Plots and Counter-Plots
On the shoulders of the head keeper falls the responsibility of all the mistakes that mar a day's sport. His position is unfortunate, for though he may perfect every arrangement, the success of the day must depend on good shooting and the perfect carrying out of orders. His plans must be set in motion amid every kind of distraction—a general in command on a battlefield is not more harassed by questions, plots, and counter-plots than the commander of a shoot. Guns are no sooner told where to go than they inquire the way—one is asking querulously where he will find his cartridges, another is sure his position is hopeless, while the beaters require constant attention, for if they are left alone to move on to the next beat they will lose themselves as a matter of course. In partridge-driving the keeper's nerves are stretched to breaking-point. Half a drive is finished, and not a bird has shown itself; the suspense grows almost unendurable before the swirling clouds of birds at last suddenly rise, and go on beautifully in twos and tens and twenties—in a stream that no man can count. The great art is to give even shooting through the day, and to distribute sport evenly among the guns, without favouritism—unless, indeed, orders are that the cream of the sport must pass the way of an important personage. If a keeper, for reasons of his own, should wish the bulk of the game to go to one quarter, he can manage this by retarding one end of the line of beaters, or by ordering certain beaters to tap with their staves more vigorously than the others—and by this stratagem his partiality is hidden completely from the sportsmen.
Indian Summer
A late spell of midsummer heat makes it seem as though summer indeed has lingered in the woods. With the oak-trees still heavily canopied with green leaves, the season of pheasant-shooting seems an anomaly. A varied bunch of wild flowers may be picked, many belonging to June rather than to the months of nuts and berries. Primroses bloom freely. Flowers are to be found everywhere, and cottage gardens are ablaze with Michaelmas and tall yellow daisies and dahlias; the coming of the first keen frost will mean a floral massacre. On hedges laden with blackberries and the red bryony berries there are sprays of honeysuckle, and there are many bright blooms of scabious, knapweed, corn-poppy, daisy, harebell, violet, and scarlet pimpernel. Even some of the old cock pheasants seem to imagine that April has come, judging by their spring-like crowing, and some of the hens nest who should have done with nests by the end of July. One very late nest we saw with eleven eggs, on which the hen was only beginning to sit, as shown by a broken egg. She had been cut out by the mowing of seed-clover heads, but returned to her mistaken duties, and was sitting on the evening of September 30.
Winter Sleep
On a perfect summer-like day of autumn, it is strange to think that hedgehogs are going to their winter quarters, and that sleep is overtaking so many creatures—bats that hang amid the dark rafters of the barn roofs; toads in the mud of the ponds; field-mice, water-voles, lizards, badgers, squirrels, hedgehogs curled in the ditches, snugly rolled up in a great ball of dry grass and leaves; and the dormouse, "seven sleeper," as it is called locally, or "dorymouse," "sleeper," or "sleeping-mouse." Much country weather-lore, in all parts of the world, is based on the storing of nuts by squirrels, the building of winter houses by musk-rats, the early or late cutting of winter supplies of wood by beavers, the working of moles, who are supposed before winter comes to prepare basins for the storage of worms, and the laying up of food on the part of bears. "The hedgehog," said the writer of "Husbandman's Practice," "commonly hath two holes or vents in his den or cave, the one toward the south and the other toward the north, and look which of them he stops; thence will come great storms and winds follow." The badger in his winter retreat certainly will block up holes from which draughts blow.