V.
A RABBIT OF THE WORLD

A Literary Lady, sentimental as was the wont of literary ladies before the incarnation of the New Woman, went once to call on a Great Poet, who pervaded these regions. But the Great Poet was coy, says the legend, and listened not to the voice of the Literary Lady, charmed she never so wisely. He refused to be drawn by her cunning blandishments, but smoked on in peace, glaring gruffly from his chimney corner. So at last the Great Poet’s wife, feeling that the situation grew slightly strained, endeavoured to create a diversion by saying, “My dear, won’t you take Mrs. Gusherville to see the garden?” The Great Poet, thus checkmated, rose unwillingly from his seat, and strode three paces ahead through the shrubbery paths, followed, longo intervallo, by the panting Mrs. Gusherville. Never a word did he say as he paced the lawn with his heavy tread; but at last, as he approached one garden border, he turned towards his visitor. Speech trembled on his lips; Mrs. Gusherville leant forward to catch the immortal accents. The Poet spoke. “D – mn those rabbits!” he said; and then relapsed into silence. That was all Mrs. Gusherville got out of her interview.

I am reminded of this episode, which if not true to fact is at any rate true to human nature, by the short sharp barking of Fan, my neighbour’s spaniel, resounding from the heather in the direction of the Frying Pan. Each bark is an eager impatient snap, and its burden is – “Rabbits!” Now, I sympathize with every living thing that breathes; yet if it were not for a constitutional objection to unnecessary vigour of language, I could almost back Fan, and echo the Great Poet’s indignant exclamation. For whatever we try to plant among the heather, by way of beautifying our small patch of moorland (as who should paint the lily or gild refined gold), those unscrupulous rodents immediately proceed to treat as their private property. Not one of our white brooms has survived their attacks; and the way they have devoured our periwinkles and our St. John’s wort is a credit to their appetites, and a testimonial to the magnificent air of this healthy neighbourhood. The lad who attends to my garden (we call it a garden by courtesy, not to hurt its feelings) is always saying to me, “Let me set a trap for ’em, sir.” But grave as their misdemeanours are, I can’t bear to trap them. I remember that after all they were the earliest inhabitants. They dwelt here before me; and when I plumped down my cottage in the midst of their moor, I seriously interfered with their domestic economy. “There’s a horrid house built,” said the mother rabbit: “I suspect a dog will follow, and perhaps a gun too.” “Never mind,” said the father, who was a rabbit of the world; “they’ll more than make it up to us, I predict, by planting green-stuff, which is a deal juicier, after all, than gorse or bracken.”

And, indeed, I feel I owe a duty to these earlier inhabitants; I love their fellowship, and do what I can to encourage their uninterrupted residence. The night-jar still perches nightly on one accustomed branch of the big lone fir-tree; the cuckoo comes and calls to us from the clump of stunted pines by the dining-room window; the merry brown hares dart obliquely across the ill-grown green patch of tennis-lawn; and the baby bunnies themselves, all unconscious of their misdemeanours against the growing shrubs, brush their faces before our eyes with their tiny grey paws as we sit upon the terrace. My neighbour has a shot at them with gun and dog; and even as I write, I can hear the ping, ping of his murderous cartridges and the quick cries of Fan in the adjoining plot of moor; but for myself I refrain. I would rather have the gambolling of such innocent fellow-creatures on my patch of grass in the dusk of evening than all the rhododendrons and azaleas and cypresses the florist can palm upon me.

And how pretty they are, those harmless little malefactors! How they frolic across the sward with tiny irregular jumps, like a sportive kitten, only ten times more guileless – no tinge of bloodthirstiness in their liquid eye, no stealthy cruelty in their honest grey faces! Your rabbit is a decent and inoffensive vegetarian. Besides, its mode of life sorts well with the uplands; it never disfigures nature, but accommodates itself to the environment like a good working evolutionist. When we first thought of building here, a clever Girton girl, whom we met at the little inn, held up her hands in horror. “Why build on Hartmoor at all? Why not simply burrow?” And the rabbits burrow. The hilltop is just honey-combed with their underground palaces. There they lurk for the most part during the heat of the day, and come out at night to feed on the furze-bushes that protect and conceal the mouths of their burrows. Indeed, the very shape of the furze-bush, as we ordinarily know it, depends on the constant activity of the hungry and greedy bunnies. Naturally, gorse, if left to itself, would grow feathery from the soil upward, without any gaunt stretch of naked stem at its base; but the rabbits eat off the growing shoots just as high as they can reach by standing tip-toe on their hind feet; so that the resulting shape is a product, so to speak, of rabbit into gorse-bush. Where the soil is light and sandy, as here, burrowing is universal; but on cold wet moors, the rabbits avoid the chance of rheumatism by constructing long tunnels above ground instead, through matted galleries of heather and herbage.

Cowardice is the principal defence of the rabbit, as of all other unarmed rodents. At the first alarm, he flies headlong to his burrow. What swiftness of foot does for the open-nesting hare, that swiftness of retreat does for his underground cousin. Natural selection in such a case favours the most cowardly; for to be brave is to court immediate extinction. That is why rabbits have the noticeable patch of white under their tails – their scuts, as sportsmen very aptly call them. At first sight you would suppose such a conspicuous white mark must be a source of danger. In reality it has been evolved as a patent safety-signal. For while the rabbits crouch and feed, unseen in the grey grass, they are very little conspicuous; but the moment one of them spies any cause of alarm, off it scampers to its hole; and, raising the danger-signal as it goes, it warns the whole warren, all whose members scuttle after it apace without waiting to inquire into the nature of the panic. The mouth of the burrow runs quite straight just at first, so that the retreating bunny can dash into it at full speed without checking his pace; but at a convenient point, a few feet in, it begins to bend and divaricate, besides branching and subdividing as a precaution against weasels and other vermin enemies. It has also at least two entrances and exits, like a room at the theatre, in case of pursuit; and it is cunningly engineered against the chance of intrusion. But the nursing-chamber, where the timid wee mother hides her naked and shapeless young, is quite differently contrived with but a single mouth, and is fitted up with every internal luxury. The good parent lines it with soft fur pulled from her own warm coat, and goes stealthily by night to suckle her little ones. When she comes away, she plasters up the entrance with earth to conceal it as well as she can from prying enemies; and there the baby rabbits remain alone in the dark till her next visit. Three or four such broods are produced each year, for your rabbit is indeed an uxorious creature.

VI.
THE ADDER’S SIESTA

Two “hedgers and tiners,” demolishing a bank of earth at Turner’s Corner as I walked along the Headley Road this morning, came, to their great surprise and no little horror, on a coiled and twisted colony of hibernating adders. I paused in my stroll for ten minutes to watch the unearthing. It was a curious sight; the lithe and sinuous creatures, recognizable at once as genuine vipers by the zigzag pattern of dark diamond-shaped spots down their glossy green backs, lay curled and entwined with one another in snaky amity, fast asleep past waking, and completely filling up, as with a living mass of inextricable knots, the curves and crannies of the underground hole where they had taken refuge. They were there, of course, for their little winter siesta, which occupies them for a trifle of six months at a sitting. I pleaded hard for their lives with the men, explaining most earnestly that they would do much more good than harm, from the point of view of those whose talk is of beeves, and who regard standing corn as the one really sacred object in this beautiful universe. But I need hardly say my special pleading proved of no avail; the hedgers chopped them up fine before my eyes with their murderous spades, on the familiar antique principle of “larning them to be adders.” Poor helpless creatures, expiating thus unaware the delicta majorum! They would have killed more mice in a week than the men could catch in a summer; but they were snakes for all that, and your rustic hates and shrinks from snakes, et dona ferentes.

The adder’s siesta is just as much a part of his fixed yearly cycle as the fall of the leaf is to the tree, or migration towards warmer lands is to the swallow or house-martin. Snakes can’t migrate; because, of course, they’ve got no wings to migrate with; and being chilly creatures, evolving little animal heat of their own from their sluggish circulation, and warmed by the sun alone into spasmodic activity, they are compelled to bury themselves in holes in the ground, where they lie close to all others of their species that they can find, so as to utilize in common, by mutual aid, whatever trifle of bodily warmth they possess between them. Indeed, a snake, like a tree, can only be said really to live for half its lifetime; the other half these Persephones of the north spend underground in the torpid condition. The heart almost entirely ceases to beat; the lungs cease to act; sensation is suspended; and the animal dozes away his time unconsciously till the summer warmth of the surface soil begins once more to revive him. Then he ventures forth timorously from his hole on some bright May morning, to see how things are progressing in the upper world; and meeting, peradventure, some belated shrew-mouse or some early spring chicken, makes a dash at it at once with what life he has left in him, strikes it with his poison-fang, and, swallowing it whole, straightway regains fresh fuel for the battle of existence.

Adders were always friends of mine. They are numerous hereabouts, on our heathy uplands; and for my own part, I do my best to protect and preserve them. For we have not so many wild creatures left in England that we can afford to despise any lingering element of our native fauna. Besides, they do next to no practical harm; occasionally, indeed, they may spring at a dog who provokes their otherwise placid and meditative tempers by treading on them in the heather; and they will still more rarely make a dash at a man who incautiously handles them; but as a rule they are timid and rather sluggish creatures, much more likely to take fright and flee when discovered than to turn and rend one. I come across them frequently on basking paths among the heath in summer; they lie sunning themselves on the warm sand; but when I endeavour to rouse them to resistance by poking at them with my stick, they refuse, as a rule, to show fight, and after a few minutes of hesitation and lazy reluctance to move, they retire in high displeasure to their home among the bracken. Never once have I known them try actively to resent my intentional intrusion on their post-prandial reflections.

We have but two kinds of snakes, all told, in England, popular prejudice to the contrary notwithstanding. One of them is the harmless and pretty ring-snake, easily distinguished by the absence of the rhomboidal zigzag markings; the other, who may as easily be recognized by their presence, is the venomous adder, known also under his frequent alias as the viper, and often supposed to be two distinct creatures. In reality, one reptile doubles the parts, as an actor would say, being but a single snake under two disguises. The adder is remarkable for bringing forth its young alive, instead of hatching them out of eggs, like most typical serpents; and the very name viper is short for vivipara. As for the blind-worm, or slow-worm, who is also one animal masquerading under two aliases, he must not be considered a snake at all, being a legless lizard, who tries deceptively to pass himself off in serpent’s clothing. Nay, he is not even, strictly speaking, legless, for he has rudimentary limbs, with bones to match, though they never quite succeed in pushing themselves through the scaly integument. He is a lizard, in short, arrested on his road to complete serpenthood. Neither the ring-snake nor the blind-worm is in the slightest degree dangerous; but when in doubt as to whether a particular crawling animal is an adder or otherwise, it would be safer to give him – and yourself – the benefit of the doubt, by abstaining from handling him. The poison-fangs of the viper are two in number, set in the upper jaw; they are hollow, perforated, and erectile at will by the muscles of the animal. Their poison is secreted by a gland at the back, which communicates through a tube with the canal in the fang; and it is not really so very venomous. But if you provoke an adder overmuch, and he sees a chance of remonstrating with you, I do not deny that he will throw back his smooth head, erect his angry fangs, dart quickly forward, and express his disagreement by inflicting a bite upon the offender’s trousers. In this he acts much as you and I would do if he were a man and we were adders. Put yourself in his place, and you will think less ill of him.