POACHERS AND A BATTUE
One still night about ten days before the end of September, Walnut and I
were roused by a light which, flashing across the opening to our retreat,
was reflected into our eyes. It passed immediately, but not before we
were both broad awake.
Several men were trampling about close underneath the oak.
‘Lie still, Walnut,’ I ordered uneasily, for this was something new to
me. I had never before heard men moving in the wood so late at night,
and I was at first inclined to think that there might be some new plot
of Tompkins or his satellites a-foot. Very cautiously I peered out.
There was a young moon somewhere behind the soft veil of cloud, which
covered the sky so that it was not too dark to see the figures of three
men moving cautiously across the glade in which the pheasants fed. One
carried a dark lantern, the tiny beam of light from which was what had
roused us the moment before.
‘They’ll be in them young beeches,’ said one in a hoarse whisper. ‘There
ain’t any in the oak.’
I saw them all three move cautiously across into a clump of young beeches
which stood just across the glade. There they stopped, and the lantern
was flashed upwards into the low branches, its light gleaming golden upon
the yellowing leaves. A slight rustle followed, and a voice muttered:
‘I sees ’em. Shut the lantern an’ help me fix the smudge.’
The three now stooped together on the ground and appeared to be gathering
dry leaves and heaping them together in a little pile. Presently I heard
the faint scratching of a match, and a small blue flame illuminated three
eager faces. Two of them were men whom I had never seen before; the third
I recognized as a labourer whom I had more than once watched shake his
fist fiercely as he passed the locked gate of the coppice.
The man who held the match touched it to the leaves, but before they
could burst into bright flame the two others penned the little fire by
holding a couple of sacks round it.
One of the men threw a handful of powder over the fire which at once
choked it down, making it burn with a sickly blue flame. Then they all
three stood perfectly still, hiding the fire with their sacks, but
keeping their heads turned as far as possible away from the smoke which
went wreathing up in thick columns into the foliage above them.
Before many moments had passed there came a slight whirr, the sound of
wings beating on leaves, and with a flop, down fell a great pheasant
almost on the heads of the watchers. Quick as a cat, one of the men
reached out one arm, seized the bird, and wrung its neck. He had hardly
done so when there was another rustle and thud, and a second of our
oppressor’s pets shared the fate of the first.
It was evident that from the stuff they put in the flame there arose
poisonous fumes that stupefied the roosting birds.
Very soon even we could smell the noisome stuff, and Walnut wrinkled up
his nose in disgust. Even a human being, let alone a squirrel, whose
sense of smell is fifty times more acute, could easily have perceived it.
[Illustration: A SMALL BLUE FLAME ILLUMINATED THREE EAGER FACES.]
Presently the poachers lifted up the whole fire, which we now saw had
been built upon a small square of sheet-iron, and removed it bodily to a
fresh spot, under another tree. Here no fewer than four pheasants were
secured one after another, and then the fire was moved again. So they
went on for two hours or more, working round and round the glade. As
nearly all the pheasants roosted in this part of the coppice there was no
need to go further afield. At last, when their sack was fairly bulging
with dead game, they took their departure.
Twice during the next three nights did the gang of poachers return, and
each time went home with a score or more of long-tails. Tompkins at last
began to miss his birds at feeding-time, and to suspect that something
was wrong. Walnut and I sat secure in our retreat overhead, and jeered at
the man’s utter stupidity. Why, even if he had no nose for the brimstone,
of which the whole place fairly reeked, there were great footprints all
over the place telling their story in large type to anyone who had eyes!
Yet the keeper absolutely walked over them without looking at them. The
very idea of poachers never seemed to occur to him. I verily believe
he thought that we had something to do with the disappearance of his
precious pheasants, for as he left the coppice he fired at and killed a
poor young cousin of ours.
The leaves had begun to fall once more, when one day the pompous little
fat man accompanied Tompkins through the coppice. They stopped in the
glade below us, and it was evident the new tenant was uneasy. He began
peering and pointing, and questioning the keeper as if he were only half
satisfied.
‘Oh, they’re all right, sir,’ replied the keeper hastily, in answer to
his questions. ‘You see, sir, they’ve got so big now they don’t need the
grain. They’re round in the bracken finding their own feed.’
The master swallowed his story like a thrush swallowing a worm. Indeed,
he was evidently rather pleased, for he thought the birds would be wild
and strong on the wing for next day.
That same night I was wakened by gunshots. Never before had I heard a gun
fired at night, and the sound was most alarming. I thought at first that
the firing was at a distance, but just as I looked out the darkness was
lit by a flash quite close at hand. The report was, however, strangely
slight. As a matter of fact, the guns were loaded with reduced charges.
Immediately at the report down flopped a pheasant to the ground. The
poacher gang were at work, and as time was short were shooting the
pheasants as they roosted. Pop, pop, pop! The pheasants were falling at
the rate of one a minute. There would be very few left for our stout
friend at the Hall and his swell city friends next day. Two sacks were
full.
‘Just a dozen more,’ we heard one of them say.
‘Right oh!’ answered another. He spoke out loud, for by this time the
gang had been so long undisturbed that they had become quite reckless,
and neglected the precautions which they had at first observed.
The words were hardly out of his mouth before there was a sudden rush of
feet, and there came the keeper, his son, another man, and the fourth was
no other than the new tenant himself.
Ginger recklessly rushed forward shouting. Next instant a gun cracked—I
never saw who fired the shot—and Ginger, with a hideous yell, fell
forward on his face, and lay twitching in a horrid fashion on the ground.
I saw Ginger’s son charge forward, swinging his stick, with the other man
close behind him. I saw the poachers run for their lives, leaving the
spoil behind them. But what was the new Squire about? He never budged,
but stood there like a stuck pig; and even in the dim light it was easy
to see his legs quaking and the shivers that shook his podgy frame.
Not until poachers and pursuers had vanished through the trees, and the
crashing sound of their running feet had almost died in the distance, did
the cowardly little man move slowly up to where his keeper lay.
‘Are—you—much—hurt, Tompkins?’ he stammered, in shaking accents.
Tompkins only groaned, and the stout man, kneeling beside him, fairly
wrung his hands in hopeless incompetency. At last he seemed to remember
something, and pulling out a flask from his pocket, put it to Tompkins’s
lips just as the keeper’s son and the other man returned empty-handed.
The new Squire turned on them, storming at them for having allowed the
poachers to escape, without seeming to heed the fact that his keeper
still lay unconscious at his feet. He stamped and swore and almost
shrieked in his impotent anger. Presently his son and the other man
hoisted up Tompkins, who seemed to have got the charge in his legs, and
between them carried him off, the little stout man stalking growling
along in the rear. Then, at last, Walnut and I were left to get some
sleep.
However, there was no peace for us. By ten o’clock next day the coppice
was full of beaters, making noise enough to rouse a dormouse, and
scaring the remaining pheasants nearly out of their feathers. Instead
of running or hiding, the silly birds immediately rose and flew up over
the trees, and then began such a salvo of firing as none of us had ever
heard in our lives before. The whole coppice was full of the sharp, sour
smell of smokeless powder, and as for us and the other coppice dwellers,
we cowered in the very deepest corners of our various refuges, and waited
with shaking bodies and aching heads for the din to cease. At last it did
stop, but only to break out afresh at the next spinney, and so on all day
round the whole country-side.
In the afternoon, after it was all over, and just as Walnut and I were
starting out to find our evening meal, there came a fresh invasion.
It was headed by the stout new tenant, gorgeously arrayed in a check
shooting suit, which in itself was enough to scare any self-respecting
squirrel out of his wits, and with him walked five others like unto
himself. He was evidently giving them all an account, a glorified
account, of what had happened. By the way he pointed and ran a few steps,
and let fly with his fist, it seemed as if he personally must have killed
the whole gang of poachers, and they all listened attentively, though one
or two laughed behind his back.
I learnt afterwards from Cob that he had seen a man going about with the
sacks full of dead pheasants the poachers had dropped. He had scattered
them here and there throughout the wood. This had puzzled him much, and
he had watched to see if they were left there; but, no; when the shoot
was over the pheasants were picked up again with those that had really
been shot by the guests, and in this way they made up quite a big bag.
All this poaching business does not seem to have much to do with my
life. Indirectly, however, it had, for the new tenant of the Hall was so
angry about the poaching that on the very day after the battue he set
a whole gang to work to run barbed wire—of all awful things!—round the
whole of the coppice. Other men were put to lop the hedges close, and
two new keepers engaged. The latter were worse than Tompkins. I suppose
it was by way of justifying their existence that they walked about all
day with their guns, firing at almost everything they could see that
was not game. It became almost impossible to show our noses outside our
homes during daylight, and many an evening Walnut and I went hungry to
bed. Life became one prolonged dodging, for even when the new keepers
were not about the workmen would take pot shots with stones at any of
us they could view. Incidentally, too, they knocked over many a fat
rabbit and dozens of the remaining pheasants. But of these proceedings
their employer, intent on saving his coverts from the village poachers,
remained in blissful ignorance.
At last there came a crisis. Walnut and I had taken advantage of the
quiet of the midday hour—the men being at their dinner—to steal out and
get some beech-mast, when suddenly a missile of some sort hissed just
above my head, cutting away a twig close above. I paused an instant in
utter amazement, for I had heard no report, when—ping! another bullet
whacked on the bark close below my feet, and there was a brute of a boy
in corduroys, his head peering from behind a trunk, and in the very act
of stretching the elastic of a heavy catapult. One quick bark to Walnut,
and we were both away as hard as we could lay legs to the branches. A
third buckshot whizzed close behind my brush as I fled. The boy, seeing
us run, at once followed and began positively showering shot after us.
It was impossible to reach home under the bombardment, and if we had not
been lucky enough to find a knot-hole in a beech just large enough to
shelter the two of us, one or other—both, perhaps—would have been maimed
or killed.
This was the last straw. For some days a vague resolution had been
forming slowly in my brain. That night, as we crouched, almost too hungry
to sleep, in our oak-tree home, I told Walnut we could stay there no
longer, but must leave the coppice where we had so long sheltered.
He seemed rather to like the idea than otherwise, being young and ready
for adventure.
Very early next morning I slipped across to the old beech and told my
mother. I was anxious that she and the others should accompany us, but
this she would not do.
‘No, Scud; I am too old to leave my home. I shall stay here and take my
chances. But you, I think, are wise to go. Waste no time in getting off,
for you must be well away before the men come to their work.’
A few minutes later Walnut and I had crossed the road and were hastening
away across an open field bound due north. We went that way because we
could go no other—a squirrel migrating invariably travels north. I do not
know the reason, but some instinct implanted in us ages and ages ago,
perhaps even before men began to walk erect, tells us to do so, and we
obey it, and shall obey it, thousands of years hence. In just the same
way the Norwegian lemmings march in their myriads towards the sea, and
are drowned in the salt waves in a vain, instinctive effort to reach some
place that has long disappeared beneath the waves.
I cannot tell you all our wanderings or the perils that we encountered
by the way. Twice Walnut was very nearly caught by a weasel; once a
wide-winged hen sparrow-hawk came whistling down out of the blue as we
were crossing an open field, and we escaped only by a happy accident into
an old drain-tile which happened to lie near by. In this narrow refuge we
both squeezed our trembling bodies until the bird of prey had departed in
disgust.
We travelled very slowly, stopping sometimes for a whole day in any
coppice in which we happened to find ourselves. Several times we almost
made up our minds to remain for good in one or other of these woods, but
always the same difficulty stood in our way. The scarcity of food was
universal. All the country-side had suffered alike from the great drought
of the early summer, and mast, acorns, and nuts alike were conspicuous
by their absence. As far as the present went, we did well enough. In
autumn a squirrel can always find food of some kind or another.
The love of wandering was like a fever. In the course of a week or so we
two had become regular vagabonds. There was an absolute fascination in
new scenes each day and new quarters each night; and, feeling that we had
cut ourselves off for ever from all our ties, there seemed no special
object in stopping anywhere in particular.
And yet at times I was anxious. I knew well enough that winter was
coming, and that we must settle down and find a home and collect stores
before the cold weather.
There came a morning when the sky was full of high wind cloud, but the
air so clear that distant objects seemed but a few fields away, and,
leaving a small fir-plantation on the flank of a hill where we had spent
the night, we looked down upon a deep valley, along the bottom of which
was a long line of timber, wide in some places, narrow in others. Between
the thinning autumn foliage one caught here and there the sparkle of
running water. A mile or more down the valley, and on the far side of the
river, a large old-fashioned house, that vaguely reminded me of the Hall,
lay against the steep side of the opposite slope, with gardens terraced
to the water-edge.
The wood behind it was all that we could have hoped, and more. Ancient
trees of enormous girth and size grew so thick and close that the
sun seldom if ever reached the thickets of undergrowth beneath their
spreading tops. Hardly a sign was to be seen of the interfering hand of
man, and though the place was full of wild life—rabbits, wood-pigeons,
and the like—pheasants were conspicuous by their absence. A peculiarity
of the wood, no doubt on account of its damp, sheltered position, was
the immense amount of ivy which covered the massive trunks with clinging
tendrils and dark green leaves. There was food too, for the oaks whose
roots no doubt penetrated far below the level of the stream, had a fair
crop of acorns, and, better still, there were hazel-bushes close along
the water’s edge which were still fairly full of ripe nuts. The place was
a perfect Paradise from a squirrel’s point of view, and my half-joking
suggestion of spending the winter in it speedily became a fixed idea.
The first thing to do was to find a residence. This was an easy task,
for there were dozens to choose from. Walnut was very keen upon an old
magpie’s nest which he found in a huge thorn-tree, and which was still in
excellent repair even to the roof; but I had had enough of built nests,
and preferred a knot-hole in a beech. Once a squirrel takes to living in
holes in trees, he usually sticks to the same description of residence to
the end of his days.
One fact which struck me as odd during our first day’s exploration of the
river-side wood was the almost entire absence of our own tribe. We only
saw two squirrels besides ourselves, and they were young and anything but
friendly. In fact, they both bolted before we could have a word with them.
It was the drumming of heavy rain among the dying foliage above that woke
us at daylight next morning. The sky was one uniform grey, and everything
was soaking and dripping. We had reason indeed to be thankful that we had
found a warm dry home, for this weather looked like lasting.
Last it did, all day long, and as there was nothing else to do we curled
up and slept. Evening came, and still it rained—harder if anything than
before. It was too wet to go out and forage, and so we went hungry to
bed. It is a fortunate dispensation that we squirrel folk can go for
long periods without food if we can find a dry place to sleep in, for I
have seldom known a squirrel who would not sooner be hungry than wet.
Next morning it was still raining, though not so hard. Large pools lay
in every depression, and the hoarse roar of the swollen river echoed
through the soaking woods. Rain had now been falling for thirty-six hours
straight on end, and we had been all that time without a meal.
Walnut told me he was simply starving, and must go out and find a few
acorns.
I let him go, but, being sleepy, I did not accompany him.
I was not at all uneasy about him, for the wood seemed safe enough,
and Walnut, now more than six months old, was well able to take care
of himself. As for me, I drowsed until about midday, and then looking
out again found that the downpour had at last ceased and the sun was
shining once more. I missed Walnut, for I was so much accustomed to his
nestling beside me; and, stretching lazily, I sallied forth to look
for him, stepping daintily along the soaking boughs in order to avoid
bringing down upon myself the great drops of moisture which hung on every
yellowing leaf. I made straight for the hazel-bushes, which we had found
on the first day near to the water’s edge; but when I came in sight of
the river I could hardly believe my eyes, so tremendous a change had the
great rain wrought. In place of the shallow stream that purled across
pebble beds from pool to pool, a broad torrent, red with the clay of the
upland fields, was raging down with appalling force and fury. Even where
the banks had been highest the flood was level with their tops, and in
many places it had overflowed them so that the nut-bushes stood up like
islands among wide backwaters where the current eddied lazily, swinging
on its discoloured surface millions of dead leaves and sticks.
The sight fairly fascinated me, and for the moment I forgot my hunger,
Walnut, and everything else in watching the irresistible force of the
rushing torrent and noticing the speed at which the logs and sticks which
it had tom from its banks were carried downwards.
[Illustration: ANOTHER MOMENT FOUND ME COMFORTABLY PERCHED IN THE
BRANCHES OF THE HAZEL-BUSHES.]
But hunger soon reasserted its claims, and I began to reconnoitre for
the best means of reaching the nut-bushes and breakfast. A little
further down the stream a low, flat-topped oak extended its spreading
branches more than half-way across the flooded river, and I saw that
from the point of one of its long limbs it would be easy to drop into
a good-sized clump of hazel-bush below. No sooner seen than done, and
another minute found me comfortably perched in the branches of the
hazel-bushes cracking nuts and eating them with a naturally fine appetite
sharpened by forty hours abstinence.
That I was on an island completely cut off on all sides by water troubled
me not at all. I was much too hungry to worry about that, for I felt sure
that I could jump back on to my oak bough, which formed a bridge to bring
me back to land again, and so I worked steadily downwards from branch to
branch.
I was only a foot or two from the ground when a rustle among the thick,
mossy stumps below attracted my attention. Glancing down, the sight that
met my eyes almost paralysed me with horror.