Читать книгу Wild Life in a Southern County - Richard Jefferies - Страница 9

A low thick hawthorn hedge runs along some distance below the earthwork just at the foot of the steepest part of the hill. It divides the greensward of the down from the ploughed land of the plain, which stretches two or three miles wide, across to another range opposite. A few stunted ash trees grow at intervals among the bushes, which are the favourite resort of finches and birds that feed upon the seeds and insects they find in the cultivated fields. Most of these cornfields being separated only by a shallow trench and a bank bare of underwood, the birds naturally flock to the few hedges they can find. So that, although but low and small in comparison with the copse-like hedges of the vale, the hawthorn here is often alive with birds: chaffinches and sparrows perhaps in the greatest numbers, also yellowhammers.

The colour of the yellowhammer appears brighter in spring and early summer: the bird is aglow with a beautiful and brilliant yet soft yellow, pleasantly shaded with brown. He perches on the upper boughs of the hawthorn or on a rail, coming up from the corn as if to look around him—for he feeds chiefly on the ground—and uttering two or three short notes. His plumage gives a life and tint to the hedge, contrasting so brightly with the vegetation and with other birds. His song is but a few bars repeated, yet it has a pleasing and soothing effect in the drowsy warmth of summer. Yellowhammers haunt the cornfields principally, though they are not absent from the meadows.

To this hedge the hill-magpie comes: some magpies seem to keep almost entirely to the downs, while others range the vale, though there is no apparent difference between them. His peculiar uneven and, so to say, flickering flight, marks him at a distance as he jauntily journeys along beside the slope. He visits every fir copse and beech clump on his way, spending some time, too, in and about the hawthorn hedge, which is a favourite spot. Sometimes in the spring, while the corn is yet short and green, if you glance carefully through an opening in the bushes or round the side of the gateway, you may see him busy on the ground. His restless excitable nature betrays itself in every motion: he walks now to the right a couple of yards, now to the left in a quick zigzag, so working across the field towards you; then with a long rush he makes a lengthy traverse at the top of his speed, turns and darts away again at right angles, and presently up goes his tail and he throws his head down with a jerk of the whole body as if he would thrust his beak deep into the earth. This habit of searching the field apparently for some favourite grub is evidence in his favour that he is not so entirely guilty as he has been represented of innocent blood: no bird could be approached in that way. All is done in a jerky, nervous manner. As he turns sideways the white feathers show with a flash above the green corn; another movement, and he looks all black.

It is more difficult to get near the larger birds upon the downs than in the meadows, because of the absence of cover; the hedge here is so low, and the gateway open and bare, without the overhanging oak of the meadows, whose sweeping boughs snatch and retain wisps of the hay from the top of a waggon-load as it passes under. The gate itself is dilapidated—perhaps only a rail, or a couple of ‘flakes’ fastened together with tar-cord: there are no cattle here to require strong fences.

In the young beans yonder the wood-pigeons are busy—too busy for the farmer; they have a habit as they rise and hover about their feeding-places, of suddenly shooting up into the air, and as suddenly sinking again to the level of their course, describing a line roughly resembling the outline of a tent if drawn on paper, a cone whose sides droop inward somewhat. They do this too, over the ash woods where they breed, or the fir trees; it is not done when they are travelling straight ahead on a journey.

The odour of the bean-flower lingering on the air in the early summer is delicious; in autumn when cut the stalk and pods are nearly black, so that the shocks on the side of the hills show at a great distance. The sward, where the slope of the down becomes almost level beside the hedge, is short and sweet and thickly strewn with tiny flowers, to which and to the clover the bees come, settling, as it were, on the ground, so that as you walk you nearly step on them, and they rise from under the foot with a shrill, angry buzz.

On the other side the plough has left a narrow strip of green running along the hedge: the horses, requiring some space in which to turn at the end of each furrow, could not draw the share any nearer, and on this narrow strip the weeds and wild flowers flourish. The light-sulphur-coloured charlock is scattered everywhere—out among the corn, too, for no cleaning seems capable of eradicating this plant; the seeds will linger in the earth and retain their germinating power for a length of time, till the plough brings them near enough to the surface, when they are sure to shoot up unless the pigeons find them. Here also may be found the wild garlic, which sometimes gets among the wheat and lends an onion-like flavour to the bread. It grows, too, on the edge of the low chalky banks overhanging the narrow waggon-track, whose ruts are deep in the rubble—worn so in winter.

Such places, close to cultivated land yet undisturbed, are the best in which to look for wild flowers; and on the narrow strip beside the hedge and on the crumbling rubble bank of the rough track may be found a greater variety than by searching the broad acres beyond. In the season the large white bell-like flowers of the convolvulus will climb over the hawthorn, and the lesser striped kind will creep along the ground. The pink pimpernel hides on the very verge of the corn, which presently will be strewn with the beautiful ‘blue-bottle’ flower, than whose exquisite hue there is nothing more lovely in our fields. The great scarlet poppy with the black centre, and ‘eggs and butter’—curious name for a flower—will, of course, be there: the latter often flourishes on a high elevation, on the very ridges, provided only the plough has been near.

At irregular intervals along the slope there are deep hollows—shallow near the summit, deepening and widening as they sink, till by the hedge at the foot they broaden out into a little valley in themselves. These great green grooves furrow the sides of the downs everywhere, and for that reason it is best to walk either on the ridge or in the plain at the bottom: if you follow the slope half-way up you are continually descending and ascending the steep sides of these gullys, which adds much to the fatigue. At the mouths of the hollows, close to the hedge, the great flint stones and lumps of chalky rubble rolling down from above one by one in the passage of the years have accumulated: so that the turf there is almost hidden as by a stony cascade.

On the ridge here is a thicket of furze, grown shrub-like and strong, being untouched by woodman’s tool; here the rabbits have their ‘buries,’ and be careful how you thread your way between the bushes, for the ground is undermined with innumerable flint-pits long abandoned. This is the favourite resort of the chats, who perch on the furze or on the heaps of flints, perpetually iterating their one note, from which their name seems taken. Within the enclosure of the old earthwork itself the flint-diggers have been at work: they occasionally find a few fragments of rusty metal, doubtless relics of ancient weapons; but little worth preserving is ever found there. Such treasures are much more frequently discovered in the cornfields of the plain immediately beneath than here in the camp where one would naturally look for them.

The labourers who pick up these things often put an immensely exaggerated value on them: a worn Roman coin of the commonest kind, of which hundreds are in existence, they imagine to be worth a week’s wages till after refusing its real value from a collector they finally visit a watchmaker whose aquafortis test proves the supposed gold to be brass. So, too, with fossils: a man brought me a common echinus, and expected a couple of ‘crownds’ at least for it; nothing could convince him that, although not often found just in that district, in others they were numerous. The ‘crownd’ is still the unit, the favourite coin of the labourers, especially the elder folk. They use the word something in the same sense as the dollar, and look with regret upon the gradual disappearance of the broad silver disc with the figure of ‘Saint Gaarge’ conquering the dragon.

Everywhere across the hills traces of the old rabbit-warrens may be found in the names of places. Warren Farms, Warren Houses, etc, are common; and the term is often added to the names of the villages to distinguish an outlying part of the parish. From the earthwork the sites of four such warrens, now cultivated, can be seen within the radius of as many miles. Rabbits must have swarmed on the downs in the olden times. In the season when the couch and weeds are collected in heaps and burned, the downs—were it not for the silence—might seem the scene of a mighty conflict the smoke of the battle rolling along the slopes and hanging over the plains, rising up from the hollows in dusky clouds. But the cannon of the shadowy army give forth no thunderous roar. These smouldering fires are not, of course, peculiar to the hills, but the smoke shows so much more at that elevation.

At evening, if you watch the sunset from the top of the rampart, as the red disc sinks to the horizon and the shadows lengthen—the trees below and the old barn throwing their shadows up the slope—the eye is deceived by the position of the light and the hill seems much higher and steeper, looking down from the summit, than it does at noonday. It is an optical delusion. Here on the western side the grass is still dry—in the deep narrow valleys behind the sun set long since over the earthwork and ridge, and the dew is already gathering thickly on the sward.

A broad green track runs for many a long, long mile across the downs, now following the ridges, now winding past at the foot of a grassy slope, then stretching away through cornfield and fallow. It is distinct from the waggon-tracks which cross it here and there, for these are local only, and if traced up land the wayfarer presently in a maze of fields, or end abruptly in the rickyard of a lone farmhouse. It is distinct from the hard roads of modern construction which also at wide intervals cross its course, dusty and glaringly white in the sunshine. It is not a farm track—you may walk for twenty miles along it over the hills; neither is it the king’s highway.

For seven long miles in one direction there is not so much as a wayside tavern; then the traveller finds a little cottage, with a bench under a shady sycamore and a trough for a thirsty horse, situate where three such modern roads (also lonely enough) cross the old green track. Far apart, and far away from its course hidden among their ricks and trees a few farmsteads stand, and near them perhaps a shepherd’s cottage: otherwise it is an utter solitude, a vast desert of hill and plain; silent too, save for the tinkle of a sheep bell, or, in the autumn, the moaning hum of a distant threshing machine rising and falling on the wind.

The origin of the track goes back into the dimmest antiquity; there is evidence that it was a military road when the fierce Dane carried fire and slaughter inland, leaving his ‘nailed bark’ in the creeks of the rivers, and before that when the Saxons pushed up from the sea. The eagles of old Rome, perhaps, were borne along it, and yet earlier the chariots of the Britons may have used it—traces of all have been found; so that for fifteen centuries this track of the primitive peoples has maintained its existence through the strange changes of the times, till now in the season the cumbrous steam-ploughing engines jolt and strain and pant over the uneven turf.

To-day, entering the ancient way, eight miles or so from the great earthwork, hitherto the central post of observation, I turn my face once more towards its distant rampart, just visible, showing over the hills a line drawn against the sky. Here, whence I start, is another such a camp, with mound and fosse; beyond the one I have more closely described some four miles is still a third, all connected by the same green track running along the ridges of the downs and entirely independent of the roads of modern days. They form a chain of forts on the edge of the down-land overlooking the vale. At starting the track is but just distinguishable from the general sward of the hill: the ruts are overgrown with grass—but the tough ‘tussocky’ kind, in which the hares hide, avoids the path, and by its edge marks the way. Soon the ground sinks, and then the cornfields approach, extending on either hand—barley, already bending under the weight of the awn, swaying with every gentle breath of air, stronger oats and wheat, broad squares of swede and turnip and dark-green mangold.

Plough and harrow press hard on the ancient track, and yet dare not encroach upon it. With varying width, from twenty to fifty yards, it runs like a green riband through the sea of corn—a width that allows a flock of sheep to travel easily side by side, spread abroad, and snatch a bite as they pass. Dry, shallow trenches full of weeds, and low narrow mounds, green also, divide it from the arable land; and on these now and then grow storm-stunted hawthorn bushes, gnarled and aged. On the banks the wild thyme grows in great bunches, emitting an exquisite fragrance—luxurious cushions these to rest upon beneath the shade of the hawthorn, listening to the gentle rustle of the wheat as the wind rushes over it. Away yonder the shadows of the clouds come over the ridge, and glide with seeming sudden increase of speed down-hill, then along the surface of the corn, darkening it as they pass, with a bright band of light following swiftly behind. It is gone, and the beech copse away there is blackened for a moment as the shadow leaps it. On the smooth bark of those beeches the shepherd lads have cut their names with their great clasp-knives.

Sometimes in the evening, later on, when the wheat is nearly ripe, such a shepherd lad will sit under the trees there; and as you pass along the track comes the mellow note of his wooden whistle, from which poor instrument he draws a sweet sound. There is no tune—no recognisable melody: he plays from his heart and to himself. In a room doubtless it would seem harsh and discordant; but there, the player unseen, his simple notes harmonise with the open plain, the looming hills, the ruddy sunset as if striving to express the feelings these call forth.

Resting thus on the wild thyme under the hawthorn, partly hidden and quite silent, we may see stealing out from the corn into the fallow hard by first one, then two, then half a dozen or more young partridge chicks. With them is the anxious mother, watching the sky chiefly, lest a hawk be hovering about; nor will she lead them far from the cover of the wheat. She stretches her neck up to listen and look: then, reassured, walks on, her head nodding as she moves. The little ones crowd after, one darting this way, another that, learning their lesson of life—how and where to find the most suitable food, how to hide from the enemy: imitation of the parent developing hereditary inclinations.

At the slightest unwonted sound or movement, she first stretches her neck up for a hurried glance, then, as the labouring folk say, ‘quats’—i.e. crouches down—and in a second or two runs swiftly to cover, using every little hollow of the ground skilfully for concealment on the way, like a practised skirmisher. The ants’ nests, which are so attractive to partridges, are found in great numbers along the edge of the cornfields, being usually made on ground that is seldom disturbed. The low mounds that border the green track are populous with ants, whose nests are scattered thickly on these banks, as also beside the paths and waggon-tracks that traverse the fields and are not torn up by the plough. Any beaten track such as this old path, however green, is generally free from them on its surface: ants avoid placing their nests where they may be trampled upon. This may often be noticed in gardens: there are nests at and under the edge of the paths, but none where people walk. It is these nests in the banks and mounds which draw the partridges so frequently from the middle of the fields to the edges where they can be seen; they will come even to the banks of frequented roads for the eggs of which they are so fond.

Now that their courting-time is over, the larks do not sing so continuously. Later on, when the ears of wheat are ripe and the reapers are sharpening their sickles, if you walk here, with the corn on either hand, every ten or twenty yards a cloud of sparrows and small birds will rise from it, literally hiding the hawthorn bush on which they settle, so that the green tree looks brown. Wait a little while, and with defiant chirps back they go, disappearing in the wheat.

The sparrows will sometimes flutter at the top of the stalk, hovering for a few moments in one spot as if trying to perch on the ears; then, grasping one with their claws, they sink with it and bear it to the ground, where they can revel at their leisure. A place where a hailstorm or heavy rain has beat down and levelled the tall corn flat is the favourite spot for these birds; they rise from it in hundreds at a time. But some of the finches are probably searching for the ripe seeds of the weeds that spring up among the corn; they find also a feast of insects.

Leaving now the gnarled hawthorn and the cushion of thyme, I pass a deserted sheep-pen, where in the early year the tender lambs were sheltered from the snow and wind. Mile after mile, and still no sign of human life—everywhere silence, solitude. Hill after hill and plain after plain. Presently the turf is succeeded by a hard road—flints ground down into dust by broad waggon-wheels bearing huge towering loads of wool or heavy wheat. Just here the old track happens to answer the purposes of modern civilisation. Fast this, and again it reverts to turf, leaving now the hills for a mile or two to cross a plain lying between a semicircle of downs; and here at last are hedges of hawthorn and hazel and stunted crab tree.

Round black marks upon the turf, with grey ashes scattered about and half-consumed sticks, show where the gipsies have recently bivouacked, sheltered somewhat at night by the hedges. Near by is an ancient tumulus, on which grows a small yet obviously aged sycamore tree, stunted by wind and storm, and under it the holes of rabbits—drilling their habitations into the tomb of the unknown warrior. In his day, perhaps, the green track wound through a pathless wood long since cleared. Soon the hedges all but disappear, the ground rises once more, nearing the hills; and here the way widens out—first fifty, then a hundred yards across—green sward dotted with furze and some brake fern, and bunches of tough dry grass. Above on the summit is another ancient camp, and below two more turf-grown tumuli, low and shaped like an inverted bowl. Many more have been ploughed down, doubtless, in the course of the years: sometimes still, as the share travels through the soil there is a sudden jerk, and a scraping sound of iron against stone.

The ploughman eagerly tears away the earth, and moves the stone to find a thin jar, as he thinks—in fact, a funeral urn. Like all uneducated people, in the far East as well as in the West, he is imbued with the idea of finding hidden treasure, and breaks the urn in pieces to discover—nothing; it is empty. He will carry the fragments home to the farm, when, after a moment’s curiosity, they will be thrown aside with potsherds, and finally used to mend the floor of the cowpen. The track winds away yet further, over hill after hill; but a summer’s day is not long enough to trace it to the end.

In the narrow valley, far below the frowning ramparts of the ancient fort that has been more specially described, a beautiful spring breaks forth. Three irregularly circular green spots, brighter in colour than the dry herbage around, mark the outlets of the crevices in the earth through which the clear water finds its way to the surface. Three tiny threads of water, each accompanied by its riband of verdant grasses, meander downwards some few yards, and then unite and form a little stream. Then the water in its channel first becomes visible, glistening in the sun; for at the sources the aquatic grasses bend over, growing thickly, and hide it from view. But pressing these down, and parting them with the hand, you may trace the exact place where it rises, gently oozing forth without a sound.

Lower down, where the streamlet is stronger and has worn a groove—now rushing over a floor of tiny flints, now partly buoyed up and chafing against a smooth round lump of rubble—there is a pleasant murmur audible at a short distance. Still farther from the source, where, grown wider, the shallow water shoots swiftly over a steeper gradient, the undulations of its surface cross each other, plaiting a pattern like four strands interwoven. The resemblance to the pattern of four rushes which the country children delight to plait together as they wander by the brooks is so close as almost to suggest the derivation of the art of weaving rushes, flags, and willows by the hand. The sheep grazing at will in the coombe eat off the herbage too closely to permit of many flowers. Where the springs join and irrigate a broader strip there grows a little watercress, and some brooklime, said to be poisonous and occasionally mistaken for the cress; a stray cuckoo-flower shows its pale lilac petals in spring, and a few bunches of rushes are scattered round. They do not reach any height or size; they seem dry and sapless, totally unlike the tall green succulent rush of the meadows far below.

A water-wagtail comes now and then; sometimes the yellow variety, whose colour in the spring is so bright as to cause the bird to resemble the yellowhammer at the first glance. But besides these the spring-head is not much-frequented by birds; perhaps the clear water attracts less visible insect life, and, the shore of the stream being hard and dry, there is no moisture where grubs and worms may work their way. Behind the fountain the steep green wall of the coombe rises almost perpendicularly—so steep as not to be climbed without exertion. At the summit are the cornfields of the level plain which here so suddenly sinks without warning. The plough has been drawn along all but on the very edge, and the tall wheat nods at the verge. From thence a strong arm might send a flat round stone skimming across to the other side of the narrow hollow, and its winding course is apparent.

Like a deep groove it cuts a channel up towards the hills, becoming narrower as it approaches; and the sides diminish in height, till at the neck a few rails and a gate can close it, being scarcely broader than a waggon-track. There, at the foot of the down, it ends, overlooked by a barn, the home of innumerable sparrows, whose nests are made under the eaves, everywhere their keen eyes can find an aperture large enough to squeeze into.

Looking down the steep side of the coombe, near the bottom there runs along a projecting ledge, or terrace, like a natural footway. On the opposite side is another corresponding ledge, or green turf-covered terrace; these follow the windings of the valley, decreasing in width as it diminishes, and gradually disappearing. In its broadest part one of them is used as a waggon-track, for which it is admirably adapted, being firm and hard, even smoother than the bottom of the coombe itself. If it were possible to imagine the waters of a tidal river rising and ebbing up and down this hollow these ledges would form its banks. Their regular shape is certainly remarkable, and they are not confined to this one place. Such steep-sided narrow hollows are found all along the edge of this range of downs, where they slope to the larger valley which stretches out to the horizon. There are at least ten of them in a space of twelve miles, many having similar springs of water and similar terrace-like ledges, more or less perfect. Towards the other extremity of this particular coombe—where it widens before opening on the valley—the spring spreads and occupies a wider channel, beside which there is a strip of osier-bed.

When at the fountain-head, and looking down the current the end of the coombe westwards away from the hills seems to open to the sky; for the ground falls rapidly, and the trees hide any trace of human habitation. The silent hills close in the rear, capped by the old fort; the silent cornfields come to the very edge above; the silent steep green walls rise on either hand, so near together that the swallows in the blue atmosphere high overhead only come into sight for a second as they shoot swiftly across. In the evening the red sun, enlarged and bulging as if partly flattened, hangs suspended, as it seems, at the very mouth of the trough-like hollow. It is natural in the silence and the solitude for thoughts of the lapse of time to arise—of the endless centuries since, by some slow geological process, this hollow was formed. Fifteen hundred years ago the men of the camp above came hither to draw water; still the spring oozes and flows, and the sun sinks at the western mouth. So too, doubtless, the sun shone into the hollow in the evening cycle upon cycle ere then.

Up the blade of grass here a tiny white-shelled snail has crawled, feeling in its dull, dim way that evening is approaching. The coils of the little shell are exquisitely turned—the workmanship is perfect; the creature within, there can be no question, is equally perfect in its way and finds a joy in the plants on which it feeds. On the ground below, hidden among the fibres near the roots of the grass, lies another tiny shell; but it is empty, the life that once animated it has fled—whither? Presently the falling dew will condense upon it, and at the opening one round drop will stand; after awhile to add its mite to the ceaseless flow of the fountain. Could any system of notation ever express the number of these creatures that have existed in the past? If time is measured by the duration of life, reckoned by their short spans eternity upon eternity has gone by. To me the greatest marvel is the countless, the infinite number of the organisms that have existed, each with its senses and feelings, whose bodies now help to build up the solid crust of the earth. These tiny shells have had millions of ancestors: Nature seems never weary of repeating the same model.

In the osier-bed the brook-sparrow chatters; there, too, the first pollard willow stands, or rather leans, hollow and aged, across the water. This tree is the outpost of a thousand others that line the banks of the stream for mile after mile yonder down in the valley. How quickly this little fountain grows into a streamlet and then to a considerable brook!—without apparently receiving the waters of any feeders. In the first half-mile it swells sufficiently, if bayed up properly, to drive a mill—as, indeed, many of the springs issuing from these coombes do just below the mouth. In little more than a mile, measuring by its windings, it becomes broad enough to require some effort to leap it, and then deepens into a fair-sized brook.

The rapidity of the increase is accounted for by the fact that every field it passes whose surface inclines towards it is a watershed from which an unseen but considerable drainage takes place. When no brook passes through the fields the water stands and soaks downwards, or evaporates slowly: directly a ditch is opened it fills, and the effect of a stream is not only to collect water till then unseen, but to preserve it from evaporation or disappearance into the subsoil. Probably, if it were possible to start an artificial stream in many places, after a while it would almost keep itself going at times, provided, of course, that the bottom was not porous. Below the mouth of the coombe the water has worn itself a channel quite six feet deep in the chalk—washing out the flints that now lie at the bottom. Hawthorn bushes bend over it, and great briars uncut since their first shoot was put forth; the elder, too, grows luxuriously, whose white flowers, emitting a rich but sickly odour, the village girls still gather to make elder-water to remove freckles. These bushes hide the deep gully in which the current winds its way—so deep that no cattle can get down to drink.

A cottage stands on the very edge a little further along; the residents do not dip their water from the running stream, but have made a small pool beside it, with which no doubt it communicates, for the pool, or ‘dipping-place,’ is ever full of cool, clear, limpid water. The plan is not without its advantages, because the stream itself, though usually clear, is liable to become foul from various causes—such as a flood, when it is white from suspended chalk, or from cattle higher up above the gully coming to slake their thirst and stirring the sandy grit of the bottom. But the little pool long remains clear, because the water from the stream to enter it has to strain itself through the narrow partition of chalky rubble.

So limpid is the current in general, that the idea of seeing trout presently when it shall widen out naturally arises. But before then the soil changes, and clay and loam spoil the clean, sandy, or gravelly bottom trout delight in. In one such stream hard by, however, the experiment of keeping trout has been tried, and with some success: it could be done without a doubt if it were not that after a short course all the streams upon this side of the downs enter the meadows, and immediately run over a mud bottom. With care, a few young fish were maintained in the upper waters, but it was only as an experiment; left to themselves they would speedily disappear, and of course no angling could be thought of.

On the opposite side of the range of hills, where they decline in height somewhat, but still roll on for a great distance, the contrary is the case. The springs that run in that direction pass over a soil that gives a good clear bottom, and gradually assume the character of rivers; narrow, indeed, and shallow, but clear, sweet, and beautiful. There, as you wander over the down, and push your way through one of those extensive nutwoods which grow on the hills, acres and acres of hazel bushes, suddenly you come to the edge of a steep cliff, falling all but perpendicularly, and lo! at the foot is a winding river, bordered by broad green meads dotted with roan-and-white cattle.

Here in the season the angler may be seen skilfully tempting the speckled trout. Across the meads a grove of elm and oak, and the dull red of old houses dimly seen between, and the low dark crenellated tower of a village church. Behind the downs rise again, their slopes in spring a mass of colour—green corn, squares of bright yellow mustard, bright crimson trifolium, and brown fallows.