Retriever's Usefulness
The gamekeeper's retriever will learn to discover the whereabouts of every hedgehog in a ditch. A clever dog will find in a few hours as many hedgehogs as a week of trapping will secure—miles of hedges may be cleared in a day in the summer. The dog must be kept under absolute control, lest he disturb sitting birds, thereby, perhaps, doing as much damage as might the hedgehogs. Almost any dog may be trained to a particular work, such as playing the bloodhound's part, and following the trail of men, whether friends or strangers—even terriers may become useful trackers. The night-dogs used by gamekeepers—crosses between mastiffs and bulldogs—will follow poachers through the woods during the blackest hours of night.
A retriever is wonderfully useful for many purposes besides recovering game. A dog, which had never seen a cricket ball, was with us when we chanced to be crossing a field, at dusk, where a ball had been lost in thick cow-parsley in the shade of trees. The cricketers appealed for our help; we cleared the course, and set on the dog. She took the wind, trotted along, turned suddenly, ran straight for a score of yards, and came back, the lost ball in her mouth. Perhaps she worked it out in her own mind that as no shot had been fired there was no game to follow, and the ball-scent must therefore be the one she was required to track. No doubt she would have left the line of the ball if the scent of anything in the shape of dead game had reached her sensitive nose.
Nuts and Mice
The gamekeeper classes the nutters among "the reg'lar plagues" of his life. Not that he begrudges them their nuts, but that they stand for an old, old story of innocent pleasures and game disturbance. As primrose-pickers are to the nesting pheasants of April, so are nutters to the young birds of October, and the final result is always an angry keeper. His young birds at this season are ever ready to avail themselves of an excuse to stray to fresh woods. The nutter who would avoid the keeper should avoid paths, and lie very low and still when the keeper comes his way. This lesson in woodcraft had been mastered so thoroughly by one young nutter of our acquaintance that when a keeper chanced to pass along the ride near which he was picking, he still lay low when the keeper's words were almost in his ear: "Where be ye? Ah, I sees ye. Come out on it, then!" And he was duly rewarded by the knowledge that these remarks were merely an exhortation to pheasants to feed.
Dormice are the chief of all lovers of hazel-nuts. They are found very often at work by human nutters; and their nest is seen sheltered by hazel leaves—a neat round structure, built of dry grass, beautifully woven. One autumn we came upon a nest containing six young dormice, about half-grown and ready to run, and three of them, wonderful to relate, were wholly white. Autumnal litters are common, and, as though by a beautiful piece of foresight on the part of Nature, the favourite nut food is most abundant just when the little mice are ready to give up a milk diet. Though called "the mouse of the hazel," he seems as partial to acorns as to hazel-nuts, and he is insectivorous, and feeds heartily on nut-weevil grubs. With November he will be as fat as nuts can make him, and before the month is out he will have fallen into his long winter trance. The little reddish brown harvest-mouse seems to have almost disappeared in the north of Hampshire and other parts, and for years we have not seen a single specimen. The nest of the harvest-mouse—cunningly woven amid the corn-stalks—used to be one of the prettiest of things seen in the cornfields, especially when the mouse was seen also, nibbling in his dainty way at the grain. To go round an oat-stack and poke it with a stick was to disturb these gregarious little creatures by the score. The common mouse remains as plentiful as ever, and thousands are seen during the threshing of a single stack; but the harvest-mouse has gone. So much the better, no doubt, for the stacks. Their population of furred foes is always too large—as some idea may be gained from the fact that in one season, and from a group of three ricks, no fewer than 1300 rats were taken. It is a proof of the barn-owls' value to farmers that they are often caught in rat-traps set by holes at the base of stacks. The stack is a favourite if sometimes a fatal hunting-place.