Part 13

A BARREN HILLSIDE.

Living a secluded life in the pasture with his little mate, Kweek escaped the close attention paid by the "vermin" to his kindred in the colony beyond the wood. The brown owl still remembered where he dwelt, but, loath to make a special nightly journey to the spot, seldom caused him the least anxiety. She seemed to content herself with a strict watch over the bank inhabited by the red voles, and over the fields on the far side of the copse, where the grey voles, notwithstanding that they supplied her with many a delicious supper, were becoming numerous. She awaited an almost certain increase among the "small deer" of the pasture, before commencing her raids on the grey voles there. As events proved, however, her patience was unrewarded.

Kweek's first experience in rearing a family ended disastrously. Two of the nurslings died a few hours after birth; one, venturing from the nest too soon in the evening, was killed by a magpie; and two, while sitting out near the hedge, were trampled to death by a flock of sheep rushing, panic-stricken, at the sight of a wandering fox. By the middle of May, when another vole family of six had arrived, the number of vermin in the valley had perceptibly diminished. The old, asthmatic keeper in charge of the Cerdyn valley died, and a younger and more energetic man from a neighbouring estate came to take his place. Eager to gain the favour of his master by providing him good sport in the coming autumn, the new keeper ranged the woods from dawn till dusk, setting pole-traps in the trees, or baiting rabbit-traps in the "creeps" of stoat or weasel, and destroying nests, as well as shooting any furred or feathered creature of questionable character. The big brown owl from the beech-grove, the kestrel from the rock on the far side of the brook, the sparrow-hawk from the spinney up-stream, together with the weasels, the stoats, the cats, the jays, and the magpies--all in turn met their doom.

A pair of barn-owls from the loft in the farm suffered next. These owls were great pets at the old homestead. For many years they had lived unmolested in their gloomy retreat under the tiles, and regularly at nightfall had flown fearlessly to and fro among the outbuildings, or perched on the ruined pigeon-cote watching for the rats to leave their holes.

The farmer, less ignorant than the keeper, recognised the owls as friends, and treated them accordingly. They were his winged cats, and assisted to check the increase of a plague. Like the brown owl, they knew well the habits of the voles; but their attention was diverted by the rats and the mice at the farm, and they seldom wandered far afield except for a change of diet or to stretch wings cramped by a long summer day's seclusion. The rats, however, were far from being exterminated; and so, when a little child who was all sunshine to his parents in the lonely homestead died from typhoid fever, the village doctor, fearing an epidemic, advised that the pests should be utterly destroyed. Loath to use strychnine, since he knew that in a neighbouring valley some owls had died from eating poisoned rats, the farmer sought the aid of the village poachers, who, with their terriers and ferrets, thoroughly searched the stacks and the buildings. During the hunt it was noticed that about a score of rats took refuge in a narrow chamber under the eaves. The farmer, directing operations in another part of the yard, was unaware of what had occurred. The poachers, knowing nothing of the presence of the owls, pushed a terrier through the opening beneath the rafters of the loft, and blocked the hole with the rusty blade of a disused shovel. For a few moments the quick patter of tiny feet indicated that the terrier was busily engaged with his task; then cries of rage and terror came from the imprisoned dog, while with these cries were mingled the sounds of flapping wings. When at last the poachers unstopped the hole and dragged the terrier out, they found that every rat had been killed, and that the place was thickly strewn with the feathers of two dying owls.

During the rest of the summer, Kweek led a strangely peaceful life, having little to fear beyond an occasional visit from Reynard, or from an astute old magpie that, evading with apparent ease the keeper's gun and pole-traps, lived on till the late autumn, when, before a line of beaters, he broke cover over some sportsmen waiting for their driven game. As soon as the leaves began to fall and exhausted Nature longed for winter's rest, the burrow in the pasture became the scene of feverish activity. Kweek was now the proud sire of five or six healthy families, and the grand-sire of many more. Even the youngest voles were growing fat and strong; and, when the numerous members of the colony set about harvesting their winter stores, ripe, delicious seeds were plentiful everywhere along the margin of the wood.

The winter was uniformly mild, with exception of one short period of great cold which brought a thorough, healthful sleep to the voles; and in the earliest days of spring, when the love-calls of chaffinches and tits were heard from almost every tree, Kweek and his tribe resumed their work and throve amazingly. Every circumstance appeared to favour their well-being. But for the fox, that sometimes crouched beside an opening to the burrow and snapped up an incautious venturer peeping above ground, a young sheep-dog, whose greatest pleasure in life seemed to be found in digging a large round hole in the centre of the burrow, and an adder, that stung a few of the weaklings to death, but found them inconveniently big for swallowing, the voles were seldom troubled. Their numbers, and those of every similar colony in the neighbourhood, increased in such a fashion that, before the following autumn, both the pasture and the near ploughland were barren wastes completely honeycombed with their dwellings. Every grass-root in the pasture was eaten up; every stalk in the cornfield was nibbled through so that the grain might be easily reached and devoured; and the root-crops--potatoes, turnips, and mangolds--on the far side of the cornfield were utterly spoiled; and in the hedgerows and the copse the leaves dropped from the lifeless trees, each of which was marked by a complete ring where the bark was gnawed away close to the ground.

But capricious Nature, as if regretting the haste with which she had brought into the world her destructive little children, and desiring, even at the cost of untold suffering and the loss of countless lives, to restore the pleasant Cerdyn valley to its beauty of green fields and leafy woods, sent her twin plagues of disease and starvation among the voles, till, like the sapless leaves, they withered and died. And from far and near the hawks and the owls, the weasels, the stoats, and the foxes hastened to the scene. The keeper, at a loss to know whence they came, and not understanding the lesson he was being taught, bewailed his misfortune, but dared not stay their advent. At almost any hour of the day, five or six kestrels might be seen quartering the fields or hovering here and there among the burrows. And, long before dark, the stoats and the weasels, as if knowing that, fulfilling a special mission, they were now safe from their arch-enemy, the keeper, hunted their prey through the "trash" of the hedge-banks, or in and out of the passages underground.

The farm labourers, in desperate haste, dug numerous pitfalls, wide at the bottom but narrow at the mouth, and trapped hundreds of the voles, which, maddened by hunger but unable to climb the sloping sides, attacked one another--all at last dying a miserable death. Not only did the customary enemies of the voles arrive on the scene: Nature called to her great task a number of unexpected destroyers--sea-gulls from the distant coast, a kite from a wooded island on a desolate, far-off mere, and a buzzard from a rocky fastness, rarely visited save by keepers and shepherds, near the up-country lakes. Food had gradually become scarce even for the few hundred voles that yet remained. No longer were they to be seen at play together, in little groups, during the cool, hazy twilight, that, earlier in the year, shimmered like a wonderful afterglow on the mossy pasture-floor. Now their only desire was for food and sleep.

Unnoticed by a passing owl, Kweek, worn to a skeleton by sickness and privation, crawled from his burrow into the moonlight of a calm, clear autumn night, and lay in the shadow of the stone where the old male vole had watched and listened for the cruel "vear." A big blow-fly, attracted, with countless thousands of his kind, to the place of slaughter and decay, had gone to sleep on the side of the stone, and Kweek, in a last desperate effort to obtain a little food, moved forward to secure his prize; but at that moment his strength failed him, his weary limbs relaxed, and the dull, grey film of death overspread his half-closed eyes.

The owl, hearing a faint sound like the rustle of a dry grass-bent, quickly turned in her flight; then, slanting her wings, dropped to the ground, and presently, with her defenceless quarry in her talons, flew away towards the woods.

THE FOX.

THE LAST HUNT.

A dark and wind-swept night had fallen over the countryside when Reynard left the steep slope above the keeper's cottage, and stole through gorse and brambles towards the outskirts of the covert, where a narrow dingle, intersected by a noisy rill and thickly matted with brown bracken, divided the furze from some neighbouring pine-woods.

For months nothing had occurred to disturb the peace of his woodland home. Once, about a year ago, he had fled for his life before the hounds; and again, during the last autumn, while lying hidden in the ditch of the root-crop field above the pines, he had been surprised by two sheep-dogs that nipped him sorely before he could make good his escape. But at no other time had he been in evident peril, and so, though naturally cunning and suspicious, he had grown bolder, and better acquainted with the neighbourhood of cottage and farmstead than were certain members of his family living on the opposite side of the valley, among thickets hunted regularly, where guns and spaniels might be heard from early morning till close of day.

Here and there, as the fox crept stealthily among the blackthorns and the gorse-bushes, he stopped for a moment on the scent of a rabbit; but the night was not such as to induce Bunny to remain outside her cosy burrow in the bank. He examined each "creep" in the tangled clumps along his way, and sometimes, resting on his haunches, sniffed the air and listened intently for any sign to indicate the presence of a feeding coney; but even the strongest taint was "stale," and no sound could be detected that might betray the whereabouts of any creature feeding in the grass. Disappointed, the fox turned towards the uplands and crossed the hedgerow into the nearest stubble. Louping leisurely along, he surprised and killed a sleeping lark. Further on he crossed the scent of a hare, but Puss was doubtless some distance away, feeding in a quiet corner of the root-crop field. Reynard now instinctively made for the farmyard among the pines, trusting meanwhile that luck would befriend him. Across the gap, by the side of the hedgerow, and through an open gateway, he went, seeking spoil everywhere, but finding none. With all his senses alert, he climbed the low wall around the yard, peeped into the empty cart-house, and stealthily approached an open shed. There, unluckily, the dogs were sleeping on a load of hay in the furthest corner. Careful not to arouse his foes, the fox retreated, and, passing the pond at the bottom of the yard, moved silently towards another shed, in which, as he knew from a former visit, the poultry roosted. Though the door was shut, an opening for the use of the fowls seemed to afford the possibility of success. With difficulty Reynard managed to squeeze himself in, only, however, to no purpose. Just beyond the door lay a loose coil of wire, brought home by the labourers after fencing and thrown here out of the way. The fox, fearing a trap, reluctantly abandoned his project, returned to the bank by the pond, and crept down the lane to a spot where the ducks were housed in a neat shelter built in the wall. But here he found everything securely fastened. At this moment a door of the farmstead creaked loudly, the light of a lantern flooded the yard, and the baffled marauder sprang over the wall and trotted across the field towards the wood.

His pace soon slackened when he found himself free from pursuit; and before he reached the end of the meadow he had regained all his cool audacity and was busily planning a visit to the cottage at the foot of the dingle. Hardly had his thoughts turned once more to hunting when fortune favoured him. A hen from the farmyard had laid her eggs in the hedgerow bordering the wood, and was brooding over them in proud anticipation of one day leading home a healthy family, thus causing an agreeable surprise to the farmer's wife. The fox almost brushed against her as he sprang over the hedge, and she paid to the utmost the penalty of indiscretion.

After feasting royally on the eggs, the fox took up the dead bird, and moved slowly away through the trees towards his home. Re-entering the covert, he was met by a prowling vixen that, in company with her four young cubs, inhabited an "earth" not many yards away. Reckless through hunger and maddened by the scent of blood, she attacked him savagely, bullied him out of the possession of the dead fowl, and bore her prize away in triumph to her den. The fox endured his ill-treatment with the submission of a Stoic--he happened to be the pugnacious vixen's mate, and the sire of her family. Soon recovering from the chastisement, he set off, and skirted the covert as far as the cottage garden. Finding the gate of the hen-coop closed, he sprang on the water-butt, climbed to the roof of the shed, and tried to enter the coop from above; but there, as at the farm, he feared a trap, and dared not creep beneath the loose wire netting overhanging the shed. As he jumped from the coop to the wall of the stye, he caught sight of several rats scampering to their holes. Lying flat on the wall, he awaited patiently their re-appearance. At last one of them ventured out beneath the door of the cot, and was instantly killed. But, much to his chagrin, Reynard found the carcass a decidedly doubtful tit-bit, and so, having conveyed it gingerly to the margin of the covert, he scratched a shallow hole among the rotting leaves, and buried his prey, that, perhaps, its flavour might improve with keeping. Afterwards, till the sky lightened almost imperceptibly, and a steel-blue bar, low down beneath the clouds, first signalled the coming of day, he lay motionless among the undergrowth near a warren in the dingle. Then an unsuspecting rabbit hopped out into the grass, and Reynard, his watch rewarded, disappeared with his spoil into the wilderness of the gorse.

Dawn was breaking over the hills. Blue smoke curled up into the sky from the lodge cottage at the foot of the tree-clad slope. The door of the cottage stood wide open, and the scent of the wood-fire hung on the chill, damp air filling the narrow lane. A blackbird flew into the apple-tree overlooking the thatch, shook the moisture from his wings, and cleaned his bright orange bill on a bough. Then his full, reed-like music floated over the fields. The skylarks soared above the upland pastures, and a shower of song descended to the valley out of the pearl-blue haze just lifting in a cloud from the hill-top. Presently the blackbird flew from the apple-tree to feed beside the hedge, and the larks dropped from the mist into the grass. But for the crackle of the cottage fire as the keeper busied himself with the preparation of his morning meal, and the rustle of a withered leaf as the blackbird moved to and fro in the ditch, not a sound disturbed the silence of the dawn. Soon the haze lifted, leaving the dew thick on the grass by the ditch, and on the moss and the ivy in the hedgerow bank. The larks soared once more into the sky; a robin sang wistfully in the ash; a brown wren, with many a flick of her tiny wings and many a merry curtsy, hopped in and out among the trees, trilling loudly a gleeful carol. The tits flew hither and thither, twittering to each other as they flew. The hedge-sparrows' metallic notes sounded clear amid all the varied music, as the birds, moving among the hazels and gently flirting their wings, pursued their coy mates from bough to bough. Through the raised curtain of the mist the sun--a white globe hardly too brilliant to be boldly looked at--illumined the dewy fields with its faint beams, till the cloud-streaked sky became a clear expanse, and the blue and brown countryside glowed with the splendour of a perfect morning. The wind changed and freshened, so that the call of a farm labourer to his team and the constant voice of the river were distinctly heard in the level valley below the wood.

As the morning advanced, signs of unusual stir and bustle were apparent in the neighbourhood of the lodge. Messengers came and went between the cottage and the mansion at the bend of the river, or between the mansion and the distant village. The keeper appeared at his door, and, after satisfying himself that the lane seemed clean and well-kept, walked off briskly in the direction of the "big house." Scarlet-coated horsemen, and high-born maids and matrons, with all the medley of the Hunt in their train, cantered along the winding road--a mirthful, laughter-loving company. There were the General, stout and inelegant, wont to take his fences carefully, who changed his weight-carrying mount thrice during the day, and liked a gateway better than a thorny hedge, and for the last fifteen years had never been in at the death; and his wife, the leader of fashion, but not yet the leader of the Hunt; the Major, an old shekarry from India, who still could ride as straight and fast as any man in the west; and his niece, the belle of the countryside, whose mettlesome hunter occasionally showed a sudden fondness for taking the bit between his teeth, and carrying his mistress, with reckless abandon, over furrow and five-barred gate and through the thickest hedgerow--anywhere, so long as he had breath and the music of the hounds allured him onward in his impetuous career. The sun glanced between the trees as they passed the cottage door. Then came the Magistrate's Clerk, faultlessly attired, with florid face and glittering eyeglass, who, in an ambitious youth, finding his name too suggestive of plebeian blood, changed a vowel in it, and thereby gave an aristocratic flavour to the title of his partnership, and who acquired, with this new dignity, the taste for a monocle, a horse, and a good cigar. Following were the members of the medley--the big butcher on his sturdy pony, the "dealer" on his black, raw-boned half-bred, the publican on his stolid old mare, farmers, drovers, after-riders, on cropped and uncropped mounts more accustomed to the slow drudgery of labour than to the rollicking, hard-going hunt; and after them the crowd on foot--village children, farm labourers, and apprentices from forge and counter. Riding side by side, and earnestly conversing, were the "vet," whose horse at the last hunt bolted and left him clinging to a bough, and the shopkeeper, whose grave attire and sober mien seemed strangely out of keeping with the bright, hilarious throng. These were soon met by the main party from the meet, and hounds and hunters sped away in the direction of the hillside covert, while the onlookers adjourned to the uplands, whence an almost uninterrupted view of the valleys for miles around might be enjoyed, and the movements of the fox and his enemies followed more closely than from the hollows beneath the woods.

Reynard, abundantly satisfied with his supper of eggs and early breakfast of rabbit, was lying asleep in a tuft of grass at the top of the thicket when the huntsman passed down the dingle after the meet. Awakened by the noise that reached him from below, he arose, stretched his limbs, and listened anxiously--the clatter of hoofs seemed to fill the valley. Suddenly, from the outskirts of the wood, came the deep, sonorous note of a hound, followed by the sharp rebuke of the whipper-in; Jollity, the keen-nosed puppy, was "rioting" on the cold scent near the stream. Peering between the bushes, the fox could as yet see nothing moving in the covert, but a few minutes afterwards his sharp eye caught a glimpse of a hound leaping over the bank above the gorse, followed by another, and another, and yet another, till the place seemed alive with his foes.

Whither should he flee? The dingle was occupied; men and horses were everywhere in the lane; and the hounds were closing in above the gorse. The far side of the covert offered the only chance of escape, and thither he must hie, else the hounds, now pouring down the slope, would cut off his retreat. Quickly he threaded his way through the gorse, by paths familiar only to himself and the rabbits, till he reached the bank by the willows; but, even while he ran, the full chorus of the hounds echoed from hillside to hillside, as, having "struck the line," they tore madly in pursuit. He reached the edge of the covert at a point furthest from his foes--then, as he crossed the meadow, a single red-coated horseman, standing sentinel far up the hillside, gave the "view-halloo," and over the brow of the slope streamed the main body of the Hunt.

It was at once evident to Reynard that by skirting the margin of the covert he could not for the present escape, so he headed down-wind towards the opposite hill, hoping to find refuge in a well-known "earth" amid the thickets. To his surprise he found the entrance "stopped" with clods and prickly branches of gorse, and had perforce to continue his flight. Having well out-distanced his pursuers, he stayed to rest for a while near the stream that trickled by the hedgerow; then, with the horrid music of the hounds again in his ears, he turned, by a long backward cast, in the direction of his home.

But he was wholly unable to shake off his pursuers. For four long hours he was hustled from covert to covert, and hillside to hillside, finding no respite, no mercy, no sanctuary. Breathless, mud-stained, footsore, and sick with fright, his draggling "brush" and lolling tongue betraying his distress, he sought at last the place he had long avoided, and, entering the mouth of the den where the vixen and her cubs were hiding, lay there, almost utterly exhausted. Some minutes elapsed, during which no sound but that of his laboured breathing, and of the tiny sucklings busy by the side of the dam, disturbed the stillness.

Suddenly, a deep-voiced hound broke through the bushes and bayed loudly before the entrance. His fellow joined him, and their foreboding clamour reverberated in the chamber. Terrified, the fox crawled slowly into the recess of the den. Presently a shaggy terrier came down the tunnel, and bit him sorely on the flank. He scarcely had the courage to turn on the aggressor; but the enraged vixen, thrusting her mate aside, quickly routed the daring intruder, and followed his retreat to the very mouth of the "earth," where she turned back, threatened by the great hounds that stood without. But even the reckless courage of maternity was unavailing. Soon the noise of blows and of falling earth was heard, as the passage was gradually opened by brawny farm labourers, working with spade and pick, and assisted in their task by the eager huntsman, who ever and anon thrust a long bramble-spray into the tunnel and thus ascertained the direction of its devious course.

At last the tip of the fox's "brush" was seen amid the soil and pebbles that had fallen into the chamber. The huntsman had cut two stout hazel rods; these he now thrust into the hollow, one along either flank of the fox; then, grasping their ends firmly about the exposed tail, he drew poor Reynard from his hiding place, and thrust him, defiant to the last, and with his teeth close-locked on one of the hazel rods, into an old sack requisitioned at the nearest farm. The vixen met a similar fate, while the sleek, furry little cubs, treated with the utmost gentleness, were wrapped together in the Master's handkerchief and given to the care of an attendant.

Reynard's life was nearing its close. In the meadow behind the keeper's cottage the hounds were summoned by the huntsman's horn, and the bag was opened. The scene that followed marred, for some of us at least, the beauty of the bright March morning. The vixen and her cubs were carried away, and found a new home in an artificial "earth" prepared for their reception near a distant mansion.

II.