Читать книгу Wild Life at the Land's End - John Coulson Tregarthen - Страница 10

This morning dawn had surprised him miles away from his rocky stronghold. For hours before daybreak he had lain in wait with glowing eyes under the shelter of some rustling sedge that grew amidst the waters of a pool, for wildfowl. His listening ears caught the swish of their tantalising wingbeats as skein after skein circled above his lurking-place, but he had awaited in vain the splash of widgeon or teal on the lane of water he had opened in the thin ice as he swam to his “islet” ambush. Hunger and expectation had kept him there too long and, in the grey light that had quenched the green fires of his eyes, chilled and famished he had stolen away to the near brake, and under its thickest furze-bush shunned those hateful rays that jewelled the frosted spines above his lair and gilded the crags between him and his earth.

Scarcely had he curled himself up before the tread of human steps made him cock his ears, and when the Earthstopper bent over his clean-cut footprints the ominous silence had brought him to his feet. But as the footsteps died away he had settled himself down again, and it was out of a deep sleep that the warning voice of Troubadour had roused him. Once more, like an outlaw, he was driven forth under the eye of the wintry sun with hue and cry behind him, conscious that his safety lay in his own cunning and endurance and the stout heart that had carried him through before.

As he crosses the sward there is nothing hurried in his stealthy movements, despite the clamour in his ears. He is not sure that his earth is open—more than once he had found it closed—so he is husbanding his strength, and, if need be, every bit of it will be doled out under the direction of his vulpine brain in the attempt to outwit his enemies. Some fifteen feet from the cliff a slab of rock—outcrop of the granite formation beneath—brings back to his memory a ruse that the old vixen had taught him, when one August day at sundown she anxiously led her playful litter up to the great world overlooking their rocky nursery. This he at once decides to put into practice.

So to the amazement of the open-mouthed Tregellas he crosses and recrosses the rock as he had seen her do, hoping thereby at least to check his pursuers, if not to foil them altogether.

Leaving the tangled lines of scent for the hounds to unravel, he, by a single leap, reaches the verge of the cliff and for an instant clings to its dizzy edge as if to listen to the swelling cry, for his mask is turned that way. Then, gathering himself for a spring, with a whisk of his brush he is gone. This was too much for the spellbound Tregellas, good Methodist though he was: “Well, I’m dommed, that taakes the fuggan.”

The leading hounds were breaking through the furze at the foot of the hill, their voices ringing like silver bells.

Flashing across the open they checked at the rock, but only for a moment, and then, like an impetuous stream, poured down the cliff. Thither Tregellas, loosing the dog he had been holding, ran at the top of his speed and looked over. The scene below stirred his Celtic blood. The pack, with the fox a furlong ahead, was racing along the narrow beach, till, reaching a jutting point, pursued and pursuers took to the water and, skirting the rocks, swam out of his sight.

Knowing the line the fox would probably take, Tregellas, with the fever of the chase in his veins, climbed the steep hill leading to the Deadman and, though he bruised his knees through his corduroys, gained at length the topmost stone of the cairn that crowned it.

“Aal for nawthin’,” he gasped as he overlooked the stretch of silent moor beneath him. The only sound of the hunt was the distant thud of hoofs where the “field” galloped along the coast road. Yet with quick, restless eyes he swept the waste as from that very eyry a sparrow-hawk was wont to do, watchful for the slightest sign. The echo of the horn had kept hope alive, faint though it was, but now he has seen something which rivets his gaze.

He is looking towards the lower side of the moor, over the shoulder of which lies the sea, fringed with surf where it frets the black precipice of a headland. He is watching a bird that flies close to the stunted furze. The white of its plumage gleams as the sun catches it. Threading the sinuous lanes between the bushes, appearing at the distance almost like the shadow of the overhanging magpie, is the hunted game; and though Tregellas cannot hear the chattering of the bird, he knows that it is mobbing the fox whose mask is set in the direction of Deadman. As his form comes well in view Tregellas fancies that his stride is perhaps not quite so easy as when he swung so lithely across the turf, and it may be he was shaken by those terrible leaps adown the jagged rocks where a whipper-in, a coastguard, and a truant schoolboy are at this moment attending to two crippled hounds. “Es eh failin’ a bit, do ee think, ’Gellas?” “Caan’t hardly tell,” said he, answering the question put to himself. And then the hounds heave in view. At what a pace they sweep over the waste, how silently they are running! With anxious eyes he follows them as they cross the moor above. “Dear life, they’re niver headin’ for Deadman, are ’em? Iss ... iss ... wonder ef An’rew stopped the eearth.... Hooray!” for standing on tip-toe he saw the blurred pack swerve near the heart of the haunted moor as though at that point the fox had been headed.

“I knowed ee raather die in th’ open nor go to ground in that wisht auld plaace.”

Then the field at full gallop passed before his gaze. “Lor’ a mercy, passon’s bin and falled into the bog,” and he laughed as only a yokel can laugh.

Tregellas lingered until the desolate waste swallowed up the hindmost of the field; the circling flight of a snipe being the only sign that the hunt had swept across the moor.

The stout fox held bravely on; but the pack, racing for blood, with hardly a check, kept lessening his lead as moor and croft were left behind.

With what a crash of music they dashed through the Forest Rocks and through the belt of pines to the open heath beyond. Though death was ringing in his ears there was the gallant fox struggling gamely forward. Racing from scent to view they pulled him down on the dead bracken below the now deserted cairn.

The huntsman, Squire Tremenheere and Sir Bevil close behind him, galloped up in time to rescue the carcass from the ravenous pack. The who-whoop was heard by the parson as he urged his grey mare, mud to the girths, between the pine boles. To him, when he came up, Sir Bevil handed the mask; the brush he had presented to the Squire.

Late the same night the parson sat in his study recording the incidents of the chase and, despite the strains of “Trelawny” which reached his ears from the “One and All” hard by, where Tregellas and his friends were making merry, kept true to the line of the fox and with graphic touches described the run.

Closing the book, he returned it to the shelf between the door and the pegs, where his hunting-cap hung. Then for the first time that season he took a map from its tin case and spread it on the table. It was a map of West Penwith, and was crossed by lines in all directions, reminding one of threads of dodder on a furze-bush. Those thin red lines represented the best runs of the hounds during the five and thirty years he had followed them. Having put on his spectacles, he dipped the fine-pointed nib in the ink and, starting from near the pool under Ding Dong, traced the run to the adit at the foot of the cliffs. Why did he pause there, why not let the pen skirt the coast and the headland and cross the moor to Deadman?

See! there is another red line—a line that starts at Lamorna Cliffs—which ends at the adit, and as his eye wandered along the converging tracks he was wondering whether the fox which gave that great run from sea to sea was the one whose death he had just recorded. That is why his hand dwelt and why he raised his questioning eyes to the wall facing him.

He could not be sure, and the fixed grin on the fox’s mask hanging between the cap and hunting-crop did not help him.

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