Ch. 21: The Shepherd As Naturalist

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