Skewbald and his mother sometimes sunned themselves by a bank crowned with lichened thorns. It was quite a badger fortress, being honeycombed with passages. A certain family which camped by it one August must have occasioned the badger some inconvenience, for they used the great holes as dustbins, stuffing down newspapers, tins, tea-leaves and coffee grounds, and other rubbish. But they never set eyes on him, not even on moonlight nights. Probably he used an exit on the other side of the bank while the campers were about. But Skewbald sometimes saw him after dusk, coming or going with his rolling gait, or appearing at the mouth of his den with sniffing snout and uplifted paw. Once the foal came upon him in broad day, and sunny at that. He was fast asleep, nearly hidden in a great nest of dried grass and bracken in a sheltered corner.
Sometimes, though probably he was unaware of it, the colt walked over little sharply pitted tracks which were the slots of the deer. Only once did he see that rare and shy British mammal, the roedeer. Skewbald was strolling in a forest ride, when, all at once, a delicate fawn-coloured shape with two uplifted sharp horn spikes emerged from a fern brake, and paused with raised fore-foot and twitching ears before venturing across the grassy space, and like a shadow his mate followed him.
In the thick woods, he sometimes saw the other deer, mostly fallow, the buck with widely branching palmate antlers, but occasionally a great red deer.
One September midday, mother and foal were wandering down a wide drive in the woods, when strange noises came to the foal’s ears, people shouting, baying of hounds and blowing of horns. He ran close to his mother, who, though not alarmed, raised her head and snuffed the air with interest. People with horns no longer hunted ponies, and she had no apprehensions of capture.
Presently a buck topped the bank, and shot across the drive, a mere rusty brown streak, gone as soon as seen. The noise of the hounds wavered, and grew fainter. The buck had eluded them. Then in the distance a huntsman appeared coming up the drive on a tall white horse. He was a fine sight in his black velvet cap, dark green coat with brass buttons, and his horn ready to hand. He stopped by a gate watching the drive, not knowing he was too late. On the hill out of sight were the three men in brown velveteen, each holding a team of the leashed hounds; young and swift these, waiting to be put on the track of the quarry when the slow old hounds, or “tufters,” had got the scent, and mounted hunting folk waiting or patrolling the forest glades. But the noise and the sight of the buck was all that Skewbald experienced, that day, of a forest buck-hunt.
After being warned by his mother, Skewbald kept as respectful a distance from harmless grass-snakes and slow-worms as from vipers. He even jumped when the little brown lizard ran across the path in front of him. And doubtless he sometimes found the open door of the home of the underground wasp, and quickly removed his nose and himself from its proximity. More rarely he saw the brown paperish globe of the wood-wasp hung from a low branch, with a hovering swarm of wasps like a yellow halo round it.
As for “stoats,” heathflies, and the tickling, crawling New Forest fly, they are, in hot weather, the torment of a forest pony’s life, and the less said about them the better.
Of birds, he knew most familiarly the stonechat, always on the topmost spray of a gorsebush, both in summer and in winter, with his little jerking tail and monotonous “tick-tack” note. Sometimes he would see the stonechat’s relative, the wheatear, standing on a stone or clod of earth, with the same flirting of the tail; the attitude alert and vigilant, his black eye-streak emphasizing his suspicious glance.
In the evening he heard the “hoo-hoo” of the tawny owl, and might have seen him sitting upright on the low branch of a willow, close to the trunk; and once in broad daylight, as he was nibbling at the bark of the branches of a stubby hollow holly, a blotched form appeared at the opening as if in response to the noise he made before her door; then with a couple of wing-beats, the little owl flew up into the higher branches and looked at him with fierce gold-rimmed eyes, and irritable movements of her head.
Now and then he came across a small covey of partridges dusting themselves in a sandy patch, or sunning on a bank. Once in May, as he put his nose to a tussock, a sitting partridge gave it a sharp peck. All that season he looked into tussocks warily, and one day he came upon what looked like two partridges sitting together; but the one outside the nest was a cock-bird, as could be seen by his red ear-lobes and absence of cross-bars on his wings. As Skewbald looked, a little head peeped out from under his father’s wing and piped. Then there was more chirping, and from under the mother emerged a tiny chick, and in a moment was lost in his male parent’s feathery recesses. That faithful husband and father was on duty, receiving each little chick as it hatched, and “drying them off.”