On Easter Saturday the roadsides and copses by the little river Nadder
were full of children gathering primroses; they might have filled a
thousand baskets without the flowers being missed, so abundant were
they in that place. Cold though it was the whole air was laden with the
delicious fragrance. It was pleasant to see and talk with the little
people occupied with the task they loved so well, and I made up my mind
to see the result of all this flower-gathering next day in some of the
village churches in the neighbourhood--Fovant, Teffant Evias, Chilmark,
Swallowcliffe, Tisbury, and Fonthill Bishop. I had counted on some
improvement in the weather--some bright sunshine to light up the
flower-decorated interiors; but Easter Sunday proved colder than ever,
with the bitter north-east still blowing, the grey travelling cloud
still covering the sky; and so to get the full benefit of the bitterness
I went instead to spend my day on the top of the biggest down above the
valley. That was Whitesheet Hill, and forms the highest part of the long
ridge dividing the valleys of the Ebble and Nadder.
It was roughest and coldest up there, and suited my temper best, for
when the weather seems spiteful one finds a grim sort of satisfaction
in defying it. On a genial day it would have been very pleasant on
that lofty plain, for the flat top of the vast down is like a plain in
appearance, and the earthworks on it show that it was once a populous
habitation of man. Now because of the wind and cloud its aspect was bare
and bleak and desolate, and after roaming about for an hour, exploring
the thickest furze patches, I began to think that my day would have to
be spent in solitude, without a living creature to keep me company. The
birds had apparently all been blown away and the rabbits were staying
at home in their burrows. Not even an insect could I see, although
the furze was in full blossom; the honey-suckers were out of sight and
torpid, and the bloom itself could no longer look "unprofitably gay," as
the poet says it does. "Not even a wheatear!" I said, for I had counted
on that bird in the intervals between the storms, although I knew I
should not hear his wild delightful warble in such weather.
Then, all at once, I beheld that very bird, a solitary female,
flittering on over the flat ground before me, perching on the little
green ant-mounds and flirting its tail and bobbing as if greatly excited
at my presence in that lonely place. I wondered where its mate was,
following it from place to place as it flew, determined now I had found
a bird to keep it in sight. Presently a great blackness appeared low
down in the cloudy sky, and rose and spread, travelling fast towards
me, and the little wheatear fled in fear from it and vanished from sight
over the rim of the down. But I was there to defy the weather, and so
instead of following the bird in search of shelter I sat down among some
low furze bushes and waited and watched. By and by I caught sight of
three magpies, rising one by one at long intervals from the furze and
flying laboriously towards a distant hill-top grove of pines. Then I
heard the wailing cry of a peewit, and caught sight of the bird at a
distance, and soon afterwards a sound of another character--the harsh
angry cry of a carrion crow, almost as deep as the raven's angry voice.
Before long I discovered the bird at a great height coming towards me
in hot pursuit of a kestrel. They passed directly over me so that I had
them a long time in sight, the kestrel travelling quietly on in the face
of the wind, the crow toiling after, and at intervals spurting till he
got near enough to hurl himself at his enemy, emitting his croaks of
rage. For invariably the kestrel with one of his sudden swallow-like
turns avoided the blow and went on as before. I watched them until
they were lost to sight in the coming blackness and wondered that so
intelligent a creature as a crow should waste his energies in that vain
chase. Still one could understand it and even sympathize with him. For
the kestrel is a most insulting creature towards the bigger birds. He
knows that they are incapable of paying him out, and when he finds them
off their guard he will drop down and inflict a blow just for the fun of
the thing. This outraged crow appeared determined to have his revenge.
Then the storm broke on me, and so fiercely did the rain and sleet
thrash me that, fearing a cold soaking, I fled before it to the rim of
the plain, where the wheatear had vanished, and saw a couple of hundred
yards down on the smooth steep slope a thicket of dwarf trees. It was,
the only shelter in sight, and to it I went, to discover much to my
disgust that the trees were nothing but elders. For there is no tree
that affords so poor a shelter, especially on the high open downs, where
the foliage is scantier than in other situations and lets in the wind
and rain in full force upon you.
But the elder affects me in two ways. I like it on account of early
associations, and because the birds delight in its fruit, though they
wisely refuse to build in its branches; and I dislike it because its
smell is offensive to me and its berries the least pleasant of all
wild fruits to my taste. I can eat ivy-berries in March, and yew in its
season, poison or not; and hips and haws and holly-berries and harsh
acorn, and the rowan, which some think acrid; but the elderberry I can't
stomach.
How comes it, I have asked more than once, that this poor tree is so
often seen on the downs where it is so badly fitted to be and makes so
sorry an appearance with its weak branches broken and its soft leaves
torn by the winds? How badly it contrasts with the other trees and
bushes that flourish on the downs--furze, juniper, holly, blackthorn,
and hawthorn!
Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on an
extensive down in another part of Wiltshire with the tenant of the land,
who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but eventually finding that
he could make more with rabbits than with sheep turned most of his land
into a warren. The higher part of this down was overgrown with furze,
mixed with holly and other bushes, but the slopes were mostly very bare.
At one spot on a wide bare slope where the rabbits had formed a big
group of burrows there was a close little thicket of young elder trees,
looking exceedingly conspicuous in the bright green of early April.
Calling my companion's attention to this little thicket I said something
about the elder growing on the open downs where it always appeared to
be out of harmony with its surroundings. "I don't suppose you planted
elders here," I said.
"No, but I know who did," he returned, and he then gave me this curious
history of the trees. Five years before, the rabbits, finding it a
suitable spot to dig in, probably because of a softer chalk there,
made a number of deep burrows at that spot. When the wheatears, or
"horse-maggers" as he called them, returned in spring two or three pairs
attached themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them. There was
that season a solitary elder-bush higher up on the down among the furze
which bore a heavy crop of berries; and when the fruit was ripe he
watched the birds feeding on it, the wheatears among them. The following
spring seedlings came up out of the loose earth heaped about the rabbit
burrows, and as they were not cut down by the rabbits, for they dislike
the elder, they grew up, and now formed a clump of fifty or sixty little
trees of six feet to eight feet in height.
Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear, the bird
of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not even ask for a bush
to perch on?
It then occurred to me that in every case where I had observed a
clump of elder bushes on the bare downside, it grew upon a village or
collection of rabbit burrows, and it is probable that in every case the
clump owed its existence to the wheatears who had dropped the seed about
their nesting-place. The clump where I had sought a shelter from the
storm was composed of large old dilapidated-looking half-dead elders;
perhaps their age was not above thirty or forty years, but they looked
older than hawthorns of one or two centuries; and under them the rabbits
had their diggings--huge old mounds and burrows that looked like a
badger's earth. Here, too, the burrows had probably existed first and
had attracted the wheatears, and the birds had brought the seed from
some distant bush.
Crouching down in one of the big burrows at the roots of an old elder I
remained for half an hour, listening to the thump-thump of the alarmed
rabbits about me, and the accompanying hiss and swish of the wind and
sleet and rain in the ragged branches.
The storm over I continued my rambles on Whitesheet Hill, and coming
back an hour or two later to the very spot where I had seen and followed
the wheatear, I all at once caught sight of a second bird, lying dead
on the turf close to my feet! The sudden sight gave me a shock of
astonishment, mingled with admiration and grief. For how pretty it
looked, though dead, lying on its back, the little black legs stuck
stiffly up, the long wings pressed against the sides, their black tips
touching together like the clasped hands of a corpse; and the fan-like
black and white tail, half open as in life, moved perpetually up and
down by the wind, as if that tail-flirting action of the bird had
continued after death. It was very beautiful in its delicate shape and
pale harmonious colouring, resting on the golden-green mossy turf. And
it was a male, undoubtedly the mate of the wheatear I had seen at the
spot, and its little mate, not knowing what death is, had probably been
keeping watch near it, wondering at its strange stillness and greatly
fearing for its safety when I came that way, and passed by without
seeing it.
Poor little migrant, did you come back across half the world for
this--back to your home on Whitesheet Hill to grow cold and fail in the
cold April wind, and finally to look very pretty, lying stiff and cold,
to the one pair of human eyes that were destined to see you! The little
birds that come and go and return to us over such vast distances, they
perish like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they are
blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the pestilence-stricken
multitudes" whirled away by the wind! They die in myriads: that is not
strange; the strange, the astonishing thing is the fact of death; what
can they tell us of it--the wise men who live or have ever lived on the
earth--what can they say now of the bright intelligent spirit, the dear
little emotional soul, that had so fit a tenement and so fitly expressed
itself in motions of such exquisite grace, in melody so sweet! Did it go
out like the glow-worm's lamp, the life and sweetness of the flower?
Was its destiny not like that of the soul, specialized in a different
direction, of the saint or poet or philosopher! Alas, they can tell us
nothing!
I could not go away leaving it in that exposed place on the turf, to be
found a little later by a magpie or carrion crow or fox, and devoured.
Close by there was a small round hillock, an old forsaken nest of the
little brown ants, green and soft with moss and small creeping herbs--a
suitable grave for a wheatear. Cutting out a round piece of turf from
the side, I made a hole with my stick and put the dead bird in and
replacing the turf left it neatly buried.
It was not that I had or have any quarrel with the creatures I have
named, or would have them other than they are--carrion-eaters and
scavengers, Nature's balance-keepers and purifiers. The only creatures
on earth I loathe and hate are the gourmets, the carrion-crows and foxes
of the human kind who devour wheatears and skylarks at their tables.