Part 22

It is a matter of importance that the woodland rides shall be trimmed before harvest-time, so that the woods may be sanctuaries to the corn's evicted creatures. On many shoots this trimming is left to a woodman; he may be responsible for all such work over a large estate let to various tenants. As a consequence, the rides of some of the woods are likely to remain untrimmed until just before the time of covert-shooting, when the work will seriously disturb game. Keepers prefer to trim the rides on their beats themselves, at such odd moments as between the feeding of hand-reared pheasants, and with the help of labourers who are glad enough to earn a few extra shillings during the long evenings of July. The work in this way is done betimes, and all the better for shooting purposes. The harvest migration of game to the woods tells many a story to the keeper. Foxes who have spent a happy summer entirely in the game-stocked cornfields do not come in unnoticed. Fresh-made runs in the fences leading to the coverts tell of the passage of stoats. Hedgehogs work their way in from the fields; they are more numerous than most people imagine, and the keeper holds them responsible for many a ruined game-nest.

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Weasel Families

As the summer wanes, families of stoats and weasels break up, and parents cease to have any dealings with their offspring. This severance of the family ties throws a light upon wild creatures and their young. Having given their young ones a good start in life, many seem to dismiss them from their minds. One grove will not nurture two robins, and the day comes when Cock Robin will drive his young hopeful into the world, and will attack him fiercely if he dare again approach his presence. The wild rabbit that on one day, in defence of her young ones, faces and drives away a stoat, her deadliest foe, on the next day leaves them to the mercy of fate--a new family having arrived. The mother stoat stays with her young ones for a long while, sometimes until they are much larger than herself; but sooner or later comes the day of parting.

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Mother Stoat

She is an admirable mother. Her litters are large ones--numbering as a rule from five to eight, though occasionally as many as twelve are found--and the feeding of these hungry mouths can only be a work of desperate energy in the weaning days. It is a fine sight to see the mother foraging at the head of her grown-up family. A long time passes before the young stoats can cater for themselves. The mother does not leave them until they are perfectly qualified to hunt on their own accord--which their innate blood-thirstiness at last prompts them to do in preference to eating food which their mother has captured. In the young stoat's natural love of hunting lies the cause of the final severance of family ties. With many animals it appears that motherly solicitude continues relatively to the relief obtained through the young taking their mother's milk. Yet in the stoat there appears to be a scrap of the human mother's reasoning love for her children. We have known a stoat whose young had been destroyed, when as large as herself, to seek them out, and with diligent care and labour remove their bodies to a distant resting-place, where she stayed by them for days, though she appeared no longer to bring them their former abundant supplies of food. When a stoat, the mother of a family, is killed, her young do not fail to come to her--but in this case there is no disinterested love. The apparent affection springs chiefly from desire of food. No food forthcoming, the young stoats quickly begin to devour their unfortunate mother. The gamekeeper knows that having once caught a mother stoat, he will have little difficulty in catching her family also; but having captured the family, it is by no means easy to secure the mother.

When June comes, litters of young stoats, each one as big as the mother, are strong enough to travel about, but for many weeks they remain together, and depend for food on what their mother catches. Like fox cubs, they spend their days eating, sleeping, and playing. Without the aid of a trained dog the keeper is unlikely to discover the lodging of a litter unless he chances to see the mother going to her young. He may see her entering a burrow, a bavin-pile, a pile of hurdle-rods, or of hurdles, or he may chance to see the young stoats out at play. Should he come upon their playground his sharp eyes instantly note the runs and the signs of rollings in the herbage--the playground is as the playground of fox cubs in miniature. The comings and goings of a mother stoat are cunning and silent. Once we found a place where a litter had been lodging for weeks within a few yards of a man who had been making hurdles day after day, and his report was that he had not seen "ne'er a sign of a stoo-at." The family had gone when we found their lodging, and it was evident that the old stoat had moved her young ones at night just before they were old enough to proclaim their presence by coming out from their wood-pile to play.

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Lurking-places

The keeper's eyes are always open for stoats. They are fond of prying about the base of a gate-post, where a trap is often set to good purpose. Then they delight in frisking along the middle of a ride, especially after rain. There the keeper sets a tunnel trap, covering it with bundles of brushwood; and every stoat that comes along will explore so likely a lurking-place for a rabbit, and each naturally enters by the fatal passage. Those heaps of corn-rakings placed in the woods for pheasants form a favourite stoat-haunt. Here they find a warm, dry lair, and good hunting, for the corn attracts a crowd of small birds. Chancing once to right an overturned sheep-trough which had been lying inverted for some weeks, we disturbed the peace of a couple of stoats which had made the trough their home. They were gone like flashes of lightning, and though we overturned the trough again for their benefit, they had the good sense not to be caught napping a second time.

Not half the stoats that are caught are trapped by bait; for the only bait which is a certain charm is something which the stoat has caught itself, from the enjoyment of which it has been newly disturbed. Many stoats are shot. They pursue young blackbirds and thrushes which hover about the sides of country lanes; and when intent on dragging a blackbird up a bank they give the keeper the easiest of marks. Should his coming drive a feeding stoat to cover, he has only to wait within range for a few minutes for a chance to pull the avenging trigger. Stoats would soon be exterminated if they were attracted to baited traps for the sake of food. It would seem that they come chiefly from curiosity; for though they live on warm flesh and blood, when they fall victims to traps it is usually in those with the bait stale and strong in scent.

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Studies in Stoat Ways

We heard a gamekeeper say that he would be better pleased to harbour a litter of cubs on his beat than a litter of stoats. But this was too flattering a compliment to the stealthiest of the keeper's foes: foxes would smile at a comparison between the havoc they play with game interests and all the robber-work of stoats and weasels combined. No doubt the gamekeeper's idea was that while foxes may be found and dealt with according to their deserts without difficulty, stoats may be on the ground and do endless damage before they are detected. With a litter of cubs on his ground the keeper, if minded, may promptly put an end to the nuisance. But he may never congratulate himself that there are no stoats. Where there is game, there stoats must be also. Just where they lurk the keeper may never know; and every art may fail to catch these sly thieves.

The keeper does not wait to see a stoat before he sets his traps; usually when a stoat is caught he sees it for the first time. During the mating season, in the early spring, stoats are trapped most easily. When one has been caught it serves as a lure to attract others. The body is suspended just out of the reach of curious relatives and friends, and a neatly hidden trap is set beneath it. Since rabbits supply the staple food of stoats, they serve as bait: anything that suggests newly done rabbit work is almost sure to attract the attention of any passing stoat. So after setting a trap just inside a hole in the track of stoats, the keeper with his stick scratches up a little fresh soil on each visit to the trap, to imitate what he calls the "ferricking" of a rabbit. A hollow underwood stump is always a likely place for a stoat. Rabbits love to sit in such stumps, and a stoat never misses a chance to investigate them, surprising the rabbit before he can scoot away, and then himself lodging in a recess of the stump, on a cosy couch made from the fur of his victim.

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The First

Nowadays, the First on a large shoot passes much as other days, for October has usurped the prestige of September, and the big partridge drives are reserved until that month. But when the keeper goes home to his tea on the First, his wife, with ever-ready sympathy, is likely enough to notice "summat's up." There is a scowl on the tanned face, and a vindictive look in the keen eyes, and the way in which the thirsty throat is flushed with a pint or so of tea suggests a forlorn attempt to drown trouble. At last the murder is out: "They pot-hunters," growls the keeper, "they has bin and wiped out half my birds." Shots have been heard all day near his boundary; on the neighbouring small shoot the First has not been allowed to go by unhonoured.

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Early Birds

With the First come poachers, anxious to win the big rewards paid for the earliest birds to reach the market. Netting is not so prevalent as of old, but more of it is done than most people imagine, since netting is practised in the dark, and in fields easily entered from public roads. The best preventive is to dress the fields in which the birds chiefly jug--stubbles, pastures, and fallows--with small pieces of tangled wire-netting, and small bushes, left lying on the ground, so that they may roll with the net, and entangle it the more hopelessly. A sneaking method of poaching is to set gins in the partridges' dusting-places, such as ash-heaps, the remains of burnt couch--the keeper forms a habit of probing such dust-baths with his stick. As dawn breaks on September 1, the poacher conceals himself in a ditch commanding a fallow where the coveys jug. Then he sends his dog or his son to stroll casually and slowly to and fro across the field at the far end. The birds, not hard-pressed enough to take wing, make for a furrow, and run in a solid bunch towards the ambush, to be greeted by a heavy charge of shot, calculated to account for several brace. One shot--a rush for the fallen birds--and the poacher has flown.

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Walking-up

One hears a great deal of praise lavished on the old-fashioned style of walking-up partridges, to the detriment of driving. True, where birds and cover are not abundant, a bag of fifteen brace or so made by two or three guns will often represent much clever sportsmanship--besides a hard day's tramping and some shots not to be despised. Yet there is a way of walking-up birds which is nothing more nor less than butchery. In September, the partridges are mobbed and worn out by men whose duty it is to drive them from the barer fields into thick roots, there to be walked up--and snuffed out like so many candles at short range. This may be magnificent for the bag, but it is not sport. Again, partridges on occasion may even be walked up in standing corn. That is a moral crime, and ought to be a legal one.

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Thoughts on Cubbing

With September, cubbing begins--and the young of the thief of the world must justify their existence by making sport. Many sudden and bewildering shocks the cubs receive. Hitherto their lives have been peaceful enough. No wolf has found them out in the cornfields where they have been learning to hunt their own game; no wild dog has dug a way into the nursery earth. To be hunted is quite a new experience. The cubs are spared at least the dread of anticipation as in the early hours of a September morning they settle to sleep in their soft warm kennel, canopied by bracken and brambles. Dreaming, it may be, of their own night's sport, the cheerful voice of the huntsman, as he urges on his newly entered puppies to draw with their elders, means no more than a general alarm to the cubs' drowsy ears. Again and again the hunt may come, yet a cub may have no thought of a game, with life or death as the stake. Not until the attentions of the hounds become pressing and particular can he awake fully to what cub-hunting means. Then perhaps it is too late. But an old fox is quick enough to hear the first sound of the hunt; he breaks away at an unguarded corner, and is allowed to go.