Out with the Gun
Fresh Woods. By lan Niall. Wood engravings by Barbara Greg. (Heinemann. ios. 6d.) IN a familiar passage Richard Jefferies has told how, after he had gone about with a gun almost as long as he could remember, there came a day when, feeling the trigger, "in the act I hesitated, dropped the barrel, and watched the beautiful bird." It was the same with Thoreau, the same with Darwin ; and both would probably have agreed further with Jefferies when he said that many an observation
he made in later life would have eluded him "if I had not been about at all hours with my gun as a boy."
In his latest book Mr. Ian Niall tells of a similar experience. When he was twelve he boasted an ancient double-barrelled shot- gun ; but even at that age, it would seem, not all the daybreak adventure was in the killing. The discipline involved in the act induced a sharpened awareness, a lift of heart, so that years after he recalled not only the shot but "the dew on my boots, the wind of the morning in my face, stumbling over uneven ground, passing through a cobwebbed gap, hearing sounds made a score of miles away, someone clattering churns, wheels on a hard road." And then one day the stock of the old gun got broken. "I have not used it since," says Mr. Niall, "for my inclination to stand and stare has almost completely overcome my desire to shoot." In the tension of the watching and waiting a poet had been born.
The woods of which Mr. Niall writes are remembered, for the most part, from those boyhood days when he sought any and every excuse to steal away to the plantings not far from the family's Scottish farm. How deep and true were the lessons he learned during those truancies is clearly shown here, in the immediacy of his descriptions, as if it were all happening again this minute before his keen, delighting eye, and in the enrichment of life which is evident on every page. • Of country books intended primarily to inform us there is an abundance these days, and I have no quarrel with this. If or: demand for information concerning the wild life which we have done our best to exterminate should result in a wiser attitude towards what is left, this is, however belatedly, all to the good ; but my pleasure in Fresh Woods comes rather from the -fact that its plentiful and precise information is never paraded, is even con- cealed. With Mr. Niall for companion we-are in no danger of not seeing the wood for the trees. He knows his woods and the creatures who inhabit them, pigeon and owl, bees and badgers, hedgehogs, hares and foxes, as narrowly as anybody ; but wha: rivets our attention to his pages (all too few) is the assurance that they are the work of a poet. He goes out WI shoot a hare, for instance, and though it rises only a few yards away, he lett it go— to live again, these twenty years after, in a 'description that is as strict as it is loving.
"I confess to having taken you on this journey," writes Mr. Nial!, "that I might enjoy myself." It is the mea'sure of his success as a country writer that this enjoyment has here been stretched to include whoever reads his book. C. HENRY WARREN.
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