SUNDOWN IN SHOTLEY WOOD.
SHOTLEY Wood is marked on the county map. Some. times, though rarely, when there was enough spare money in the county to keep a three-days-a-week pack, it figured among the less popular meets of the season. Now it is forgotten by the world, even the world of county sport. Yet it has stood—or rather it has been felled and risen again—since the days of King John. From the time of Magna Charta till the Christmas of 1893, no plough or harrow has cut the virgin soil within its fences ; and every decent piece of building in the parish, from the church roof— set on in the year of grace 1507—to our new barn floor, has been fitted with the timber grown on its seventy acres of deep yellow clay. " Us be all despret poor now," as the exciseman (the only rich man in the parish) truly says ; and those who had sense to read the signs of the times have made treaty with necessity, and stepped back, with a rough and rugged insistance on the change, to the plain living of Saxon times. Are our tables worse furnished, or is our roof-tree colder ? I think not. We kill our own swine, brew our own ale, and press our cyder; bake our dark but palatable bread, and pay our men and our dwindling "tradesmen's bills" from the narrow yield of our own fields. The owner of the "big wood" finds it a little silver-mine. Frugality begins at home—a coy but lasting friend—and when once won is never lost by the countryman who lives on his own acres. The coal-grates have been pulled out in hall an dining-room, and the old bars rescued from rust in the out:' house are piled with the surplus branches of the oaks ; and on Christmas-day the green ashen faggot will blaze and sputter with a lively warmth that mocks the dull calorie of the coal, as young laughter leaps above the book-bound wit of ages. The wood supplies our table with its daintiest fare. Never was there such a year for wild-bred pheasants ; and the stub-rabbits are no longer despised. Just now the wood-pigeons come in to roost in large flocks, and pay a daily tribute to the gun. The poor still look for rabbits at Christmas, and on our way to the wood before dusk, to lie in wait for the pigeons, we overhear the rabbiter and the bailiff in consultation ; the former deep in the yawning ditch, under the etubbs, the other with his ear to the bolt-hole in the field above. The rabbiter is calm and professional, as becomes one finishing a long day's work. The bailiff—a schoolboy friend of the poorer man, long since risen in the social scale, a stern and unbending Nonconformist, but with a suppressed but uncontrollable love of sport—is as excited as a boy. They have dropped the ceremonious " Mister " of East Anglian address, and for the moment have forgotten that the world contains anything but themselves, the hapless rabbit in the bury, and the ferret at the end of the line. " Eddard," says the bailiff; " Eddard, I can hear it a-scra,bbin' ! " "Can you ? " replies the rabbiter. "Do you cop me your 'dabber.'" The "dabber," an implement with a spade at one end and a spike at the other, is "copped," and dexterously caught. "Do you fudge him a bit," urges the rabbiter ; and the bailiff " fudges" vigorously. Then the ferret is withdrawn. " Lor' bless me, if I hain't been a-fudging the ferret ! " he exclaims ; and the ill-used and gasping ferret is exhibited. "Oh, ah ! " says the ra biter, "we'd best go back, I reckon." And the pair wind up nets and bags, and splash home through the mud. They are almost the last to leave the open fields, and as we enter the high wood the Bounds of daily human labour die with the waning light— when the plough-teams, with looped-up splinter-bars banging against the trace-chains, plod homewards to the stables. The grey light wanes and the wind rises, angry and sighing in the tree-tops. A wide avenue of Scotch firs runs down the length of the wood. The ride is still strewn thick with acorns, for this has been the most prolific year ever known for the seeds of trees ; the husks are already splitting here and there, and the red shoots are sprouting from the pointed end; but many are mere crackling shells nibbled by squirrels and mice. The wood-pigeons have been feasting for weeks, pheasants have helped them, sacksfull have been carried home by the wood- man to grind and mix with bran for the sheep, and pigs have forced their way through the fences to munch their fill, yet the quantity on the ground seems now as great as ever. In the ride we met a hedgehog, almost the last creature to be ex- pected on such a chilly day. Generally piggy spends the winter coiled up in a bed of leaves in a rabbit-burrow, under a root, or in the centre of a thick bush, and sleeps till spring comes. Perhaps this hedgehog had been idle iu the summer, and not laid up a store of fat to last him through the winter; so he was awake, and obliged to forage. He was hunting eagerly, taking half the width of the ride, and quartering it to and fro,—not very accurately, for he did not keep straight lines, like a setter, but still rarely going twice over the same ground. We approached slowly, for if a hedgehog is not disturbed by a heavy footfall or a sudden movement, it simply disregards men. To and fro he went, poking his long snout into every hoof-mark, and routing among the oak- leaves. He seemed to find little, and to be very hungry. Once or twice he put up his head and sniffed, and stared at the figure above him; but as it did not move, he went on searching for a supper. As he passed, we touched him a Urge, with the gun-barrel. He whisked round with prickles up, looking angry and quite at a loss to understand what had happened. He then examined the boots, and tried to climb the leg above, but could not get a foot-bold for his hind- feet. Down again to the boots. The blacking smelt nice, so he gnawed at them steadily, with far more force than might be expected from so small a hedgehog—for he was not larger than a cocoa-nut. Having tasted one boot, he then tried the other, and did not take alarm till he was suddenly picked up. Then for a minute he closed his eyes, and rolled into a ball. A curious change of expression takes place when the hedgehog draws his heavy eyebrows down. At other times his face is impudent and rather savage. Then he looks meek and gentle, a nice little fellow, who eats bread and milk, and is regarded as a pet for children. Un- rolled, he is his true self,—a creature that kills adders, drives the partridge from her nest, and eats the eggs ; a sturdy, omnivorous little animal, afraid of few things, except a badger. He had not been held a minute before he began to uncurl, wriggled over on to his back, gave the nearest finger a bite which reached through a buckskin glove, dropped on to the ride, and scuffled away among the brambles. By this time it was almost dusk, and the pigeons were arriving in small flocks, and settling into the fir-tops in different parts of the wood. Each flock circled high overhead twice or thrice before alighting. The fieldfares followed, squeaking and chat- tering from tree to tree, and the cock-pheasants went up to roost one by one, telling the whole wood about it. Small woodland birds feed till dark in these short winter days, and a whole flock of tits and bullfinches were climbing and flitting among the ash-poles, eager to use the last minutes of twilight. A pair of sparrow-hawks were anxious to make their supper on the tits, and their silent gliding forms crossed and recrossed among the stems from minute to minute, winding among the closely growing ash-poles with astonishing powers of steering in full flight. So quick were their movements, and so close to the stems, that though the bold birds took no alarm at the motionless human figure, it was almost impossible to fire a shot at these worst poachers of the wood, with any certainty of killing. They had carried off more than one of the tits when a third hawk swept over the wood, seized a small bird in its claws, and sailed off up the ride. A shot and a red shower of sparks was followed by the fall of the hawk, and the clatter of a hundred pairs of wings as the pigeons left the trees. The hawk was dead, with the finch still in its claws, apparently unhurt. In a few minutes the wood is quiet again, and the pigeons return, and during the last few minutes before dark, pay heavy toll to the gun, as they fly low and sleepy and bewildered over the pine-tops. There is hardly a better bird for the table, outside the list of true game-birds, than these plump Christmas wood-pigeons after months of plenty and open weather. Even:when the lingering twilight has almost gone, and the bright planets shine with eager eyes through the lacing oak boughs, while "echo bids good-night from every glade," the wood is not yet silent. The grey crows have come from the North to tell us that it is Christmas. They have crossed the North Sea, and skirted the shore southward from estuary to estuary, past the mouths of the Fen rivers and the marshes of the Broads, and arrived, as they always do, in the last week of the old year, to croak their warning tale into the winter night.
"I sent forth memory in heedful guise,
To search the record of preceding years ; Back, like the raven to the ark she flies, And croaks disaster to my trembling ears,"
the poet writes. The cry of the grey crows, like the voice of the raven, has an evil sound. But they have croaked in the wood at each year's ending, and if the next be no worse than those which have gone, we shall not cease to enjoy the sounds of the winter wood at sundown.
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