I could well understand his feeling, and have not ceased to envy him his good fortune. Thinking, after leaving him, of the sublime conflict he had described, and of the raven's savage nature, Blake's question in his "Tiger, tiger, burning bright" came to my mind:
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
We can but answer that it was no other; that when the Supreme Artist had fashioned it with bold, free lines out of the blue-black rock, he smote upon it with his mallet and bade it live and speak; and its voice when it spoke was in accord with its appearance and temper—the savage, human-like croak, and the loud, angry bark, as if a deep-chested man had barked like a blood-hound.
How strange it seems, when we come to think of it, that the owners of great estates and vast parks, who are lovers of wild nature and animal life, and should therefore have been most anxious to preserve this bird, have allowed it to be extirpated! "A raven tree," says the author of the Birds of Wiltshire, "is no mean ornament to a park, and speaks of a wide domain and large timber, and an ancient family; for the raven is an aristocratic bird and cannot brook a confined property and trees of a young growth. Would that its predilection were more humoured and a secure retreat allowed it by the larger proprietors in the land!"
The wide domains, the large timber, and the ancient families survive, but the raven has vanished. It occasionally takes a young rabbit. But the human ravens of Somerset—to wit, the men and boys who have as little right to the rabbits—do the same. I do not suppose that in this way fewer than ten thousand to twenty thousand rabbits are annually "picked up," or "poached"—if any one likes that word better—in the county. Probably a larger number. The existence of a pair of ravens on an estate of twenty or thirty thousand acres would not add much to the loss. No doubt the raven kills other creatures that are preserved for sport, but it does not appear that its extermination has improved things in Somerset. Thirty years ago, when black-game was more plentiful than it is now, the raven was to be met with throughout the county, and was abundant on Exmoor and the Quantocks. The old head keeper on the Forest of Exmoor told me that when he took the place, twenty-five years ago, ravens, carrion crows, buzzards, and hawks of various kinds were very abundant, and that the war he had waged against them for a quarter of a century had well-nigh extirpated all these species. He had kept a careful record of all birds killed, noting the species in every case, as he was paid for all, but the reward varied, the largest sum being given for the largest birds—ravens and buzzards. His book shows that in one year, a quarter of a century ago, he was paid for fifty-two ravens shot and trapped. After that the number annually diminished rapidly, and for several years past not one raven had been killed.
At present one may go from end to end of the county, which is a long one, and find no raven; but in very many places, from North Devon to the borders of Gloucestershire, one would find accounts of "last ravens." Even in the comparatively populous neighbourhood of Wells at least three pairs of ravens bred annually down to about twenty years ago—one pair in the tower on Glastonbury Tor, one on the Ebor rocks, and one at Wookey Hole, two miles from the town.
But Somerset is no richer in memories of "last ravens" than most English counties. A selection of the most interesting of such memories of ravens expelled from their ancestral breeding-places during the last half-century would fill a volume. In conclusion I will give one of the raven stories I picked up in Somerset. It was related to me by Dr Livett, who has been the parish doctor in Wells for over sixty years, and was able to boast, before retiring in 1898, that he was the oldest parish doctor in the kingdom. About the year 1841 he was sent for to attend a cottage woman at Priddy—a desolate little village high up in the Mendips, four or five miles from Wells. He had to remain some hours at the cottage, and about midnight he was with the other members of the family in the living-room, when a loud tapping was heard on the glazed window. As no one in the room moved, and the tapping continued at intervals, he asked why some one did not open the door. They replied that it was only the ravens, and went on to tell him that a pair of these birds roosted every night close by, and invariably when a light was seen burning at a late hour in any cottage they would come and tap at the window. The ravens had often been seen doing it, and their habit was so well known that no notice was taken of it.
CHAPTER IX
OWLS IN A VILLAGE