Part 3 (1/2)
That same that runnith a awaie Againe maie fighte ane other daie.
The well-known cunning of the fox is shewn in the following:-A favourite ”find” for many yeans has been Thornton Wood, some three miles from Woodhall Spa; and a frequent line for the fox to take was (and is) from that covert to Holme Wood, near Scrivelsby. To accomplish this the Horncastle Ca.n.a.l and the small river Bain have to be crossed. The writer, as a boy, has swum the ca.n.a.l on his pony, at the tail of the pack; but usually riders have to make a detour by a bridge, between the first and second locks on the ca.n.a.l. During the intervals of ten minutes or a quarter of an hour required for this, the hounds are left to themselves. It happened on two or three occasions that in this interval the scent suddenly failed, and the fox was lost; casts were made up and down the river, but without success. On one occasion, a labourer, working in the gra.s.s field between the ca.n.a.l and the Bain, saw the fox cross the ca.n.a.l by the lock doors, over which there was a narrow plank-bridge for foot-pa.s.sengers. It then made across the field for the Bain. He saw it pa.s.s out of sight down the banks of the river, close by a willow tree, overhanging the water; but it did not emerge on the other side. With the lack of quick wit, characteristic of the clod-hopper, it did not occur to him to mention this at the time. He told it, however, afterwards to his master, a hunting man; and, on a subsequent occasion, when the same incident occurred again, one of the whips dismounted and went into the water, and, poking about the roots of the willows, dislodged Reynard, concealed under the hollow bank, and immersed under water, except his nose and mouth, by which he was hanging suspended from a fang of the tree roots. Surely Reynard's clever ruse deserved a better fate than the death which speedily followed.
The following incident occurred under my own observation. I was out shooting in Woodhall. In a certain field I had put up a hare, which went away, without a shot. Pa.s.sing, in due course, to the next field, I observed an object sitting, so far as I could make out, in a crouching position, in the middle of the field, and it looked in the distance like a man. I proceeded towards it, and soon perceived that it was a fox, sitting up on his hindquarters. At this moment a hare, presumably that which I had put up just before, entered the field and cantered leisurely in the direction of the fox. As sportsmen are aware, the hare, though able to see behind it, or on either side, does not, from the peculiar position of the eyes, see so well straight in front. In this case, the hare never perceived the fox until it was within a few feet of it; whereupon it stopped short, and the two sat up facing each other, evidently mutually fascinated, as the bird is said to be by the snake.
They thus remained motionless, or powerless to move, for some minutes, until my nearer approach attracted their attention and broke the spell, whereupon they both bounded off in different directions. This, I am told by an authority, was a case of neurasthenia, or nerve-paralysis. A not quite similar occurrence was recorded some little time ago. A farmer saw a pheasant go to roost in a tree, standing alone in the field. Presently he saw a fox approach, go to the tree, and look up at the pheasant.
After pausing for a moment, regarding the bird, he proceeded to run rapidly round the tree in a narrow circle. This he did for some time, continuing his circuit without intermission; when, to the farmer's astonishment, the pheasant fell from its roost, and before it reached the ground was seized by the fox, who went off with his prey to a neighbouring plantation. This would seem to have been a case of hypnotism, rather than neurasthenia. The bird was mesmerised, or made giddy, by the fox's circular motion, and literally fell into the operator's arms.-(”Spectator,” January, 1898). The writer, when travelling in Germany, once met a German gentleman, who had visited country houses in England, and had conceived a great admiration for the English sport of fox-hunting. ”Ah,” he said, ”we have nothing like it in Germany. It is a grand inst.i.tution. It makes you good hors.e.m.e.n, good soldiers, good judges of country and distance.” To those who would object to fox-hunting on the score of its cruelty, I would quote words used at a church congress, by Colonel Hornby, master of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. Speaking on ”The Ethics of Amus.e.m.e.nts,” he said: ”The exercise of hunting is productive of the most beneficial effects on both mind and body. There could be no hunting without suffering to the animal hunted, but this was greatly exaggerated. These animals were born to be hunted by other wild animals; we had destroyed the latter, and our hunting was more merciful. The pain inflicted was no equivalent to the pleasure afforded to hounds and horses, leaving men out of the question.
The true lover of sport was a lover of mercy as well. Every sportsman, in the true sense of the word, did all in his power to lessen the suffering.”-Quoted, ”Guardian,” Oct. 17, 1894, p. 1,620.
The days are gone by when gentlemen ”of the cloth” were common in the hunting field. Yet I have known some of the hardest working clergymen, and the most sincere, earnest Christians, who saw no excessive cruelty in the chase. We have no ”Jack Russels” among us now; the last of the type who lived in our neighbourhood found a dead fox in his pulpit, when he ascended it to preach his sermon one Sunday morning; and though he did not deliver a funeral oration over it, it was said that he buried it with as much loving reverence and genuine grief, as if it had been a Christian paris.h.i.+oner.
A meet of the foxhounds at that favourite tryst, the ”Tower on the Moor,”
near to Woodhall Spa, presents a pretty and lively scene. Besides the red-coated sportsman, there are riders, with horses of every degree, from the barebacked, or rudely saddled ”screw,” to the 100 guinea or 200 guinea hunter; and from the ”weedy” hack to the long, elastic-legged animal of racing blood. There are numerous vehicles, two-wheeled and four-wheeled, with their varied occupants, from the butcher's light cart to the phaeton or the drag. There are numbers on foot, of both s.e.xes; some of the men, staid of mein and beyond middle life, have already walked their miles; townsmen, for once, breaking away from their trade, or their business, and bent once more on breathing the fresh air on the heather, and listening again to the ”echoing horn,” as it vibrates through the woods. There are ladies, on horseback, eager for the burst across country ”in the first flight”; there are ladies on cycles, not yet arrived at the degree of perfection to enable the fair riders to take a ”bee-line,” but yet, from the speed attainable, able to make rapid detours, and if they study the wind, and are familiar with the ”lay” of the country, likely to see almost as much of the sport as the best-mounted. All are bent on the healthy enjoyment of this thoroughly English pastime. Their thoughts might find echo in the old hunting song,
Tally-ho! Tally-ho!
Let the foreigner know We are Englishmen: so, Tally-ho! Tally-ho!
And who shall say that the pleasure is confined to them? Someone has said: ”The horses enjoy it, the hounds enjoy it, and no one can say from experience that the fox does not enjoy it as well.” Then comes the M.F.H., with his beauties, all in ”the pink” of condition. A moment's delay for pleasant greetings between all and sundry, and the hounds are quickly thrown in for business; their tails, and little more, wave above the long ling and the tall bracken. The whips gallop to their points of observation. Presently a whimper or two is heard; then the deeper tone of an old hound takes it up; the rest rally about him, and soon the whole pack join in full chorus. A halloo is heard from a ride, as the fox crosses it; a distant hat is held up to show the line he is taking in the cover, and then a more distant shout of ”gone away,” and the whole field are off, helter skelter, as though riding for their lives, _sauve qui peut_. Such are ”the pleasures of the chase,” for which we are indebted to the Little Red Rover: ”The sport of kings, the image of war, without its guilt.” (Somerville, ”The Chase,” Book I.)
The neighbourhood of Woodhall combines lands of a wild unreclaimed nature, such as the Ostler Ground and other moorlands, in the parishes of Thornton, Martin, Roughton, Kirkby and Tattershall, and closely contiguous, and even mixed up with these, lands which are in an advanced state of cultivation. I have already mentioned a tract of waste, boggy ground, lying between the Tower on the Moor and Bracken Wood, formerly the haunt of wild fowl, and still called ”The Bogs Neuk.” The origin of this ground was probably the following:-The old antiquary, Leland, writing of ”The Tower,” {61} says, ”one of the Cromwelles builded a pretty turret, caullid the Tower on the Moore, and thereby he made a faire greate pond or lake, bricked about. The lake is commonly called the Synkker.” This ”lake,” and all trace of it, have entirely disappeared; but it is probable that the decay of its ”bricked” walls, or of whatever the environment may really have been, led to the escape of the water, and the creation of the tract of swamp, which remained until recent years. Similarly the Ostler Ground was, within the writer's recollection, a much wilder tract, and its woods more extensive than at present. Some 300 acres of wood were destroyed by fire, through accident, about the year 1847. This happened at night, and, seen from a distance, it looked like a vast American prairie conflagration, the heavens being tinged with a lurid light far and wide. At that time the plantations opposite the Tower were of Scotch fir, so dense that the rays of the sun could scarcely penetrate. The roads, as I have previously stated, were little more than cart tracts, often s.h.i.+fting; and the whole tract was almost as little frequented, or disturbed, as if it had been in the heart of the Black Forest of Germany. In the centre of this wild were two or three fields belonging to another property, {62a} where roamed a herd of small, s.h.a.ggy cattle, which, shut out as they were from the rest of the world, became almost wild; and when, on occasions, the foxhounds penetrated to their haunts, they frantically broke through all bounds, and for some days afterwards would be found scattered about the open country around. This tract of wood and moor has been for many years the prettiest bit of wild shooting anywhere in this neighbourhood for many miles round. There is not, at the present time, anything like the amount of game upon it which was to be found only a few years ago; drainage and several very dry seasons, as also two or three accidental fires, having killed much of the ling, and reduced very considerably the amount of cover. Still, to the genuine sportsman who thinks more of a varied bag than of the slaughter of numbers, it affords great attractions, and the writer has enjoyed many a happy day of healthy relaxation, with dog and gun, upon it. {62b} The variety of birds now, or formerly, to be seen, have been described already. The ground game upon it now, apart from the fox, are the hares and rabbits; of these I shall speak more at length presently. If the Moor ground has afforded fair sport of a wild and varied character, the shooting in the adjoining domain of Kirkstead, in hares and partridges, has been also much superior to the rest of the neighbourhood, with the one exception of Tattershall, which has been nearly as good. On one occasion, being one of a party of five, the writer was stationed at the north-east corner of ”The Arbours Wood,” in Kirkstead, to shoot the hares which pa.s.sed that point, while the rest of the sportsmen walked the wood with the beaters. In the s.p.a.ce of about one hour and a quarter, without moving from his position, he shot 56 hares. At one moment he had 16 hares lying dead before him; and he could have shot many more, but that, from the rapid firing, his gun barrels became, at times, so hot that he was afraid to load, and the hares were allowed to pa.s.s him, and escape unmolested. {63}
We occasionally find on the Ostler Ground an unusual hybrid between hare and rabbit, a notice of which may be of some interest to the naturalist.
As its occurrence has led to a good deal of correspondence, I will give here a summary of the observations made upon it as they were stated by me at a meeting of the Lincolns.h.i.+re Naturalists' Union. Among other persons who made enquiry about it was Mr. Walter Heape, of Cambridge, who has made the subject of hybrids a special study. He asked my reasons for supposing the animal to be such a cross. My reply was as follows:-
(1) The animal is the size of a hare.
(2) Its fur is the rabbit grey.
(3) The head is the shorter, and the ears the more p.r.i.c.ked and shorter, of the rabbit.
(4) One which I shot at, and missed in the ling, bolted straight for a hole, as though accustomed to it, and I never knew a hare to go to ground in that ready way.
(5) A tradition has long attached to the Moor that the hare and rabbit do occasionally inter-breed.
Mr. Heape replied:-”I am aware that many naturalists deny that hares and rabbits will breed together. I am not, however, myself of that opinion, but I never had satisfactory proof of such a cross occurring.” Further enquiry led to the following facts:-In the year 1773 the Abbe Domenico Gagliari got two litters from a female hare by a male rabbit. Richard Thursfield also got hybrid's of these two species. M. Roux, in 1847, established a breed of ”Leporides” in Angonleme, where he bred largely hybrids of hares and rabbits, and these hybrids were fertile with both parent species and among themselves. Baron de Gleichen states that at Hoching, Canton de la Prusse, Polonaise, hybrids of hare (female), and rabbits (male) are generally known. He says, however, that M. Brocca, the French savant, states that there are anatomical differences between hare and rabbit which make it, antecedently, improbable that they should inter-breed. I have myself shot three of these hybrids on the Ostler Ground, and have one of them stuffed. In the year 1897 Sir Henry Hawley shot a similar specimen in Haltham Wood, some five miles from Woodhall; more recently (Oct. 4th, 1898), the Rev. C. E. Chapman, then rector of Scrivelsby, shot another in New York Fen; one was occasionally seen on the Ostler Ground in 1898, and one was mentioned in ”Land and Water,”
March 5, 1892, as having been shot on the Moors, at Parkend, in Northumberland. I may add that a cross between a rabbit and guinea pig is in the possession of a person at Horncastle; and I have lately heard of a cross between black game and the capercailzie in Scotland. But the following somewhat a.n.a.logous cases have created special interest.
Professor Ewart, of Edinburgh, has bred a cross between a male Berch.e.l.l's zebra and a mare pony, of the Isle of Rum breed, half wild, lent for the experiment by Lord Arthur Cecil. The pony was jet black; the foal resulting, except over the hind quarters, had as many stripes as the zebra sire, the stripes being fawn colour, with background nearly black.
In form it closely resembled a well-bred foal. As another interesting case of a similar kind, Lord Morton has bred a cross between a male quagga and a nearly pure-bred Arab mare; and Lord Tankerville has, more than once, bred a cross between the famous wild Chillingham bull (Bos Urus Primigenius) and a shorthorn cow.
An interesting variety of the hare is also found in Woodhall and the neighbourhood. This is the albino or white hare. Some 30 or more years ago one was frequently seen in the parishes of Langton and Woodhall, and eventually was shot in Thimbleby. They were then, so far as the writer knows, in abeyance for some years. But within the last decade heredity has a.s.serted itself, and they have reappeared in increased numbers, and would doubtless become an established variety if allowed to multiply. In September, 1894, one of the Woodhall tenants killed, in the harvest field, a three-quarter-grown white leveret. In 1896 the writer presented to the Natural History Museum, at Lincoln, a fine albino specimen, also shot in Woodhall, with two small white leverets, accidentally killed in the harvest field at Langton. Since then, attention having been drawn to their existence, a number of instances occurring in the neighbourhood have been recorded. One was shot at Ranby as far back as Oct. 19, 1860; two were seen in Clayworth in 1896; one was shot in Baumber, Sept. 17, 1896; one shot at Thorpe Tilney, in Timberland parish, with slight tinge of brown on the ears, October, 1897; one shot in Timberland in 1895; one being seen still at large in Thorne Tilney in May, 1898; one shot in Branston, September, 1895, half grown; two shot at Bracebridge in 1893 or 1894; one shot in Wispington in 1896. {65} On one occasion, when shooting in Kirkstead, the writer shot (right and left) a couple of hares with white face and forelegs, one of which he has stuffed.
We commonly speak of the cunning of the fox, but Mr. E. A. Pease, M.P., in his recent book, ”Hunting Reminiscences” (Thacker & Co., 1895, p.
119), says: ”The hare is really a much more ruse animal than the fox; can steal better away, and, once started, there is no end to her wiles and dodges.” Of this cunning, with a view to self-preservation, I can give instances. It has been maintained that hares never take to water, but a correspondence was carried on in the newspaper a few years ago (see ”Morning Post,” Nov. 14, 1892), in which instances were given of their doing so. I have myself seen a hare, which has eluded the greyhounds, swim across a moat, almost surrounding the house in which I am writing; and then steal away to the cover of some large ferns in a sheltered nook in the garden. Some years ago a baronet visited a relative of mine in this neighborhood, and brought with him a pack of beagles. We used to run on foot after these in pursuit of hares. It is known that a hare, when getting exhausted, has not the strong scent of one just started. As we ran over a rough ploughed field, I have seen a hare, when nearly tired out, thrust another sitting hare out of her ”form,” and take her place.
The pack of beagles pa.s.sed over the worn-out hare squatting in the furrow, and rushed forward with a fresh burst of music in their rich deep tones, on the strong scent of the hare just set on foot. I pa.s.sed the squatting hare, but had not the heart to betray her, feeling that she deserved to reap the reward of her cleverness. When hunted by harriers, hares often ”double” on their track, and so throw the hounds out. I here give a very clever instance of this, which I myself once witnessed. On one occasion, sitting on the South Downs, watching the movements of a pack of harriers in the distance, I saw ”puss” gradually approaching me.
In a hilly country like the Downs, a hare, from the great length and propelling power of her hind legs, gains considerably upon the pack in running up hill, and loses ground in a descent. The hare in question had just descended a steep Down side, the hounds gaining rapidly upon her.
It was what may be termed ”a squeak” for her life, when, in the ”dean”
below, {67} she reached, just in time, the shelter of a clump of gorse.
Working her way through this, she stole out on the opposite side to the pack, and at a tremendous pace faced the hill, near the top of which I was sitting, by a chalk quarry. In the ascent she distanced the hounds once more, but she was getting done, and, in the gentle breeze which floated towards me, I distinctly heard her panting as she bounded upward.
But here her instinctive cunning came into play. The hill top was a few feet above me, some twenty yards away. I sat motionless, and, in her anxiety about her pursuers, she never observed me. She pa.s.sed me, breathing heavily, and sprang along as far as the hill top; there, just at the brow, she paused, then cantered forward a few yards, returned, and repeated this more than once. Then, turning suddenly towards me, she made four or five huge bounds, only just touching the ground, and dropped into the chalk quarry a few feet below me, and crept under the shelter of some dwarf thorn bushes. Her object was manifest. By pa.s.sing more than once over her own tracks, on the hill top, she created a strong scent, which the breeze, just catching it at the brow, would carry further forward. By her leaps towards the quarry, she had left but a slight scent, and under those thorn bushes she was doubtless waiting tremblingly the result of her ruse. I remained motionless, watching the issue. The pack came somewhat laboriously up the hill side, keeping close to the line she had taken; and a pretty sight it was, as a large sheet would almost have covered them, as they held on compactly together. They pa.s.sed, as the hare had done, within a few yards of the chalk quarry; pressed on to the brow of the hill, and thence followed the scent which had been blown on beyond it. Presently there was a check, and the music ceased. The master never thought of ”harking back,” his pack having followed a strong scent beyond the brow; but pushed on to a spinney lying on the slope of the next ”dean.” I sat for a time longer by the quarry, and presently I saw puss, having recovered her breath, emerge from her hiding place and steal away, bent, doubtless, on reaching some distant secure retreat before her limbs became stiff from the unwonted exertion.