Caleb was quite ready to believe it, and was a little proud at having a sheep-dog from that distant country. He said that it also put something new into his mind. He didn't know nothing about Russia before that, though he had been hearing so much of our great war there and of all the people that had been killed. Now he realized that Russia was a great country, a land where there were hills and valleys and villages, where there were flocks and herds, and shepherds and sheepdogs just as in the Wiltshire Downs. He only wished that Tramp—that was the name he had given his dog—could have told him his history.
Tramp, in spite of being strange to the downs and the downland sheep-dog's work, would probably have been kept by Caleb to the end but for his ineradicable passion for hunting rabbits. He did not neglect his duty, but he would slip away too often, and eventually when a man who wanted a good dog for rabbits one day offered Caleb fifteen shillings for Tramp, he sold him, and as he was taken away to a distance by his new master, he never saw him again.
CHAPTER XXI
THE SHEPHERD AS NATURALIST
General remarks—Great Ridge Wood—Encounter with a roe-deer—A hare on a stump—A gamekeeper's memory—Talk with a gipsy—A strange story of a hedgehog—A gipsy on memory—The shepherd's feeling for animals—Anecdote of a shrew—Anecdote of an owl—Reflex effect of the gamekeeper's calling—We remember best what we see emotionally
It will appear to some of my readers that the interesting facts about wild life, or rather about animal life, wild and domestic, gathered in my talks with the old shepherd, do not amount to much. If this is all there is to show after a long life spent out of doors, or all that is best worth preserving, it is a somewhat scanty harvest, they will say. To me it appears a somewhat abundant one. We field naturalists, who set down what we see and hear in a notebook, lest we forget it, do not always bear in mind that it is exceedingly rare for those who are not naturalists, whose senses and minds are occupied with other things, to come upon a new and interesting fact in animal life, or that these chance observations are quickly forgotten. This was strongly borne in upon me lately while staying in the village of Hindon in the neighbourhood of the Great Ridge Wood, which clothes the summit of the long high down overlooking the vale of the Wylye. It is an immense wood, mostly of scrub or dwarf oak, very dense in some parts, in others thin, with open, barren patches, and like a wild forest, covering altogether twelve or fourteen square miles—perhaps more. There are no houses near, and no people in it except a few gamekeepers: I spent long days in it without meeting a human being. It was a joy to me to find such a spot in England, so wild and solitary, and I was filled with pleasing anticipation of all the wild life I should see in such a place, especially after an experience I had on my second day in it. I was standing in an open glade when a cock-pheasant uttered a cry of alarm, and immediately afterwards, startled by the cry perhaps, a roe-deer rushed out of the close thicket of oak and holly in which it had been hiding, and ran past me at a very short distance, giving me a good sight of this shyest of the large wild animals still left to us. He looked very beautiful to me, in that mouse-coloured coat which makes him invisible in the deep shade in which he is accustomed to pass the daylight hours in hiding, as he fled across the green open space in the brilliant May sunshine. But he was only one, a chance visitor, a wanderer from wood to wood about the land; and he had been seen once, a month before my encounter with him, and ever since then the keepers had been watching and waiting for him, gun in hand, to send a charge of shot into his side.
That was the best and the only great thing I saw in the Great Ridge Wood, for the curse of the pheasant is on it as on all the woods and forests in Wiltshire, and all wild life considered injurious to the semi-domestic bird, from the sparrowhawk to the harrier and buzzard and goshawk, and from the little mousing weasel to the badger; and all the wild life that is only beautiful, or which delights us because of its wildness, from the squirrel to the roe-deer, must be included in the slaughter.
One very long summer day spent in roaming about in this endless wood, always on the watch, had for sole result, so far as anything out of the common goes, the spectacle of a hare sitting on a stump. The hare started up at a distance of over a hundred yards before me and rushed straight away at first, then turned, and ran on my left so as to get round to the side from which I had come. I stood still and watched him as he moved swiftly over the ground, seeing him not as a hare but as a dim brown object successively appearing, vanishing, and reappearing, behind and between the brown tree-trunks, until he had traced half a circle and was then suddenly lost to sight. Thinking that he had come to a stand I put my binocular on the spot where he had vanished, and saw him sitting on an old oak stump about thirty inches long. It was a round mossy stump, about eighteen inches in diameter, standing in a bed of brown dead leaves, with the rough brown trunks of other dwarf oak-trees on either side of it. The animal was sitting motionless, in profile, its ears erect, seeing me with one eye, and was like a carved figure of a hare set on a pedestal, and had a very striking appearance.
As I had never seen such a thing before I thought it was worth mentioning to a keeper I called to see at his lodge on my way back in the evening. It had been a blank day, I told him—a hare sitting on a stump being the only thing I could remember to tell him. "Well," he said, "you've seen something I've never seen in all the years I've been in these woods. And yet, when you come to think of it, it's just what one might expect a hare would do. The wood is full of old stumps, and it seems only natural a hare should jump on to one to get a better view of a man or animal at a distance among the trees. But I never saw it."