Part 2

Wood-pigeons are among the gamekeeper's perquisites. Apart from a very occasional request from "the house" for the wherewithal for pigeon-pie, the pigeons shot are for the benefit of the keeper and his family, and when he shoots more than he requires there are always labourers and others glad of a pigeon or two "to make a pudden." Rabbits, also, are perquisites, but to be sold no more than pigeons. The popular idea is that keepers may help themselves to any game they please--true, they could if so minded. But no matter what a keeper's ethics in other directions, as a rule he deals honourably with the game in his charge. The keeper has no more right to take a brace of birds or a hare without permission than has an ironmonger's assistant to take a coal-scuttle. There is little to be said against the keeper making use of game killed, but not eaten, by foxes or vermin, or of chance-killed game unsuitable for his employer's table. One old keeper was so anxious to make every available pheasant figure in the game-book that he would never keep the brace given him at the end of a day's shooting. Instead, he would include the birds with the bag on the following day, and this he would do day after day.

Free though they are to kill and cook rabbits, few keepers care for them, or eat them often. Most keepers, indeed, would be as pleased to go to penal servitude, or to live in London, as to eat rabbits more often than once a month. This is not because they have eaten too many, but because the smell of rabbits has become distasteful. However, rabbits prove a great help to the keeper with children to feed. Usually his larder is well stocked, and his good-wife has a store of all kinds of dainties in her cupboards--from home-made pickles to home-brewed wine. Often your keeper is a clever gardener; he takes prizes for his vegetables, and he will grow fine cucumbers and even melons under fragments of glass. Something of a cook himself, well accustomed to preparing luxurious meals for his sacred birds, he is a judge of cooks and cooking, as many a keeper's wife has discovered. If she does not know, he can tell her how to prepare a savoury dish which shall have the special advantages of not spoiling through being kept warm or from being warmed up--for the keeper's dinner is a movable feast, and must be ready at any time between noon and night. The sheet-anchor of one such dish is proper home-cured bacon, in winter baked in a pie-dish with alternate layers of parboiled potatoes, for which in summer the contents of eggs beaten just enough to blend the yolks and whites are substituted. Served with new potatoes, it is the very dish to put heart in a man.

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Homely Medicines

The gamekeeper is among the few people left in the country who have any knowledge of herb-lore, and faith in home-brewed herbal remedies. His medicine-chest contains a varied assortment. From rose-pink centaury he boils an appetising tonic for his pheasants, which he is not above drinking himself. The roots of couch-grass provide him with a powerful emetic for dogs in the first stages of distemper. He bakes acorns, grinds them to powder, and with its aid quells a rebellious stomach. His good-wife has the secret of cowslip and nettle tea. From the pounded leaves of dock blended with lard, he prepares a salve for cuts. Rheumatism, from which all keepers suffer in their old age, is treated with the fat of hedgehogs, well rubbed in--not that this is a herbal remedy. Cramp in pheasants calls for cayenne pepper boiled in their food; chopped onions are for gape-worms; a little saffron with drinking water--as much as will lie on a threepenny-bit in the water for a thousand birds--assists young birds through the troubles of feather-growing; while the first moult is aided by a few crystals of sulphate of iron in water. But oil is the sovereign remedy: castor-oil for dogs out of sorts, oil of almonds for the glued eyelids of blind birds, linseed-oil and laudanum for gapes--oil of every kind for every purpose. With corn scented with oil of rhodium-wood the keeper lays a trail which every pheasant must follow.

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The Earth-Stoppers' Feast

The reward paid to keepers from the funds of fox-hunts is a sovereign for a litter of cubs when hounds come cub-hunting. Ten shillings is paid for each fox found by hounds. And a florin is the keeper's usual reward for stopping earths when the meet is within a distance of four miles. These moneys are paid in round sums on a great occasion in the keeper's year--the earth-stoppers' dinner. In olden days keepers were full of resources for benefiting themselves from the hunt funds, while saving their pheasants' skins from foxes at the same time. The cunning keeper would induce a huntsman to pay a stealthy unofficial visit to the home of a litter, and after his departure, when a reward had been made sure, would quietly take steps to rid himself of fox troubles. Visiting the earth with a supply of sulphur matches and bags of grass, he would light the matches within, block the holes with the bags, and leave the deadly fumes to do their work. Or two keepers would combine to defraud the hunt. One would show a litter and pocket his sovereign, then shift the litter to the preserves of his friend, who in turn would call in the huntsman and pocket his reward, then return the cubs whence they came; and so the game would go on. Luck plays a great part in this matter of fox-rewards. It often happens that foxes which have been harboured honestly by one keeper are found in the preserves of another who is a vulpicide, yet is not above accepting the reward which really is the due of his scrupulous friend in the next parish. How to show foxes to the hunt and pheasants to a shooting party is the prickliest of all the manifold problems of the gamekeeper's life.

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The Keeper's Garden

The gamekeeper, like many a countryman, would be at a loss without his garden. His little plot of land means much to him: green food for his table, tonic foods for his pheasants, and a place where, by digging, he may bury some of his cares. He knows no such exercise as digging for keeping away ill-humours. He believes that the more a man sows the more he will reap--it is a lesson daily brought home to him. So he puts his best work into his garden, which is often the model plot of a rural community. In March he divides his time between spade work and his never-ending war on vermin. If he has a pen of stock pheasants he spends a good many minutes a day in admiration of the birds, besides tending to their wants; and he will defy you to prove that you ever saw a finer lot of birds. "Look at that old cock up agen yon corner--ain't 'e got some 'orns? Bless ye, them birds is worth a pound apiece."

So many a March afternoon finds the keeper hard at work at home with spade, fork, trowel or dibbler. His great object is to finish the more laborious work before the time of pheasants' eggs. A feature of the garden is the neat and spacious onion-bed, smoothed with the polished back of a favourite spade, which has dug out countless rabbits. There must be plenty of onions for the young pheasants to come. In time of need a keeper may sacrifice the whole of his onion-bed to his birds, gladly buying such onions as his wife demands for the table. Then there are two or three long rows of peas. Before sowing, the seed is sprinkled with red lead against the ravages of long-tailed field-mice, and after sowing strands of black thread are carried up and down the surface against the attacks of sparrows, while above, as a terrible warning, swings the body of a sparrow-hawk. The site of an old pheasant pen is devoted to Brussels sprouts. A dilapidated dog-kennel will serve to coax rhubarb to be ready for Easter Sunday's dinner.

Flower seeds are not forgotten: in shallow cartridge-boxes, protected by a small home-made frame, seeds are sown for making the little patch of flower-garden gay with stocks and asters, sweet peas, sun-flowers, tobacco-plants, and zinnias. The keeper puzzles over zinnia seed, which is like the fragment of a dead leaf, yet will come up and grow with the speed of mustard and cress, producing a wealth of bloom.

But the planting of the potato patch is the chief work. The neat little furrows which mark each row of potatoes, allowing the hoe to be plied fearlessly before the potatoes show above ground, give a neatness to the cottage garden all the time while the soil is brown and bare.

Gamekeepers, though their work for wages is never done, yet have a few legitimate ways of adding to their incomes. Of course they have the opportunity of making a good deal of money if they trespass on their employers' time; but your keeper is an honest man, and his work is the object of his life. Most keepers are skilled vegetable gardeners, and may make a few shillings from peas and beans. Often enough they have a cunning way with flowers, though envious amateurs are free with their hints about the advantages to be gained from burying foxes to enrich the soil. We know one who will put in a fair day's work with spade and wheelbarrow before even the waggoners have stirred to give their horses breakfast. Going his rounds, the keeper marks good briers for budding; if he does not sell them, he will beg choice buds from rose-growers, and a year or two later the passer-by may be tempted to offer half-a-crown for the fine roses of his little plot. Possibly by this time his roses mean so much to him that he will make some such excuse as, "The missus, she thinks a mortal sight of they."

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Keepers' Holidays

In February a few lucky gamekeepers may take a voluntary holiday, many must take an involuntary one--restful, perhaps, but not beneficial to pocket, health, and spirits. Keepers come and keepers go in these days when so many shoots are let for short terms. Resting between berths has one advantage--there can be no haunting worry as to the welfare of game. It would be interesting to collect cases of keepers and other country workers who have held the same berth for long periods, and have never been for a holiday right away from the scenes of their labours. Many and many old keepers would be found to have lived their whole lives on the estates where they were born. The best holiday for keepers would be a change to a bustling town; or they should be sent to a country where game is different to the game at home, the partridge man going to the home of grouse, the moorland keeper to the South.

Most keepers would be the first to say it is impossible that they should take holiday. Their work is peculiarly personal; and even when it is essential to arrange for somebody else to "give an eye to things," they can never feel happy and confident that all is going on in the accustomed way. The work, too, is cumulative--each item must be considered in its relation to several others. Even where there are several keepers, each on his own beat of a shoot, there is a jealous rivalry between them; and any one who went for a holiday would suspect advantage to be taken of his stock of breeding game in his absence. If there is one thing a keeper can endure less than being scored off by a poacher, it is to be scored off by a brother keeper.

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An Advantage of Marriage

For the first time in many a long year a gamekeeper may find himself taking a holiday in the early days of February--either because he has left his place of his own free will, or has been dismissed. "Left owing to shoot being given up"--that is the usual reason for a keeper's enforced holiday. Married keepers seldom leave berths of their own accord except to better themselves; but a young bachelor keeper with a light heart may be fond of change, and scores of places are open to him from which married men are barred. Often he can afford to take a holiday while he looks about for a new berth; he can find lodgings anywhere, and what with odd jobs and the money he has saved he can exist comfortably until he finds an employer to suit him. The married keeper is not so light-hearted, and perhaps on this account the best permanent berths go to the married men. The chance of such a berth gives the country maiden her best chance of bagging an elusive bachelor. Sometimes she captures the heart of a bachelor before he has found a berth that will support a wife; then he will advertise for a place, making the ambiguous statement: "Married when suited." No doubt some keepers who have issued this form of advertisement could tell strange stories of the applications received.

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The Keeper seeks a New Berth

When going out to look at a place where the chance of a berth has offered itself, the keeper always takes good stock of the game in the country through which he passes. You may meet him, at the end of the season, setting out by road or by rail; he is clad in his best, you will see; bright new gaiters encase his legs, his boots glitter with polish. However great his hurry, as he goes along through park-lands or woods, he is looking out for everything to be seen; not a sign of game escapes him. And there lives a keeper who, passing through an estate on his way to a personal interview with the owner, chanced to be led out of the direct path by certain suspicious sounds which he heard, and caught a poacher red-handed. It is hardly necessary to add that he stepped forthwith into the vacant berth.

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In North and South

Many long leagues separate the moor-keeper of the North from the keeper of South-country preserves; their eyes look out upon different worlds; the two men are as different in type, in ideas, and in methods as the North is different to the South, the open, rolling moor to the jungle-like covert. There are certain matters on which they agree--as in their mutual hatred of foxes; the moor-keeper, when the season is out, has no hesitation in killing all foxes and vermin within his power. He has an advantage over his brother in some things; as in nesting-sites. The heather affords an unlimited number of well-concealed places for grouse nests, whereas in Hampshire or Sussex a nesting hedgerow after the heart of pheasant or partridge is likely to be overcrowded, and to attract every sort of egg-thief. Again, he has an advantage in his natural and abundant food-supplies; though much of his success in raising a stock of healthy birds will depend on his judgment in burning old heather, and insuring a plentiful growth of young shoots. When heather is late in starting to grow, and birds are forced to feed on old, dry shoots, digestive troubles may prove fatal to many.

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Poachers--

Poachers on the moor differ in many habits and tricks from South-country poachers. They know how to trap grouse with gins, setting up little piles of gravel, which the birds eagerly seek for digestive reasons, and besetting the gravel with traps. They know how to trap grouse in winter without causing them injury; this they do by pressing a bottle into hard snow, thus shaping a hole-trap (to be baited with oats) from which the grouse cannot escape, having fallen into it head first. But on the whole the sneaking type of poacher has fewer chances on the moor than in the pheasant coverts.

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And their Dogs

A poacher owns to a dog, so marvellously trained that his master can send it for anything--but at the least sign of anybody watching its movements, or the approach of a gamekeeper or a policeman, the dog drops whatever it may be carrying, makes off for cover, and hides itself. The dog has many rivals to fame of this sort. We knew a poacher whose plan it was to dawdle along the road in his pony-cart while his lurcher foraged in the fields. But at a certain signal the dog would come instantly to heel; on suspecting danger, all the master did was to lift his cap, and scratch his head in the most unconcerned manner in the world. When once a dog grasps the meaning of a signal, he will obey it faithfully in all circumstances if he is kept in practice. In the olden days, in the Netherlands, dogs were trained to smuggle, and without attendants. They were sent off on a journey at night, loaded with goods, the keenest-nosed dog leading, and at the moment when he sighted or scented a custom-house official, he would turn back as a signal to the whole pack to rush off to cover, and hide until the danger passed. This is vouched for in an old work, "Brown on Dogs."

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Perfect Obedience

Probably there would be no great difficulty training a dog to drop a hare, or anything else, at the approach of somebody other than its master. Dogs are sometimes trained to lie down, without receiving any signal or order, when their owners meet friends and stop to talk. One old gamekeeper would consider his dogs to be very ill-mannered if they did not lie down of their own accord when he stopped walking. Another keeper has trained his dog to quite an out-of-the-way trick, which is to the keeper's personal advantage, if highly detrimental to his duties. The trick is for the dog, on command, to spit from his mouth any food he may be eating. The keeper will take his dog to a public-house, and set the example of throwing him biscuits, which he will eat greedily. He will then make a boast about the dog's obedience (in the shooting field, by the way, we have never known a more disobedient animal, though he is exceedingly clever). Eventually the keeper wagers a pint of beer to a quart that the dog not only will cease eating biscuits on command, but will eject any crumbs from his mouth, and not touch them again until so ordered. Many a pot of beer has the dog won for his master by this trick. When the two go home, it is the dog that finds the way.

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The Black List

In February the gamekeeper's thoughts and energies are turned mostly in the way of vermin and trapping. And where vermin is really plentiful it is a wonderful wild sport that he enjoys in tracking and trapping the creatures of his black list. In the North the vermin bag is more mixed than in the South, and in the olden days contained such a great variety of creatures as to suggest that the keepers enjoyed better sport than their masters. They were ruthless in their war on all that they held to be enemies to game; how ruthless may be judged from the following list of vermin, bagged in three years by a famous keeper on Glengarry, Inverness-shire. It indicates the proportion of the different sorts of animals classed as vermin found in the Highlands in the middle days of the last century: 11 foxes, 198 wild cats, 246 martens, 106 polecats, 301 stoats and weasels, 67 badgers, 48 otters, 78 house cats going wild, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, 98 blue hawks or peregrine falcons, 7 orange-legged falcons, 211 hobby hawks, 75 kites, 5 marsh harriers, 63 goshawks, 285 common buzzards, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 3 honey buzzards, 462 kestrels, 78 merlin hawks, 83 hen harriers, 6 gerfalcons, 9 ash-coloured or long blue-tailed hawks, 1431 carrion crows, 475 ravens, 35 horned owls, 71 common fern owls (nightjars), 3 golden owls, 8 magpies. A total of nearly 5000 head, giving an average of more than 1500 head a year, or about five head a day. The list, strangely enough, does not contain a single jay, rat, or hedgehog.

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A South-Country Record

A Southern keeper's list of about the same period--from 1869 to 1878--shows a total of just over 8000 head. In the year that saw the greatest destruction of hawks--nearly all sparrow-hawks and kestrels--46 were killed. The greatest number of magpies killed in a year was 205. Probably cats were not very carefully counted--their numbers in different years rise from 47 to 122. Usually more than 100 squirrels were killed each year. And over 100 carrion crows were killed yearly. But jays headed all lists in numbers sacrificed; the largest bag of 346 was made in '78, evidently when the influence of the breach-loader was beginning to make itself felt. Hedgehogs suffered least persecution among the keeper's supposed enemies, only 6 going into the bag in one year--45 was the highest hedgehog loss. Exclusive of rats, this keeper, a Hampshire man, waged war on nine species only, whereas the Inverness-shire keeper destroyed as vermin thirty-one different kinds of birds and beasts. The lists make no mention of rooks. To-day, on the Southern estate to which the list of thirty years ago refers, not a crow or a magpie is left, and the persecution has told heavily on the sparrow-hawks, and many another kind. The present keeper's sport with vermin is as different to his predecessors' as the sport of his master to his master's ancestors--to-day about 300 pheasants are bagged on this estate in the course of a big day's shooting, instead of the 30 birds that would have been a good bag in the olden times.

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Woodland Gallows

In olden days the gamekeeper set up his vermin gallows in each of his big woods. It was to his credit to show that he had killed a large amount of vermin; on his gallows he wrote his own testimonial. Nearly all the vermin he killed was duly displayed. But now the day of the gallows is passing. Keepers have little time to give to the display; nor do employers always encourage it. The gallows foster a growing feeling against the destruction of wild life involved by the preservation of game, and lead to bitter, if often misjudged attacks. Keepers are contenting themselves with modified forms of gallows, as the trunk of a tree, to which the heads, tails or claws of the malefactors are nailed. These small gallows do not speak of the keeper's successful war-waging in the bold manner of the old-fashioned, full-measure pattern. But there is much in their favour. As one old keeper remarked of his tree-trunk gallows, the faint odour was only enough to set-off the scent of the flowers.

To the gallows comes a varied bag of robbers. The vermin list of a typical North-country estate included in a recent season 133 stoats, 36 weasels, 62 cats, 98 rats, 115 hedgehogs, 10 hawks, 381 jackdaws, 82 rooks, 23 carrion crows, and 52 magpies--a total of nearly a thousand head. The rats included would probably only be those caught incidentally in the vermin traps, not the far greater number killed during special campaigns by ferret, gun and dog. Hedgehogs are usually spared the indignity of the gallows. Though a keeper cheerfully carries a stoat in the pockets of his Sunday coat--and we have known him in an emergency to put a fox into his pocket--he knows that to pocket hedgehogs means the entertainment of their numerous and active dependants. Of cats only the tails are exhibited, and they are discreetly chosen, the keeper avoiding very striking tails that might be recognised. It would be bad policy on his part to advertise dead cats too freely. He has no desire to make enemies.

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The Gallows Martyrs