‘All this time the cloud had been blowing along the sands, never lifting a fathom, but allowing some three lengths’ clear view ahead, and the wind blew still harder. Dusk it had been when we lost our way; it was almost pitch-dark now. Time and again I thought voices came through our enveloping shroud, but though I called often there was no reply. Sound did not carry far, and our loudest shouts seemed to be stifled on our lips. As I looked steadily ahead into the flurry of snowflakes, which accompanied a stiffer squall than usual, I thought the chestnut’s ear twitched as though sensitive to something occurring not far away. Then the gray cheered up—it had been doggedly pressing against the collar for some time, as though the previous terror had sapped its strength—and I turned to the master at my elbow. His face was lit with expectation, tempered with doubt. He forestalled my question. “Do you see that? I have been watching for a few seconds, though I didn’t speak, for fear it might be a delusion.” But our animals broke into a canter, and shortly the air around us was filled with the sounds of cracking whips and shouting men; and it didn’t take more than a second for us to realize that we had fallen in with a band of carriers laden with goods for the Ulverston market. Where we had been in our perilous wandering will never be known, but we returned to safety quite close to where the Kent was to be crossed. The carriers had planned to stay the night at Cartmel, and to cross the Leven sands after the morning tide, so we stayed in their company. During the night, however, the threatening storm burst; and at daybreak the sea in the channel raged so wildly that not one would venture, and all made the détour over hilly roads to Newby Bridge, and so to our journey’s end.’
SPORT AMONG THE FELLS
I. Along the Heather
It is always with exhilaration that the sportsman hears the first wing-rush of the season, and sees his first covey of grouse whirl along the heathery waste. The gun is thrown up, and on the instant the bird is singled. At the report a few feathers are struck up from the winger. Almost instantly the fury of its pinionings ceases, its flight droops, and becomes more and more unsteady, till with a thud it reaches the grass just as your retriever gets within distance.
In our district of rough shootings, the twelfth is the only festival the gunner observes, for the grouse is our stable game-bird. But though restricted in its variety of sport, ours, also, is one of the few areas in which genuine old-fashioned shooting is to be had. The exigencies of falling revenues has stopped the heavy stocking and close preserving formerly the custom, and our birds are almost always wild—wild with the freedom of the spreading moorland, not with the wildness of terror. Beating is rarely resorted to by the occupiers of our shootings, for men are scarce in upland valleys.
The evening of the eleventh closed down over the steeps in lurid fashion, and at dark a storm was whistling along the nearby braes. Our keeper, however, held that by sunrise the worst of the tempest would be spent, and that a clear day was in store for us. However, when we arose the gale still shrieked along the uplands, driving huge banks of cloud before it. The rain had ceased some hours before, but every dell was occupied with a roaring flood, and the bosky places were palpably saturated. The keeper, who appeared to have spent the whole of the wild night patrolling the only route by which poachers could reach the moor, was decidedly of opinion that, bad as the weather was, it was still improving rapidly. The clouds, whirling ghostlike in the uncertain light, were less frequent, and did not fall so far down the slopes. Now and again the surf of billowy white passed clear of the fellside for a few seconds.
Up and be doing was advised; and, as we were in friendly rivalry with the holders of the other moors as to whose gun should fall the earliest bird of the season, in a few seconds we were striding through the woods, listening to the eerie voice of the gale in the reeling pine-tops, or to the gushing down secluded ghylls of creamy torrents.
In ten minutes we were on the bleak moor; the pressure of the wind was so strong that we could barely keep our feet. The grass was beaded with raindrops; the tangled bushes through which here and there we had to force a passage shook drenching showers upon us. Walking along some half-mile, we got into the shelter of a great rib of mountain; and here the keeper anticipated sport. So far not a bird had stirred, or even called; whether they had deserted the exposed brae or were unwilling to rise, I cannot say.
Now, looking across the deep, narrow valley, we espied at a great distance another shooting-party passing through the heather in extended line. Our keeper chuckled: