The Heart of the Wild: Nature Studies from Near and Far

by S. L. Bensusan

For the next two weeks the moor was quite unsafe, the four guns sounded every morning and afternoon; on one or another of the five beats the birds fell in all directions. One day the guns came upon the young grouse suddenly, when he had no idea of their proximity and, crouched in the heather, he remained quite still. It was a hot day, no breath of air stirred the leaves; the ground was hard as iron and there was no scent. A dog passed within a yard of him without betraying his presence; the gunners moved away to the right; he was safe.

He met single birds on the moor, and all told the same doleful tale of disaster, and when with the last day of the month the weather changed and the wind rose, word passed from bird to bird that it was time to pack. So he joined one or two others and they joined some more, and when they were fifty strong they joined another band as large, and their addition went on until the pack numbered hundreds if not thousands. This was not on the old moor where he had been born, but on another one not far away, where the guns had only stayed for a day or two before going on to the high forest lands some mile or more away in pursuit of the stags. The young grouse and his companions had become very keen of sight and hearing; they were alarmed by the least sound, and gunners who tried to walk after them never arrived within firing distance.

One afternoon when the pack was feeding, the young grouse came upon his friend the royal stag by the side of the burn that ran through the heart of the heather. The great beast had been wounded by an ill-aimed bullet and had found his way to the water alone, for his hinds had scattered. He lay crouched amid the moss and water grasses.

“I have been here for two days,” he said to the grouse, “and if I’m left alone for two more I’ll be healed of my wounds and I’ll baffle the stalkers yet. They nearly tracked me, but had no dog, or I must have fought for it.”

“We’re staying here awhile,” said the grouse, “and I’ll do what I can for you in the way of warning.”

The red grouse fed and rested in that quarter for several days, and the stag went back to the forest on the third evening. “I am well enough to go to sanctuary now,” he said, “to the wood in the centre of the forest where the stalkers may not follow us. Good-bye, good luck, take care of the butts.” So saying, he trotted off bravely, before the young grouse could ask what the butts might be.

He was not left long in doubt. On the morning following the stag’s departure, he and his companions were alarmed to see a body of men armed with white flags approaching from the distance. With one accord the birds rose and went en masse in the direction indicated by the wind, right over some little banks of turf they had seen many times before on the moor. There were several of these banks on various moors, they were in a line, one being seventy yards or more from the other and were quite harmless as a rule.

This morning, however, as the birds passed over, the cry of the guns was heard, shot after shot was fired, bird after bird fell, for every little enclosure held one or two men. Some birds tried swerving, but it only carried them from one earth to another; it was a frightful experience and one that was destined to be repeated, for the birds followed the wind whenever they fled from the beaters and were caught again and again.

If the walkers had shot their tens, the drivers secured their hundreds in the next week or two, until the weather changed again for the worse and the packs took to a wilder and higher flight than they had ever attempted before. Then the gunners went off the moors and returned to the lower lands to shoot partridges.

To his last day the young grouse never knew how he survived the driving. The constant alarms, the headlong flights through the air, the hiss of the expanding shot that struck down near neighbours, these experiences filled him with a strange unreasoning fear, and he was not to escape scot free, for a couple of stray pellets cut off two of the toes of his left leg and another skinned the feathers above the left eye so that they never grew again.