CHAPTER XVI A NATIVE NATURALIST
The towans or sandhills—Their destructive progress over the land—Sea rush introduced—The ferry at Lelant—Among the towans—The meadow-pipit—The ferryman—Knowledge of wild life in country boys and men—Countryman and chaffinch—The native naturalist—A strange story of a badger—Great black-backed gull and young guillemot—Sparrow-hawk and curlew—Fight between a seal and a conger—Story of a young seal—An osprey—A great northern diver—The killing passion in sportsmen—Story of a meadow-pipit—The seal colony threatened.
THE Towans, as the sandhills or dunes on the north-east side of St. Ives Bay are called—that barren place mentioned in the last chapter where a horde of fugitive thrushes found snails enough to save them from starving—is a curiously attractive bit of country. It is plainly visible from St. Ives, looking east over the water—a stretch of yellow sands where the Hayle River empties itself in the Bay, and, behind it, a grey-green desert of hummocky or hilly earth, where the hills are like huge broken waves in "fluctuation fixed." And in a sense they are waves, formed of sand which the ocean brings out of its depths and exposes at low water, to be swept up by the everlasting winds and heaped in hills along the sea-front; and no sooner are the hills built than the wind unbuilds them again, carrying the yellow dust further inland to build other hills and yet others, burying the green farm-lands and houses and entire villages in their desolating progress. This, they say, was the state of things no longer ago than the eighteenth century, when some wise person discovered or remembered that Nature herself has a remedy for this evil, a means of staying the wind-blown sands in their march. The common sea rush, Psomma arenaria, the long coarse grass which grows on the sand by the sea, was introduced—the roots or seed, I do not know which; and it grew and spread, and in a little while took complete possession of all that desolate strip of land, clothing the deep hollows and wave-like hills to their summits with its pale, sere-looking, grey-green tussocks. As you walk there, when the wind blows from the sea, the fine, dry, invisible particles rain on your face and sting your eyes; but all this travelling sand comes from the beach and can do no harm, for where it falls it must lie and serve as food for the conquering sea rush. If you examine the earth you will find it bound down with a matting of tough roots and rootlets, and that in the spaces between the tussocks the decaying rush has formed a thin mould and is covered with mosses and lichens, and in many places with a turf as on the chalk downs.
The Towans occupy the ground on both sides of the estuary. On the south side is the ancient village of Lelant, once threatened with destruction by the shifting sands; now the square old church tower, as you approach it from St. Ives, is seen standing bravely above the rush-grown hills and hummocks made harmless for ever. On the north side of the estuary is Hayle, a small decayed town, and the ancient village and church of Phillack, and behind the village to the sea and on either hand miles upon miles of towans. There is a ferry at Lelant, and the ferryman has his little ramshackle hut at the foot of a sandhill, a little below the church, and here I often came to be rowed over to the other side, where it was wilder and more solitary. There I could spend hours at a stretch without seeing a human being or hearing any sound of human life. From the top of a high towan I could get a fine view of the Bay, with St. Ives' little town and rocky island on the further side; while looking along the coastline on the right hand, the white tower of Godrevy Lighthouse on its rock was seen at the end of the Bay, and beyond it the blue Atlantic. Coming down from my look-out all the wide exhilarating prospect would vanish—ocean and Bay and distant town, with cliffs and hills—and I would be in another world, walking on the soft sand and moss in hollow places among the tall sere rushes with their old bleached seed spikes. "They have no song the sedges dry," sings the poet, but in his heart, he adds, they touched a string and for him they had a song. So it was with these dry rushes; they touched a string in me, and that low, rustling, sibilant sound, and mysterious whispering which the wind made in them, was to me a song. There was not even a bird voice to break the silence, except when I disturbed a meadow-pipit and it rose and flew to this side and that in its usual uncertain way, uttering its sharp, thin, melancholy note of alarm—a sound which serves to intensify the feeling of wildness and to give an expression to earth in lonely desert places.
In my visits to the Towans I had a double motive and pleasure: one in communing with nature in that "empty and solitary place," the other in talking with the ferryman who took me to and fro across the river: he was a native of the place, a pure Cornishman in appearance and disposition, and a naturalist. I do not say a "born naturalist" because I fancy we are most of us that, and yet the countryman who is a naturalist is a rarity. As a rule, what he knows about nature and wild life is the little that survives in his memory of all he learnt in his boyhood. He learns a good deal then, when the mind is fresh, the senses keen and the ancient hunting and exploring instincts most active. In woods and wilds the naked savage ran, and the civilised boy still preserves the old tradition, and as he runs he picks up a good deal of knowledge which will be of no use to him. If he is a country boy of the labouring class he no sooner arrives at an age to leave school and idling and do something for a living than the change begins—a change which is like a metamorphosis. However small a part he is called on to fill, though he be but a carter's boy, it serves to open a new prospect to his mind, and to give him a new and absorbing interest in life. His work is the most important thing in the world: he ponders on it, and on the money it brings him; on the tremendous question of food and clothing and shelter; and by and by on love and marriage and children to follow; on the struggle to live and the great difference that a shilling or two more or less per week will be to him. One effect of all this is to make the interests and occupations of his early years appear trivial; his days with wild nature were all idle and useless and the knowledge of animal life he acquired of as little consequence as that of the old boyish games. The country youth would perhaps be astonished if he could be conscious of the change going on in him, or if some one were to tell him that the mental images of things seen and heard in nature will soon grow dim and eventually fade out of his mind. It is really surprising to find how far this dimming and obliterating process will go; for here (let us say) is a man whose whole life is passed amidst the same rural scenes, who has seen and heard the same bird forms and sounds from infancy, who knew them all as intimately as he knew his mother's face and voice in his early years, and yet he has ceased to know them! All because he has not renewed or refreshed the early images; because his mind has been occupied with other things exclusively, and his faculty of observation, with regard to nature at all events, has practically ceased to exist.
An amusing instance of this state of mind occurs to me here. I was staying in a small rustic village in the cottage of one of the most interesting men I have met. He was a working man, better educated than most of his class, and at the age of sixty-five had saved enough to buy a plot of ground and build himself a little house with his own hands in which to spend the remnant of his life without further labour. But he was of an active mind and an enthusiast inflamed with one great idea and hope, which was to raise the people of his own class to a better position and a higher life—morally and intellectually—to make them, in fact, as sober, righteous, independent and wise as he was himself. And as he was a man of character and courage, and gifted with a kind of eloquence, he had come to be very widely known and greatly respected; he had even been led to fight a hard fight in a populous borough as a Labour candidate for Parliament. He had lost but was not in the least soured by defeat and was still a leader of men, a sort of guide, philosopher and friend to very many of his own class, especially in matters political. Finally, he was a man of a noble presence, large and powerfully built, with a genial open countenance and a magnificent white beard—a sort of Walt Whitman both in appearance and temper of mind, his love of humanity, his tolerance and above all his unshakable faith in a glorious democracy.
All this about my leader of working men has nothing to do with the subject under discussion, but I could not resist the temptation of giving a portrait of the man.
One bright spring day I was with him, pacing his garden walk, discussing a variety of important matters relating to man's spiritual nature, and so forth, when by and by we drifted into other themes—wild nature, and then wild bird life. "There is," he said, "one curious thing about birds in which they differ from other creatures and which makes them a little more puzzling to a man with just the ordinary knowledge of nature. They have wings to carry them about and they roam from place to place so that at any moment a man may be confronted with a bird of a perfectly unfamiliar appearance. Or he may hear a cry or song which he has never heard before, and in such a case he can only say that the bird must be a stranger in that locality—a wanderer from some distant place. But one would always like to know what the bird is; it adds to the interest, and I have very often wished when seeing or hearing some such strange bird that some one like yourself, with an intimate knowledge of all the species in our country, had been with me to satisfy my curiosity."
Just as he was finishing a chaffinch flew down and vanished into the dense foliage of a young horse-chestnut tree growing a dozen yards from where we stood, and no sooner had it come down than it burst out in its familiar loud ringing lyric.
He started round and held up his hand. "There!" he exclaimed when the bird ended his song. "A case in point! Now can you tell me what bird was that?"
"A chaffinch," I said.
He looked sharply, almost resentfully, at me, thinking it a poor joke on my part, and when I smiled at his expression he was more put out than ever. But I could not help admiring him as he stood there staring into my face. He had put down his spade when our talk began; his coat was off, his cloudy old brown waistcoat unbuttoned, his blue cotton shirt-sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his hands and arms smeared with dried clay—a grand figure of a man with the white beard mixed with a little red falling to his waist, his grey old shapeless felt hat thrust back on his head and his long hair down to his shoulders.
He assured me with dignity that if there was a bird he was familiar with it was the chaffinch, that as a person born and bred in the country he could not make a mistake about such a bird. Nevertheless, I returned, the bird we had heard was a chaffinch, and familiar as he was with such a bird he could not put his knowledge against mine in such a case. He assented but still felt dissatisfied. "You will allow, I suppose," he said, "that there are great differences in individual singers and that some one bird may be so different from the generality as to deceive one who is not an ornithologist as to its species."
He was right there, I said, and that consoled him, and he concluded that this particular bird had uttered an unusual sort of song which no person, not a trained naturalist, would have identified as that of a chaffinch.
It was not so, but I let it pass, and he was glad to get back to other higher subjects where he was, so to speak, on his native heath and could be my guide.
This may appear an extreme case: I do not think so: I have conversed about the creatures with too many rustics and country people of all denominations to think it anything out of the common—scores and hundreds of rustics all over the country, and if I want to hear something fresh and interesting I go to the boy and not to his stolid father, or hoary-headed less stolid grandfather, who have both pretty well forgotten all they once knew.
Of course there are exceptions, especially among gamekeepers, although in a majority of cases their observation is of that baser kind which concerns itself solely with the things that profit. But there is also the nobler kind of observer, the one in a thousand whose keen boyish interest in all living things is not lost when he is called on to take a part in the serious business of life. Ceasing to be a boy he does not put away this boyish thing, this secret delight in nature which others outlive. It is in him like the memory of a first love, the image of a vanished form which endures in the mind to extreme old age and outlasts and has a lustre beyond all others. It is this surviving feeling of the boy which makes the native naturalist, the man with keen observant eye and retentive memory; and however illiterate he may be, or unsocial in disposition, or uncouth or repellent in manners, it is always a delight to meet him, to conquer his rudeness or reserve and to listen to the strange experiences garnered in his memory.
In the chapter on Cornish imagination something was said about the actions of animals, even of those we are most familiar with, which come as a great surprise, and I gave an account of one—an incident I witnessed of a rock-pipit which, caught by a violent gust of wind just at the moment when its wings being set for the gliding descent to earth could not be used to resist the current, was blown away into the midst of a band of hovering herring gulls and very nearly lost its life. One knows that one will never witness just such an incident again, but there will be others equally unexpected and strange for the watcher. In the course of this book I have related a few: one of a gannet falling from a great height like a stone into the sea just by the side of a herring gull floating on the surface, and one of a fox, standing like a carved figure on a big rock, savagely attacked by a raven and refusing to be driven from its stand.
Here I cannot resist the temptation to introduce an incident of this kind, but far more wonderful than any one I have related in this or any other book, which was witnessed not by a naturalist but an artist, my friend Mr. R. H. Carter, of the Land's End. He was with his friend, the late Rev. F. C. Jackson, Rector of Stanmore, who used to take his holidays in West Cornwall and was himself something of an artist. They were sketching one day on the huge cliffs of Tol-Pedn-Penwith, near the Land's End, when Mr. Carter noticed that some animal had been recently scratching the earth at the foot of a huge pile of rocks near where he was sitting. There was a large hollow place under the rock into which one could see, as there was an opening on a level with the ground on one side, and it struck him that a badger had taken refuge in this cavity, and had been obliged to scratch a little earth away to squeeze his body in. He called his companion's attention to it, and getting down on the turf and lying flat so as to bring their eyes on to a level with the floor they gazed into the cavity. They could see no animal, but the light was dim inside, and Mr. Jackson proceeded to twist up half a dozen wax matches into a small compact ball, which he lighted and then carefully pushed in right to the middle of the hollow space. The burning wax made a good light, but still they could see no creature, only at one side, a foot or so from the light, there was a dark patch which they could not make out; it was, they imagined, a hole in the rock which showed black. Presently, as they gazed in, still trying to penetrate into that dark hole with their sight, a paw was seen to emerge and move towards the light until the whole foreleg of a badger was revealed; then the paw scraped up a little loose soil from the floor and carefully drew or jerked it over the burning ball of wax and put the light out.
They had both witnessed the whole action, and by and by with a long stick or pole they succeeded in ousting the badger from his niche in the little cave. Had they not done so the sceptical reader might have said that what they had seen was an illusion—that they were looking for a badger and expecting to see one and had badger on the brain so to speak; and by and by when a slight moving shadow caused by the flickering flame made its appearance it took the form of a badger's paw and leg in their sight, and when the flame expired they imagined that the illusory paw had extinguished it. I dare say that if such an incident had been related by the Canadian, Charles Roberts, or by any of the writers of the "new or romantic school" of natural history in America, it would be set down by most readers as an unusually wild invention of the author.
The ferryman had no such wonderful story to tell when we compared notes, and I intend here to relate only a few of the curious incidents he had witnessed, and this mainly for a purpose of my own. They were mostly little tragedies.
One summer day when he was out in his boat fishing for pollack at his favourite ground a mile or two beyond the Godrevy Lighthouse he noticed three guillemots near him, one old bird with its half-grown young one, and a second young bird which accompanied the others but kept at a little distance from them. This young guillemot had doubtless been lost or left by its parents. There was no other bird in sight except a great black-backed gull, flying idly about, now making a wide circle and occasionally dropping on to the water to examine some small floating object, then flying off again. He appeared to pay no attention to the guillemots, nor they to him, and it therefore came as a great surprise when all at once in passing over the three birds he dropped down upon the second young guillemot and seized it before it had time to dive. The captive struggled in vain, sending forth its shrill cries for help far and wide over the still sea, while the great gull, sitting on the surface, proceeded in a leisurely manner to despatch and then devour his victim, tearing it to pieces with his big powerful yellow beak.
He told me of several other little tragedies of the kind which he had witnessed with surprise, one of a curlew which at the moment of flying past him was suddenly chased by a sparrow-hawk and pressed so hard that it dashed down to the beach, where it was instantly grappled. The ferryman made all haste to the spot, and the hawk flew off at his approach, leaving the curlew dead and bleeding on the sands. He picked it up and took it home to eat it himself. But of all these cases the one of the great black-backed gull impressed him the most on account of the casual way in which it came about, just as if the gull had been taken by a sudden impulse to drop upon and slaughter the young guillemot. Such an incident serves to show how perilous a world the wild creature exists in and on how small a matter its safety often depends, and it also gives the idea of an almost uncanny intelligence in the birds that live by violence. No doubt the gull was tempted to fall on that young bird solely because of its keeping a little apart from the other two, because it had no parent of its own to protect it.
The rocks to the north of St. Ives Bay are an ancient haunt of the common seal, one of the few colonies of this animal now left on the south coast of Britain. The ferryman was one day fishing in his boat at this point close to the mouth of that vast cavern in the rocks where the seals have their home, when a loud king cry or roar made him jump in his boat, and looking round he caught sight of a seal thrusting his head and half his body out of the water with a conger about seven to eight feet long fastened to his ear. The blood was streaming from the seal's head and he was trying to shake his enemy off and at the same time turning round and round in his efforts to bite the conger; but the black serpentine body wriggled and floated out of his reach, and in a very few moments they went down. Again and again they rose, the seal coming out each time with the same savage cry, shaking himself and biting, the conger still holding on with bull-dog tenacity. But on the last occasion there was no cry and commotion; the conger had lost his hold and the seal had him by the middle of the body in his jaws. On coming up he swam quietly to the sloping rock close by, and half in, half out of the water began tearing up and devouring his victim, the blood still running from his own head.
He had another seal story which interested me even more than the last, since the chief actor and conqueror in this instance was the nobler animal man, the seal being: the victim.
In the early autumn of 1907 there were mighty winds on this coast, with tremendous seas and very high tides, which made it impossible to use the ferry; but when the weather moderated and the ferryman took to his boat once more he came upon a young seal, which had, no doubt, taken refuge in the Hayle estuary and was lost from its parents. The days went by and it did not leave the river: the mother seal had not found it, and apparently the poor young thing had no sure instinct to guide it across St. Ives Bay to the seal caverns in the cliffs to the north of the lighthouse, which was probably its birthplace. And probably finding itself very lonely in the estuary, it came by and by to look on the man in the boat, who was always there, as a sort of companion—perhaps as a seal of curious habits, which looked a little like an adult seal, but progressed in a somewhat different manner, keeping always to the surface of the water and swimming with the aid of two long wing-like fins. But it appeared to be a good-natured seal, and always regarded the orphaned youngster with a mild and welcoming expression. First it watched the ferryman from a little distance, then approached him every time he appeared, then began to follow, coming nearer and nearer, and would swim behind the boat, quite close, just as a spaniel or other water-loving dog will swim after its master's boat.
This was a delightful experience to the ferryman, and the sight of the dog-like creature swimming after the boat was also an entertainment to the passengers and a cause of surprise to many. But there was nothing remarkable in its action; the seal, like the dog, is a social creature; it is well known that he readily grows tame towards, and even attached to, the human beings he is accustomed to see who do not persecute him. The old Cornish author, Borlase, refers to this character of the seal, which he classes with his "Quadruped Reptiles," in the following quaint passage: "Whether it is delighted with music or any land voice, or whether it is to alleviate the toil of swimming, it shows itself almost wholly above the water frequently, or near the shore, ibid. Add to this that the great docility of the creature (little short of that of the human species) and his being so easily trained to be familiar with and obedient to man, may make us with some grounds conclude, that this is the creature to which imagination has given the shape of half-fish half-man, a shape nowhere else to be found."
The estuary attracts a good number of wild fowl, duck and shore birds, in winter, and as a consequence is much frequented by sportsmen. One day the ferryman took one of these gentlemen, a visitor from a distance, across the river, and was not half-way over before the seal appeared as usual and with its head well up swam after the boat, and gaining quickly on it was soon not more than an oar's length from the stern. The ferryman, looking back, was watching it, and by and by, thinking it would be a pleasant surprise to the other, he remarked, "My baby seal is just behind you, coming after us." The other looked around, and instantly, before the boatman could cry out or even divine his intention, threw up his gun and fired and the brains of the young seal were scattered on the water. "You have killed my pet seal—the animal I loved best," the boatman cried, and the other was surprised and expressed regret.
He wished he had known it was a pet seal; he wouldn't have killed it, no, not for anything, if he had only known. And why had he not been warned? and so on, until he stepped out of the boat and went his way with his gun.
He had not been warned because in spite of all the ferryman had seen of sportsmen and their ways he never imagined that any one would have done so brutal a thing or that the murderous shot would have been fired so quickly.
He also told me about an osprey which appeared one autumn at the estuary. It was the first bird of its species he had ever seen, and when it first appeared, flying high in the air and hovering directly over his hut where he kept a number of fowls and turkeys, he became alarmed for their safety, thinking it was a kite or other large destructive hawk. By and by the strange bird sailed away and began circling above the water, coming lower down, then after hovering at one spot like a kestrel for some moments he saw it drop into the water and rise with a good-sized fish in its talons. Then he knew that the strange big hawk was the famous osprey.
For some days it displayed its magnificent powers to all who came to the water-side, exciting a great deal of interest; then one of the sporting gentlemen succeeded in getting a shot at it and wounding it badly. But it did not drop; it was watched flying laboriously away over the moor until out of sight and was never seen again.
Another season he had a great northern diver in the river, and this bird after a week or ten days lost its wildness and took no notice of the ferryman, although he sometimes rowed his boat to within forty yards of it to watch its movements when it was fishing. The sportsmen he ferried across wanted to shoot the diver, but he prevented them. Then one gentleman told him that he would hire a boat and go out and shoot it, in spite of him. He said that a bird so destructive to fish should not be allowed to live in the river. The ferryman said he would prove to him that the diver was doing no harm, and rowing him out to where the bird was diving at its usual feeding-ground they watched, and presently saw it come up with a small green crab in its beak. The sportsman was convinced that the bird was not taking fish, and gave his promise that he would not shoot it. However, a day or two later it was shot at by one of the sportsmen and badly wounded in the side, and from that time the sight of it was a constant pain to him as it moved continually round and round in a circle when attempting to swim and was hardly able to dive. Finally he took his gun and put it out of its misery.
The young seal, the osprey, the great northern diver were but a few of the creatures he told me of, which, when living, were a source of delight to every one who watched them, whose lives had been wantonly taken in the estuary by gentlemen sportsmen. Stories equally sad and shocking were told me by other lovers of nature and observers of wild life at other points on the coast, of how every rare and beautiful species, every owl, buzzard, harrier, chough, hoopoe and many other species, had been slaughtered by men who call themselves sportsmen and gentlemen. How is one to explain such a thing—this base destructive passion—unless it be that the gentleman, like the gamekeeper, cannot escape the reflex effect on his mind of the gun in his hand? He too has grown incapable of pleasure in any rare or noble or beautiful form of life until he has it in his hands—until he has exercised his awful power and blotted out its existence. And how hard of heart the exercise has made him!
One afternoon at Wells-by-the-Sea I entered into conversation with a sportsman I found sitting on a grassy slope, where he was waiting for the wild geese which would come in by and by from feeding to roost on the sand spit outside. He was, physically, a very fine fellow in his prime, tall, athletic-looking, with a handsome typical English face of that hard colour which comes of an open-air life, with the hard keen eyes so often seen in the sportsman. Talking with him I discovered that he was also a man of culture, a great traveller, a reader and a collector of rare and costly books on certain subjects, especially on the forms of sport he loved best. It was impossible for me not to admire him as he sat there reclining idly on his rug, thrown on the green slope, smoking his pipe, his gun lying across his knees, his big black curly-haired retriever stretched out at his side. And at intervals, as we talked, a little meadow-pipit, the only other living creature near us, flitted out of the grass and, rising to a height of twenty or thirty feet, hovered over the still water beneath, as if to get a better view of us, to find out what we were doing there; and as it hovered before us it emitted those sharp, sorrowful little call-notes which have such a charm for me. And every time the small bird rose and hovered before us the dog raised his head and watched it excitedly, then looked up into his master's face. Then the little thing with an anxious mind would drop back on the turf again and go on seeking its food as before, so near to us that we could distinctly see its bright eyes and thin little pale brown legs and all the markings and shadings of its pretty winter plumage—the olive-browns and dull blacks, the whites and the cream faintly tinged with buff on the striped breast.
By and by I got up and strolled away to the dunes on the sea-front, and when I had gone about seventy or eighty yards a shot rang out behind me. Glancing back I saw that the sportsman had also got up and was now walking to a point among the dunes where he had planned to lie in wait for the geese. The retriever was some distance behind, playing with something; and then, instead of following his master, he came on to me, and seeing that he was carrying something I stooped down and drew it from his mouth. It was the titling—the little meadow-pipit; its anxious little question and challenge had been answered with an idle charge of shot when it flew up and hovered before the man with a gun.
I suppose that his motive, if he had one, was to give his dog a few minutes' amusement in retrieving the shattered little bird from the water and in playing with and carrying it. But if I had gone to him and demanded to know why he had taken that happy little life, which was sacred to me, I think his answer, if he had condescended to make one, would have been very contemptuous—I think he would have said that he perceived me to be a sentimentalist and that he declined to say anything to a person of that sort.
There are not, I imagine, many men of so fine a temper of mind as to escape this hardening effect of the gun in the hand.
In conclusion of this chapter I will go back to the subject of the Cornish seals of that small surviving colony which has its ancestral home in the caves outside the Bay of St. Ives. Sportsmen occasionally shoot them just for the pleasure of the thing, but the fishermen of St. Ives do not consider that they suffer any injury from the animals and have consequently refrained from persecuting them. Unhappily they are now threatened with extermination from a new quarter: the students at the Camborne Mining School have recently found out a new and pleasant pastime, which is to seat themselves with rifle or fowling-piece on the cliff and watch for the appearance of a brown head above the water below of a seal going out of or coming in to the caves and letting fly at it. When they hit the seal it sinks and is seen no more, but the animal is not wanted, the object is to shoot it, and this accomplished the sportsman goes back happy and proud at his success in having murdered so large and human-like a creature.
