CHAPTER IX
WAR DECLARED AGAINST OUR RACE
I think the shock of the disaster which robbed me at one fell swoop of wife, family, and home must have so completely stunned all my faculties that for a time I was unable to realize fully what had happened. I vaguely remember wandering round and about the still faintly-steaming ruins of the beech-tree, and calling piteously for Sable. Lucky for me that no enemy came near. Even a boy with a catapult could have made an easy prey of me, for all my senses were strangely dulled.
What first brought me to myself again was a low but familiar call which came from a small larch near by. Looking up, I could hardly believe my eyes when I caught sight of a small dark squirrel crouching on a branch at no great height from the ground shivering piteously.
‘Walnut!’ I exclaimed in absolute amazement.
I had felt so certain that the poor charred remains in my broken home comprised the whole of my family. Was it possible that one of them had escaped, after all?
The poor little chap was so shockingly frightened that it was a long time before he could give me any clear account of how he had escaped. It appears that when my poor Sable saw the storm coming she at once set to work to take her family from the summer drey in the larch back to the hollow in the beech-trunk. She had been afraid, Walnut said, that the wind might blow the drey away. The jump across the path from tree to tree being too much for the youngsters, their mother had led the way down to the ground, ordering them all to follow her closely. Walnut, however, who had never seen a thunderstorm, and who, of course, did not realize the danger, thought it would be a fine joke to remain behind. In the hurry of the moment Sable, no doubt, never noticed until too late that he was not with the others, and when the storm broke the darkness at once became almost impenetrable.
When the hail began, Walnut, terrified almost out of his senses, wished most devoutly that he had not been such a fool, for great lumps of ice beat through the roof of the drey, and the tree swayed so frightfully that he expected every moment the whole nest would be torn away and sent flying in fragments to the ground. However, it was too late for useful repentance, so he was forced to stay where he was. Then came the final fearful crash, and he remembered nothing more until he found himself clinging desperately to a bough a long way below the drey. When the weather cleared a little he had gone across to the beech-tree, but the smoke frightened him so that he had not dared to climb.
That night we two spent amid the dripping ruins in the larch. After the great heat the night breeze struck bitter cold, and we lay chilled and shivering, though too miserable to care much one way or the other. As soon as ever it grew light we left that part of the coppice for ever. I took my son to the extreme opposite end of the wood, and there had the good luck to stumble almost immediately upon possible quarters. These were in a vast oak, the boughs of which were beginning to decay from sheer old age. In the end of one branch, broken short off by some long past gale, was a deep hole which had evidently been formerly the habitation of a pair of stock-doves, for the remains of their nest were mouldering just inside the entrance. I had no spirit to build new quarters, so with sore hearts we took possession of this shelter. Later, when I recovered my energies a little, I collected moss to line it, and made a dry and fairly comfortable residence.
Of the time that followed I will not speak. But for Walnut I should not have cared to live. As it was, I hardly took the trouble to eat, but sat and moped from day to day, until I grew thin and bony; my coat stared, and I looked like an old squirrel.
But time cures all sorrows, and happily for us, just as a squirrel’s life is shorter than a man’s, so much the more rapidly do his griefs pass away. Walnut grew from day to day, and became a strong, handsome fellow, well able to take care of himself. I was very proud and fond of him, and gradually his bright companionship did me good, and amid new scenes I began slowly to take a fresh interest in life.
Our new home was very near to the far end of the wood path, close to the other gate, which opened on to the road; the same road which ran past the Hall, across the brook, to the village beyond. As I have, I think, mentioned before, the new people at the Hall had closed this path, padlocked the gates, and posted notices forbidding anyone from using the short cut. This course caused intense dissatisfaction among the villagers, and more than once I saw a passing labourer shake his fist in silent anger as he tramped along the dusty road past the locked, iron-spiked gate.
It was not long before we began to realize the reason of this proceeding. One day the ginger-whiskered keeper appeared outside the gate with a cart loaded with coops. Unlocking the gate, he and another man carried in the coops one by one. All our curiosity aroused, Walnut and I followed cautiously, and watched them lay the coops down in an open glade, not far from our oak tree, open them, and let loose dozens of young pheasants, which scuttled about without attempting to fly, tame as so many barn-door fowls. Next came a proceeding which interested me far more. Taking two bags from the cart, the keeper proceeded to scatter a quantity of Indian corn and other food about in the grass, then, picking up the coops, he departed.
So soon as ever they were gone, down swooped Walnut and myself, and, sending the frightened young pheasants scuttling in every direction, set to work on the corn. It was nearly a year since I had tasted this delicacy, which Jack Fortescue used to give me as a treat in the old, quiet days at the Hall. The food was a godsend to us, for, as I have said, the supply of nuts, mast, and acorns, was of the shortest in our neighbourhood that season. I let my mother know, and she as well as Cob and my sister and their young ones were very soon on the spot. The pheasants got precious little of that meal, or of many subsequent ones which the keeper carefully brought day by day. However, they were not much to be pitied, for the supply of ants’ eggs was plentiful all over the coppice, and pheasants do better on ants’ eggs than on almost any artificial food they can be given.
I noticed that Rusty never troubled to come down to the pheasant food, though his wife and family of three sturdy sons regularly attended our daily free feed. I had my own suspicions, and these were confirmed when his wife told me that he was often away for whole days together. When she remonstrated with him he only laughed, and this made her seriously uneasy. Rusty had grown to be the largest and most powerful squirrel that I have ever seen in my life. No other in the wood could have stood up to him for a minute. He was also astonishingly brave and independent, and would venture across open fields for any distance.
One day he said to me:
‘Hulloa, Scud! why don’t you ever come to the Hall nowadays? I believe you’re scared. Don’t you want another taste of those cob-nuts?’
‘You don’t mean to say you go there?’ exclaimed I.
‘Of course I do. Great polecats! do you think I’ve got nothing better to do than mess about here all day picking up a few rotten grains of corn or green acorns?’
‘You ran fast enough on the day you and I got shot at,’ I retorted, rather annoyed at his insinuations.
‘A precious pair of young idiots we were!’ he returned scornfully. ‘I take jolly good care they don’t see me nowadays.’
‘How do you manage that?’
‘Why, in the first place I go at dawn, before any one is about; in the second, I don’t cut across the lawn, but round to the right of the house. Are you game to come to-morrow morning?’
A longing to see the old place once more came over me. I was also anxious to find out what Rusty was about, for I did not believe for a moment that the attraction lay in the cob-nuts. I hesitated.
‘Very well,’ said Rusty, taking my silence for consent. ‘Meet me at sun-up by the pool at the other end of the wood.’
I won’t describe how we reached the Hall, except to say that, instead of working down the road-hedge to the left, as we had done on the previous occasion, we struck boldly out down the right-hand side to the large meadow. Rusty guided me round to the home farm-buildings, which lay some quarter of a mile to the right of the Hall. The farm and rick-yards were surrounded on two sides by a stone wall, outside which was a strip of laurel shrubbery.
‘Now, you wait here,’ said Rusty with a patronizing air which I could not help resenting. ‘I’m going over the wall for my breakfast. You needn’t watch if you don’t like.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Rusty!’ exclaimed I angrily, for I thought it sheer bravado on his part. ‘There’s nothing to eat there, except the chicken grain you profess to despise.’
‘Oh! isn’t there?’ jeered my brother; and before I could say another word he had leaped on to the wall, and with another bold spring was down in the yard.
It was still very early, a bright cloudless August morning, and everything dripping with dew. The place appeared to be deserted, although from the kitchen chimney of the farm-house a slight blue smoke was rising. Climbing into the top of a laurel, I got a good view of the whole yard, and watched Rusty nimbly scuttle across towards the further buddings. Behind these he was lost to sight.
Suddenly arose the wild cackling of a frightened hen, and next moment, to my utter horror, there came Rusty round the corner of a shed, head up, as bold as brass, with a young chicken swinging by the neck between his sharp teeth. At the same moment I saw—what he failed to notice—a man, who raised his head cautiously over the half-door of a cowshed on the far side of the yard, and the level rays of the rising sun glinting on the barrels of a gun. I gave one sharp bark of warning. Too late! A puff of smoke sprang from the muzzle, the heavy report sent the sparrows up in a chattering cloud, and of my brother no more remained than a little red rag of broken fur stretched on the cobbles which paved the yard.
I suppose the man with the gun could not have heard my attempted warning. If he had, nothing could have saved me, for I was too horror-stricken for the moment to move at all. I sat like a stuffed squirrel and watched him walk across to where Rusty lay. ‘Well, I never would ha’ believed it!’ he said wonderingly, holding the small bunch of mangled fur out at arm’s length. ‘If one of them chicks has gone I’ve lost a dozen; and to think it was this here little red rascal!’ He turned and called loudly, ‘Jim, bring me a hammer and a nail.’
A tousle-headed boy came out of the back door of the farm-house with the required implements. The man took the hammer, and deliberately nailed the dead body of my brother against the tarred wooden wall of one of the barns. ‘You’ll do for a warning,’ he remarked grimly as he turned away. And, sick at heart, I dropped out of sight and made the best of my way back to the coppice.
Such was the end of the strongest and bravest squirrel whom I ever knew. You must not imagine for one moment that such a crime as he was guilty of is a common one among squirrels. It is, indeed, very rare for one of our family to take to a carnivorous diet, but when he does fall into such a habit he never abandons it. They say that there is a kind of parrot in New Zealand, called the kea, which in old days, before sheep were imported into the islands, lived entirely upon seeds and insects. But the bird found it was easier to pick at the raw skins of newly-killed sheep, hung out on the fences, than to hunt food for itself; and, once it acquired a taste for blood, there was no more caterpillar-hunting for the kea! Next thing the shepherds knew, sheep were found dying or dead all over the ranges, the fat above the kidneys torn out by the powerful hooked beak of this goblin bird. Now the Government has set a price upon the head of the kea, and the outlaw lives a proscribed and hunted life.
Far be it from the squirrels that, as a race, they should take to the evil habit of flesh eating. But from time immemorial a few in each generation have begun with devouring birds’ eggs; from that gone on to eating young hedge-sparrows, redstarts, and the like; and finally, like my poor brother, taken to larger game, such as young pheasants, ducks, or chickens. But they seldom have the chance of long continuing such raids, for, unlike foxes, rats, polecats, and other enemies of the poultry yard, they do not hunt by night, but boldly in broad daylight. Consequently they almost inevitably meet fate in the shape of a charge of lead.
‘AND TO THINK IT WAS THIS HERE LITTLE RED RASCAL’
Whether the man who shot Rusty told the story to the ginger-whiskered keeper, or whether the latter himself surprised some of us feasting on his pheasant food in the coppice I do not know, but from that very day dated the war against the squirrels on the Hall estate.
That same afternoon, having discharged the unpleasant duty of telling poor Rusty’s widow of the sad event of the morning, I was roaming sadly about our oak-tree, searching under the bark for the insects which inhabited the rotten wood, when I heard a gun fired twice at the other end of the coppice. At first I hardly moved, for I took it that the keeper was merely killing a weasel or some such vermin. But when two more shots followed quickly, and immediately afterwards the vicious crack, crack of a lighter weapon, I was amazed, for, like all other woodland dwellers, I was perfectly well aware that the shooting season had not yet commenced. When the double barrel spoke again, and this time nearer, I called Walnut, who was up in the top branches, and together we took hasty refuge in our hole.
We had not been there five minutes before there came a quick scuttering of claws up the rough bark, and simultaneously the tramping of heavy feet through the bracken at a little distance.
I was moving to the entrance to find out what was going on when something fairly shot into the hole, knocking me back to its farthest end. When I had picked myself up, there was Cob lying panting, almost too much exhausted to speak.
‘They’re after us, Scud!’ he gasped at last.
‘Who? What?’
‘The keeper and a boy. They’ve shot three of us already, and I’m frightened to death about Hazel. I was away from home and couldn’t get back. I saw three dead bodies.’
Here a gruff human voice broke in from below.
‘Where’s the dratted little beggar got to? I seed him jump into this here oak. He can’t be far off.’
‘He’s sure to be in one of the holes in the trunk,’ replied more sharply pitched tones which I recognized at once as those of the high-collared boy whose mark I still bore in the shape of a shot hole in one ear. ‘Climb up, Tompkins, and see.’
‘Climb! Thank’ee, sir. I wasn’t engaged to break my neck climbing trees—not at my age. Tell you what, sir. I’ll go on with the gun. You can wait here quietly, and after a bit he’s sure to come out, and then you can shoot him.’
‘All right,’ answered the boy, and we plainly heard Tompkins stamping off. Cob was crazy to get away and go in search of his wife and family, but the boy below, who had about as much idea of woodcraft as a frog has of flying, made such a noise moving from one foot to the other, breathing hard and shifting his rifle about, that even a hedgehog would have known better than to take the chances of showing himself.
His patience was about on a par with his other performances, for in less than five minutes he became tired of waiting, and moved off after the keeper.
But we heard no more shots. Bad news spreads like magic in a wood, and by this time every squirrel of the forty or fifty who inhabited our coppice was snug under cover, and it would have taken better eyes than those of Ginger or his young friend to find us. After another half hour or so we heard the far gate slam to, and knew that danger was over—at least, for the present. Then Cob went off as hard as his legs would carry him, and later on I was delighted to hear that he had found Hazel and his two young ones quite safe and unhurt.
To say that we were furious at this wanton massacre is to put our feelings very mildly. From time out of mind the lives of the squirrels on the Hall estate had been sacred, and except when trespassing louts—such as those who had caused the death of my father—had attacked us we had lived safe and happy from one generation to another.
As a race, we squirrels are very conservative and home loving. So long as we are not molested, the same families and their children remain in the same wood year after year, never emigrating unless driven to do so by over-population or lack of food. If, on the other hand, the squirrels in any particular locality are regularly persecuted by man, always their worst enemy, the survivors will very soon clear out completely. There are to-day whole tracts of beautiful beech woods in Buckinghamshire, where, though food is perhaps as plentiful as anywhere else in England, yet hardly a squirrel is to be seen. Our race has been so harried that they have left altogether. Modern high preserving is what we unlucky squirrels cannot stand. Where the owner’s one idea is to get as large a head of pheasants as the coverts can possibly carry, every other woodland creature goes to the wall, and the keepers shoot us down as mercilessly as they kill kestrels, owls, jays, hedgehogs, and a dozen other harmless birds and beasts.
Very soon it became clear that the new tenant of the Hall had declared war against us. The pheasants, of which an immense number had been turned down, were his only care. He used to come and strut about while Tompkins was feeding them. As Walnut said, he only needed a long tail and a few feathers to resemble exactly a stupid old, stuck-up cock-pheasant himself.
Again and again during that August Tompkins with his twelve bore, and the band-box boy with a small repeating rifle, invaded the wood and fired indiscriminately at every squirrel they could set eyes on. But, as you may imagine, we very soon learnt caution, and when news of their approach was signalled from tree to tree, every squirrel in the coppice took instant cover. Still, our enemies occasionally succeeded in cutting off one of our number in some tree where total concealment was impossible, and then the cruel little brute of a boy would make him a target for his tiny bullets, often inflicting half a dozen wounds before a vital spot was struck. Then at last the tightly-clutching claws would slowly relax, and the poor, bleeding little body come thudding down from bough to bough, to be pounced on by the young murderer with a yell of fiendish glee.
In those days I kept Walnut very close at home. Except at dawn or just before dusk we never ventured far from cover, with the result that neither was ever shot at. It was uncommonly lucky for us that this was the time of most plentiful food, for otherwise, being afraid to roam far in search of provender, we must often have gone hungry. But though, as I have already mentioned, the early drought had caused a famine in nuts, acorns, and mast, yet there was plenty else to eat. It was as wet now as it had been dry in the earlier part of the year, and the steamy heat had produced amazing crops of mushrooms and other fungi. The hedgerows, too, which before the rain had looked thin and brown, were now full of rank, new growth, while as for insects of all kinds, they fairly swarmed. On the pheasant food, too, we levied regular toll. In any case, the fool of a keeper threw down twice as much as the birds cared to eat.
In those days our enemy was busy with other weapons beside the gun. Men were constantly at work lopping the underbrush to keep the rides open, while much spading went on to clear the water-logged ditches.
September was three parts gone, and the pheasants were nearly full grown, but as yet so tame that they had almost to be kicked before they would use their wings. They were still fed in the small glade close below the oak, when Walnut and I, peeping out cautiously from the end of the hollow branch, would watch our enemy with the ginger whiskers strewing the wheat, and then, as soon as he was safely out of the gate, make a wild rush down and eat our fill. Pheasants are quite the most utter fools of any birds that I know. With their great weight and strong beaks we could have done nothing to resist had they chosen to attack us when we raided their larder. But this never seemed to occur to them. You have only to look very fierce and rush at him for the largest cock-pheasant to run for dear life.
More often than before, the new master of the Hall began to accompany his keeper and watch the feeding process. Great hazel-sticks! the man was as fussy as a hen with ducklings.
However, there’s many a slip ’twixt the nut and the teeth, and our pompous friend was not destined to have things all his own way after all.
