CHAPTER X
POACHERS AND A BATTUE
One still night about ten days before the end of September, Walnut and I were roused by a light which, flashing across the opening to our retreat, was reflected into our eyes. It passed immediately, but not before we were both broad awake.
Several men were trampling about close underneath the oak.
‘Lie still, Walnut,’ I ordered uneasily, for this was something new to me. I had never before heard men moving in the wood so late at night, and I was at first inclined to think that there might be some new plot of Tompkins or his satellites a-foot. Very cautiously I peered out. There was a young moon somewhere behind the soft veil of cloud, which covered the sky so that it was not too dark to see the figures of three men moving cautiously across the glade in which the pheasants fed. One carried a dark lantern, the tiny beam of light from which was what had roused us the moment before.
‘They’ll be in them young beeches,’ said one in a hoarse whisper. ‘There ain’t any in the oak.’
I saw them all three move cautiously across into a clump of young beeches which stood just across the glade. There they stopped, and the lantern was flashed upwards into the low branches, its light gleaming golden upon the yellowing leaves. A slight rustle followed, and a voice muttered:
‘I sees ’em. Shut the lantern an’ help me fix the smudge.’
The three now stooped together on the ground and appeared to be gathering dry leaves and heaping them together in a little pile. Presently I heard the faint scratching of a match, and a small blue flame illuminated three eager faces. Two of them were men whom I had never seen before; the third I recognized as a labourer whom I had more than once watched shake his fist fiercely as he passed the locked gate of the coppice.
The man who held the match touched it to the leaves, but before they could burst into bright flame the two others penned the little fire by holding a couple of sacks round it.
One of the men threw a handful of powder over the fire which at once choked it down, making it burn with a sickly blue flame. Then they all three stood perfectly still, hiding the fire with their sacks, but keeping their heads turned as far as possible away from the smoke which went wreathing up in thick columns into the foliage above them.
Before many moments had passed there came a slight whirr, the sound of wings beating on leaves, and with a flop, down fell a great pheasant almost on the heads of the watchers. Quick as a cat, one of the men reached out one arm, seized the bird, and wrung its neck. He had hardly done so when there was another rustle and thud, and a second of our oppressor’s pets shared the fate of the first.
It was evident that from the stuff they put in the flame there arose poisonous fumes that stupefied the roosting birds.
Very soon even we could smell the noisome stuff, and Walnut wrinkled up his nose in disgust. Even a human being, let alone a squirrel, whose sense of smell is fifty times more acute, could easily have perceived it.
A SMALL BLUE FLAME ILLUMINATED THREE EAGER FACES.
Presently the poachers lifted up the whole fire, which we now saw had been built upon a small square of sheet-iron, and removed it bodily to a fresh spot, under another tree. Here no fewer than four pheasants were secured one after another, and then the fire was moved again. So they went on for two hours or more, working round and round the glade. As nearly all the pheasants roosted in this part of the coppice there was no need to go further afield. At last, when their sack was fairly bulging with dead game, they took their departure.
Twice during the next three nights did the gang of poachers return, and each time went home with a score or more of long-tails. Tompkins at last began to miss his birds at feeding-time, and to suspect that something was wrong. Walnut and I sat secure in our retreat overhead, and jeered at the man’s utter stupidity. Why, even if he had no nose for the brimstone, of which the whole place fairly reeked, there were great footprints all over the place telling their story in large type to anyone who had eyes! Yet the keeper absolutely walked over them without looking at them. The very idea of poachers never seemed to occur to him. I verily believe he thought that we had something to do with the disappearance of his precious pheasants, for as he left the coppice he fired at and killed a poor young cousin of ours.
The leaves had begun to fall once more, when one day the pompous little fat man accompanied Tompkins through the coppice. They stopped in the glade below us, and it was evident the new tenant was uneasy. He began peering and pointing, and questioning the keeper as if he were only half satisfied.
‘Oh, they’re all right, sir,’ replied the keeper hastily, in answer to his questions. ‘You see, sir, they’ve got so big now they don’t need the grain. They’re round in the bracken finding their own feed.’
The master swallowed his story like a thrush swallowing a worm. Indeed, he was evidently rather pleased, for he thought the birds would be wild and strong on the wing for next day.
That same night I was wakened by gunshots. Never before had I heard a gun fired at night, and the sound was most alarming. I thought at first that the firing was at a distance, but just as I looked out the darkness was lit by a flash quite close at hand. The report was, however, strangely slight. As a matter of fact, the guns were loaded with reduced charges.
Immediately at the report down flopped a pheasant to the ground. The poacher gang were at work, and as time was short were shooting the pheasants as they roosted. Pop, pop, pop! The pheasants were falling at the rate of one a minute. There would be very few left for our stout friend at the Hall and his swell city friends next day. Two sacks were full.
‘Just a dozen more,’ we heard one of them say.
‘Right oh!’ answered another. He spoke out loud, for by this time the gang had been so long undisturbed that they had become quite reckless, and neglected the precautions which they had at first observed.
The words were hardly out of his mouth before there was a sudden rush of feet, and there came the keeper, his son, another man, and the fourth was no other than the new tenant himself.
Ginger recklessly rushed forward shouting. Next instant a gun cracked—I never saw who fired the shot—and Ginger, with a hideous yell, fell forward on his face, and lay twitching in a horrid fashion on the ground.
I saw Ginger’s son charge forward, swinging his stick, with the other man close behind him. I saw the poachers run for their lives, leaving the spoil behind them. But what was the new Squire about? He never budged, but stood there like a stuck pig; and even in the dim light it was easy to see his legs quaking and the shivers that shook his podgy frame.
Not until poachers and pursuers had vanished through the trees, and the crashing sound of their running feet had almost died in the distance, did the cowardly little man move slowly up to where his keeper lay.
‘Are—you—much—hurt, Tompkins?’ he stammered, in shaking accents.
Tompkins only groaned, and the stout man, kneeling beside him, fairly wrung his hands in hopeless incompetency. At last he seemed to remember something, and pulling out a flask from his pocket, put it to Tompkins’s lips just as the keeper’s son and the other man returned empty-handed.
The new Squire turned on them, storming at them for having allowed the poachers to escape, without seeming to heed the fact that his keeper still lay unconscious at his feet. He stamped and swore and almost shrieked in his impotent anger. Presently his son and the other man hoisted up Tompkins, who seemed to have got the charge in his legs, and between them carried him off, the little stout man stalking growling along in the rear. Then, at last, Walnut and I were left to get some sleep.
However, there was no peace for us. By ten o’clock next day the coppice was full of beaters, making noise enough to rouse a dormouse, and scaring the remaining pheasants nearly out of their feathers. Instead of running or hiding, the silly birds immediately rose and flew up over the trees, and then began such a salvo of firing as none of us had ever heard in our lives before. The whole coppice was full of the sharp, sour smell of smokeless powder, and as for us and the other coppice dwellers, we cowered in the very deepest corners of our various refuges, and waited with shaking bodies and aching heads for the din to cease. At last it did stop, but only to break out afresh at the next spinney, and so on all day round the whole country-side.
In the afternoon, after it was all over, and just as Walnut and I were starting out to find our evening meal, there came a fresh invasion. It was headed by the stout new tenant, gorgeously arrayed in a check shooting suit, which in itself was enough to scare any self-respecting squirrel out of his wits, and with him walked five others like unto himself. He was evidently giving them all an account, a glorified account, of what had happened. By the way he pointed and ran a few steps, and let fly with his fist, it seemed as if he personally must have killed the whole gang of poachers, and they all listened attentively, though one or two laughed behind his back.
I learnt afterwards from Cob that he had seen a man going about with the sacks full of dead pheasants the poachers had dropped. He had scattered them here and there throughout the wood. This had puzzled him much, and he had watched to see if they were left there; but, no; when the shoot was over the pheasants were picked up again with those that had really been shot by the guests, and in this way they made up quite a big bag.
All this poaching business does not seem to have much to do with my life. Indirectly, however, it had, for the new tenant of the Hall was so angry about the poaching that on the very day after the battue he set a whole gang to work to run barbed wire—of all awful things!—round the whole of the coppice. Other men were put to lop the hedges close, and two new keepers engaged. The latter were worse than Tompkins. I suppose it was by way of justifying their existence that they walked about all day with their guns, firing at almost everything they could see that was not game. It became almost impossible to show our noses outside our homes during daylight, and many an evening Walnut and I went hungry to bed. Life became one prolonged dodging, for even when the new keepers were not about the workmen would take pot shots with stones at any of us they could view. Incidentally, too, they knocked over many a fat rabbit and dozens of the remaining pheasants. But of these proceedings their employer, intent on saving his coverts from the village poachers, remained in blissful ignorance.
At last there came a crisis. Walnut and I had taken advantage of the quiet of the midday hour—the men being at their dinner—to steal out and get some beech-mast, when suddenly a missile of some sort hissed just above my head, cutting away a twig close above. I paused an instant in utter amazement, for I had heard no report, when—ping! another bullet whacked on the bark close below my feet, and there was a brute of a boy in corduroys, his head peering from behind a trunk, and in the very act of stretching the elastic of a heavy catapult. One quick bark to Walnut, and we were both away as hard as we could lay legs to the branches. A third buckshot whizzed close behind my brush as I fled. The boy, seeing us run, at once followed and began positively showering shot after us. It was impossible to reach home under the bombardment, and if we had not been lucky enough to find a knot-hole in a beech just large enough to shelter the two of us, one or other—both, perhaps—would have been maimed or killed.
This was the last straw. For some days a vague resolution had been forming slowly in my brain. That night, as we crouched, almost too hungry to sleep, in our oak-tree home, I told Walnut we could stay there no longer, but must leave the coppice where we had so long sheltered.
He seemed rather to like the idea than otherwise, being young and ready for adventure.
Very early next morning I slipped across to the old beech and told my mother. I was anxious that she and the others should accompany us, but this she would not do.
‘No, Scud; I am too old to leave my home. I shall stay here and take my chances. But you, I think, are wise to go. Waste no time in getting off, for you must be well away before the men come to their work.’
A few minutes later Walnut and I had crossed the road and were hastening away across an open field bound due north. We went that way because we could go no other—a squirrel migrating invariably travels north. I do not know the reason, but some instinct implanted in us ages and ages ago, perhaps even before men began to walk erect, tells us to do so, and we obey it, and shall obey it, thousands of years hence. In just the same way the Norwegian lemmings march in their myriads towards the sea, and are drowned in the salt waves in a vain, instinctive effort to reach some place that has long disappeared beneath the waves.
I cannot tell you all our wanderings or the perils that we encountered by the way. Twice Walnut was very nearly caught by a weasel; once a wide-winged hen sparrow-hawk came whistling down out of the blue as we were crossing an open field, and we escaped only by a happy accident into an old drain-tile which happened to lie near by. In this narrow refuge we both squeezed our trembling bodies until the bird of prey had departed in disgust.
We travelled very slowly, stopping sometimes for a whole day in any coppice in which we happened to find ourselves. Several times we almost made up our minds to remain for good in one or other of these woods, but always the same difficulty stood in our way. The scarcity of food was universal. All the country-side had suffered alike from the great drought of the early summer, and mast, acorns, and nuts alike were conspicuous by their absence. As far as the present went, we did well enough. In autumn a squirrel can always find food of some kind or another.
The love of wandering was like a fever. In the course of a week or so we two had become regular vagabonds. There was an absolute fascination in new scenes each day and new quarters each night; and, feeling that we had cut ourselves off for ever from all our ties, there seemed no special object in stopping anywhere in particular.
And yet at times I was anxious. I knew well enough that winter was coming, and that we must settle down and find a home and collect stores before the cold weather.
There came a morning when the sky was full of high wind cloud, but the air so clear that distant objects seemed but a few fields away, and, leaving a small fir-plantation on the flank of a hill where we had spent the night, we looked down upon a deep valley, along the bottom of which was a long line of timber, wide in some places, narrow in others. Between the thinning autumn foliage one caught here and there the sparkle of running water. A mile or more down the valley, and on the far side of the river, a large old-fashioned house, that vaguely reminded me of the Hall, lay against the steep side of the opposite slope, with gardens terraced to the water-edge.
The wood behind it was all that we could have hoped, and more. Ancient trees of enormous girth and size grew so thick and close that the sun seldom if ever reached the thickets of undergrowth beneath their spreading tops. Hardly a sign was to be seen of the interfering hand of man, and though the place was full of wild life—rabbits, wood-pigeons, and the like—pheasants were conspicuous by their absence. A peculiarity of the wood, no doubt on account of its damp, sheltered position, was the immense amount of ivy which covered the massive trunks with clinging tendrils and dark green leaves. There was food too, for the oaks whose roots no doubt penetrated far below the level of the stream, had a fair crop of acorns, and, better still, there were hazel-bushes close along the water’s edge which were still fairly full of ripe nuts. The place was a perfect Paradise from a squirrel’s point of view, and my half-joking suggestion of spending the winter in it speedily became a fixed idea.
The first thing to do was to find a residence. This was an easy task, for there were dozens to choose from. Walnut was very keen upon an old magpie’s nest which he found in a huge thorn-tree, and which was still in excellent repair even to the roof; but I had had enough of built nests, and preferred a knot-hole in a beech. Once a squirrel takes to living in holes in trees, he usually sticks to the same description of residence to the end of his days.
One fact which struck me as odd during our first day’s exploration of the river-side wood was the almost entire absence of our own tribe. We only saw two squirrels besides ourselves, and they were young and anything but friendly. In fact, they both bolted before we could have a word with them.
It was the drumming of heavy rain among the dying foliage above that woke us at daylight next morning. The sky was one uniform grey, and everything was soaking and dripping. We had reason indeed to be thankful that we had found a warm dry home, for this weather looked like lasting.
Last it did, all day long, and as there was nothing else to do we curled up and slept. Evening came, and still it rained—harder if anything than before. It was too wet to go out and forage, and so we went hungry to bed. It is a fortunate dispensation that we squirrel folk can go for long periods without food if we can find a dry place to sleep in, for I have seldom known a squirrel who would not sooner be hungry than wet.
Next morning it was still raining, though not so hard. Large pools lay in every depression, and the hoarse roar of the swollen river echoed through the soaking woods. Rain had now been falling for thirty-six hours straight on end, and we had been all that time without a meal.
Walnut told me he was simply starving, and must go out and find a few acorns.
I let him go, but, being sleepy, I did not accompany him.
I was not at all uneasy about him, for the wood seemed safe enough, and Walnut, now more than six months old, was well able to take care of himself. As for me, I drowsed until about midday, and then looking out again found that the downpour had at last ceased and the sun was shining once more. I missed Walnut, for I was so much accustomed to his nestling beside me; and, stretching lazily, I sallied forth to look for him, stepping daintily along the soaking boughs in order to avoid bringing down upon myself the great drops of moisture which hung on every yellowing leaf. I made straight for the hazel-bushes, which we had found on the first day near to the water’s edge; but when I came in sight of the river I could hardly believe my eyes, so tremendous a change had the great rain wrought. In place of the shallow stream that purled across pebble beds from pool to pool, a broad torrent, red with the clay of the upland fields, was raging down with appalling force and fury. Even where the banks had been highest the flood was level with their tops, and in many places it had overflowed them so that the nut-bushes stood up like islands among wide backwaters where the current eddied lazily, swinging on its discoloured surface millions of dead leaves and sticks.
The sight fairly fascinated me, and for the moment I forgot my hunger, Walnut, and everything else in watching the irresistible force of the rushing torrent and noticing the speed at which the logs and sticks which it had tom from its banks were carried downwards.
ANOTHER MOMENT FOUND ME COMFORTABLY PERCHED IN THE BRANCHES OF THE HAZEL-BUSHES.
But hunger soon reasserted its claims, and I began to reconnoitre for the best means of reaching the nut-bushes and breakfast. A little further down the stream a low, flat-topped oak extended its spreading branches more than half-way across the flooded river, and I saw that from the point of one of its long limbs it would be easy to drop into a good-sized clump of hazel-bush below. No sooner seen than done, and another minute found me comfortably perched in the branches of the hazel-bushes cracking nuts and eating them with a naturally fine appetite sharpened by forty hours abstinence.
That I was on an island completely cut off on all sides by water troubled me not at all. I was much too hungry to worry about that, for I felt sure that I could jump back on to my oak bough, which formed a bridge to bring me back to land again, and so I worked steadily downwards from branch to branch.
I was only a foot or two from the ground when a rustle among the thick, mossy stumps below attracted my attention. Glancing down, the sight that met my eyes almost paralysed me with horror.
