Part 19

A continuous supply prevents the straying of pheasants as they grow up, and feel inclined to see the world, especially when they have been weaned from food more or less pappy to a diet of hard corn. Another benefit is felt by the gamekeeper: where there is no constant supply, he must trudge many weary miles carrying heavy buckets of water, and he knows all the time that his labour is almost in vain--so much of the precious water is wasted by evaporation, and fouled by the birds washing themselves, and by the drifting of leaves. If artificial supplies are relied upon, it is always difficult to supply enough; if rain is relied upon, there is usually far too much. For game-birds, the ideal covert is one with never-failing brooks, and the ideal weather is the ideal weather of April--days of warm sunshine with occasional light, warm showers by day to supplement the dews of night.

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The Thirst of Rabbits

Nothing keeps down rabbits more thoroughly than a soaking wet summer; while heavy rains drown the partridge and pheasant broods above ground, they also drown the little rabbits in their furry nests below. Yet in times of drought, when herbage is parched and sapless, the keeper who supplies water for the rabbits to drink in arid, sandy warrens does much for the prosperity of the does and their young. Rabbits eat their young when in want of water, and a dry summer puts a check on the increase of rats, since the old ones kill the young for their blood. With rabbits, a favourite place is always a dry spot by the side of water, although the ground is likely to be favoured by stoats. Rabbits found in such places are always extra fine and fat.

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Puppies at Walk

"Please drive cautiously. Hound puppies are at walk in the village." We came upon this notice nailed to the trunk of an ash on the road outside a village in Hampshire. The inference suggested itself that so long as those who might drive furiously through the village touched no hair of a hound puppy's head nothing else mattered. Usually, it is the old-fashioned notices that bring a smile to the passer-by's face: "Beware of Man-traps," "Spring Guns," "Dog-spears set here." Walking along the River Stort we have been startled by a notice beside some of the locks, "The Punishment for Tampering with these Works is Transportation." "Trespassers will be Punished by Transportation" would be a suitable legend for a board in a strictly preserved wood, hinting that if you do not go quietly on request the keeper will carry you. Reading the new caution to drivers outside the Hampshire village, we were tempted to simplify it thus: "Beware of hound puppies." It is pleasant to see young hounds basking in the sun in the farm-yard; but when they are at walk in the charge of the village butcher they may be more than a general nuisance; they may terrorise the place. People who walk hounds do not always undertake the honour because they like it, but because they cannot well refuse. The hounds are turned out into the streets to prowl at large--they slaughter poultry, spread havoc in many a garden plot, knock down children, and roam in through open cottage doors, to steal the labourer's dinner from off his very table. A pack of hounds under the control of a firm huntsman and his whips is one thing--but hounds at walk, allowed to wander at their will, are a peril to the community. "Beware of hound puppies"--when they come up treacherously behind you.

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Schooling the Puppies

Retriever pups born about the end of January are old enough, by August or September, to begin their careers of usefulness. If given light work, during the second half of their first year they may be ready to take an important part in the next shooting season, when eighteen months old. Spring puppies are certainly easier to rear than autumn puppies--they grow faster, and are likely to become finer specimens than the others, which must endure long months of trying weather during puppyhood. But there is this in favour of autumn puppies--they come to their first shooting season at a more mature age, and intellectually are readier to learn than the six months old puppies of spring. At the age of twelve months a puppy begins to put away puppyish things.

It is only possible to gain perfection in the education of a puppy by beginning so soon as it is weaned. From that time the puppy should be taken in hand by its future master, whom alone it should know and understand. One can hardly begin too early to teach the meaning of the word "No," which, to the puppy, is that it must not do something that it had thought desirable to do--whether to chase a cat or rabbit, to be excited at the rising of a lark, or to hunt a roadside hedge. Another important early lesson is teaching the puppy its name. For stud-book and show purposes the name may be, if you please, "Beelzebub of Babylon," or any other high-flown title, but for common use it should be distinct in sound, and preferably of not more than one syllable. Puppies may be taught their names and obedience at the same time; in classes perhaps more quickly and more thoroughly than individually. It is a good plan at feeding-time to have the puppies together, and put food outside an opening in their kennel; then to call out each puppy by name, and on no account allow any other to come than the one called. In a surprisingly short time it will be possible to set open the door and call out each puppy by name, without forcibly keeping back the uninvited. In this way a good grounding might be given to the favourite fox-terriers in obedience, of which so many have not the slightest notion.

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Dogs' Noses

The power of scent varies much with different dogs: usually a slow dog makes better use of its scenting nerves than the fast galloper. It is pretty to watch a good retriever following a wounded bird over ground alive with unwounded game, yet never turning aside from the one trail. A dog could hardly distinguish one partridge from another--probably it is by the scent of blood that the one line can be followed so accurately. Sportsmen do not always give the dogs fair chances; they throw them cheese at lunch-time, or perhaps allow bagged game or themselves to taint the wind, so foiling other trails. In one case a sportsman blamed a new retriever for not finding a bird which was actually lying beneath his own boots. And even a first-rate retriever will sometimes tread on the very bird he is seeking, without finding it.

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The Thief of the World

Gamekeepers, we know, have little love for foxes--for the sufficient reason that they are at one with foxes in their love of pheasants. Keepers have also some of that craftiness and worldly wisdom so developed in foxes; they know it is not always policy to say with their lips what they believe in their hearts. There are good people who tell keepers every now and again that foxes do no harm to game. Keepers have heard stories in favour of foxes; they know the rights of them. Dark and mysterious are the ways of the fox; but darker still and more mysterious are the ways of the keeper with "the thief of the world." This alone he will admit in favour of the fox: he adds to the keeper's work an uncertainty which makes success the sweeter. The fox is a favourite of Fortune, his needs are fulfilled exactly; all things seem arranged in his favour to a nicety. Other creatures may die of starvation in time of snow; but the fox then finds his prey with greatest ease. Cubs are weaned about the middle of May, and must be fed on flesh, when a majority of pheasants are sitting. And when a sitting pheasant is scented or seen by a vixen in search of food for her cubs, that pheasant, you may say, is dead. The keeper, though his blood boils afresh at each nesting tragedy--at the sight of the strewn feathers of the hen pheasant and at the cold touch of the lifeless eggs--appreciates the deftness of the marauder's work. He reconstructs each scene of the plundering--the silent passage of the prowling fox, the pause of a moment to sniff and sniff again the scent that taints the air, the swift thrust of long jaws between bramble, brier, and bracken, the grab of gleaming teeth, the stifled cry of the dying bird, the floating of brown feathers on the wind of night, and the joy of the cubs at the sight of the dead bird and the scent of her welling blood. And then the carnival of feasting at the mouth of the earth, by the old tree of the cubs' playground, while the white owl screeches his protest as he passes overhead, and the mother fox, sitting on her haunches, licks her chops and watches. The work of a vixen among sitting birds differs from that of the dog fox. While she always carries her booty to her cubs, he kills in wanton waste, leaving the birds' bodies, often headless, near their nests. Some or all of the eggs may be eaten, or they may be left untouched, still as neatly arranged in the nest as the mother bird left them when she stole off to feed and take a bath in dust. The keeper may recognise the excuse of the mother fox's necessity, but for the wanton slaughter by her idle mate he sees no reason, and finds no forgiveness.

Only those who have seen the remains of game scattered round the earth of a litter of cubs--the cubs of an experienced mother--can realise what it costs in game to entertain foxes. Where rabbits are plentiful, pheasants and partridges suffer less from foxes than where rabbits are scarce, and the keeper may help a vixen to cater for her cubs by shooting and snaring rabbits in her favour. He leaves their bodies, but scattered at a fair distance from the earth, so that the vixen must spend some time in fetching and carrying, and has the less time for making a mixed bag of her own selection.

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The Cubs' Playground

Unseeing eyes pass blindly over the home of a litter of cubs; but the keeper's never overpass the place. Long furrows through the dog's-mercury and grasses tell their tale. Primroses are torn and crushed, the great leaves of the burdock are bruised and broken, the moss is rubbed from the underwood stumps and from the boles of trees where the cubs have been gambolling and rubbing their coats, the excavated soil near the earth is smooth from the pattering of their feet, beaten hard and polished--and in all directions there are scattered wings, feathers and bones. If the keeper calls, and sees signs of recent rollicking play and fresh-killed food, and fresh-drawn soil where the cubs amuse themselves at earth-making and enlarging the burrows of rabbits, he knows the family to be in residence. Should the soil near the entrance to the earth have a green look, he knows the family has gone away.

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A Fox's Feat

Who would believe that a full-grown fox could pass through the mesh of ordinary sheep-netting?--four-inch mesh, if memory serves. We know of one case where a vixen was actually seen to accomplish this wonderful feat. With her cubs, she had been dug out from her earth, carried to a distant part of the country, and imprisoned. The four-inch mesh must have been a tight fit for her body; but perhaps she had worried and fretted at her imprisonment, until she had worn herself to a shadow. Her cubs, which were unweaned, may have helped to weaken her strength, and reduce her waist until it could squeeze through the netting.

The story has a sequel. A town doctor saw the vixen a few moments after her escape; and happened to find himself sitting next to a M.F.H. at dinner. The doctor remarked, with a well-meant attempt at affability, "Foxes seem to be plentiful in your neighbourhood this year." "What makes you think so?" asked the M.F.H., with encouraging eagerness. "Why, only the other day, passing your place about noon, I saw a vixen with cubs trotting across your lawn." The doctor swiftly perceived that he had let the fox out of the bag, so black was the look that came over the Master's face. But it was months before he solved the full riddle of the black look, when he learned that the fox he had seen on the lawn in broad daylight had only just escaped from her wire-net prison, so saving herself from the ignominy of being turned down with her cubs.

The keeper finds his game-nests with his eyes, the fox with his nose. The keeper who must preserve game and preserves foxes takes steps to overcome the scent of his birds. He sprinkles the neighbourhood of all the nests he can find with some strong-smelling fluid. But the foulest or strongest scent will not save a bird when a fox has once seen her. Fortunately he is not clever enough to know a new trap from an old one, nor a sound from a broken one, and the keeper finds at nesting-time a good use for his disused traps, placing them about birds sitting in dangerous spots. Anything in the shape of scrap-iron the fox suspects; anything unusual about a nest, such as a piece of newspaper on a bush near by, will arouse his fears, and possibly save a bird's life. But as rooks learn to treat scarecrows with contempt, so foxes learn to have no fear for harmless terrors, and the keeper rings the changes on all the fox-alarming devices which experience and ingenuity can suggest.

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Dog-Washing Days