Ch. 9: The Shepherd on Foxes - Page 2

attracting the fox.

I say that the keeper was off his guard in this instance, because the
fiction that foxes were preserved on the estate was kept up, though as a
fact they were systematically destroyed by the keepers. As the
pheasant-breeding craze appears to increase rather than diminish,
notwithstanding the disastrous effect it has had in alienating the
people from their lords and masters, the conflict of interest between
fox-hunter and pheasant-breeder will tend to become more and more acute,
and the probable end will be that fox-hunting will have to go. A
melancholy outlook to those who love the country and old country sports,
and who do not regard pheasant-shooting as now followed as sport at all.
It is a delusion of the landlords that the country people think most
highly of the great pheasant-preserver who has two or three big shoots
in a season, during which vast numbers of birds are slaughtered--every
bird "costing a guinea," as the saying is. It brings money into the
country, he or his apologist tells you, and provides employment for the
village poor in October and November, when there is little doing. He
does not know the truth of the matter. A certain number of the poorer
people of the village are employed as beaters for the big shoots at a
shilling a day or so, and occasionally a labourer, going to or from his
work, finds a pheasant's nest and informs the keeper and receives some
slight reward. If he "keeps his eyes open" and shows himself anxious at
all times to serve the keeper he will sometimes get a rabbit for his
Sunday dinner.

This is not a sufficient return for the freedom to walk on the land and
in woods, which the villager possessed formerly, even in his worst days
of his oppression, a liberty which has now been taken from him. The
keeper is there now to prevent him; he was there before, and from of
old, but the pheasant was not yet a sacred bird, and it didn't matter
that a man walked on the turf or picked up a few fallen sticks in a
wood. The keeper is there to tell him to keep to the road and sometimes
to ask him, even when he is on the road, what is he looking over the
hedge for. He slinks obediently away; he is only a poor labourer with
his living to get, and he cannot afford to offend the man who stands
between him and the lord and the lord's tenant. And he is inarticulate;
but the insolence and injustice rankle in his heart, for he is not
altogether a helot in soul; and the result is that the sedition-mongers,
the Socialists, the furious denouncers of all landlords, who are now
quartering the country, and whose vans I meet in the remotest villages,
are listened to, and their words--wild and whirling words they may
be--are sinking into the hearts of the