Читать книгу England have my Bones - T. H. White - Страница 29
Оглавление10. v. xxxiv.
I helped Tom Bourne to deliver one of his mares of a foal to-day. It was a grisly business in a way, as you have to actually haul the creature out with a rope; but it makes up for itself. For one thing, you are helping: you did not yourself invent the system of birth, and are making it better for the mare, not worse. Also there is a sense of creation about it. There were more horses in the field when I left it than there were when I went in. It is the kind of visible increase that pleased Cobbett.
It was exciting. She had been due to foal for nearly twenty-four hours. When we went out after tea Mark was there watching, and he beckoned to us. We went with the rope and an iron bar, in case leverage was needed in emergency, and stood under a hedge at the top of the field, two hundred yards away. She was down, and they said that she wouldn’t be long now. We stood and watched, talking involuntarily in low voices. She got up again, looking rocky, but nothing happened. The other mare, Poppet, had foaled two weeks ago. Poppet’s foal suddenly came trotting across from her mother and began to suck milk from Blossom, who allowed it without protest. The foal trotted back. We thought it might make him scour. Tom had never seen anything like this happen before. After about twenty minutes Blossom went down again, and rolled on her back. She held her legs unnaturally, as if she were dead or in pain. We began to stir uneasily. It was obviously beginning to happen. She got up again clumsily, and tried to crop some grass, and turned her back to us, and we could see that there was something white coming out. We walked quietly downhill towards her, till she lay down for the third time, and cut the bag, and looped the rope round the soft mushroom-coloured hoofs.
We fell over when he came out, a big foal. He lay there and shivered, all legs and hoofs, but with his head up in a new country, whilst Blossom shuddered. He had come, with his lizard face and unfocused eyes, from another world. He was going to be a black horse, gelded at eighteen months, perhaps a fine specimen. We didn’t know. He had the world before him.
The feature of the whole thing was lack of hurry. We let them alone for a minute or two, whilst Tom told me that a foal is born with a kind of false tongue in his mouth. I think he called it “with a crown in his mouth.” A filly is not. We found the thing, like a bit of liver, and turned it over with our toes. Mark was reticent and offhanded about the so-called magic properties that it possessed.[3] Tom suggested letting Blossom see the foal, which was lying behind her, but just then she lifted her neck and looked round. The foal tried to get up, but couldn’t, because it didn’t know what its legs were for. It had to find out about gravity. Blossom stood up and thought. They had both stopped bleeding. After a bit Tom said we should teach the foal to stand. It seems that if you can teach it to stand and suckle more quickly than it would naturally learn to do so, then its chances of survival are greater. We uncrossed its legs and held it up on them, but when we let it go it would sway, trip up, and subside. However, after we had held it up twice, it knew what it ought to aim at. It began trying to get up by itself. We went round the hedges for half an hour with the gun. When we came back it was standing laboriously on all four hocky pins, and Blossom was snuffing gently at it through her nose.
11. v. xxxiv.
The late spring is the time for finding out about birds, and I have been spending many days standing mournfully under trees, identifying young female blackbirds as chaffinches by their note. One of the sad things about birds is that none of the text-books can really be of any use. For a bird is not normally identified by its plumage. A book of bird pictures is all very well if you have the creature dead in your hand, but a real bird is not a static collection of colours: it is a thing that sings and flies. It is by flight and song that the proper identification is made, and neither of these things can satisfactorily be written down in a book. For one thing, as far as the song goes, most birds have several variations: and for another, although I have captured musical experts and taken them round with me, it seems impossible to write down a bird’s music in any known or unknown notation. I had high hopes of inventing an easy means of record, of a graphlike or seismographic nature, in which, for instance, you would record the cuckoo thus: ᐱ and the skylark as follows: ᐱᐱᐱᐱᐱᐱᐱᐱᐱᐱ. But it fell down on the tits, because it was incapable of representing the difference between Te—te—te—te, and Pe—Pe—Pe—Pe. In fact, there is something consonantal about birds’ song (which is the reason why bird books try desperately to record their knowledge in terms of the alphabet, e.g. “a constant repetition of two notes,[4] sounding like ‘ee-ker, ee-ker.’ Call, ‘zee, zee’ and ‘pink, pink.’ ”) and also why country people have little phrases which birds are supposed to say. The pigeon says traditionally, “Take two cows, Taffy,” or “Joe’s toe bleeds, Betty” if it is going to rain. But unfortunately the alphabetical approach only carries us half-way, like graphic notation, and what it really comes down to is that bird song can’t be put in books. I said “unfortunately” without thinking, because as a matter of fact it is a good thing. It means this, that ornithology, in spite of having such a long name, is bound to remain a traditional, oral and empirical craft. You can’t have a correspondence course in birds. You have to go out to them in person, with a companion to start you by experience and word of mouth, and then you have got to find out for yourself. In fact, birds are handed down apostolically. They are the kind of thing that cannot be industrialised or mechanised or mass-produced or turned into print, or efficiently pigeon-holed in the Drage Way, or Pelmanised in the abstract or put in a Blue book, or demeaned by any other modern jerry-built systems. They have got to be encountered personally, in parties preferably of not more than two, and their lore has got to be handed down in the honest old verbal chain: so that what I know comes down to me along a linked descent of gamekeepers and sons of farmers and birds-nesting little boys, each one inheriting in affectionate personal contact, generation after generation, as the honest trade of sculpture was handed down in Greece. Indeed, I can dream that the mentor of my mentor was possibly acquainted with this or that fact by W. H. Hudson in person, or even by Richard Jefferies. It is like being ordained.
The other incommunicable thing about birds is their flight, and this is the best way of all to distinguish them. It is all very well to know that a carrion crow is bigger than a rook and has a feathered beak. In order to make these identifications you have got to have the crow to hand, and preferably a dead rook as well for purposes of comparison. Now the carrion crow lives, I believe I am right in saying, as long as a man, is extremely destructive of game, and is hunted for that reason with much enthusiasm by gamekeepers, as well as by emotional people who object to the creature for pecking out the eyes of dying animals. It can be easily understood that a crow who may be as old as myself, and has been hunted, as he hunts, all his life, is not an easy bird to bring to hand. I want to kill him, because he eats my partridges, and so I want to be able to distinguish him. I don’t want to spend hours stalking every black bird I see, in case he is a crow, and yet I want the carrion. It is not much use my knowing that he has a hairy beak, because if he has one he will be up and away before I am within two hundred yards. Book knowledge is useless. He is only about two inches longer than a rook, and at that distance the difference is not perceptible. It is true that I can learn from a book that he usually goes about singly or in pairs, whilst a rook keeps in a flock; but this rule is by no means invariable. A rook is not gregarious all the time, or perhaps his friends (for they are exclusive in their tribal system) are hidden by a fold of the field. To cut a long story short, I have got to recognise him, the most cunning of the birds, by the way he flies in the air. And he does fly differently. The rook wags his wings: the crow hoists and thrusts them. A rook leaps out of a tree: a crow falls out of it. It is as if the crow had a more toilsome body.
12. v. xxxiv.
The flight of all birds is individual. You can illustrate it best by taking the more exaggerated ones, but even a blackbird flies differently from a thrush. The hawk hovers and so does the lark;[5] but when the hawk stoops he drops the whole way vertically. The lark flattens out after ten feet, goes some yards horizontally, and drops again. He goes down, therefore, in a series of L’s; and the last L has its base almost on the ground. You think you have marked him down at the point A, but when you go there he is really at B, perhaps ten yards farther on. It is the same sort of thing that happens with partridges later in the season, when you mark them closer than they actually dropped, and with snipe. I have been prepared to bet my daughter’s hand in marriage that a snipe was in a certain reedy clump, only to find his little ghost skewing “chippering” away, twenty yards to the right. The Tree Pipit, another of the semi-hovering birds, comes down almost exactly like an autogiro. He sails gently down to his tree-top, with wings spread out like a cupid in a holy picture, all the time shaking his tiny buff body with his song: Terwee terwee terwee terwee tweet tweet tweet tweet.
[3] But when I went to see the foal next day and looked for it, the thing was gone.
[4] And I wonder whether anybody can identify the bird, without further help, from this description?
[5] But of course not in the same way. It is the difference between violently agitating the wings to keep station, and sailing by leaning against the air: a habit which has earned for the rusty-backed kestrel (who looks so much better when seen from above, perhaps from the window of a train on an embankment) his lovely title, The Windhover.
