Ch. 21: The Shepherd As Naturalist - Page 2

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