On going or wading through the belt of bracken under the tall firs—that billowy sea of fronds in the midst of which I have so long detained my patient reader—into the great oak wood beyond and below it, on each successive visit during the last days of June, the harshening of the bird voices became more marked. Only the wren and wood-wren and willow-wren uttered an occasional song, but the bigger birds made most of the sound. Families of young jays were then just out of the nest, crying with hunger, and filling the wood with their discordant screams when the parent birds came with food. A pair of kestrels, too, with a nestful of young on a tall fir incessantly uttered their shrill reiterated cries when I was near; and one pair of green woodpeckers, with young out of the breeding-hole but not yet able to fly, were half crazed with anxiety. Around me and on before me they flitted from tree to tree and clung to the bark, wings spread out and crest raised, their loud laugh changed to a piercing cry of anger that pained the sense.
They were now moved only by solicitude and anger: all other passion and music had gone out of the bird and into the insect world. The oak woods were now full of a loud continuous hum like that of a distant threshing-machine; an unbroken deep sound composed of ten thousand thousand small individual sounds conjoined in one, but diffused and flowing like water over the surface, under the trees, and the rough bushy tangle. The incredible number and variety of blood-sucking flies makes this same low hot part of the Forest as nearly like a transcript of tropical nature in some damp, wooded district as may be found in England. But these Forest flies, even when they came in legions about me, were not able to spoil my pleasure. It was delightful to see so much life—to visit and sit down with them in their own domestic circle.
In other days, in a distant region, I have passed many a night out of doors in the presence of a cloud of mosquitoes; and when during restless sleep I have pulled the covering from my face, they had me at their mercy. For the smarts they inflicted on me then I have my reward, since the venom they injected into my veins has proved a lasting prophylactic. But to the poor cattle this place must be a very purgatory, a mazy wilderness swarming with minute hellish imps that mock their horns and giant strength, and cannot be shaken off. While sitting on the roots of a tree in the heart of the wood, I heard the heavy tramping and distressed bellowings of several beasts coming at a furious rate towards me, and presently half a dozen heifers and young bulls burst through the bushes; and catching sight of me at a distance of ten or twelve yards, they suddenly came to a dead stop, glaring at me with strange, mad, tortured eyes; then swerving aside, crashed away through the undergrowth in another direction.
Dark Water
In this wood I sought and found the stream well named the Dark Water; here, at all events, it is grown over with old ivied oaks, with brambles and briars that throw long branches from side to side, making the almost hidden current in the deep shade look black; but when the sunlight falls on it the water is the colour of old sherry from the red soil it flows over. No sooner had I sat down on the bank, where I had a little space of sunlit water to look upon, than the flies gathered thick about and on me, and I began to pay some attention to individuals among them. Those that came to suck blood, and settled at once in a business-like manner on my legs, were some hairy and some smooth, and of various colours—grey, black, steel-blue, and barred and ringed with bright tints; and with these distinguished guests came numberless others, small lean gnats mostly, without colour, and of no consideration. I did not so much mind these as the others that simply buzzed round without an object—flies that have no beauty, no lancet to stab you with, and no distinction of any kind, yet will persist in forcing themselves on your attention. They buzz and buzz, and are loudest in your ear when you are most anxious to listen to some distant faint sound. If a blood-sucker hurts you, you can slap him to death, and there's an end of the matter; but slap at one of these idle, aimless, teasing flies as hard as you like, and he is gone like quicksilver through your fingers. He is buzzing derisively in your ears: "Slap away as much as you like—it pleases you and doesn't hurt me." And then down again in the same place!
When the others—the serious flies on business bent—got too numerous, I began to slap my legs, killing one or two of the greediest at each slap, and to throw their small corpses on the sunlit current. These slain flies were not wasted, for very soon I had quite a number of little minnows close to my feet, eager to seize them as they fell. And, by-and-by, three fiddlers, or pond-skaters, "sagacious of their quarry from afar," came skating into sight on the space of bright water; and to these mysterious, uncanny-looking creatures—insect ghosts that walk on the water, but with very unghost-like appetites—I began tossing some of the flies; and each time a fiddler seized a floating fly he skated away into the shade with it to devour it in peace and quiet all alone by himself. For a fiddler with a fly is like a dog with a bone among other hungry dogs. When I had finished feeding my ghosts and little fishes, I got up and left the place, for the sun was travelling west and the greatest heat was over.