ON a bright, cold, sunshiny October day I started from Lynton on my way across the moors to Porlock Weir. The sea upon my left was flecked with the foam of curling waves, and upon my right the brown hills stretched in ridge after ridge, their sides “enfolding sunny spots of greenery.” As I was scanning the middle distance I became aware of a number of moving dots on the outskirts of a deep wood which runs down to Badgeworthy Water. The faint winding of a horn came up upon the breeze, and from the edge of the woodland burst forth a noble stag. His antlers were laid flat upon his back, and with incredible speed he made away across the open moor. I watched him as he ran. He must have felt a tingling triumph all along the blood, for he was unpursued. In time he came to cultivation. He leapt the hedges in his pride, raced across the open fields and was soon lost to view.
I then knew What there was in store for him. To get him thus to break away from covert had needed all the resources of the hunter’s craft. Doubtless he had been “harboured” by the harbourer. The tufters, the old sagacious hounds, who are not easily diverted from their quarry by the crossing scent of other deer, had tracked him in his efforts to force others from the wood while he remained within the shelter. And now he had been driven forth, the tufters had been whipped off, and the hounds, which had been waiting at a little distance, were being sent for to be put upon his track. The field were content to wait ; there was no need of haste. To the inexperienced spectator nothing could be fairer. The hunted stag was given a noble start before the pursuing pack was put upon the scent.
And yet his chance of escape was but small. When once a stag is forced into the open it is not likely that he will live to see another day. He is a big, wild beast; he cannot run to earth. And unless he manages to reach a wood like Horner Wood, which not only covers a large area of ground, but which swarms with other deer, and even then has wondrous luck, his fate is sealed
I saw the pack laid on,
“Bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew’d, so sanded ; and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew,
Crook-kneed, and dew—lapped like Thessalian bulls.”
Instantly their full—mouthed baying came singing to me on the wind as they raced across the russet moor.
“Chime, ye dappled darlings,” says the Rev. Charles Kingsley. So did their music sound in the ears of a hunting man, a clergyman of the mid—Victorian age. Did he ever pause, think you, to consider how this “music” struck upon the heart of the haunted quarry and turned it to stone?
The stag meanwhile had one goal he strove to reach—the sea. In its welcoming billows would he shake off this fell pursuit. But hunting man prevented him. Along the summit of the moorland parallel with the coast he had erected a high paling, inexorable to deer, to prevent the baffling of the hunt by that escape. Besides the paling, then, he sped until it ended, and then once more he sought the sea. In the woodland through which I passed he crossed my path, a wearied, panting thing, and after an interval the dogs in Indian file, with long and tireless loup, each giving an occasional tongue as their nostrils caught the exhilarating scent.
With that mysterious rapidity by which news travels the people at Porlock Weir, on the seashore for which the stag was making, got wind of his approach, and in numbers they had congregated, not to render aid to the animal in his dis-tress, but to drive him back into the jaws of the pursuing hounds. They succeeded. But the sea would have been no harbour of refuge. A stag puts out to sea, but not with the intention of swimming across a bay and landing in some safer cove. No, he puts to sea, but seldom, if ever, comes he back. He rushes into the water in his terror to escape, and swims straight out. He knows not, cares not, whither he is going. He will swim till he can swim no longer, but he will not turn to face the fangs of his pursuers. So, unless a boat puts out and captures him for a prey to the expectant hounds, he buffets with the waves till they close over him. And to-day with the white horses curling on the crown of every billow, he would soon have been “full fathom five.”
Once more the stag was driven back upon the hounds. He was hunted up and down through the coppice clothing the steep hills rising abruptly from the sea. The coppice was too thick to be traversed by the riders, so down they clattered upon the shore by a side route to watch the closing scene. The whole countryside was out. I scanned the riders closely. They were of either sex and every age. Boys and girls on ponies. Women, young and elderly. Men, lay and clerical, white—haired, and those with down upon the chin. They were all intent on one thing only—the death of the hunted stag. I listened for one expression of sympathy. I looked for one sign of compassion. I heard and. saw none. I thought that a certain hardness of feature was common to them all. Two elderly spinsters drove up in a small pony-carriage and joined the crowd. In these tender, ancient hearts at last, I said, the poor deer will find his friends. Not so; they had driven up in hot haste to say that the deer had leaped into the road just before their pony, thinking that their information might be useful to the hunt. “He cannot run much longer,” they said in triumph; “he is dead—beat.”
I thought to myself, have centuries of civilisation changed mankind, or are these the same people to—day who in ancient times turned up their thumbs in the amphitheatre at Rome? Once more the stag made his last and desperate effort to reach the sea. He fled into a small orchard on the level of the beach, and then the end was come. There was the lassooing, the throat-cutting, the disembowelling, and the rest of it, witnessed by the crowd, but which I did not see.
I climbed the hills on my return. The golden glory of the waning sun lit up the woods, which glowed with autumn colours. But the day was spoilt for me. The happy, hearty sportsman will tell me that I am sentimental. It may be so. I do not judge him. Let him think kindly in his turn of me.
I only place on record some sights I saw, and some thoughts which those sights aroused. The hidden mystery of cruelty and pain I do not seek to solve. I have spoken of the pursuit of the mature and powerful stag. The hinds are likewise hunted. They have no weapons of defence. Nor have they the courage of the male. They are sometimes pulled down slowly by the dogs. Moreover, they are often hunted when they are in kind.
An animal about to become a mother may, I think, with some excuse arouse the chivalric instinct in man. Likewise, I seem somewhere to have read of a good shepherd who gently leads those that are with young. Your sportsman, as he reads this, mutters to. himself that clearly it is manliness that I lack, and that it is, after all, only of sheep that the ancient tale is told.