“I suppose,” said Hamilton, “it is the actual profession of those Försters? There was one near the Iron Works, and he always supplied Madame Rosenberg with game;—she paid him for it, however.”
“Of course she did,” replied Baron Z—, laughing; “and if you shoot a chamois you must pay for it too, that is, if you wish to keep it. I have myself no game whatever, but as the Förster rents the whole chase in my neighbourhood from government, I have as much sport as I please, and in fact as much game too; I pay for whatever I retain, and so do all the others to whom he has given the permission to shoot; but I suspect his profits are not great, for we have a number of Wildschützen, wild hunters—poachers you call them, I believe, in England.”
“Yes, one hears of them continually in the country; I begin to have a faint idea that they may be great nuisances.”
“I have no intention of exactly undertaking their defence,” said Baron Z—, “but here in the mountains, where almost every man is a good shot, and the ideas of some are rather confused as to the better right which one man may have more than another to shoot an animal roaming about among the rocks—the crime is, to say the least, venial. I, for my part, would never pursue a Wildschützen with the wish to catch him; but between them and the Försters there is the most implacable hatred and deadly war. When they meet without witnesses, it not unfrequently happens that they fire at each other! If the Förster fall, he is immediately missed; if the Wildschütz, it often remains long undiscovered. Last winter the body of a young man was found on one of the mountains here, several weeks after his friends had first privately, and then publicly, sought him. There is little doubt that he was shot by one of our wood-rangers, and the man was immediately arrested, but no sort of proof could be obtained; the day of the young man’s death was unknown, the wood-ranger had been on that mountain, but also on others about the supposed time—shots had been heard by some wood-cutters, but not more than could be accounted for by the game brought home; in short, he was set at liberty; but the fate of the Wildschütz, who was a handsome, good-humoured fellow, created much interest and pity; so you see there is so much danger, and so little profit, so much romance, and so little vulgarity about them altogether, that they are not unfrequently the subject of a song or the hero of a legend. I am not even quite sure that the suspicion of a young man being at times a wild hunter would injure him in the opinion of any girl born and bred among the mountains!”
“I dare say not,” said Hamilton; “women higher born, and better bred, have not unfrequently similar feelings, and the very word is in itself the essence of romance! You must allow that it sounds a vast deal better than Förster, or Förstmeister, or Förstcommissioner, or Förstinspector. Everybody seems to be Först something in this part of the world.”
“And are we not surrounded by forests? Are not all our mountains covered with wood?” asked Baron Z—, laughing; “can you wonder that, in a country where wood is used as fuel, the care and culture of it should be of the greatest importance?”
“Then these Försters are not a—exactly game-keepers?”
“No; the preserving of the game is, however, always in connection with the woods and forests. The Förstmeister, Förstactuar, Försters, and Förstpracticants are appointed by government; the under Förster, or wood-ranger, is the only thing at all answering to your idea of game-keeper.”
“And what have they all to do?” asked Hamilton.
“Can you not imagine the care of all these woods giving a number of people employment?” asked Baron Z—, looking round him. “The never-ending felling and drifting, and selling and planting; the corrections of the rivers used for drifting; the care of the game, and a hundred other things, which I do not just now remember. The Förstwesen, as we call it here, requires as much, and as peculiar study at the University, as theology, philosophy, law, physic, or any other branch of learning. Had I been given my choice, I should have preferred it to all others.”