<SPAN name="ch21"><!--Marker--></SPAN>
<h2> CHAPTER XXI </h2>
<h3> THE SHEPHERD AS NATURALIST </h3>
<blockquote>
General remarks—Great Ridge Wood—Encounter with a
roe-deer—A hare on a stump—A gamekeeper's
memory—Talk with a gipsy—A strange story of a
hedgehog—A gipsy on memory—The shepherd's feeling
for animals—Anecdote of a shrew—Anecdote of an
owl—Reflex effect of the gamekeeper's calling—We
remember best what we see emotionally
</blockquote>
<p>It will appear to some of my readers that the interesting
facts about wild life, or rather about animal life, wild and
domestic, gathered in my talks with the old shepherd, do not
amount to much. If this is all there is to show after a long
life spent out of doors, or all that is best worth
preserving, it is a somewhat scanty harvest, they will say.
To me it appears a somewhat abundant one. We field
naturalists, who set down what we see and hear in a notebook,
lest we forget it, do not always bear in mind that it is
exceedingly rare for those who are not naturalists, whose
senses and minds are occupied with other things, to come upon
a new and interesting fact in animal life, or that these
chance observations are quickly forgotten. This was strongly
borne in upon me lately while staying in the village of
Hindon in the neighbourhood of the Great Ridge Wood, which
clothes the summit of the long high down overlooking the vale
of the Wylye. It is an immense wood, mostly of scrub or dwarf
oak, very dense in some parts, in others thin, with open,
barren patches, and like a wild forest, covering altogether
twelve or fourteen square miles—perhaps more. There are
no houses near, and no people in it except a few gamekeepers:
I spent long days in it without meeting a human being. It was
a joy to me to find such a spot in England, so wild and
solitary, and I was filled with pleasing anticipation of all
the wild life I should see in such a place, especially after
an experience I had on my second day in it. I was standing in
an open glade when a cock-pheasant uttered a cry of alarm,
and immediately afterwards, startled by the cry perhaps, a
roe-deer rushed out of the close thicket of oak and holly in
which it had been hiding, and ran past me at a very short
distance, giving me a good sight of this shyest of the large
wild animals still left to us. He looked very beautiful to
me, in that mouse-coloured coat which makes him invisible in
the deep shade in which he is accustomed to pass the daylight
hours in hiding, as he fled across the green open space in
the brilliant May sunshine. But he was only one, a chance
visitor, a wanderer from wood to wood about the land; and he
had been seen once, a month before my encounter with him, and
ever since then the keepers had been watching and waiting for
him, gun in hand, to send a charge of shot into his side.</p>
<p>That was the best and the only great thing I saw in the Great
Ridge Wood, for the curse of the pheasant is on it as on all
the woods and forests in Wiltshire, and all wild life
considered injurious to the semi-domestic bird, from the
sparrowhawk to the harrier and buzzard and goshawk, and from
the little mousing weasel to the badger; and all the wild
life that is only beautiful, or which delights us because of
its wildness, from the squirrel to the roe-deer, must be
included in the slaughter.</p>
<p>One very long summer day spent in roaming about in this
endless wood, always on the watch, had for sole result, so
far as anything out of the common goes, the spectacle of a
hare sitting on a stump. The hare started up at a distance of
over a hundred yards before me and rushed straight away at
first, then turned, and ran on my left so as to get round to
the side from which I had come. I stood still and watched him
as he moved swiftly over the ground, seeing him not as a hare
but as a dim brown object successively appearing, vanishing,
and reappearing, behind and between the brown tree-trunks,
until he had traced half a circle and was then suddenly lost
to sight. Thinking that he had come to a stand I put my
binocular on the spot where he had vanished, and saw him
sitting on an old oak stump about thirty inches long. It was
a round mossy stump, about eighteen inches in diameter,
standing in a bed of brown dead leaves, with the rough brown
trunks of other dwarf oak-trees on either side of it. The
animal was sitting motionless, in profile, its ears erect,
seeing me with one eye, and was like a carved figure of a
hare set on a pedestal, and had a very striking appearance.</p>
<p>As I had never seen such a thing before I thought it was
worth mentioning to a keeper I called to see at his lodge on
my way back in the evening. It had been a blank day, I told
him—a hare sitting on a stump being the only thing I
could remember to tell him. "Well," he said, "you've seen
something I've never seen in all the years I've been in these
woods. And yet, when you come to think of it, it's just what
one might expect a hare would do. The wood is full of old
stumps, and it seems only natural a hare should jump on to
one to get a better view of a man or animal at a distance
among the trees. But I never saw it."</p>
<p>What, then, had he seen worth remembering during his long
hours in the wood on that day, or the day before, or on any
day during the last thirty years since he had been policing
that wood, I asked him. He answered that he had seen many
strange things, but he was not now able to remember one to
tell me! He said, further, that the only things he remembered
were those that related to his business of guarding and
rearing the birds; all other things he observed in animals,
however remarkable they might seem to him at the moment, were
things that didn't matter and were quickly forgotten.</p>
<p>On the very next day I was out on the down with a gipsy, and
we got talking about wild animals. He was a middle-aged man
and a very perfect specimen of his race—not one of the
blue-eyed and red or light-haired bastard gipsies, but dark
as a Red Indian, with eyes like a hawk, and altogether a
hawk-like being, lean, wiry, alert, a perfectly wild man in a
tame, civilized land. The lean, mouse-coloured lurcher that
followed at his heels was perfect too, in his way—man
and dog appeared made for one another. When this man spoke of
his life, spent in roaming about the country, of his very
perfect health, and of his hatred of houses, the very
atmosphere of any indoor place producing a suffocating and
sickening effect on him, I envied him as I envy birds their
wings and as I can never envy men who live in mansions. His
was the wild, the real life, and it seemed to me that there
was no other worth living.</p>
<p>"You know," said he, in the course of our talk about wild
animals, "we are very fond of hedgehogs—we like them
better than rabbits."</p>
<p>"Well, so do I," was my remark. I am not quite sure that I
do, but that is what I told him. "But now you talk of
hedgehogs," I said, "it's funny to think that, common as the
animal is, it has some queer habits I can't find anything
about from gamekeepers and others I've talked to on the
subject, or from my own observation. Yet one would imagine
that we know all there is to be known about the little beast;
you'll find his history in a hundred books—perhaps in
five hundred. There's one book about our British animals so
big you'd hardly be able to lift its three volumes from the
ground with all your strength, in which its author has raked
together everything known about the hedgehog, but he doesn't
give me the information I want—just what I went to the
book to find. Now here's what a friend of mine once saw. He's
not a naturalist, nor a sportsman, nor a gamekeeper, and not
a gipsy; he doesn't observe animals or want to find out their
ways; he is a writer, occupied day and night with his
writing, sitting among books, yet he saw something which the
naturalists and gamekeepers haven't seen, so far as I know.
He was going home one moonlight night by a footpath through
the woods when he heard a very strange noise a little
distance ahead, a low whistling sound, very sharp, like the
continuous twittering of a little bird with a voice like a
bat, or a shrew, only softer, more musical. He went on very
cautiously, until he spied two hedgehogs standing on the path
facing each other, with their noses almost or quite touching.
He remained watching and listening to them for some moments,
then tried to go a little nearer and they ran away.</p>
<p>"Now I've asked about a dozen gamekeepers if they ever saw
such a thing, and all said they hadn't; they never heard
hedgehogs make that twittering sound, like a bird or a
singing mouse; they had only heard them scream like a rabbit
when in a trap. Now what do you say about it?"</p>
<p>"I've never seen anything like that," said the gipsy. "I only
know the hedgehog makes a little whistling sound when he
first comes out at night; I believe it is a sort of call they
have."</p>
<p>"But no doubt," I said, "you've seen other queer things in
hedgehogs and in other little animals which I should like to
hear."</p>
<p>Yes, he had, first and last, seen a good many queer things
both by day and night, in woods and other places, he replied,
and then continued: "But you see it's like this. We see
something and say, 'Now that's a very curious thing!' and
then we forget all about it. You see, we don't lay no store
by such things; we ain't scholards and don't know nothing
about what's said in books. We see something and say
<i>That's</i> something we never saw before and never heard
tell of, but maybe others have seen it and you can find it in
the books. So that's how 'tis, but if I hadn't forgotten them
I could have told you a lot of queer things."</p>
<p>That was all he could say, and few can say more. Caleb was
one of the few who could, and one wonders why it was so,
seeing that he was occupied with his own tasks in the fields
and on the down where wild life is least abundant and varied,
and that his opportunities were so few compared with those of
the gamekeeper. It was, I take it, because he had sympathy
for the creatures he observed, that their actions had stamped
themselves on his memory, because he had seen them
emotionally. We have seen how well he remembered the many
sheep-dogs he had owned, how vividly their various characters
are portrayed in his account of them. I have met with
shepherds who had little to tell about the dogs they had
possessed; they had regarded their dogs as useful servants
and nothing more as long as they lived, and when dead they
were forgotten. But Caleb had a feeling for his dogs which
made it impossible for him to forget them or to recall them
without that tenderness which accompanies the thought of
vanished human friends. In a lesser degree he had something
of this feeling for all animals, down even to the most minute
and unconsidered. I recall here one of his anecdotes of a
very small creature—a shrew, or over-runner, as he
called it.</p>
<p>One day when out with his flock a sudden storm of rain caused
him to seek for shelter in an old untrimmed hedge close by.
He crept into the ditch, full of old dead leaves beneath the
tangle of thorns and brambles, and setting his back against
the bank he thrust his legs out, and as he did so was
startled by an outburst of shrill little screams at his feet.
Looking down he spied a shrew standing on the dead leaves
close to his boot, screaming with all its might, its long
thin snout pointed upwards and its mouth wide open; and just
above it, two or three inches perhaps, hovered a small brown
butterfly. There for a few moments it continued hovering
while the shrew continued screaming; then the butterfly
flitted away and the shrew disappeared among the dead leaves.</p>
<p>Caleb laughed (a rare thing with him) when he narrated this
little incident, then remarked: "The over-runner was a-crying
'cause he couldn't catch that leetel butterfly."</p>
<p>The shepherd's inference was wrong; he did not know—few
do—that the shrew has the singular habit, when
surprised on the surface and in danger, of remaining
motionless and uttering shrill cries. His foot, set down
close to it, had set it screaming; the small butterfly, no
doubt disturbed at the same moment, was there by chance. I
recall here another little story he related of a bird—a
long-eared owl.</p>
<p>One summer there was a great drought, and the rooks, unable
to get their usual food from the hard, sun-baked
pasture-lands, attacked the roots and would have pretty well
destroyed them if the farmer had not protected his swedes by
driving in stakes and running cotton-thread and twine from
stake to stake all over the field. This kept them off, just
as thread keeps the chaffinches from the seed-beds in small
gardens, and as it keeps the sparrows from the crocuses on
lawn and ornamental grounds. One day Caleb caught sight of an
odd-looking, brownish-grey object out in the middle of the
turnip-field, and as he looked it rose up two or three feet
into the air, then dropped back again, and this curious
movement was repeated at intervals of two or three minutes
until he went to see what the thing was. It turned out to be
a long-eared owl, with its foot accidentally caught by a
slack thread, which allowed the bird to rise a couple of feet
into the air; but every such attempt to escape ended in its
being pulled back to the ground again. It was so excessively
lean, so weightless in his hand, when he took it up after
disengaging its foot, that he thought it must have been
captive for the space of two or three days. The wonder was
that it had kept alive during those long midsummer days of
intolerable heat out there in the middle of the burning
field. Yet it was in very fine feather and beautiful to look
at with its long, black ear-tufts and round, orange-yellow
eyes, which would never lose their fiery lustre until glazed
in death. Caleb's first thought on seeing it closely was that
it would have been a prize to anyone who liked to have a
handsome bird stuffed in a glass case. Then raising it over
his head he allowed it to fly, whereupon it flew off a
distance of a dozen or fifteen yards and pitched among the
turnips, after which it ran a little space and rose again
with labour, but soon recovering strength it flew away over
the field and finally disappeared in the deep shade of the
copse beyond.</p>
<p>In relating these things the voice, the manner, the
expression in his eyes were more than the mere words, and
displayed the feeling which had caused these little incidents
to endure so long in his memory.</p>
<p>The gamekeeper cannot have this feeling: he may come to his
task with the liveliest interest in, even with sympathy for,
the wild creatures amidst which he will spend his life, but
it is all soon lost. His business in the woods is to kill,
and the reflex effect is to extinguish all interest in the
living animal—in its life and mind. It would, indeed,
be a wonderful thing if he could remember any singular action
or appearance of an animal which he had witnessed before
bringing his gun automatically to his shoulder.</p>
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