Breaking a sheep-dog—The shepherd buys a pup—His training—He refuses to work—He chases a swallow and is put to death—The shepherd's remorse—Bob, the sheep-dog—How he was bitten by an adder—Period of the dog's receptivity—Tramp, the sheep-dog—Roaming lost about the country—A rage of hunger—Sheep-killing dogs—Dogs running wild—Anecdotes—A Russian sheep-dog—Caleb parts with Tramp
To Caleb the proper training of a dog was a matter of the very first importance. A man, he considered, must have not only a fair amount of intelligence, but also experience, and an even temper, and a little sympathy as well, to sum up the animal in hand—its special aptitudes, its limitations, its disposition, and that something in addition, which he called a "kink," and would probably have described as its idiosyncrasy if he had known the word. There was as much individual difference among dogs as there is in boys; but if the breed was right, and you went the right way about it, you could hardly fail to get a good servant. If a dog was not properly broken, if its trainer had not made the most of it, he was not a "good shepherd": he lacked the intelligence—"understanding" was his word—or else the knowledge or patience or persistence to do his part. It was, however, possible for the best shepherd to make mistakes, and one of the greatest to be made, which was not uncommon, was to embark on the long and laborious business of training an animal of mixed blood—a sheep-dog with a taint of terrier, retriever, or some other unsuitable breed in him. In discussing this subject with other shepherds I generally found that those who were in perfect agreement with Caleb on this point were men who were somewhat like him in character, and who regarded their work with the sheep as so important that it must be done thoroughly in every detail and in the best way. One of the best shepherds I know, who is sixty years old and has been on the same downland sheep-farm all his life, assures me that he has never had and never would have a dog which was trained by another. But the shepherd of the ordinary kind says that he doesn't care much about the animal's parentage, or that he doesn't trouble to inquire into its pedigree: he breaks the animal, and finds that he does pretty well, even when he has some strange blood in him; finally, that all dogs have faults and you must put up with them. Caleb would say of such a man that he was not a "good shepherd." One of his saddest memories was of a dog which he bought and broke without having made the necessary inquiries about its parentage.
It happened that a shepherd of the village, who had taken a place at a distant farm, was anxious to dispose of a litter of pups before leaving, and he asked Caleb to have one. Caleb refused. "My dog's old, I know," he said, "but I don't want a pup now and I won't have 'n."
A day or two later the man came back and said he had kept one of the best of the five for him—he had got rid of all the others. "You can't do better," he persisted. "No," said Caleb, "what I said I say again. I won't have 'n, I've no money to buy a dog."
"Never mind about money," said the other. "You've got a bell I like the sound of; give he to me and take the pup." And so the exchange was made, a copper bell for a nice black pup with a white collar; its mother, Bawcombe knew, was a good sheep-dog, but about the other parent he made no inquiries.
On receiving the pup he was told that its name was Tory, and he did not change it. It was always difficult, he explained, to find a name for a dog—a name, that is to say, which anyone would say was a proper name for a dog and not a foolish name. One could think of a good many proper names—Jack and Watch, and so on—but in each case one would remember some dog which had been called by that name, and it seemed to belong to that particular well-remembered dog and to no other, and so in the end because of this difficulty he allowed the name to remain.
The dog had not cost him much to buy, but as it was only a few weeks old he had to keep it at his own cost for fully six months before beginning the business of breaking it, which would take from three to six months longer. A dog cannot be put to work before he is quite half a year old unless he is exceptionally vigorous. Sheep are timid creatures, but not unintelligent, and they can distinguish between the seasoned old sheep-dog, whose furious onset and bite they fear, and the raw young recruit as easily as the rook can distinguish between the man with a gun and the man of straw with a broomstick under his arm. They will turn upon and attack the young dog, and chase him away with his tail between his legs. He will also work too furiously for his strength and then collapse, with the result that he will make a cowardly sheep-dog, or, as the shepherds say, "brokenhearted."
Another thing. He must be made to work at first with an old sheep-dog, for though he has the impulse to fly about and do something, he does not know what to do and does not understand his master's gestures and commands. He must have an object-lesson, he must see the motion and hear the word and mark how the old dog flies to this or that point and what he does. The word of command or the gesture thus becomes associated in his mind with a particular action on his part. But he must not be given too many object-lessons or he will lose more than he will gain—a something which might almost be described as a sense of individual responsibility. That is to say, responsibility to the human master who delegates his power to him. Instead of taking his power directly from the man he takes it from the dog, and this becomes a fixed habit so quickly that many shepherds say that if you give more than from three to six lessons of this kind to a young dog you will spoil him. He will need the mastership of the other dog, and will thereafter always be at a loss and work in an uncertain way.
A timid or unwilling young dog is often coupled with the old dog two or three times, but this method has its dangers too, as it may be too much for the young dog's strength, and give him that "broken-heart" from which he will never recover; he will never be a good sheep-dog.
To return to Tory. In due time he was trained and proved quick to learn and willing to work, so that before long he began to be useful and was much wanted with the sheep, as the old dog was rapidly growing stiffer on his legs and harder of hearing.
One day the lambs were put into a field which was half clover and half rape, and it was necessary to keep them on the clover. This the young dog could not or would not understand; again and again he allowed the lambs to go to the rape, which so angered Caleb that he threw his crook at him. Tory turned and gave him a look, then came very quietly and placed himself behind his master. From that moment he refused to obey, and Bawcombe, after exhausting all his arts of persuasion, gave it up and did as well as he could without his assistance.
That evening after folding-time he by chance met a shepherd he was well acquainted with and told him of the trouble he was in over Tory.
"You tie him up for a week," said the shepherd, "and treat him well till he forgets all about it, and he'll be the same as he was before you offended him. He's just like old Tom—he's got his father's temper."
"What's that you say?" exclaimed Bawcombe. "Be you saying that Tory's old Tom's son? I'd never have taken him if I'd known that. Tom's not pure-bred—he's got retriever's blood."
"Well, 'tis known, and I could have told 'ee, if thee'd asked me," said the shepherd. "But you do just as I tell 'ee, and it'll be all right with the dog."
Tory was accordingly tied up at home and treated well and spoken kindly to and patted on the head, so that there would be no unpleasantness between master and servant, and if he was an intelligent animal he would know that the crook had been thrown not to hurt but merely to express disapproval of his naughtiness.
Then came a busy day for the shepherd, when the lambs were trimmed before being taken to the Wilton sheep-fair. There was Bawcombe, his boy, the decrepit old dog, and Tory to do the work, but when the time came to start Tory refused to do anything.
When sent to turn the lambs he walked off to a distance of about twenty yards, sat down and looked at his master. Caleb hoped he would come round presently when he saw them all at work, and so they did the best they could without him for a time; but the old dog was stiffer and harder of hearing than ever, and as they could not get on properly Caleb went at intervals to Tory and tried to coax him to give them his help; and every time he was spoken to he would get up and come to his master, then when ordered to do something he would walk off to the spot where he had chosen to be and calmly sit down once more and look at them. Caleb was becoming more and more incensed, but he would not show it to the dog; he still hoped against hope; and then a curious thing happened. A swallow came skimming along close to the earth and passed within a yard of Tory, when up jumped the dog and gave chase, darting across the field with such speed that he kept very near the bird until it rose and passed over the hedge at the farther side. The joyous chase over Tory came back to his old place, and sitting on his haunches began watching them again struggling with the lambs. It was more than the shepherd could stand; he went deliberately up to the dog, and taking him by the straw collar still on his neck drew him quietly away to the hedge-side and bound him to a bush, then getting a stout stick he came back and gave him one blow on the head. So great was the blow that the dog made not the slightest sound: he fell; his body quivered a moment and his legs stretched out—he was quite dead. Bawcombe then plucked an armful of bracken and threw it over his body to cover it, and going back to the hurdles sent the boy home, then spreading his cloak at the hedge-side, laid himself down on it and covered his head.
An hour later the fanner appeared on the scene. "What are you doing here, shepherd?" he demanded in surprise. "Not trimming the lambs!"
Bawcombe, raising himself on his elbow, replied that he was not trimming the lambs—that he would trim no lambs that day.
"Oh, but we must get on with the trimming!" cried the farmer.
Bawcombe returned that the dog had put him out, and now the dog was dead—he had killed him in his anger, and he would trim no more lambs that day. He had said it and would keep to what he had said.
Then the farmer got angry and said that the dog had a very good nose and would have been useful to him to take rabbits.
"Master," said the other, "I got he when he were a pup and broke 'n to help me with the sheep and not to catch rabbits; and now I've killed 'n and he'll catch no rabbits."
The farmer knew his man, and swallowing his anger walked off without another word.
Later on in the day he was severely blamed by a shepherd friend who said that he could easily have sold the dog to one of the drovers, who were always anxious to pick up a dog in their village, and he would have had the money to repay him for his trouble; to which Bawcombe returned, "If he wouldn't work for I that broke 'n he wouldn't work for another. But I'll never again break a dog that isn't pure-bred."
But though he justified himself he had suffered remorse for what he had done; not only at the time, when he covered the dead dog up with bracken and refused to work any more that day, but the feeling had persisted all his life, and he could not relate the incident without showing it very plainly. He bitterly blamed himself for having taken the pup and for spending long months in training him without having first taken pains to inform himself that there was no bad blood in him. And although the dog was perhaps unfit to live he had finally killed him in anger. If it had not been for that sudden impetuous chase after a swallow he would have borne with him and considered afterwards what was to be done; but that dash after the bird was more than he could stand; for it looked as if Tory had done it purposely, in something of a mocking spirit, to exhibit his wonderful activity and speed to his master, sweating there at his task, and make him see what he had lost in offending him.
The shepherd gave another instance of a mistake he once made which caused him a good deal of pain. It was the case of a dog named Bob which he owned when a young man. He was an exceptionally small dog, but his quick intelligence made up for lack of strength, and he was of a very lively disposition, so that he was a good companion to a shepherd as well as a good servant.
One summer day at noon Caleb was going to his flock in the fields, walking by a hedge, when he noticed Bob sniffing suspiciously at the roots of an old holly-tree growing on the bank. It was a low but very old tree with a thick trunk, rotten and hollow inside, the cavity being hidden with the brushwood growing up from the roots. As he came abreast of the tree, Bob looked up and emitted a low whine, that sound which says so much when used by a dog to his master and which his master does not always rightly understand. At all events he did not do so in this case. It was August and the shooting had begun, and Caleb jumped to the conclusion that a wounded bird had crept into the hollow tree to hide, and so to Bob's whine, which expressed fear and asked what he was to do, the shepherd answered, "Get him." Bob dashed in, but quickly recoiled, whining in a piteous way, and began rubbing his face on his legs. Bawcombe in alarm jumped down and peered into the hollow trunk and heard a slight rustling of dead leaves, but saw nothing. His dog had been bitten by an adder, and he at once returned to the village, bitterly blaming himself for the mistake he had made and greatly fearing that he would lose his dog. Arrived at the village his mother at once went off to the down to inform Isaac of the trouble and ask him what they were to do. Caleb had to wait some time, as none of the villagers who gathered round could suggest a remedy, and in the meantime Bob continued rubbing his cheek against his foreleg, twitching and whining with pain; and before long the face and head began to swell on one side, the swelling extending to the nape and downwards to the throat. Presently Isaac himself, full of concern, arrived on the scene, having left his wife in charge of the flock, and at the same time a man from a neighbouring village came riding by and joined the group. The horseman got off and assisted Caleb in holding the dog while Isaac made a number of incisions with his knife in the swollen place and let out some blood, after which they rubbed the wounds and all the swollen part with an oil used for the purpose. The composition of this oil was a secret: it was made by a man in one of the downland villages and sold at eighteenpence a small bottle; Isaac was a believer in its efficacy, and always kept a bottle hidden away somewhere in his cottage.
Bob recovered in a few days, but the hair fell out from all the part which had been swollen, and he was a curious-looking dog with half his face and head naked until he got his fresh coat, when it grew again. He was as good and active a dog as ever, and lived to a good old age, but one result of the poison he never got over: his bark had changed from a sharp ringing sound to a low and hoarse one. "He always barked," said the shepherd, "like a dog with a sore throat."
To go back to the subject of training a dog. Once you make a beginning it must be carried through to a finish. You take him at the age of six months, and the education must be fairly complete when he is a year old. He is then lively, impressionable, exceedingly adaptive; his intelligence at that period is most like man's; but it would be a mistake to think that it will continue so—that to what he learns now in this wonderful half-year, other things may be added by and by as opportunity arises. At a year he has practically got to the end of his capacity to learn. He has lost his human-like receptivity, but what he has been taught will remain with him for the rest of his life. We can hardly say that he remembers it; it is more like what is called "inherited memory" or "lapsed intelligence."
All this is very important to a shepherd, and explains the reason an old head-shepherd had for saying to me that he had never had, and never would have, a dog he had not trained himself. No two men follow precisely the same method in training, and a dog transferred from his trainer to another man is always a little at a loss; method, voice, gestures, personality, are all different; his new master must study him and in a way adapt himself to the dog. The dog is still more at a loss when transferred from one kind of country to another where the sheep are worked in a different manner, and one instance Caleb gave me of this is worth relating. It was, I thought, one of his best dog stories.
His dogs as a rule were bought as pups; occasionally he had had to get a dog already trained, a painful necessity to a shepherd, seeing that the pound or two it costs—the price of an ordinary animal—is a big sum of money to him. And once in his life he got an old trained sheep-dog for nothing. He was young then, and acting as under-shepherd in his native village, when the report came one day that a great circus and menagerie which had been exhibiting in the west was on its way to Salisbury, and would be coming past the village about six o'clock on the following morning. The turnpike was a little over a mile away, and thither Caleb went with half a dozen other young men of the village at about five o'clock to see the show pass, and sat on a gate beside a wood to wait its coming. In due time the long procession of horses and mounted men and women, and gorgeous vans containing lions and tigers and other strange beasts, came by, affording them great admiration and delight. When it had gone on and the last van had disappeared at the turning of the road, they got down from the gate and were about to set out on their way back when a big, shaggy sheepdog came out of the wood and running to the road began looking up and down in a bewildered way. They had no doubt that he belonged to the circus and had turned aside to hunt a rabbit in the wood; then, thinking the animal would understand them, they shouted to it and waved their arms in the direction the procession had gone. But the dog became frightened, and turning fled back into cover, and they saw no more of it.
Two or three days later it was rumoured that a strange dog had been seen in the neighbourhood of Winterbourne Bishop, in the fields; and women and children going to or coming from outlying cottages and farms had encountered it, sometimes appearing suddenly out of the furze-bushes and staring wildly at them; or they would meet him in some deep lane between hedges, and after standing still a moment eyeing them he would turn and fly in terror from their strange faces. Shepherds began to be alarmed for the safety of their sheep, and there was a good deal of excitement and talk about the strange dog. Two or three days later Caleb encountered it. He was returning from his flock at the side of a large grass field where four or five women were occupied cutting the thistles, and the dog, which he immediately recognized as the one he had seen at the turnpike, was following one of the women about. She was greatly alarmed, and called to him, "Come here, Caleb, for goodness' sake, and drive this big dog away! He do look so desprit, I'm afeared of he."
"Don't you be feared," he shouted back. "He won't hurt 'ee; he's starving—don't you see his bones sticking out? He's asking to be fed." Then going a little nearer he called to her to take hold of the dog by the neck and keep him while he approached. He feared that the dog on seeing him coming would rush away. After a little while she called the dog, but when he went to her she shrank away from him and called out, "No, I daren't touch he—he'll tear my hand off. I never see'd such a desprit-looking beast!"
"'Tis hunger," repeated Caleb, and then very slowly and cautiously he approached, the dog all the time eyeing him suspiciously, ready to rush away on the slightest alarm. And while approaching him he began to speak gently to him, then coming to a stand stooped and patting his legs called the dog to him. Presently he came, sinking his body lower as he advanced and at last crawling, and when he arrived at the shepherd's feet he turned himself over on his back—that eloquent action which a dog uses when humbling himself before and imploring mercy from one mightier than himself, man or dog.
Caleb stooped, and after patting the dog gripped him firmly by the neck and pulled him up, while with his free hand he undid his leather belt to turn it into a dog's collar and leash; then, the end of the strap in his hand, he said "Come," and started home with the dog at his side. Arrived at the cottage he got a bucket and mixed as much meal as would make two good feeds, the dog all the time watching him with his muscles twitching and the water running from his mouth. The meal well mixed he emptied it out on the turf, and what followed, he said, was an amazing thing to see: the dog hurled himself down on the food and started devouring it as if the mass of meal had been some living savage creature he had captured and was frenziedly tearing to pieces. He turned round and round, floundering on the earth, uttering strange noises like half-choking growls and screams while gobbling down the meal; then when he had devoured it all he began tearing up and swallowing the turf for the sake of the little wet meal still adhering to it.
Such rage of hunger Caleb had never seen, and it was painful to him to think of what the dog had endured during those days when it had been roaming foodless about the neighbourhood. Yet it was among sheep all the time—scores of flocks left folded by night at a distance from the village; one would have imagined that the old wolf and wild-dog instinct would have come to life in such circumstances, but the instinct was to all appearance dead.
My belief is that the pure-bred sheep-dog is indeed the last dog to revert to a state of nature; and that when sheep-killing by night is traced to a sheep-dog, the animal has a bad strain in him, of retriever, or cur, or "rabbit-dog," as the shepherds call all terriers. When I was a boy on the pampas sheep-killing dogs were common enough, and they were always curs, or the common dog of the country, a smooth-haired animal about the size of a coach-dog, red, or black, or white. I recall one instance of sheep-killing being traced to our own dogs—we had about six or eight just then. A native neighbour, a few miles away, caught them at it one morning; they escaped him in spite of his good horse, with lasso and bolas also, but his sharp eyes saw them pretty well in the dim light, and by and by he identified them, and my father had to pay him for about thirty slain and badly injured sheep; after which a gallows was erected and our guardians ignominiously hanged. Here we shoot dogs; in some countries the old custom of hanging them, which is perhaps less painful, is still followed.
To go back to our story. From that time the stray dog was Caleb's obedient and affectionate slave, always watching his face and every gesture, and starting up at his slightest word in readiness to do his bidding. When put with the flock he turned out to be a useful sheep-dog, but unfortunately he had not been trained on the Wiltshire Downs. It was plain to see that the work was strange to him, that he had been taught in a different school, and could never forget the old and acquire a new method. But as to what conditions he had been reared in or in what district or country no one could guess. Every one said that he was a sheep-dog, but unlike any sheep-dog they had ever seen; he was not Wiltshire, nor Welsh, nor Sussex, nor Scotch, and they could say no more. Whenever a shepherd saw him for the first time his attention was immediately attracted, and he would stop to speak with Caleb. "What sort of a dog do you call that?" he would say. "I never see'd one just like 'n before."
At length one day when passing by a new building which some workmen had been brought from a distance to erect in the village, one of the men hailed Caleb and said, "Where did you get that dog, mate?"
"Why do you ask me that?" said the shepherd.
"Because I know where he come from: he's a Rooshian, that's what he is. I've see'd many just like him in the Crimea when I was there. But I never see'd one before in England."
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.
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."
What, then, had he seen worth remembering during his long hours in the wood on that day, or the day before, or on any day during the last thirty years since he had been policing that wood, I asked him. He answered that he had seen many strange things, but he was not now able to remember one to tell me! He said, further, that the only things he remembered were those that related to his business of guarding and rearing the birds; all other things he observed in animals, however remarkable they might seem to him at the moment, were things that didn't matter and were quickly forgotten.
On the very next day I was out on the down with a gipsy, and we got talking about wild animals. He was a middle-aged man and a very perfect specimen of his race—not one of the blue-eyed and red or light-haired bastard gipsies, but dark as a Red Indian, with eyes like a hawk, and altogether a hawk-like being, lean, wiry, alert, a perfectly wild man in a tame, civilized land. The lean, mouse-coloured lurcher that followed at his heels was perfect too, in his way—man and dog appeared made for one another. When this man spoke of his life, spent in roaming about the country, of his very perfect health, and of his hatred of houses, the very atmosphere of any indoor place producing a suffocating and sickening effect on him, I envied him as I envy birds their wings and as I can never envy men who live in mansions. His was the wild, the real life, and it seemed to me that there was no other worth living.
"You know," said he, in the course of our talk about wild animals, "we are very fond of hedgehogs—we like them better than rabbits."
"Well, so do I," was my remark. I am not quite sure that I do, but that is what I told him. "But now you talk of hedgehogs," I said, "it's funny to think that, common as the animal is, it has some queer habits I can't find anything about from gamekeepers and others I've talked to on the subject, or from my own observation. Yet one would imagine that we know all there is to be known about the little beast; you'll find his history in a hundred books—perhaps in five hundred. There's one book about our British animals so big you'd hardly be able to lift its three volumes from the ground with all your strength, in which its author has raked together everything known about the hedgehog, but he doesn't give me the information I want—just what I went to the book to find. Now here's what a friend of mine once saw. He's not a naturalist, nor a sportsman, nor a gamekeeper, and not a gipsy; he doesn't observe animals or want to find out their ways; he is a writer, occupied day and night with his writing, sitting among books, yet he saw something which the naturalists and gamekeepers haven't seen, so far as I know. He was going home one moonlight night by a footpath through the woods when he heard a very strange noise a little distance ahead, a low whistling sound, very sharp, like the continuous twittering of a little bird with a voice like a bat, or a shrew, only softer, more musical. He went on very cautiously, until he spied two hedgehogs standing on the path facing each other, with their noses almost or quite touching. He remained watching and listening to them for some moments, then tried to go a little nearer and they ran away.
"Now I've asked about a dozen gamekeepers if they ever saw such a thing, and all said they hadn't; they never heard hedgehogs make that twittering sound, like a bird or a singing mouse; they had only heard them scream like a rabbit when in a trap. Now what do you say about it?"
"I've never seen anything like that," said the gipsy. "I only know the hedgehog makes a little whistling sound when he first comes out at night; I believe it is a sort of call they have."
"But no doubt," I said, "you've seen other queer things in hedgehogs and in other little animals which I should like to hear."
Yes, he had, first and last, seen a good many queer things both by day and night, in woods and other places, he replied, and then continued: "But you see it's like this. We see something and say, 'Now that's a very curious thing!' and then we forget all about it. You see, we don't lay no store by such things; we ain't scholards and don't know nothing about what's said in books. We see something and sayThat'ssomething we never saw before and never heard tell of, but maybe others have seen it and you can find it in the books. So that's how 'tis, but if I hadn't forgotten them I could have told you a lot of queer things."
That was all he could say, and few can say more. Caleb was one of the few who could, and one wonders why it was so, seeing that he was occupied with his own tasks in the fields and on the down where wild life is least abundant and varied, and that his opportunities were so few compared with those of the gamekeeper. It was, I take it, because he had sympathy for the creatures he observed, that their actions had stamped themselves on his memory, because he had seen them emotionally. We have seen how well he remembered the many sheep-dogs he had owned, how vividly their various characters are portrayed in his account of them. I have met with shepherds who had little to tell about the dogs they had possessed; they had regarded their dogs as useful servants and nothing more as long as they lived, and when dead they were forgotten. But Caleb had a feeling for his dogs which made it impossible for him to forget them or to recall them without that tenderness which accompanies the thought of vanished human friends. In a lesser degree he had something of this feeling for all animals, down even to the most minute and unconsidered. I recall here one of his anecdotes of a very small creature—a shrew, or over-runner, as he called it.
One day when out with his flock a sudden storm of rain caused him to seek for shelter in an old untrimmed hedge close by. He crept into the ditch, full of old dead leaves beneath the tangle of thorns and brambles, and setting his back against the bank he thrust his legs out, and as he did so was startled by an outburst of shrill little screams at his feet. Looking down he spied a shrew standing on the dead leaves close to his boot, screaming with all its might, its long thin snout pointed upwards and its mouth wide open; and just above it, two or three inches perhaps, hovered a small brown butterfly. There for a few moments it continued hovering while the shrew continued screaming; then the butterfly flitted away and the shrew disappeared among the dead leaves.
Caleb laughed (a rare thing with him) when he narrated this little incident, then remarked: "The over-runner was a-crying 'cause he couldn't catch that leetel butterfly."
The shepherd's inference was wrong; he did not know—few do—that the shrew has the singular habit, when surprised on the surface and in danger, of remaining motionless and uttering shrill cries. His foot, set down close to it, had set it screaming; the small butterfly, no doubt disturbed at the same moment, was there by chance. I recall here another little story he related of a bird—a long-eared owl.
One summer there was a great drought, and the rooks, unable to get their usual food from the hard, sun-baked pasture-lands, attacked the roots and would have pretty well destroyed them if the farmer had not protected his swedes by driving in stakes and running cotton-thread and twine from stake to stake all over the field. This kept them off, just as thread keeps the chaffinches from the seed-beds in small gardens, and as it keeps the sparrows from the crocuses on lawn and ornamental grounds. One day Caleb caught sight of an odd-looking, brownish-grey object out in the middle of the turnip-field, and as he looked it rose up two or three feet into the air, then dropped back again, and this curious movement was repeated at intervals of two or three minutes until he went to see what the thing was. It turned out to be a long-eared owl, with its foot accidentally caught by a slack thread, which allowed the bird to rise a couple of feet into the air; but every such attempt to escape ended in its being pulled back to the ground again. It was so excessively lean, so weightless in his hand, when he took it up after disengaging its foot, that he thought it must have been captive for the space of two or three days. The wonder was that it had kept alive during those long midsummer days of intolerable heat out there in the middle of the burning field. Yet it was in very fine feather and beautiful to look at with its long, black ear-tufts and round, orange-yellow eyes, which would never lose their fiery lustre until glazed in death. Caleb's first thought on seeing it closely was that it would have been a prize to anyone who liked to have a handsome bird stuffed in a glass case. Then raising it over his head he allowed it to fly, whereupon it flew off a distance of a dozen or fifteen yards and pitched among the turnips, after which it ran a little space and rose again with labour, but soon recovering strength it flew away over the field and finally disappeared in the deep shade of the copse beyond.
In relating these things the voice, the manner, the expression in his eyes were more than the mere words, and displayed the feeling which had caused these little incidents to endure so long in his memory.
The gamekeeper cannot have this feeling: he may come to his task with the liveliest interest in, even with sympathy for, the wild creatures amidst which he will spend his life, but it is all soon lost. His business in the woods is to kill, and the reflex effect is to extinguish all interest in the living animal—in its life and mind. It would, indeed, be a wonderful thing if he could remember any singular action or appearance of an animal which he had witnessed before bringing his gun automatically to his shoulder.
Moral effect of the great man—An orphaned village—The masters of the village.—Elijah Raven—Strange appearance and character—Elijah's house—The owls—Two rooms in the house—Elijah hardens with time—The village club and its arbitrary secretary—Caleb dips the lambs and falls ill—His claim on the club rejected—Elijah in court
In my roamings about the downs it is always a relief—a positive pleasure in fact—to find myself in a village which has no squire or other magnificent and munificent person who dominates everybody and everything, and, if he chooses to do so, plays providence in the community. I may have no personal objection to him—he is sometimes almost if not quite human; what I heartily dislike is the effect of his position (that of a giant among pigmies) on the lowly minds about him, and the servility, hypocrisy, and parasitism which spring up and flourish in his wide shadow whether he likes these moral weeds or not. As a rule he likes them, since the poor devil has this in common with the rest of us, that he likes to stand high in the general regard. But how is he to know it unless he witnesses its outward beautiful signs every day and every hour on every countenance he looks upon? Better, to my mind, the severer conditions, the poverty and unmerited sufferings which cannot be relieved, with the greater manliness and self-dependence when the people are left to work out their own destiny. On this account I was pleased to make the discovery on my first visit to Caleb's native village that there was no magnate, or other big man, and no gentleman except the parson, who was not a rich man. It was, so to speak, one of the orphaned villages left to fend for itself and fight its own way in a hard world, and had nobody even to give the customary blankets and sack of coals to its old women. Nor was there any very big farmer in the place, certainly no gentleman farmer; they were mostly small men, some of them hardly to be distinguished in speech and appearance from their hired labourers.
In these small isolated communities it is common to find men who have succeeded in rising above the others and in establishing a sort of mastery over them. They are not as a rule much more intelligent than the others who are never able to better themselves; the main difference is that they are harder and more grasping and have more self-control. These qualities tell eventually, and set a man a little apart, a little higher than the others, and he gets the taste of power, which reacts on him like the first taste of blood on the big cat. Henceforward he has his ideal, his definite goal, which is to get the upper hand—to be on top. He may be, and generally is, an exceedingly unpleasant fellow to have for a neighbour—mean, sordid, greedy, tyrannous, even cruel, and he may be generally hated and despised as well, but along with these feelings there will be a kind of shamefaced respect and admiration for his courage in following his own line in defiance of what others think and feel. It is after all with man as with the social animals: he must have a master—not a policeman, or magistrate, or a vague, far-away, impersonal something called the authorities or the government; but a head of the pack or herd, a being like himself whom he knows and sees and hears and feels every day. A real man, dressed in old familiar clothes, a fellow-villager, who, wolf or dog-like, has fought his way to the mastership.
There was a person of this kind at Winterbourne Bishop who was often mentioned in Caleb's reminiscences, for he had left a very strong impression on the shepherd's mind—as strong, perhaps, though in a disagreeable way, as that of Isaac his father, and of Mr. Ellerby of Doveton. For not only was he a man of great force of character, but he was of eccentric habits and of a somewhat grotesque appearance. The curious name of this person was Elijah Raven. He was a native of the village and lived till extreme old age in it, the last of his family, in a small house inherited from his father, situated about the centre of the village street. It was a quaint, old, timbered house, little bigger than a cottage, with a thatched roof, and behind it some outbuildings, a small orchard, and a field of a dozen or fifteen acres. Here he lived with one other person, an old man who did the cooking and housework, but after this man died he lived alone. Not only was he a bachelor, but he would never allow any woman to come inside his house. Elijah's one idea was to get the advantage of others—to make himself master in the village. Beginning poor, he worked in a small, cautious, peddling way at farming, taking a field or meadow or strip of down here and there in the neighbourhood, keeping a few sheep, a few cows, buying and selling and breeding horses. The men he employed were those he could get at low wages—poor labourers who were without a place and wanted to fill up a vacant time, or men like the Targetts described in a former chapter who could be imposed upon; also gipsies who flitted about the country, working in a spasmodic way when in the mood for the farmers who could tolerate them, and who were paid about half the wages of an ordinary labourer. If a poor man had to find money quickly, on account of illness or some other cause, he could get it from Elijah at once—not borrowed, since Elijah neither lent nor gave—but he could sell him anything he possessed—a horse or cow, or sheepdog, or a piece of furniture; and if he had nothing to sell, Elijah would give him something to do and pay him something for it. The great thing was that Elijah had money which he was always willing to circulate. At his unlamented death he left several thousands of pounds, which went to a distant relation, and a name which does not smell sweet, but is still remembered not only at Winterbourne Bishop but at many other villages on Salisbury Plain.
Elijah was short of stature, broad-shouldered, with an abnormally big head and large dark eyes. They say that he never cut his hair in his life. It was abundant and curly, and grew to his shoulders, and when he was old and his great mass of hair and beard became white it was said that he resembled a gigantic white owl. Mothers frightened their children into quiet by saying, "Elijah will get you if you don't behave yourself." He knew and resented this, and though he never noticed a child, he hated to have the little ones staring in a half-terrified way at him. To seclude himself more from the villagers he planted holly and yew bushes before his house, and eventually the entire building was hidden from sight by the dense evergreen thicket. The trees were cut down after his death: they were gone when I first visited the village and by chance found a lodging in the house, and congratulated myself that I had got the quaintest, old rambling rooms I had ever inhabited. I did not know that I was in Elijah Raven's house, although his name had long been familiar to me: it only came out one day when I asked my landlady, who was a native, to tell me the history of the place. She remembered how as a little girl, full of mischief and greatly daring, she had sometimes climbed over the low front wall to hide under the thick yew bushes and watch to catch a sight of the owlish old man at his door or window.
For many years Elijah had two feathered tenants, a pair of white owls—the birds he so much resembled. They occupied a small garret at the end of his bedroom, having access to it through a hole under the thatch. They bred there in peace, and on summer evenings one of the common sights of the village was Elijah's owls flying from the house behind the evergreens and returning to it with mice in their talons. At such seasons the threat to the unruly children would be varied to "Old Elijah's owls will get you." Naturally, the children grew up with the idea of the birds and the owlish old man associated in their minds.
It was odd that the two very rooms which Elijah had occupied during all those solitary years, the others being given over to spiders and dust, should have been assigned to me when I came to lodge in the house. The first, my sitting-room, was so low that my hair touched the ceiling when I stood up my full height; it had a brick floor and a wide old fireplace on one side. Though so low-ceilinged it was very large and good to be in when I returned from a long ramble on the downs, sometimes wet and cold, to sit by a wood fire and warm myself. At night when I climbed to my bedroom by means of the narrow, crooked, worm-eaten staircase, with two difficult and dangerous corners to get round, I would lie awake staring at the small square patch of greyness in the black interior made by the latticed window; and listening to the wind and rain outside, would remember that the sordid, owlish old man had slept there and stared nightly at that same grey patch in the dark for very many years. If, I thought, that something of a man which remains here below to haunt the scene of its past life is more likely to exist and appear to mortal eyes in the case of a person of strong individuality, then there is a chance that I may be visited this night by Elijah Raven his ghost. But his owlish countenance never appeared between me and that patch of pale dim light; nor did I ever feel a breath of cold unearthly air on me.
Elijah did not improve with time; the years that made him long-haired, whiter, and more owl-like also made him more penurious and grasping, and anxious to get the better of every person about him. There was scarcely a poor person in the village—not a field labourer nor shepherd nor farmer's boy, nor any old woman he had employed, who did not consider that they had suffered at his hands. The very poorest could not escape; if he got some one to work for fourpence a day he would find a reason to keep back a portion of the small sum due to him. At the same time he wanted to be well thought of, and at length an opportunity came to him to figure as one who did not live wholly for himself but rather as a person ready to go out of his way to help his neighbours.
There had long existed a small benefit society or club in the village to which most of the farm-hands in the parish belonged, the members numbering about sixty or seventy. Subscriptions were paid quarterly, but the rules were not strict, and any member could take a week or a fortnight longer to pay; when a member fell ill he received half the amount of his wages a week from the funds in hand, and once a year they had a dinner. The secretary was a labourer, and in time he grew old and infirm and could not hold a pen in his rheumaticky fingers, and a meeting was held to consider what was to be done in the matter. It was not an easy one to settle. There were few members capable of keeping the books who would undertake the duty, as it was unpaid, and no one among them well known and trusted by all the members. It was then that Elijah Raven came to the rescue. He attended the meeting, which he was allowed to do owing to his being a person of importance—the only one of that description in the village; and getting up on his legs he made the offer to act as secretary himself. This came as a great surprise, and the offer was at once and unanimously accepted, all unpleasant feelings being forgotten, and for the first time in his life Elijah heard himself praised as a disinterested person, one it was good to have in the village.
Things went on very well for a time, and at the yearly dinner of the club, a few months later, Elijah gave an account of his stewardship, showing that the club had a surplus of two hundred pounds. Shortly after this trouble began; Elijah, it was said, was making use of his position as secretary for his own private interests and to pay off old scores against those he disliked. When a man came with his quarterly subscription Elijah would perhaps remember that this person had refused to work for him or that he had some quarrel with him, and if the subscription was overdue he would refuse to take it; he would tell the man that he was no longer a member, and he also refused to give sick pay to any applicant whose last subscription was still due, if he happened to be in Elijah's black book. By and by he came into collision with Caleb, one of the villagers against whom he cherished a special grudge, and this small affair resulted in the dissolution of the club.
At this time Caleb was head-shepherd at Bartle's Cross, a large farm above a mile and a half from the village. One excessively hot day in August he had to dip the lambs; it was very hard work to drive them from the farm over a high down to the stream a mile below the village, where there was a dipping place, and he was tired and hot, and in a sweat when he began the work. With his arms bared to the shoulders he took and plunged his first lamb into the tank. When engaged in dipping, he said, he always kept his mouth closed tightly for fear of getting even a drop of the mixture in it, but on this occasion it unfortunately happened that the man assisting him spoke to him and he was compelled to reply, but had no sooner opened his mouth to speak than the lamb made a violent struggle in his arms and splashed the water over his face and into his mouth. He got rid of it as quickly as he could, but soon began to feel bad, and before the work was over he had to sit down two or three times to rest. However, he struggled on to the finish, then took the flock home and went to his cottage. He could do no more. The farmer came to see what the matter was, and found him in a fever, with face and throat greatly swollen. "You look bad," he said; "you must be off to the doctor." But it was five miles to the village where the doctor lived, and Bawcombe replied that he couldn't go. "I'm too bad—I couldn't go, master, if you offered me money for it," he said.
Then the farmer mounted his horse and went himself, and the doctor came. "No doubt," he said, "you've got some of the poison into your system and took a chill at the same time." The illness lasted six weeks, and then the shepherd resumed work, although still feeling very shaky. By and by when the opportunity came, he went to claim his sick pay—six shillings a week for the six weeks, his wages being then twelve shillings. Elijah flatly refused to pay him; his subscription, he said, had been due for several weeks and he had consequently forfeited his right to anything. In vain the shepherd explained that he could not pay when lying ill at home with no money in the house and receiving no pay from the farmer. The old man remained obdurate, and with a very heavy heart the shepherd came out and found three or four of the villagers waiting in the road outside to hear the result of the application.
They, too, were men who had been turned away from the club by the arbitrary secretary. Caleb was telling them about his interview when Elijah came out of the house and, leaning over the front gate, began to listen. The shepherd then turned towards him and said in a loud voice: "Mr. Elijah Raven, don't you think this is a tarrible hard case! I've paid my subscription every quarter for thirty years and never had nothing from the fund except two weeks' pay when I were bad some years ago. Now I've been bad six weeks, and my master giv' me nothing for that time, and I've got the doctor to pay and nothing to live on. What am I to do?"
Elijah stared at him in silence for some time, then spoke: "I told you in there I wouldn't pay you one penny of the money and I'll hold to what I said—in there I said it indoors, and I say again that indoors I'll never pay you—no, not one penny piece. But if I happen some day to meet you out of doors then I'll pay you. Now go."
And go he did, very meekly, his wrath going down as he trudged home; for after all he would have his money by and by, although the hard old man would punish him for past offences by making him wait for it.
A week or so went by, and then one day while passing through the village he saw Elijah coming towards him, and said to himself, Now I'll be paid! When the two men drew near together he cried out cheerfully, "Good morning, Mr. Raven." The other without a word and without a pause passed by on his way, leaving the poor shepherd gazing crestfallen after him.
After all he would not get his money! The question was discussed in the cottages, and by and by one of the villagers who was not so poor as most of them, and went occasionally to Salisbury, said he would ask an attorney's advice about the matter. He would pay for the advice out of his own pocket; he wanted to know if Elijah could lawfully do such things.
To the man's astonishment the attorney said that as the club was not registered and the members had themselves made Elijah their head he could do as he liked—no action would lie against him. But if it was true and it could be proved that he had spoken those words about paying the shepherd his money if he met him out of doors, then he could be made to pay. He also said he would take the case up and bring it into court if a sum of five pounds was guaranteed to cover expenses in case the decision went against them.
Poor Caleb, with twelve shillings a week to pay his debts and live on, could guarantee nothing, but by and by when the lawyer's opinion had been discussed at great length at the inn and in all the cottages in the village, it was found that several of Bawcombe's friends were willing to contribute something towards a guarantee fund, and eventually the sum of five pounds was raised and handed over to the person who had seen the lawyer.
His first step was to send for Bawcombe, who had to get a day off and journey in the carrier's cart one market-day to Salisbury. The result was that action was taken, and in due time the case came on. Elijah Raven was in court with two or three of his friends—small working farmers who had some interested motive in desiring to appear as his supporters. He, too, had engaged a lawyer to conduct his case. The judge, said Bawcombe, who had never seen one before, was a tarrible stern-looking old man in his wig. The plaintiff's lawyer he did open the case and he did talk and talk a lot, but Elijah's counsel he did keep on interrupting him, and they two argued and argued, but the judge he never said no word, only he looked blacker and more tarrible stern. Then when the talk did seem all over, Bawcombe, ignorant of the forms, got up and said, "I beg your lordship's pardon, but may I speak?" He didn't rightly remember afterwards what he called him, but 'twere your lordship or your worship, he was sure. "Yes, certainly, you are here to speak," said the judge, and Bawcombe then gave an account of his interview with Elijah and of the conversation outside the house.
Then up rose Elijah Raven, and in a loud voice exclaimed, "Lord, Lord, what a sad thing it is to have to sit here and listen to this man's lies!"
"Sit down, sir," thundered the judge; "sit down and hold your tongue, or I shall have you removed."
Then Elijah's lawyer jumped up, and the judge told him he'd better sit down too because he knowed who the liar was in this case. "A brutal case!" he said, and that was the end, and Bawcombe got his six weeks' sick pay and expenses, and about three pounds besides, being his share of the society's funds which Elijah had been advised to distribute to the members.
And that was the end of the Winterbourne Bishop club, and from that time it has continued without one.