Gipsies and gamekeepers have enough in common to make them deadly foes.
They share an intimate knowledge of the ways of wild creatures. They
are skilled trackers and crafty trappers. They are hedgerow men; born
to the hedgerow, trained to know the meaning of every hole, and hollow,
and run. Their eyes read the story of the hedge as the scholar's the
printed page; hedge-lore is their second nature, and it is as though an
instinct tells them where the partridge has built, where the hedgehog
has buried himself, or where the rabbits are crouching. In their
knowledge of the ways of rabbits and hares keepers and gipsies stand
alone; and it often happens that all the knowledge and craft of the one
class is pitted against the cunning and knowledge of the other. Between
keepers and gipsies it is always war.
The keeper detests nothing more than a gipsies' camp. His eyes take no
more pleasure in their red rags spread on the bushes than might the
eyes of a bull. A gipsy camp means to the keeper so much dirt, so much
thieving, so many lies, so much the more trouble, and so many the fewer
rabbits in his preserves. The gipsies' cauldron, steaming at dusk over
a fragrant fire of wood, brings only the bitter knowledge that some
of the birds or beasts he is paid to preserve are stewing in the pot.
Speak to him of gipsies, and scorn flashes in his eyes, anger flushes
on his face. "They be always a-shirking about wi' a dog or two, perkin'
into everything," an old keeper once said to us. "They can't let
nothing bide."
A gipsy brought to trial for larceny made oath that his law allowed
him to take as much from others every day as sufficed for his
maintenance. That was more than three hundred years ago; and gipsies
still faithfully believe in and take advantage of that law. In our
experience, we have known one gipsy who was honest; he was famous for
his honesty. His blameless character was so much appreciated that he
was allowed to pitch his tent in an old ox-drove, where it ran past
a sheltering wood. Within the wood the keeper had buried four-dozen
traps; and it chanced that the leaves drifted over his traps, so that
when he came to find them he hunted the ground in vain. One day the
gipsy's boy came to the keeper's cottage. He said that while picking
wood for his father's fire he had trodden on something hard, which
turned out to be a heap of traps, and that his father, thinking they
must belong to the keeper, had sent him to tell the story. Where is
another gipsy in England who would throw away such a chance?
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