Part 27

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Sporting Policemen

In rural villages, keen sportsmen are often found beneath the uniforms of the policeman and the postman. No one knows better than the keeper how useful it is to be on friendly terms with the policeman--and no one knows better how to manage it. Often policeman and postman may be found doing duty as beaters, especially during September partridge shooting, when the harvest is late and out-of-work labourers are few. If you see through his disguise of plain clothes, the policeman will remark how he just thought he would have a walk for an hour or two, just to oblige Mr. Keeper. Upholding the law and delivering the post mean much walking: and country policemen and postmen, when passing along the roads early and late, find the haunt of many a fine covey. Being good sportsmen, they take note of the customary line of flight; and if you own some of the land of the covey's haunting they can tell you almost to a minute when the birds leave the turnips beyond the boundary for your stubble.

If a policeman is on duty during the early days of partridge shooting, he will manage to fall in with shooting parties; then he makes it known that he heard shots, and was impelled to take a look round, "to see that there weren't nothing wrong." The policeman's favourite time for making known his presence is soon after the bagging of a good, broad-backed hare. Even policemen become spoiled with favours. On a sportsman telling his keeper to give a hare to a polite and zealous officer of the law, "Excuse me, sir," said he, "but the party over the hedge have just given me a hare, so might I have a brace of birds? Thank ye kindly, I'm sure; a hare will do nicely next time, sir." The sporting policeman can do much to help the luckless sportsman.

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The Woodcraft of Gipsies

Gipsies and gamekeepers have enough in common to make them deadly foes. They share an intimate knowledge of the ways of wild creatures. They are skilled trackers and crafty trappers. They are hedgerow men; born to the hedgerow, trained to know the meaning of every hole, and hollow, and run. Their eyes read the story of the hedge as the scholar's the printed page; hedge-lore is their second nature, and it is as though an instinct tells them where the partridge has built, where the hedgehog has buried himself, or where the rabbits are crouching. In their knowledge of the ways of rabbits and hares keepers and gipsies stand alone; and it often happens that all the knowledge and craft of the one class is pitted against the cunning and knowledge of the other. Between keepers and gipsies it is always war.

The keeper detests nothing more than a gipsies' camp. His eyes take no more pleasure in their red rags spread on the bushes than might the eyes of a bull. A gipsy camp means to the keeper so much dirt, so much thieving, so many lies, so much the more trouble, and so many the fewer rabbits in his preserves. The gipsies' cauldron, steaming at dusk over a fragrant fire of wood, brings only the bitter knowledge that some of the birds or beasts he is paid to preserve are stewing in the pot. Speak to him of gipsies, and scorn flashes in his eyes, anger flushes on his face. "They be always a-shirking about wi' a dog or two, perkin' into everything," an old keeper once said to us. "They can't let nothing bide."

A gipsy brought to trial for larceny made oath that his law allowed him to take as much from others every day as sufficed for his maintenance. That was more than three hundred years ago; and gipsies still faithfully believe in and take advantage of that law. In our experience, we have known one gipsy who was honest; he was famous for his honesty. His blameless character was so much appreciated that he was allowed to pitch his tent in an old ox-drove, where it ran past a sheltering wood. Within the wood the keeper had buried four-dozen traps; and it chanced that the leaves drifted over his traps, so that when he came to find them he hunted the ground in vain. One day the gipsy's boy came to the keeper's cottage. He said that while picking wood for his father's fire he had trodden on something hard, which turned out to be a heap of traps, and that his father, thinking they must belong to the keeper, had sent him to tell the story. Where is another gipsy in England who would throw away such a chance?

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Gipsy Lies

Gipsies are certainly good sportsmen, after their own fashion. But one seldom hears of a gipsy shooting with a gun; the gun speaks too loudly. The gipsy makes sport with dogs, ferrets, and nets. He takes no open risks; he holds it to be a disgraceful thing to be caught red-handed. And if caught he never makes confession. No matter how red his hands, there is always an excuse. His horse is found feeding, perhaps, on the farmer's crops. Then the horse must have broken loose unbeknown. Or his dog crosses the road, leveret in mouth. Then, "He picked un up dead, killed by a stoat what I seed a-sniffin' about." His dog has snapped up a sitting partridge. "It must be one as they beggarin' foxes 'ave killed." Or the gipsy himself, hunting a rabbit in a hedge, is taken in the act of knocking over the rabbit with his stick. All was done in mistake for a rat. The keeper remarks that he has lost a fine clutch of eggs--olive-brown eggs: he hints that the gipsy knows something about it. Innocently comes the question: "They sart o' eggs be pison, bain't they?" If caught with nets and ferrets on a rabbit burrow, a fine tale he has to tell of poachers who ran away at his approach, leaving all their tackle.

A keeper, who had strict orders to allow no gipsies to stop on his ground, one day came across a strong swarm, and saw clearly that they intended to stay the night. But in reply to his marching orders, they pleaded that they wished to stay only long enough to make some tea; they promised they would be gone by the time the keeper returned, in a couple of hours. So he went away, but went no farther than behind the nearest hedge: whence he heard himself described in a picturesque and blood-curdling fashion, and heard the declaration also that the gipsies had no intention of budging an inch for such a blue-livered, red-nosed piece of pulp as he. Thereupon the keeper took a run and a jump, and landed his eighteen stone self and his leaded stick in the gipsies' midst, sending their pots and pans far-flying. The gipsies snatched burning sticks from the fire, and a desperate fight began, but they soon had enough of that eighteen stone of angry keeper.

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Long-netters

In autumn, rabbits receive special attention from the long-net poachers. On a night not too dark or windy, yet windy and dark enough, the long-netters find all omens propitious. To begin with, the rabbits are now in prime condition. Then there is no fear of a hard frost to make the fixing of net-pegs a difficulty, or to allow the sound of footfalls to be carried far through the silence of night. And rabbits are plentiful; as yet their ranks have been thinned by no serious covert shooting. To crown all, the market is ready and expectant, for the chance of a sale of stolen rabbits has not been spoilt by the large surplus bags of genuine sportsmen. A warm night best suits the poachers' object, with the wind blowing towards the side of the selected wood--enough wind to prevent a panic among the rabbits through sound or scent of danger while the gear is fixed, yet not enough to deter them from turning out in goodly numbers, and journeying some distance from the wood to feed. The nets are set up all along the side of the wood, then poachers with dogs or drag-lines make a circuit and drive the feeding rabbits home, and to their doom.

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Training Rabbits

Keepers have found it more or less possible to train rabbits to a mode of life which shall baffle the long-net poachers. By giving them regular courses of driving-in at night they will take to feeding chiefly by day, and will grow very suspicious of the sound of a footfall after dark. Where there are not enough rabbits to justify special precautions and continual watching, long-netting may be made difficult by turning cattle at night into the grass fields bordering the woods. Not only will the cattle be sure to take an inquisitive interest in the long-netting, but they will have something to say to the dogs used for driving in, and will quite upset their work. In one place some poachers were baffled after a curious fashion. A local gang had set up some seven hundred yards of new netting, worth about ten guineas, and had gone off to round up the rabbits, when another gang from a distant part of the county arrived on the scene. The curses they heaped on their luck soon gave way to blessings--at any rate, they were quick to see the chance of poaching something more valuable than rabbits. They rolled up the new nets and fled. Then the men of the first gang returned in the wake of the rabbits, which had found nothing to impede their rush to cover. Curses were deeper and stronger than those breathed before. The men decided in the end to put their case and themselves unreservedly into the hands of the police, who telephoned to the nearest railway station, and captured the poachers with their poaching brethren's gear and their own rolled up in blankets.

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Why Birds Flock

Why birds and beasts flock, no doubt, is for mutual protection from natural foes. One has heard of swallows nesting on a cliff beneath an eagle's eyrie, yet having nothing to fear from the eagle's attack because of their combination; and every one knows how a party of small birds will defy a hawk, or will mob and rout a cuckoo or a day-flying owl. Possibly the reason for the great congregation of sparrows in one chosen tree in a London square is mutual protection from cats. Food is a most important factor in flocking; the keeper knows that the scarcer the food of partridges the greater is their tendency to pack. Birds may pack at night for mutual warmth--as when titmice snuggle on branches, and wrens, to the number of ten or twenty, crowd a hole in the thatch. Partridges gain something in warmth in snowy weather by their habit of jugging at night--a good covey on a yard of ground. But examination of the spot where they have passed the night shows that the main pack has been divided into comparatively small parties, in the same way as there were small parties among the great herds of buffalo that travelled as one column across the plains of America. Sheltered hollows are naturally chosen for jugging, where the keen edge of the wind passes over the birds' heads. There is not always safety or benefit in numbers; a flock may attract foes where individuals would pass unnoticed, or may make short work of food which would keep an individual for many days. With insects, great congregations may be harmful, if an advantage to their bird enemies. Presumably, flocking is a matter of general convenience.

During the first fortnight of October little parties of fieldfares from Scandinavia drift over the fields, chuckling in their throaty way, redwings are seen, our wood-pigeons are reinforced by countless thousands from overseas, snipe come in, woodcock will soon be here, parties of goldcrests, newly arrived, cry their sharp notes among the larches, and the winter flocks of tits, with goldcrests, tree-creepers, and nuthatches busily move in the woods. Everywhere birds are in flocks. Chaffinches, greenfinches, and sparrows move in vast congregations, plovers circle in clouds above the fallows, flocks of rooks unite in the evening and thousands upon thousands of starlings rise, fall, and circle in perfect unison, filling the air with the rushing noise of wings.

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The Companies of Rats

Many animals snuggle together for warmth in bitter weather--as the squirrels and the rats. Those who go ratting in hedges and dells in the winter know they may try a dozen freshly used burrows without finding a rat--when suddenly from a single hole the rats will come pouring out in a stream of fur. Twenty or more rats will lie together in one hole. They are clever enough to block up a hole on the windward side to keep out the draught--so that a rat-hole newly stopped with soil, turnip leaves, or grass, is almost certain indication that rats are within. They store food for winter, and the keeper may find it more difficult to secure his potatoes from frost than from the attack of the most numerous of his furred foes.

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The Fall