Jim and Wally

by Mary Grant Bruce

“Poison them, or shoot them, or get rid of them in any way possible,” said Jim, enjoying the mounting agony of Mr. Burke. “We can’t do much hunting, you see, when we live on big places, with the nearest neighbour perhaps twenty miles off; and often the hills are so steep and rough, and so thick with fallen timber, that horses and hounds would want wings to hunt through them. But a man may have thousands of sheep on hills like that.”

“Do ye tell me? Thousands, is it?”

“Rather. And the foxes breed like rabbits in those hills, and there’s nothing they like so well as young lambs. You can go out in the morning and find forty or fifty dead lambs—the cruel brutes of foxes just eat their noses and go on to the next. When you see that number of little lambs killed, in that fashion, you’re ready to start poisoning foxes.”

“Ye would so,” said Mr. Burke, explosively. “And no one interferes with ye?”

“Why, you get paid for it,” Jim said. To which Mr. Burke replied by a gasp of “God help us!” and relieved his feelings by lashing the horse with a shout of “G’wan, now!” The horse broke into a surprised canter, and they rocked down a little hill. At its foot a wide expanse of bog stretched westward, looking like a great grassy plain. Here and there, near the road, men were working at cutting turf, armed with the loy or narrow, sharp spade, which takes out a sod of turf, the size of a brick, to be stacked to dry in the sun. A great corner had already been cut away, and lay bleak and desolate. Above its level the wall of turf rose three or four feet, a dark-brown glutinous-looking mass, smoothly marked with the scars of the loy. There were deep pools of water here and there: the brown bog-water that scares the English tourists who finds it in a bedroom jug in a hotel, and gives foundation for future scathing comments on the dirty ways of Ireland: the fact being that if its exquisite velvet-softness could be taken to London, most of the Bond Street complexion specialists would go out of business for lack of customers.

“So that’s turf,” commented Wally, looking curiously at the rough stacks of sods, which the sun was drying to a lighter colour than the deep brown of the bog-face. “It doesn’t look the sort of stuff you’d make fires of—wherein I expect I show my hideous ignorance.”

Mr. Burke had begun with a snort at the first part of this remark, but checked it in its birth at the frank avowal of the conclusion.

“Wait till ye see it burn, sir,” he said. “Ye’d not want a better fire, barring ye could get a bit of bog-wood to mix with it. Then ye’d not get its aiqual if ye were walking the world all your life.”

“Are those pools deep?” Norah asked, looking at the still brown water, fringed with reeds and sedges.

“Some of ’em’s no depth at all; and there’s some that deep that no man knows the bottom of ’em. They’d take anyone and swallow him entirely, the way he’d never be heard of again; and they do say the bog keeps ’em fresh as if they’d just fallen in, only I dunno would it be true: I never seen anybody that had come out. It’s one of the old stories that do be going in the country.”