Field and Hedgerow

R >> Richard Jefferies >> Field and Hedgerow

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If any one climbed the wall from the park and looked across at the plain
of corn-fields in early spring, everywhere there would be seen brown dots
in the air--above the first slender green blades; above the freshly
turned dark furrows; above the distant plough, the share of which,
polished like a silver mirror by friction with the clods, reflects the
sunshine, flashing a heliograph message of plenty from the earth;
everywhere brown dots, and each a breathing creature--larks ceaselessly
singing, and all unable to set forth their joy. Swift as is the vibration
of their throats, they cannot pour the notes fast enough to express their
eager welcome. As a shower falls from the sky, so falls the song of the
larks. There is no end to them: they are everywhere; over every acre away
across the plain to the downs, and up on the highest hill. Every crust of
English bread has been sung over at its birth in the green blade by a
lark.

If one looked again in June, the clover itself, a treasure of beauty and
sweetness, would be out, and the south wind would come over acres of
flower--acres of clover, beans, tares, purple trifolium, far-away crimson
sainfoin (brightest of all on the hills), scarlet poppies, pink
convolvulus, yellow charlock, and green wheat coming into ear. In August,
already squares would be cut into the wheat, and the sheaves rising,
bound about the middle, hour-glass fashion; some breadths of wheat
yellow, some golden-bronze; besides these, white barley and oats, and
beans blackening. Turtle-doves would be in the stubble, for they love to
be near the sheaves. The hills after or during rain look green and near;
on sunny days, a far and faint blue. Sometimes the sunset is caught in
the haze on them and lingers, like a purple veil about the ridges. In the
dusk hares come heedlessly along; the elder-bushes gleam white with
creamy petals through the night.

Sparrows and partridges alike dust themselves in the white dust, an inch
deep, of midsummer, in the road between the wall and the corn--a pitiless
Sahara road to traverse at noonday in July, when the air is still and you
walk in a hollow way, the yellow wheat on one side and the wall on the
other. There is shade in the park within, but a furnace of sunlight
without--weariness to the eyes and feet from glare and dust. The wall
winds with the highway and cannot be escaped. It goes up the slight
elevations and down the slopes; it has become settled down and bound with
time. But presently there is a steeper dip, and at the bottom, in a
narrow valley, a streamlet flows out from the wheat into the park. A
spring rises at the foot of the down a mile away, and the channel it has
formed winds across the plain. It is narrow and shallow; nothing but a
larger furrow, filled in winter by the rains rushing off the fields, and
in summer a rill scarce half an inch deep. The wheat hides the channel
completely, and as the wind blows, the tall ears bend over it. At the
edge of the bank pink convolvulus twines round the stalks and the
green-flowered buckwheat gathers several together. The sunlight cannot
reach the stream, which runs in shadow, deep down below the wheat-ears,
over which butterflies wander. Forget-me-nots flower under the banks;
grasses lean on the surface; willow-herbs, tall and stiff, stand up; but
out from the tangled and interlaced fibres the water flows as clear as it
rose by the hill. There is a culvert under the road, and on the opposite
side the wall admits the stream by an arch jealously guarded by bars. In
this valley the wall is lower and thicker and less covered at the top
with ivy, so that where the road rises over the culvert you can see into
the park. The stream goes rounding away through the sward, bending
somewhat to the right, where the ground gradually descends. On the left
side, at some distance, stands a row of full-grown limes, and through
these there is a glimpse of the old manor-house. It is called the old
house because the requirements of modern days have rendered it unsuitable
for an establishment. A much larger mansion has been erected in another
part of the park nearer the village, with a facade visible from the
highway. The old manor-house is occupied by the land-steward, or, as he
prefers to be called, the deputy-forester, who is also the oldest and
largest tenant on the estate. It is he who rules the park. The labourers
and keepers call him the 'squire.'

Now the old squire's favourite resort is the window-seat in the gun-room,
because thence he can see a section of the highway, which, where it
crosses the streamlet, comes within half a mile of the house. There the
hollow and the lower wall permit any one at this window to obtain a view
of the road on one of the sides of the valley. At this declivity it
almost faces the house, and whether the passers-by are going to the
market town, or returning to the village, they cannot escape observation.
If they come from the town, the steep descent compels them to walk their
horses down it; if from the village, they have a hard pull up. So the
oaken window-seat in the gun-room is as polished and smooth as an old
saddle; for if the squire is indoors, he is certain to be there. He often
rests there after half an hour's work on one or other of the guns in the
rack; for, though he seldom uses but one, he likes to take the locks to
pieces upon a little bench which he has fitted up, and where he has a
vice, tools, a cartridge-loading apparatus, and so forth, from which the
room acquired its name. With the naked eye, however, as the road is half
a mile distant, it is not possible to distinguish persons, except in
cases of very pronounced individuality. Nevertheless old 'Ettles,' the
keeper, always declared that he could see a hare run up the down from the
park, say a mile and a half. This may be true; but in the gun-room there
is a field-glass, said to have been used at the siege of Seringapatam,
which the squire can bring to bear upon the road in an instant, for from
constant use at the same focus there is a rim round the tarnished brass.
No time, therefore, need be lost in trials; it can be drawn out to the
well-known mark at once. The window itself is large, but there is a
casement in it,--a lesser window,--which can be thrown open with a mere
twist of the thumb on the button, and as it swings open it catches itself
on a hasp. Then the field-glass examines the distant wayfarer.

When people have dwelt for generations in one place they come to know the
history of their immediate world. There was not a waggon that went by
without a meaning to the squire. One perhaps brought a load of wool from
the downs: it was old Hobbes's, whose affairs he had known these forty
years. Another, with wheat, was Lambourne's team: he lost heavily in
1879, the wet year. The family and business concerns of every man of any
substance were as well known to the squire as if they had been written in
a chronicle. So, too, he knew the family tendency, as it were, of the
cottagers. So and So's lads were always tall, another's girls always
tidy. If you employed a member of this family, you were sure to be well
served; if of another, you were sure to be cheated in some way. Men vary
like trees: an ash sapling is always straight, the bough of an oak
crooked, a fir full of knots. A man, said the squire, should be straight
like a gun. This section of the highway gave him the daily news of the
village as the daily papers give us the news of the world. About two
hundred yards from the window the row of limes began, each tree as tall
and large as an elm, having grown to its full natural size. The last of
the row came very near obstructing the squire's line of sight, and it
once chanced that some projecting branches by degrees stretched out
across his field of view. This circumstance caused him much mental
trouble; for, having all his life consistently opposed any thinning out
or trimming of trees, he did not care to issue an order which would
almost confess a mistake. Besides which, why only these particular
branches?--the object would be so apparent. The squire, while conversing
with Ettles, twice, as if unconsciously, directed his steps beneath these
limes, and, striking the offending boughs with his stick, remarked that
they grew extremely fast. But the keeper, usually so keen to take a hint,
only answered that the lime was the quickest wood to grow of which he
knew. In his heart he enjoyed the squire's difficulty. Finally the
squire, legalising his foible by recognising it, fetched a ladder and a
hatchet, and chopped off the boughs with his own hands.

It was from the gun-room window that the squire observed the change of
the seasons and the flow of time. The larger view he often had on
horseback of miles of country did not bring it home to him. The old
familiar trees, the sward, the birds, these told him of the advancing or
receding sun. As he reclined in the corner of the broad window-seat, his
feet up, and drowsy, of a summer afternoon, he heard the languid cawing
of an occasional rook, for rooks are idle in the heated hours of the day.
He was aware, without conscious observation, of the swift, straight line
drawn across the sky by a wood-pigeon. The pigeons were continually to
and fro the cornfields outside the wall to the south and the woods to the
north, and their shortcut route passed directly over the limes. To the
limes the bees went when their pale yellow flowers appeared. Not many
butterflies floated over the short sward, which was fed too close for
flowers. The butterflies went to the old garden, rising over the high
wall as if they knew beforehand of the flowers that were within. Under
the sun the short grass dried as it stood, and with the sap went its
green. There came a golden tint on that part of the wheat-fields which
could be seen over the road. A few more days--how few they seemed!--and
there was a spot of orange on the beech in a little copse near the limes.
The bucks were bellowing in the forest: as the leaves turned colour their
loves began and the battles for the fair. Again a few days and the snow
came, and rendered visible the slope of the ground in the copse between
the trunks of the trees: the ground there was at other times indistinct
under brambles and withered fern. The squire left the window for his
arm-chair by the fire; but if presently, as often happens when frost
quickly follows a snow-storm, the sun shone out and a beam fell on the
wall, he would get up and look out. Every footstep in the snow contained
a shadow cast by the side, and the dazzling white above and the dark
within produced a blue tint. Yonder by the limes the rabbits ventured out
for a stray bunch of grass not quite covered by the drift, tired, no
doubt, of the bitter bark of the ash-rods that they had nibbled in the
night. As they scampered, each threw up a white cloud of snow-dust behind
him. Yet a few days and the sward grew greener. The pale winter hue,
departing as the spring mist came trailing over, caught for a while in
the copse, and, lingering there, the ruddy buds and twigs of the limes
were refreshed. The larks rose a little way to sing in the moist air. A
rook, too, perching on the top of a low tree, attempted other notes than
his monotonous caw. So absorbed was he in his song that you might have
walked under him unnoticed. He uttered four or five distinct sounds that
would have formed a chant, but he paused between each as if uncertain of
his throat. Then, as the sun shone, with a long-drawn 'ca-awk' he flew to
find his mate, for it would soon be time to repair the nest in the limes.
The butterflies came again and the year was completed, yet it seemed but
a few days to the squire. Perhaps if he lived for a thousand years, after
a while he would wonder at the rapidity with which the centuries slipped
by.

By the limes there was a hollow--the little circular copse was on the
slope--and jays came to it as they worked from tree to tree across the
park. Their screeching often echoed through the open casement of the
gunroom. A faint mark on the sward trended towards this hollow; it was a
trail made by the squire, one of whose favourite strolls was in this
direction. This summer morning, taking his gun, he followed the trail
once more.

The grass was longer and coarser under the shadow of the limes, and
upborne on the branches were numerous little sticks which had dropped
from the rookery above. Sometimes there was an overthrown nest like a
sack of twigs turned out on the turf, such as the hedgers rake together
after fagoting. Looking up into the trees on a summer's day not a bird
could be seen, till suddenly there was a quick 'jack-jack' above, as a
daw started from his hole or from where the great boughs joined the
trunk. The squire's path went down the hollow till it deepened into a
thinly wooded coomb, through which ran the streamlet coming from the
wheat-fields under the road. As the coomb opened, the squire went along a
hedge near but not quite to the top. Years ago the coomb had been
quarried for chalk, and the pits were only partly concealed by the
bushes: the yellow spikes of wild mignonette flourished on the very
hedge, and even half way down the precipices. From the ledge above, the
eye could see into these and into the recesses between the brushwood. The
squire's son, Mr. Martin, used to come here with his rook-rifle, for he
could always get a shot at a rabbit in the hollow. They could not see him
approach; and the ball, if it missed, did no damage, being caught as in a
bowl. Rifles in England, even when their range is but a hundred yards or
so, are not to be used without caution. Some one may be in the hedge
nutting, or a labourer may be eating his luncheon in the shelter; it is
never possible to tell who may be behind the screen of brambles through
which the bullet slips so easily. Into these hollows Martin could shoot
with safety. As for the squire, he did not approve of rifles. He adhered
to his double-barrel; and if a buck had to be killed, he depended on his
smoothbore to carry a heavy ball forty yards with fair accuracy. The
fawns were knocked over with a wire cartridge unless Mr. Martin was in
the way--he liked to try a rifle. Even in summer the old squire generally
had his double-barrel with him--perhaps he might come across a weasel, or
a stoat, or a crow. That was his excuse; but, in fact, without a gun the
woods lost half their meaning to him. With it he could stand and watch
the buck grazing in the glade, or a troop of fawns--sweet little
creatures--so demurely feeding down the grassy slope from the beeches.
Already at midsummer the nuts were full formed on the beeches; the green
figs, too, he remembered were on the old fig-tree trained against the
warm garden wall. The horse-chestnuts showed the little green knobs which
would soon enlarge and hang all prickly, like the spiked balls of a
holy-water sprinkle, such as was once used in the wars. Of old the folk,
having no books, watched every living thing, from the moss to the oak,
from the mouse to the deer; and all that we know now of animals and
plants is really founded upon their acute and patient observation. How
many years it took even to find out a good salad may be seen from ancient
writings, wherein half the plants about the hedges are recommended as
salad herbs: dire indeed would be our consternation if we had to eat
them. As the beech-nuts appear, and the horse-chestnuts enlarge, and the
fig swells, the apples turn red and become visible in the leafy branches
of the apple-trees. Like horses, deer are fond of apples, and in former
times, when deer-stealing was possible, they were often decoyed with
them.

There is no tree so much of the forest as the beech. On the verge of
woods the oaks are far apart, the ashes thin; the verge is like a
wilderness and scrubby, so that the forest does not seem to begin till
you have penetrated some distance. Under the beeches the forest begins at
once. They stand at the edge of the slope, huge round boles rising from
the mossy ground, wide fans of branches--a shadow under them, a greeny
darkness beyond. There is depth there--depth to be explored, depth to
hide in. If there is a path, it is arched over like a tunnel with boughs;
you know not whither it goes. The fawns are sweetest in the sunlight,
moving down from the shadow; the doe best partly in shadow, partly in
sun, when the branch of a tree casts its interlaced work, fine as
Algerian silverwork, upon the back; the buck best when he stands among
the fern, alert, yet not quite alarmed--for he knows the length of his
leap--his horns up, his neck high, his dark eye bent on you, and every
sinew strung to spring away. One spot of sunlight, bright and white,
falls through the branches upon his neck, a fatal place, or near it: a
guide, that bright white spot, to the deadly bullet, as in old days to
the cross-bow bolt. It was needful even then to be careful of the aim,
for the herd, as Shakespeare tells us, at once recognised the sound of a
cross-bow: the jar of the string, tight-strained to the notch by the
goat's-foot lever, the slight whiz of the missile, were enough to startle
them and to cause the rest to swerve and pass out of range. Yet the
cross-bow was quiet indeed compared with the gun which took its place.
The cross-bow was the beginning of shooting proper, as we now understand
it; that is, of taking an aim by the bringing of one point into a line
with another. With the long-bow aim indeed was taken, but quite
differently, for if the arrow were kept waiting with the string drawn,
the eye and the hand would not go true together. The quicker the arrow
left the bow the moment that it was full drawn, the better the result. On
the other hand, the arblast was in no haste, but was adjusted
deliberately--so deliberately that it gave rise to a proverb, 'A fool's
bolt is soon shot.' This could not apply to the long-bow, with which the
arrow was discharged swiftly, while an arblast was slowly brought to the
level like a rifle. As it was hard to draw again, that added strength to
the saying; but it arose from the deliberation with which a good
cross-bowman aimed. To the long-bow the cross-bow was the express rifle.
The express delivers its bullet accurately point-blank--the bullet flies
straight to its mark up to a certain distance. So the cross-bow bolt flew
point-blank, and thus its application to hunting when the deer were
really killed for their venison. The hunter stole through the fern, or
crept about the thickets--thickets and fern exactly like those here
to-day--or waited Indian-like in ambush behind an oak as the herd fed
that way, and, choosing the finest buck, aimed his bolt so as either to
slay at once or to break the fore-leg. Like the hare, if the fore-leg is
injured, deer cannot progress; if only the hind-quarter is hit, there is
no telling how far they may go. Therefore the cross-bow, as enabling the
hunter to choose the exact spot where his bolt should strike, became the
weapon of the chase, and by its very perfection began the extermination
of the deer. Instead of the hounds and the noisy hunt, any man who could
use the cross-bow could kill a buck. The long-bow, of all weapons,
requires the most practice, and practice begun in early youth. Some of
the extraordinary feats attributed to the outlaws in the woods and to the
archers of the ancient English army are quite possible, but must have
necessitated the constant use of a bow from childhood, so that it became
second nature. But almost any man who has strength to set a cross-bow,
with moderate practice, and any idea at all of shooting, could become a
fairly good shot with it. From the cross-bow to a gun was a comparatively
easy step, and it was the knowledge of the power of the one that led to
the quick introduction of the other. For gunpowder was hardly discovered
before hand-guns were thought of, and no discovery ever spread so
swiftly. Then the arquebuse swept away the old English chase.

These deer exist by permission. They are protected with jealous care; or
rather they have been protected so long that by custom they have grown
semi-consecrated, and it is rare for anyone to think of touching them.
The fawns wander, and a man, if he choose, might often knock one over
with his axe as he comes home from his work. The deer browse up to the
very skirts of the farmhouse below, sometimes even enter the rick-yard,
and once now and then, if a gate be left open, walk in and eat the pease
in the garden. The bucks are still a little wilder, a little more nervous
for their liberty, but there is no difficulty in stalking them to within
forty or fifty yards. They have either lost their original delicacy of
scent, or else do not respond to it, as the approach of a man does not
alarm them, else it would be necessary to study the wind; but you may get
thus near them without any thought of the breeze--no nearer; then,
bounding twice or thrice, lifting himself each time as high as the fern,
the buck turns half towards you to see whether his retreat should or
should not be continued.

The fawns have come out from the beeches, because there is more grass on
the slope and in the hollow, where trees are few. Under the trees in the
forest proper there is little food for them. Deer, indeed, seem fonder of
half-open places than of the wood itself. Thickets, with fern at the foot
and spaces of sward between, are their favourite haunts. Heavily timbered
land and impenetrable underwood are not so much resorted to. The deer
here like to get away from the retreats which shelter them, to wander in
the half-open grounds on that part of the park free to them, or, if
possible, if they see a chance, out into the fields. Once now and then a
buck escapes, and is found eight or ten miles away. If the pale were
removed how quickly the deer would leave the close forest which in
imagination is so associated with them! It is not their ideal. They would
rather wander over the hills and along the river valleys. The forest is,
indeed, and always would be their cover, and its shadows their defence;
but for enjoyment they would of choice seek the sweet herbage, which does
not flourish where the roots of trees and underwood absorb all the
richness of the soil. The farther the trees are apart the better the
forest pleases them. Those great instinctive migrations of wild animals
which take place annually in America are not possible in England. The
deer here cannot escape--solitary individuals getting free of course, now
and then; they cannot move in a body, and it is not easy to know whether
any such desire remains among them. So far as I am aware, there is no
mention of such migrations in the most ancient times; but the omission
proves nothing, for before the Normans, before the game laws and parks
together came into existence, no one who could write thought enough of
the deer to notice their motions. The monks were engaged in chronicling
the inroads of the pagans, or writing chronologies of the Roman Empire.
On analogical grounds it would seem quite possible that in their original
state the English deer did move from part to part of the country with the
seasons. Almost all the birds, the only really free things in this
country now, move, even those that do not quit the island; and why not
the deer in the old time when all the woods were open to them? England is
not a large country, but there are considerable differences in the
climate and the time at which vegetation appears, quite sufficient of
themselves to induce animals to move from place to place. We have no
narrowing buffalo zone to lament, for our buffalo zone disappeared long
ago. These parks and woods are islets of the olden time, dotted here and
there in the midst of the most modern agricultural scenery. These deer
and their ancestors have been confined within the pale for hundreds of
years, and though in a sense free, they are in no sense wild. But the old
power remains still. See the buck as he starts away, and jumps at every
leap as high as the fern. He would give the hounds a long chase yet.

The fern is fully four feet tall, hiding a boy entirely, and only showing
a man's head. The deer do not go through it unless startled; they prefer
to follow a track already made, one of their own trails. It is their
natural cover, and when the buckhounds meet near London the buck often
takes refuge in one or other of the fern-grown commons of which there are
many on the southern side. But fern is inimical to grass, and, while it
gives them cover, occupies the place of much more pleasant herbage. As
their range is limited, though they have here a forest of some extent as
well as the park to roam over, they cannot always obtain enough in
winter. In frost, when the grass will not grow, or when snow is on the
ground, that which they can find is supplemented with hay. They are, in
fact, foddered exactly the same as cattle. In some of the smaller parks
they are driven into inclosures and fed altogether. This is not the case
here. Perhaps it was through the foggers, as the labourers are called who
fodder cattle and carry out the hay in the morning and evening, that deer
poachers of old discovered that they could approach the deer by carrying
a bundle of sweet-smelling hay, which overcame the scent of the body and
baffled the buck's keen nostrils till the thief was within shot. The
foggers, being about so very early in the morning,--they are out at the
dawn,--have found out a good many game secrets in their time. If the deer
were outside the forest at any hour it was sure to be when the dew was on
the grass, and thus they noticed that with the hay truss on their heads
they could walk up quite close occasionally. Foggers know all the game on
the places where they work; there is not a hare or a rabbit, a pheasant
or a partridge, whose ways are not plain to them. There are no stories
now of stags a century old (three would go back to Queen Elizabeth); they
have gone, like other traditions of the forest, before steam and
breechloader. Deer lore is all but extinct, the terms of venery known but
to a few; few, indeed, could correctly name the parts of a buck if one
were sent them. The deer are a picture only--a picture that lives and
moves and is beautiful to look at, but must not be rudely handled. Still,
they linger while the marten has disappeared, the polecat is practically
gone, and the badger becoming rare. It is curious that the badger has
lived on through sufferance for three centuries. Nearly three centuries
ago, a chronicler observed that the badger would have been rooted out
before his time had it not been for the parks. There was no great store
of badgers then; there is no great store now. Sketches remain in old
country-houses of the chase of the marten; you see the hounds all yelping
round the foot of a tree, the marten up in it, and in the middle of the
hounds the huntsman in top-boots and breeches. You can but smile at it.
To Americans it must forcibly recall the treeing of a 'coon. The deer
need keep no watch, there are no wolves to pull them down; and it is
quite probable that the absence of any danger of that kind is the reason
of their tameness even more than the fact that they are not chased by
man. Nothing comes creeping stealthily through the fern, or hunts them
through the night. They can slumber in peace. There is no larger beast of
prey than a stoat, or a stray cat. But they retain their dislike of dogs,
a dislike shared by cattle, as if they too dimly remembered a time when
they had been hunted. The list of animals still living within the pale
and still wild is short indeed. Besides the deer, which are not wild,
there are hares, rabbits, squirrels, two kinds of rat,--the land and the
water rat,--stoat, weasel, mole, and mouse. There are more varieties of
mouse than of any other animal: these, the weakest of all, have escaped
best, though exposed to so many enemies. A few foxes, and still fewer
badgers, complete the list, for there are no other animals here. Modern
times are fatal to all creatures of prey, whether furred or feathered;
and so even the owls are less numerous, both in actual numbers and in
variety of species, than they were even fifty years ago.

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