Afoot in England: Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Whitesheet Hill

On Easter Saturday the roadsides and copses by the little
river Nadder were full of children gathering primroses; they
might have filled a thousand baskets without the flowers being
missed, so abundant were they in that place. Cold though it
was the whole air was laden with the delicious fragrance. It
was pleasant to see and talk with the little people occupied
with the task they loved so well, and I made up my mind to see
the result of all this flower-gathering next day in some of
the village churches in the neighbourhood--Fovant, Teffant
Evias, Chilmark, Swallowcliffe, Tisbury, and Fonthill Bishop.
I had counted on some improvement in the weather--some
bright sunshine to light up the flower-decorated interiors;
but Easter Sunday proved colder than ever, with the bitter
north-east still blowing, the grey travelling cloud still
covering the sky; and so to get the full benefit of the
bitterness I went instead to spend my day on the top of the
biggest down above the valley. That was Whitesheet Hill, and
forms the highest part of the long ridge dividing the valleys
of the Ebble and Nadder.

It was roughest and coldest up there, and suited my temper
best, for when the weather seems spiteful one finds a grim
sort of satisfaction in defying it. On a genial day it would
have been very pleasant on that lofty plain, for the flat top
of the vast down is like a plain in appearance, and the
earthworks on it show that it was once a populous habitation
of man. Now because of the wind and cloud its aspect was bare
and bleak and desolate, and after roaming about for an hour,
exploring the thickest furze patches, I began to think that my
day would have to be spent in solitude, without a living
creature to keep me company. The birds had apparently all
been blown away and the rabbits were staying at home in their
burrows. Not even an insect could I see, although the furze
was in full blossom; the honey-suckers were out of sight
and torpid, and the bloom itself could no longer look
"unprofitably gay," as the poet says it does. "Not even a
wheatear!" I said, for I had counted on that bird in the
intervals between the storms, although I knew I should not
hear his wild delightful warble in such weather.

Then, all at once, I beheld that very bird, a solitary female,
flittering on over the flat ground before me, perching on the
little green ant-mounds and flirting its tail and bobbing as
if greatly excited at my presence in that lonely place. I
wondered where its mate was, following it from place to place
as it flew, determined now I had found a bird to keep it in
sight. Presently a great blackness appeared low down in the
cloudy sky, and rose and spread, travelling fast towards me,
and the little wheatear fled in fear from it and vanished from
sight over the rim of the down. But I was there to defy the
weather, and so instead of following the bird in search of
shelter I sat down among some low furze bushes and waited and
watched. By and by I caught sight of three magpies, rising
one by one at long intervals from the furze and flying
laboriously towards a distant hill-top grove of pines. Then I
heard the wailing cry of a peewit, and caught sight of the
bird at a distance, and soon afterwards a sound of another
character--the harsh angry cry of a carrion crow, almost as
deep as the raven's angry voice. Before long I discovered the
bird at a great height coming towards me in hot pursuit of a
kestrel. They passed directly over me so that I had them a
long time in sight, the kestrel travelling quietly on in the
face of the wind, the crow toiling after, and at intervals
spurting till he got near enough to hurl himself at his enemy,
emitting his croaks of rage. For invariably the kestrel with
one of his sudden swallow-like turns avoided the blow and went
on as before. I watched them until they were lost to sight in
the coming blackness and wondered that so intelligent a
creature as a crow should waste his energies in that vain
chase. Still one could understand it and even sympathize with
him. For the kestrel is a most insulting creature towards the
bigger birds. He knows that they are incapable of paying him
out, and when he finds them off their guard he will drop down
and inflict a blow just for the fun of the thing. This
outraged crow appeared determined to have his revenge.

Then the storm broke on me, and so fiercely did the rain and
sleet thrash me that, fearing a cold soaking, I fled before it
to the rim of the plain, where the wheatear had vanished, and
saw a couple of hundred yards down on the smooth steep slope a
thicket of dwarf trees. It was, the only shelter in sight,
and to it I went, to discover much to my disgust that the
trees were nothing but elders. For there is no tree that
affords so poor a shelter, especially on the high open downs,
where the foliage is scantier than in other situations and
lets in the wind and rain in full force upon you.

But the elder affects me in two ways. I like it on account of
early associations, and because the birds delight in its
fruit, though they wisely refuse to build in its branches; and
I dislike it because its smell is offensive to me and its
berries the least pleasant of all wild fruits to my taste. I
can eat ivy-berries in March, and yew in its season, poison or
not; and hips and haws and holly-berries and harsh acorn, and
the rowan, which some think acrid; but the elderberry I can't
stomach.

How comes it, I have asked more than once, that this poor tree
is so often seen on the downs where it is so badly fitted to
be and makes so sorry an appearance with its weak branches
broken and its soft leaves torn by the winds? How badly it
contrasts with the other trees and bushes that flourish on the
downs--furze, juniper, holly, blackthorn, and hawthorn!

Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on
an extensive down in another part of Wiltshire with the tenant
of the land, who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but
eventually finding that he could make more with rabbits than
with sheep turned most of his land into a warren. The higher
part of this down was overgrown with furze, mixed with holly
and other bushes, but the slopes were mostly very bare. At
one spot on a wide bare slope where the rabbits had formed a
big group of burrows there was a close little thicket of young
elder trees, looking exceedingly conspicuous in the bright
green of early April. Calling my companion's attention to
this little thicket I said something about the elder growing
on the open downs where it always appeared to be out of
harmony with its surroundings. "I don't suppose you planted
elders here," I said.

"No, but I know who did," he returned, and he then gave me
this curious history of the trees. Five years before, the
rabbits, finding it a suitable spot to dig in, probably
because of a softer chalk there, made a number of deep burrows
at that spot. When the wheatears, or "horse-maggers" as he
called them, returned in spring two or three pairs attached
themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them. There
was that season a solitary elder-bush higher up on the down
among the furze which bore a heavy crop of berries; and when
the fruit was ripe he watched the birds feeding on it, the
wheatears among them. The following spring seedlings came up
out of the loose earth heaped about the rabbit burrows, and as
they were not cut down by the rabbits, for they dislike the
elder, they grew up, and now formed a clump of fifty or sixty
little trees of six feet to eight feet in height.

Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear,
the bird of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not
even ask for a bush to perch on?

It then occurred to me that in every case where I had observed
a clump of elder bushes on the bare downside, it grew upon a
village or collection of rabbit burrows, and it is probable
that in every case the clump owed its existence to the
wheatears who had dropped the seed about their nesting-place.
The clump where I had sought a shelter from the storm was
composed of large old dilapidated-looking half-dead elders;
perhaps their age was not above thirty or forty years, but
they looked older than hawthorns of one or two centuries; and
under them the rabbits had their diggings--huge old mounds and
burrows that looked like a badger's earth. Here, too, the
burrows had probably existed first and had attracted the
wheatears, and the birds had brought the seed from some
distant bush.

Crouching down in one of the big burrows at the roots of an
old elder I remained for half an hour, listening to the
thump-thump of the alarmed rabbits about me, and the
accompanying hiss and swish of the wind and sleet and rain in
the ragged branches.

The storm over I continued my rambles on Whitesheet Hill, and
coming back an hour or two later to the very spot where I had
seen and followed the wheatear, I all at once caught sight of
a second bird, lying dead on the turf close to my feet! The
sudden sight gave me a shock of astonishment, mingled with
admiration and grief. For how pretty it looked, though dead,
lying on its back, the little black legs stuck stiffly up, the
long wings pressed against the sides, their black tips
touching together like the clasped hands of a corpse; and the
fan-like black and white tail, half open as in life, moved
perpetually up and down by the wind, as if that tail-flirting
action of the bird had continued after death. It was very
beautiful in its delicate shape and pale harmonious colouring,
resting on the golden-green mossy turf. And it was a male,
undoubtedly the mate of the wheatear I had seen at the spot,
and its little mate, not knowing what death is, had probably
been keeping watch near it, wondering at its strange stillness
and greatly fearing for its safety when I came that way, and
passed by without seeing it.

Poor little migrant, did you come back across half the world
for this--back to your home on Whitesheet Hill to grow cold
and fail in the cold April wind, and finally to look very
pretty, lying stiff and cold, to the one pair of human eyes
that were destined to see you! The little birds that come
and go and return to us over such vast distances, they perish
like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they
are blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the
pestilence-stricken multitudes" whirled away by the wind!
They die in myriads: that is not strange; the strange, the
astonishing thing is the fact of death; what can they tell
us of it--the wise men who live or have ever lived on the
earth--what can they say now of the bright intelligent spirit,
the dear little emotional soul, that had so fit a tenement and
so fitly expressed itself in motions of such exquisite grace,
in melody so sweet! Did it go out like the glow-worm's lamp,
the life and sweetness of the flower? Was its destiny not
like that of the soul, specialized in a different direction,
of the saint or poet or philosopher! Alas, they can tell us
nothing!

I could not go away leaving it in that exposed place on the
turf, to be found a little later by a magpie or carrion crow
or fox, and devoured. Close by there was a small round
hillock, an old forsaken nest of the little brown ants, green
and soft with moss and small creeping herbs--a suitable grave
for a wheatear. Cutting out a round piece of turf from the
side, I made a hole with my stick and put the dead bird in and
replacing the turf left it neatly buried.

It was not that I had or have any quarrel with the creatures
I have named, or would have them other than they are
--carrion-eaters and scavengers, Nature's balance-keepers and
purifiers. The only creatures on earth I loathe and hate are
the gourmets, the carrion-crows and foxes of the human kind
who devour wheatears and skylarks at their tables.

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