with a fuller account of
our way of living as to food, a fascinating subject to most persons.
The psychologists tell us a sad truth when they say that taste, being
the lowest or least intellectual of our five senses, is incapable of
registering impressions on the mind; consequently we cannot recall or
recover vanished flavours as we can recover, and mentally see and
hear, long past sights and sounds. Smells, too, when we cease
smelling, vanish and return not, only we remember that blossoming
orange grove where we once walked, and beds of wild thyme and penny-
royal when we sat on the grass, also flowering bean and lucerne
fields, filled and fed us, body and soul, with delicious perfumes. In
like manner we can recollect the good things we consumed long years
ago--the things we cannot eat now because we are no longer capable of
digesting and assimilating them; it is like recalling past perilous
adventures by land and water in the brave young days when we loved
danger for its own sake. There was, for example, the salad of cold
sliced potatoes and onions, drenched in oil and vinegar, a glorious
dish with cold meat to go to bed on! Also hot maize-meal cakes eaten
with syrup at breakfast, and other injudicious cakes. As a rule it was
a hot breakfast and midday dinner; an afternoon tea, with hot bread
and scones and peach-preserve, and a late cold supper. For breakfast,
mutton cutlets, coffee, and things made with maize. Eggs were
plentiful--eggs of fowl, duck, goose, and wild fowl's eggs--wild duck
and plover in their season. In spring--August to October--we
occasionally had an ostrich or rhea's egg in the form of a huge
omelette at breakfast, and it was very good. The common native way of
cooking it by thrusting a rod heated red through the egg, then burying
it in the hot ashes to complete the cooking, did not commend itself to
us. From the end of July to the end of September we feasted on
plovers' eggs at breakfast. In appearance and taste they were
precisely like our lapwings' eggs, only larger, the Argentine lapwing
being a bigger bird than its European cousin. In those distant days
the birds were excessively abundant all over the pampas where sheep
were pastured, for at that time there were few to shoot wild birds and
nobody ever thought of killing a lapwing for the table. The country
had not then been overrun by bird-destroying immigrants from Europe,
especially by Italians. Outside of the sheep zone in the exclusively
cattle-raising country, where the rough pampas grasses and herbage had
not been eaten down, the plover were sparsely distributed.
I remember that one day, when I was thirteen, I went out one morning
after breakfast to look for plovers' eggs, just at the beginning of
the laying season when all the eggs one found were practically new-
laid. My plan was that of the native boys, to go at a fast gallop over
the plain and mark the spot far ahead where a lapwing was seen to rise
and fly straight away to some distance. For this method some training
is necessary to success, as in many cases more birds than one--
sometimes as many as three or four--would be seen to rise at various
points and distances, and one had to mark and keep in memory the exact
spots to visit them successively and find the nests. The English
method of going out and quartering the ground in search of a nest in
likely places where the birds breed was too slow for us.
The nests I found that morning contained one or two and sometimes
three eggs--very rarely the full clutch of four. Before midday I had
got back with a bag of sixty-four eggs; and that was the largest
number I ever gathered at one time.
Our dinner consisted of meat and pumpkin, boiled or baked, maize "in
the milk" in its season and sweet potatoes, besides the other common
vegetables and salads. Maize-meal puddings and pumpkin pies and tarts
were common with us, but the sweet we loved best was a peach-pie, made
like an apple-pie with a crust, and these came in about the middle of
February and lasted until April or even May, when our late variety,
which we called "winter peach," ripened.
My mother was a clever and thrifty housekeeper, and I think she made
more of the peach than any other resident in the country who possessed
an orchard. Her peach preserves, which lasted us the year round, were
celebrated in our neighbourhood. Peach preserves were in most English
houses, but our house was alone in making pickled peaches: I think
this was an invention of her own; I do not know if it has taken on,
but we always had pickled peaches on the table and preferred them to
all other kinds, and so did every person who tasted them.
I here recall an amusing incident with regard to our pickled peaches,
and will relate it just because it serves to bring in yet another of
our old native neighbours. I never thought of him when describing the
others, as he was not so near us and we saw little of him and his
people. His name was Bentura Gutierres, and he called himself an
estanciero--a landowner and head of a cattle establishment; but there
was very little land left and practically no cattle--only a few cows,
a few sheep, a few horses. His estate had been long crumbling away and
there was hardly anything left; but he was a brave spirit and had a
genial, breezy manner, and dressed well in the European mode, with
trousers and coat and waistcoat--this last garment being of satin and
a very bright blue. And he talked incessantly of his possessions: his
house, his trees, his animals, his wife and daughters. And he was
immensely popular in the neighbourhood, no doubt because he was the
father of four rather good-looking, marriageable girls; and as he kept
open house his kitchen was always full of visitors, mostly young men,
who sipped mate by the hour, and made themselves agreeable to the
girls.
One of Don Ventura's most delightful traits--that is, to us young
people--was his loud voice. I think it was a convention in those days
for estancieros or cattlemen to raise their voices according to their
importance in the community. When several gauchos are galloping over
the plain, chasing horses, hunting or marking cattle, the one who is
head of the gang shouts his directions at the top of his voice.
Probably in this way the habit of shouting at all times by landowners
and persons in authority had been acquired. And so it pleased us very
much when Don Ventura came one evening to see my father and consented
to sit down to partake of supper with us. We loved to listen to his
shouted conversation.
My parents apologized for having nothing but cold meats to put before
him--cold shoulder of mutton, a bird, and pickles, cold pie and so on.
True, he replied, cold meat is never or rarely eaten by man on the
plains. People do have cold meat in the house, but that as a rule is
where there are children, for when a child is hungry, and cries for
food, his mother gives him a bone of cold meat, just as in other
countries where bread is common you give a child a piece of bread.
However, he would try cold meat for once. It looked to him as if there
were other things to eat on the table. "And what is this?" he shouted,
pointing dramatically at a dish of large, very green-looking pickled
peaches. Peaches--peaches in winter! This is strange indeed!
It was explained to him that they were pickled peaches, and that it
was the custom of the house to have them on the table at supper. He
tried one with his cold mutton, and was presently assuring my parents
that never in his life had he partaken of anything so good--so tasty,
so appetizing, and whether or not it was because of the pickled
peaches, or some quality in our mutton which made it unlike all other
mutton, he had never enjoyed a meal as much. What he wanted to know
was how the thing was done. He was told that large, sound fruit, just
ripening, must be selected for pickling; when the finger dents a peach
it is too ripe. The selected peaches are washed and dried and put into
a cask, then boiling vinegar, with a handful of cloves is poured in
till it covers the fruit, the cask closed and left for a couple of
months, by which time the fruit would be properly pickled. Two or
three casks-full were prepared in this way each season and served us
for the entire year.
It was a revelation, he said, and lamented that he and his people had
not this secret before. He, too, had a peach orchard, and when the
fruit ripened his family, assisted by all their neighbours, feasted
from morning till night on peaches, and hardly left room in their
stomachs for roast meat when it was dinner-time. The consequence was
that in a very few weeks--he could almost say days--the fruit was all
gone, and they had to say, "No more peaches for another twelve
months!" All that would now be changed. He would command his wife and
daughters to pickle peaches--a cask-full, or two or three if one would
not be enough. He would provide vinegar--many gallons of it, and
cloves by the handful. And when they had got their pickled peaches he
would have cold mutton for supper every day all the year round, and
enjoy his life as he had never done before!
This amused us very much, as we knew that poor Don Ventura,
notwithstanding his loud commanding voice, had little or no authority
in his house; that it was ruled by his wife, assisted by a council of
four marriageable daughters, whose present objects in life were little
dances and other amusements, and lovers with courage enough to marry
them or carry them off.