Of kingfishers she preserves a considerable number for ladies’ hats, and some for glass cases. Once or twice she has been asked to prepare the woodpecker, whose plumage and harsh cry entitle him to the position of the parrot of our woods. Gentlemen interested in natural history often commission her husband to get them specimens of rare birds; and in the end he generally succeeds, though a long time may elapse before they cross his path. For them she has prepared some of the rare owls and hawks. She has a store of peacocks’ feathers—every now and then people, especially ladies, call at the cottage and purchase these things. Country housewives still use the hare’s “pad” for several domestic purposes—was not the hare’s foot once kept in the printing-offices?
The keeper’s wife has nothing to do with rabbits, but knows that their skins and fur are still bought in large quantities. She has heard that geese were once kept in large flocks almost entirely for their feathers, which were plucked twice a year, she thinks; but this is not practised now, at least not in the south. She has had snakes’ skins, or more properly sloughs, for the curious. It is very difficult to get one entire; they are fragile, and so twisted in the grass where the snake leaves them as to be generally broken. Some country folk put them in their hats to cure headache, which is a very old superstition; but more in sport than earnest. There are no deer now in the park. There used to be a hundred years ago, and her husband has found several cast antlers in the wood. The best are up at the great house, but there is one on her staircase. Will I take a few chestnuts? It is winter—the proper time—and these are remarkably fine. No tree is apparently so capricious in its yield as the chestnut in English woods: the fruit of many is so small as to be worthless, or else it does not reach maturity. But these large ones are from a tree which bears a fine nut: her husband has them saved every year. Here also are half-a-dozen truffles if I will accept them: most that are found go up to the great house; but of late years they have not been sought for so carefully, because coming in quantities from abroad. These truffles are found, she believes, in the woods where the soil is chalky. She used to gather many native herbs; but tastes have changed, and new seasonings and sauces have come into fashion.
Out of doors in his work the assistant upon whom the gamekeeper places his chief reliance is his own son—a lad hardly taller than the gun he carries, but much older than would be supposed at first sight.
It is a curious physiological fact that although open-air life is so favourable to health, yet it has the apparent effect of stunting growth in early youth. Let two children be brought up together, one made to “rough” it out of doors, and the other carefully tended and kept within; other things being equal, the boy of the drawing-room will be taller and to all appearance more developed than his companion. The labourer’s children, for instance, who play in the lonely country roads and fields all day, whose parents lock their cottage doors when leaving for work in the morning so that their offspring shall not gain entrance and get into mischief, are almost invariably short for their age. In their case something may be justly attributed to coarse and scanty food; but the children of working farmers exhibit the same peculiarity, and although their food is not luxurious in quality, it is certainly not stinted in quantity. Some of the ploughboys and carters’ lads seem scarcely fit to be put in charge of the huge cart-horses who obey their shouted orders, their heads being but a little way above the shafts—mere infants to look at. Yet they are fourteen or fifteen years of age. With these, and with the sons of farmers who in like manner work in the field, the period of development comes later than with town-bred boys. After sixteen or eighteen, after years of hesitation as it were, they suddenly shoot up, and become great, hulking, broad fellows, possessed of immense strength. So the keeper’s boy is really much more a man than he appears, both in years and knowledge—meaning thereby that local intelligence, technical ability, and unwritten education which is the resultant of early practice and is quite distinct from book-learning.
From his father he has imbibed the spirit of the woods and all the minutiae of his art. First he learned to shoot; his highest ambition being satisfied in the beginning when permitted to carry the double-barrel home across the meadow. Then he was allowed occasionally to fire off the charges left in after the day’s work, before the gun was hung against the beam. Next, from behind the fallen trunk of an oak he took aim at a sitting rabbit which had raised himself on his hind-quarters to listen suspiciously—resting the heavy barrels on the tree, and made nervous by the whispered instructions from the keeper kneeling on the grass out of sight behind, “Aim at his shoulder, lad, if he be sitting sidelong; if a’ be got his back to ’ee aim at his poll.” From this it was but a short step to be trusted with the single-barrel, and finally with the double; ultimately having one of his own and walking his own distinct rounds.
He is now a keen shot, even better than his father; for it is often observed that at a certain age young beginners in most manual arts reach an excellence which in later years fails them. Perhaps the muscles are more elastic, and respond instantaneously to the eye. This mere boy at snap-shooting in the “rough” will beat crack sportsmen hollow. At the trap with pigeons he would probably fail; but in a narrow lane where the rabbits, driven out by the ferrets, just pop across barely a yard of open ground, where even a good shot may miss repeatedly, he is “death” itself to the “bunnies.” So, too, with a wood-hare—i.e. those hares that always lie in the woods as others do in the open fields and on the uplands. They are difficult to kill. They slip quietly out from the form in the rough grass under the ashstole, and all you have for guidance is the rustling and, perhaps, the tips of the ears, the body hidden by the tangled dead ferns and “rowetty” stuff. When you try to aim the barrel knocks against the ash-poles, which are inconveniently near together, or the branches get in the way, and the hare dodges round a tree, and your cartridge simply barks a bough and cuts a tall dead thistle in twain. But the keeper’s lad, who had waited for your fire, instantly follows, as it seems hardly lifting his gun to his shoulder, and the hare is stopped by the shot.
Rabbit-shooting, also, in an ash wood like this is trying to the temper; they double and dodge, and if you wait, thinking that the brown rascals must presently cross the partially open space yonder, lo! just at the very edge up go their white tails and they dive into the bowels of the earth, having made for hidden burrows. There is, of course, after all, nothing but a knack in these things. Still it is something to have acquired the knack. The lad, if you ask him, will proudly show off several gun tricks, as shooting left-handed, placing the butt at the left instead of the right shoulder and pulling the trigger with the left finger. He will knock over a running rabbit like this; and at short distances can shoot with tolerable certainty from under the arm without coming to the “present,” or even holding the gun out like a pistol with one hand.
By slow degrees he has obtained an intimate acquaintance with every field on the place, and no little knowledge of natural history. He will decide at once, as if by a kind of instinct, where any particular bird or animal will be found at that hour.
He is more bitter than his father against poachers, and would like to see harder measures dealt out to them; but his chief use is in watching or checking the assistants, who act as beaters, ferreters, or keep up the banks and fences about the preserves, etc. Without a doubt these men are very untrustworthy, and practise many tricks. For instance, when they are set to ferret a bank, what is to prevent them, if the coast is clear, from hiding half a dozen dead rabbits in a burrow? digging has frequently to be resorted to, and thus they can easily cast earth over and conceal the entrance to a hole. Many a wounded hare and pheasant that falls into the hands of the beaters never makes it appearance at the table of the sportsman; and doubtless they help themselves to the game captured in many a poacher’s wire before giving notice of the discovery to the head man.
Some of these assistants wear waistcoats of calfskin with the hair on it. The hair is outside, and the roan-and-white colour has a curious appearance: the material is said to be very warm and durable. Such waistcoats were common years ago; but of late the looms and spindles of the manufacturing districts have reduced the most outlying of the provinces to a nearly dead uniformity of shoddy.
One pair of eyes cannot be everywhere at once; consequently the keeper, as his son grew up, found him a great help in this way: while he goes one road the lad goes the other, and the undermen never feel certain that some one is not about. Perhaps partly for this reason the lad is not a favourite in the village, and few if any of the other boys make friends