Wild Life in a Southern County. Richard Jefferies
be mathematically straight. They often succeed so well that the furrows look as if traced with a ruler, and exhibit curious effects of vanishing perspective. Along the furrow, just as it is turned, there runs a shimmering light as the eye traces it up. The ploughshare, heavy and drawn with great force, smooths the earth as it cleaves it, giving it for a time a ‘face’ as it were, the moisture on which reflects the light. If you watch the farmers driving to market, you will see that they glance up the furrows to note the workmanship and look for game; you may tell from a distance if they espy a hare by the check of the rein and the extended hand pointing.
The partridges, too, cower as they hear the noise of wheels or footsteps, but their brown backs, rounded as they stoop, do not deceive the eye that knows full well the irregular shape taken by lumps of earth. Both hares and rabbits may be watched with ease from an elevation, and if you remain quiet will rarely discover your presence while you are above them. They keep a sharp look-out all round, but never think of glancing upwards, unless, of course, some unusual noise attracts attention.
Looking away from the brow of the hill here over the rampart, see, yonder in the narrow hollow a flock is feeding: you can tell even so far off that it is feeding, because the sheep are scattered about, dotted hither and thither over the surface. It is their habit the moment they are driven to run together. Farther away, slowly travelling up a distant down, another flock, packed close, rises towards the ridge, like a thick white mist stealthily ascending the slope.
Just outside the trench, almost within reach, there lies a small white something, half hidden by the grass. It is the skull of a hare, bleached by the winds and the dew and the heat of the summer sun. The skeleton has disappeared, nothing but the bony casing of the head remains, with its dim suggestiveness of life, polished and smooth from the friction of the elements. Holding it in the hand the shadow falls into and darkens the cavities once filled by the wistful eyes which whilom glanced down from the summit here upon the sweet clover fields beneath. Beasts of prey and wandering dogs have carried away the bones of the skeleton, dropping them far apart; the crows and the ants doubtless had their share of the carcass. Perhaps a wound caused by shot that did not immediately check his speed, or wasting disease depriving him of strength to obtain food, brought him low; mayhap an insidious enemy crept on him in his form.
The joy in life of these animals—indeed, of almost all animals and birds in freedom—is very great. You may see it in every motion: in the lissom bound of the hare, the playful leap of the rabbit, the song that the lark and the finch must sing; the soft, loving coo of the dove in the hawthorn; the blackbird ruffling out his feathers on a rail. The sense of living—the consciousness of seeing and feeling—is manifestly intense in them all, and is in itself an exquisite pleasure. Their appetites seem ever fresh: they rush to the banquet spread by Mother Earth with a gusto that Lucullus never knew in the midst of his artistic gluttony; they drink from the stream with dainty sips as though it were richest wine. Watch the birds in the spring; the pairs dance from bough to bough, and know not how to express their wild happiness. The hare rejoices in the swiftness of his limbs: his nostrils sniff the air, his strong sinews spurn the earth; like an arrow from a bow he shoots up the steep hill that we must clamber slowly, halting half-way to breathe. On outspread wings the swallow floats above, then slants downwards with a rapid swoop, and with the impetus of the motion rises easily. Therefore it is that this skull here, lying so light in the palm of the hand, with the bright sunshine falling on it, and a shadowy darkness in the vacant orbits of the eyes, fills us with sadness. ‘As leaves on leaves, so men on men decay;’ how much more so with these creatures whose generations are so short.
If we look closely into the grass here on the slope of the fosse it is animated by a busy throng of insects rushing in hot haste to and fro. They must find it a labour and a toil to make progress through the green forest of grass-blade and moss and heaths and thick thyme bunches, over-topping them as cedars, but cedars all strewn in confusion, crossing and interlacing, with no path through the jungle. Watch this ant travelling patiently onward, and mark the distance traversed by the milestone of a tall bennet.
First up on a dry white stalk of grass lingering from last autumn; then down on to a thistle leaf, round it, and along a bent blade leading beneath into the intricacy and darkness at the roots. Presently, after a prolonged absence, up again on a dead fibre of grass, brown and withered, torn up by the sheep but not eaten: this lies like a bridge across a yawning chasm—the mark or indentation left by the hoof of a horse scrambling up when the turf was wet and soft. Half-way across the weight of the ant overbalances it, slight as that weight is, and down it goes into the cavity: undaunted, after getting clear, the insect begins to climb up the precipitous edge and again plunges into the wood. Coming to a broader leaf, which promises an open space, it is found to be hairy, and therefore impassable except with infinite trouble; so the wayfarer endeavours to pass underneath, but has in the end to work round it. Then a breadth of moss intervenes, which is worse than the vast prickly hedges with which savage kings fence their cities to the explorer, who can get no certain footing on it, but falls through and climbs up again twenty times, and burrows a way somehow in the shady depths below.
Next, a bunch of thyme crosses the path: and here for a lengthened period the ant goes utterly out of sight, lost in the interior, slowly groping round about within, and finally emerging in a glade where your walking-stick, carelessly thrown on the ground, bends back the grass and so throws open a lane to the traveller. In a straight line the distance thus painfully traversed may be ten or twelve inches; certainly in getting over it the insect has covered not less than three times as much, probably more—now up, now down, backwards and sideways, searching out a passage.
As this process goes on from morn till night through the long summer’s day, some faint idea may be obtained of the journeys thus performed, against difficulties and obstacles before which the task of crossing Africa from sea to sea is a trifle. How, for instance, does the ant manage to keep a tolerably correct course, steering straight despite the turns and labyrinthine involutions of the path? It is never possible to see far in front—half the time not twice its own length; often and often it is necessary to retrace the trail and strike out a fresh one—a step that would confuse most persons even in an English wood with which they were unacquainted.
Yet by some power of observation, perhaps superior in this respect to the abilities of greater creatures, the tiny thing guides its footsteps without faltering down yonder to the nest in the hollow on the bank of the ploughed field. I say by observation, and the exercise of faculties resembling those of the mind, because I have many times tried the supposed unerring instinct of the ant, and found it fail: therefore it must possess a power of correcting error which is the prerogative of reason. Ants cannot, under certain conditions, distinguish their own special haunts. Across a garden path I frequented there was the track of innumerable ants; their ceaseless journeyings had worn a visible path leading from the border on one side to the border on the other, where was a tiny hole, into which they each disappeared in turn. Happily, the garden was neglected, otherwise the besom of the gardener would have swept away all traces of the highway they had made. Watching the stream of life pouring swiftly along the track, it seemed to me that, like men walking hurriedly in well-known streets, they took no note of marks or bearings, but followed each other unhesitatingly in the groove.
When street-pavements are torn up, the human stream disperses and flows out on either side till it discovers by experience the most convenient makeshift passage. What would be the result if this Watling-street of the ants were interrupted? With a fragment of wood I rubbed out three inches of the path worn in the shallow film of soil deposited over the old gravel, smoothing that much down level. Instantly the crowd came to a stop. The foremost ant halted at the edge where the groove now terminated, turned round, and had an excited conversation with the next by means of their antennae; a third came up, a fourth and fifth—a crowd collected, in fact. Now, there was no real obstruction—nothing to prevent them from rushing across to the spot where the path recommenced. Why, then, did they pause? Why, presently, begin to explore, right and left, darting to one side and then to the other examining? Was it not because an old and acquired habit was suddenly uprooted? Surely infallible instinct could have carried them across the space of three inches without any trouble of investigation?
In a few seconds one of the exploring parties, making a curve, hit the other end of the path,