This was a very astonishing story to hear from Caleb, but to suspect him of inventing or of exaggerating was impossible to anyone who knew him. And we have seen that Isaac Bawcombe was an exceptional man—physically a kind of Alexander Selkirk of the Wiltshire Downs. And he, moreover, had a dog to help him—one as superior in speed and strength to the ordinary sheep-dog as he himself was to the rack of his fellow-men. It was only after much questioning on my part that Caleb brought himself to tell me of these ancient adventures, and finally to give a detailed account of how his father came to take his first deer. It was in the depth of winter—bitterly cold, with a strong north wind blowing on the snow-covered downs—when one evening Isaac caught sight of two deer out on his sheep-walk. In that part of Wiltshire there is a famous monument of antiquity, a vast mound-like wall, with a deep depression or fosse running at its side. Now it happened that on the highest part of the down, where the wall or mound was most exposed to the blast, the snow had been blown clean off the top, and the deer were feeding here on the short turf, keeping to the ridge, so that, outlined against the sky, they had become visible to Isaac at a great distance.
He saw and pondered. These deer, just now, while out of bounds, were no man's property, and it would be no sin to kill and eat one—if he could catch it!—and it was a season of bitter want. For many many days he had eaten his barley bread, and on some days barley-flour dumplings, and had been content with this poor fare; but now the sight of these animals made him crave for meat with an intolerable craving, and he determined to do something to satisfy it.
He went home and had his poor supper, and when it was dark set forth again with his dog. He found the deer still feeding on the mound. Stealing softly along among the furze-bushes, he got the black line of the mound against the starry sky, and by and by, as he moved along, the black figures of the deer, with their heads down, came into view. He then doubled back and, proceeding some distance, got down into the fosse and stole forward to them again under the wall. His idea was that on taking alarm they would immediately make for the forest which was their home, and would probably pass near him. They did not hear him until he was within sixty yards, and then bounded down from the wall, over the dyke, and away, but in almost opposite directions—one alone making for the forest; and on this one the dog was set. Out he shot like an arrow from the bow, and after him ran Isaac "as he had never runned afore in all his life." For a short space deer and dog in hot pursuit were visible on the snow, then the darkness swallowed them up as they rushed down the slope; but in less than half a minute a sound came back to Isaac, flying, too, down the incline—the long, wailing cry of a deer in distress. The dog had seized his quarry by one of the front legs, a little above the hoof, and held it fast, and they were struggling on the snow when Isaac came up and flung himself upon his victim, then thrust his knife through its windpipe "to stop its noise." Having killed it, he threw it on his back and went home, not by the turnpike, nor by any road or path, but over fields and through copses until he got to the back of his mother's cottage. There was no door on that side, but there was a window, and when he had rapped at it and his mother opened it, without speaking a word he thrust the dead deer through, then made his way round to the front.
That was how he killed his first deer. How the others were taken I do not know; I wish I did, since this one exploit of a Wiltshire shepherd has more interest for me than I find in fifty narratives of elephants slaughtered wholesale with explosive bullets, written for the delight and astonishment of the reading public by our most glorious Nimrods.
CHAPTER VII
THE DEER-STEALERS
Deer-stealing on Salisbury Plain—The head-keeper Harbutt—Strange story of a baby—Found as a surname—John Barter the village carpenter—How the keeper was fooled—A poaching attack planned—The fight—Head-keeper and carpenter—The carpenter hides his son—The arrest—Barter's sons forsake the village
There were other memories of deer-taking handed down to Caleb by his parents, and the one best worth preserving relates to the head-keeper of the preserves, or chase, and to a great fight in which he was engaged with two brothers of the girl who was afterwards to be Isaac's wife.
Here it may be necessary to explain that formerly the owner of Cranbourne Chase, at that time Lord Rivers, claimed the deer and the right to preserve and hunt deer over a considerable extent of country outside of his own lands. On the Wiltshire side these rights extended from Cranbourne Chase over the South Wiltshire Downs to Salisbury, and the whole territory, about thirty miles broad, was divided into beats or walks, six or eight in number, each beat provided with a keeper's lodge. This state of things continued to the year 1834, when the chase was "disfranchised" by Act of Parliament.