by Colin Elford
While I am stalking fallow, I move a roe from a thick piece of overstood hazel. The area is isolated by a bank of bramble and wild clematis, not a place you would favour, as it makes any movement extra noisy on approach. I am not surprised to disturb a roe in such an area.
I glass the deer as it hops over the waist-high bramble. After leaping several times and putting some distance between me and it, the deer pauses and glances back. Between its ears is a poor display of antlers, and my mind automatically files this buck away as one to take out another day. Having already shot two fallow that morning, I allow myself enough time for observance, conditioning myself to learn from the species.
The buck moves slightly, giving me a broadside view, but stops in an unsafe position. I keep my rifle on my shoulder and carry on the viewing I am enjoying. And I learn a lesson: observe ‘well’; for my buck is not a buck. Once broadside, I clearly see the anal hair tuft. The deer is actually an antlered doe, and only the third I have ever seen in my life. Although I stalk the whole area throughout that winter, I never see her again.
The weight of rain-drenched leaves has bent a number of branches over across the ride, and the constant dripping of rain droplets after the shower is the only sound I can hear. I sit on my perch, wet and hunched, as the sky turns to a Moscow grey. It feels as though all the action must be happening on the neighbouring land. I haven’t seen anything, no movement at all. This happens occasionally, the woods appearing void of all life. But I know the next day will be different. Some way off the triple whistle from a lone sika stag in search of a mate in this unfamiliar territory is almost drowned out by the constant droning of the distant early-morning traffic.
However empty you may think the forest is, though, small dramas still unfold around you if you wait and watch. In front of my seat, a grey squirrel clambers up the trunk of a pine tree in short jerky movements. I watch as he slowly reaches the top. Ten minutes later another squirrel finds its way up the very same pine; halfway up he is faced with the first squirrel hurtling headfirst down the tree. The second squirrel turns and is pursued at great speed with the sound of large chunks of bark being ripped off behind him. With the morning brightening up, it is time to move on.
During my time working with deer, I have witnessed many fights and quarrels. A few end in the death of one of the combatants, but most disagreements usually finish after a mighty shove. With some battles, a mere grunt followed by a half-hearted chase will suffice.
A bad fight, or a good fight, depending on how you want to look at it, is one between two bucks or stags of the same age and size. Such a match requires not only strength but also total concentration and endless stamina from both participants. Both animals become completely bewitched, drawn to this primitive, wild calling.
I am alerted today to one such fight between two prime fallow bucks by the crack and smack of antler on antler, as they both struggle for purchase to keep their feet on the ground. The battle area is only a dot within the landscape, a lonely corner of the forest enveloped by fallen leaves below and a high canopy above, but well known to the deer. Involved in this ancient seasonal ritual is a large black buck struggling with a pale, spotted adversary.
When I first see them they are at stalemate, their antlers intertwined, their mouths wide, gasping and panting. They are both having difficulty breathing, and their sides pound against ever-tighter ribcages. The pair stand tethered in knee-high bramble; they are as one, lit only by a pale autumnal light filtering between drooping beech branches. Transparent leaves, the colour of tarnished coins, look as delicate as rice paper as they twist and whirl in a light wind above them. The breeze separates the expired larch needles from their lacy branch anchors, casting them spiralling to earth; these tiny golden threads soon cover the bramble foliage on which the pair are standing.
Equal pressure is now being exerted by each deer, their thick necks swollen and strained, until the dark buck twists sideways, which means he has all his feet airborne at once. With more flailing and skull-splitting cracks of antlers, the pair dance, joined together, circling an old moss-covered stump with a skirt of fern. Splayed hooves soon snap the upright fern and rip the long tendrils of ground-hugging bramble from the earth.
They are close to me, although neither knows I am here. Their focus is entirely on the other. From behind my tree I can clearly see deep scars on the black buck’s neck. Exposed flesh with fur still attached hangs in strips that look like they’ve been chiselled out, ripped and gouged by sharp tines. Their eyes are bulging now, and their nostrils flaring, and I watch as the pale buck looks to the right for a split second. With this lack of concentration I know the fight is over for him for another season. Looking desperately for an escape route the pale buck backs away, then runs, but he is caught up and, twisting suddenly, he lowers his antlers once more to the ground, facing the full thrust of the black buck’s fury. Falling and staggering, his strength drained away, the pale buck turns, exposing for the first time his vulnerable flank, with antlers drawn. The dark buck lunges, but misses. Looking up briefly, the pale one leaps to the side, glancing back for a split second before racing towards the safety of a hazel thicket. Ambitiously, the exhausted dark buck gives chase, partially staggering and attempting to muster up what can best be described as a rather unconvincing groan of dominance.
Samhain. This is the last evening to try for a final cull of roe buck. I have a feeling that nothing will show tonight, but it is too wonderful an evening to stay indoors. The colours of the golden-yellow larch, with that last ray of light, is an unmissable sight, and it is a joy to be out and about, treasuring the seasons.
My truck is coated in a layer of needles that have fallen while I was in my high seat. As I undo the barrier, falling larch needles flicker in the headlights. I can’t help but take a long look into the larch tops and at the stars beyond. There was no luck deer-wise, but it was just a great night to be out.
November
At last the rabbit fence is finished and the last of the Christmas trees planted within the enclosure.
Today I check inside the newly fenced area and notice that several trees have had their tops bitten off but none have been eaten. I find indents within the tussocky grass where a rabbit has sat nipping the palatable leaders off during the night.
This morning, after doe stalking, I find time to hunt the dogs through the fenced area in the hope of shooting the culprit that has been nipping the tops off the newly planted Christmas trees. Both dogs work hard, crisscrossing the site in the hope of catching scent. When one of the dogs comes to an abrupt stop and raises its head, I automatically know through her body language that the rabbit is close. The Labrador has stopped almost on point, staring at a small bramble bush, and with a little encouragement she dives head first, pushing bramble and thorn away with her nose. Both dogs are excited now, pawing at a small bare patch inside the bush. I pull the dogs back and, sitting them down, I discover two small holes. Returning the dogs to the vehicle, I collect the white jill ferret out of her wooden box, waking her from her snug bed of straw. After placing rabbit nets over the two holes I lower the ferret into the dark entrance of the nearest one and step back out of sight. The bumping underground starts immediately – dull thumps on damp earth. All goes quiet, and I hold my breath. Then a grey blur suddenly bolts into the purse-net. I dive to the mouth of the hole, clutching the net. I finally have my culprit.
With the fallow rut over by the last week of October, I decide to check out a stand: an area used by a fallow buck during the mating season.
A pure-white buck lives at times in the top end of this block. Having entered the wood from the highest point, I find a vantage point from which I can survey the beech woods on the side of the escarpment and down into the lower valley. Naked branches poke through the diminishing leaf-covered crowns. From a distance they shimmer, a haze of brown russets and dark bronze.
On reaching the valley floor, I skirt away from the main track and into a stand of tall mature beech. From
the bottom of a trunk I look up into the underside of the canopy. The leaf colours and textures from this view are quite different from those I had looking down from above; from below the translucent leaves are a pale green mixed with anaemic yellows.
In the tops high above me, wood pigeons seen from the ground look like balancing shadows. Only the occasional jostling whack of a wing from a disagreement gives their position away. More pigeons arrive, and some settle while others leave with greater urgency. By following a well-worn deer track, I find the start of the stand under a low dark canopy of scrub. The scrub is a mixture of old moss-covered hazel, hawthorn with red berries and a patch of small stunted field maple.
On the edge of the scrub a handful of head-high Douglas fir struggle for existence; all had at one time been very attractive to the resident buck. Fresh sap leaches from newly scored tine marks, the aromatic fir smell strong in the air. Every Douglas has old deep wounds, scarred by thrashing tines on its bark.
Early dark mornings and late nights do not agree with me. It’s either one or the other. Lately the evenings seem to arrive much earlier every afternoon. Tonight the scene from the high seat is, to say the least, dismal. An evening painted with several shades of grey, where reference-less cloud drifts down to earth. The secondary line is the ever-thickening mist, its join with the clouds invisible to the eye, a mere crossover of moisture. The cheerless view is not helped by the fact that the site has recently been clear-felled and resembles a silent battlefield.
The mottle of black and white on the trunks of a group of retained birch provides the only welcome relief from the grey all around me. Not far behind me in the tops of the birch, a winter flock of long-tailed tits is busily feeding, their continuous hissing calls a mere background drone. I must have dozed when suddenly – WHOOSH – I wake abruptly to find the air filled with feathers. It is not a herd of swans passing low overhead but a massive flight of pigeons – maybe a thousand – twisting and tumbling, disappearing into the horizon, grey on grey.
I have an early start this morning, and the stars are still out when I undo the kennel door by torchlight. It is clear and frosty, and I am glad that I’ve covered the truck’s windscreen.
As soon as I drive out of my village I enter a vale of fog. I decide it will be safer to sit in a high seat today than stalk in the fog. The rungs of the ladder are covered in a film of ice; I climb the seat in the dark and stare into the morning gloom.
After several minutes I hear the swoosh of wings as a woodcock alights at the foot of the seat. I strain my eyes to find the shape of the woodcock among a patch of dead bracken no larger than an opened newspaper. Even when I scan the area with my binoculars I still cannot find the bird, although it has probably noticed me. It’s times like this you realize how superior animals’ and birds’ eyes are compared to ours. I must have disturbed it as it flies off into the gloom with a deep annoyed croak.
Overhead in the dark, a small flock of fieldfares lets out a babbled chatter, mocking my hopeless antics. As first light appears the frost starts to retreat and the tree above starts to drip.
The call of nature wakes me up, and with two fingers I prise the material of the curtains aside. Squinting, I peer out at a pirate moon, hanging large and bright in a multi-starlit sky. A few hours later, as I leave the house, I notice that the moon has gone from the sky, but the stars still shine, twinkling high above me.
With my head in the cosmos, I am suddenly taken aback when the outside light flashes on as I pass. The beam lights up my truck, showing beads of water covering the bonnet. Inside the cab is no better, with all the windows uninvitingly steamy and damp. There are rumblings coming from the direction of the kennel, which means the dogs have heard me and are now awake and active. Somewhere in the dark, possibly two fields away, a vixen calls out, pauses, then screams again.
It is still dark as I climb up the ladder into the newly positioned high seat. I sit still, almost bolt upright, moving only to lean the rifle across a secure safety bar, then allowing time for the ripples of my movements to dissipate. High as I am in my seat, I know that, when the light comes, I will have a view of part of the forest that I would never be able to see from the ground. In time I know I will learn a lot about the goings-on of woodland creatures in that part of the forest. All around me individual tawny owls are communicating to each other with long distant hoots and excited kee-wick replies.
In the east a clear, pale yellow sky holds some light, although dark islands of broken cloud race across it, attempting to fill the void. Ribbons of treetops, untouched by the movement of wind, stand stark, framed by the sky. They are of little interest to me until the silhouette of a woodcock, twisted like a wind-blown leaf, skirts the tops. When the woodcock disappears, I drop my gaze below the high seat to the patchwork-quilt blocks of dripping, rain-sodden bracken entangled with bramble in the hope of seeing some deer movement. On my right a steamy grey cloud of mist hovers, rising like bonfire smoke from the ground. Like forest-fire smoke, the mist twists itself through the trees without ever giving away its starting point. These vapours control their own existence, starting wherever, rising, growing in size, then disappearing as fast and as mysteriously as they are born.
I watch as a ground-hugging fog that is slowly approaching my seat is swept up into the air; the wind has awakened. Two winds are at work now: one harassing the low mists; and the other the clouds high above in a tempest in the sky. The latter sends streaks of black cloud racing and regrouping into a mass, ready to do battle against the ensuing light.
A cackle of fieldfares that have been roosting overnight, unseen, in a thicket opposite, awake and flush away. They scatter their winter calls over my head in the new dawn – a seasonal sound reminding me of wind-blown apples and snow-threatening skies. At the same time a distant boom, miles away, sends what must be hundreds of cock pheasants into a calling frenzy. As the sound of the last persistent pheasant fades, night inevitably turns to day, as a shaft of light forces the clouds apart. To celebrate, a flock of goldfinches, erratic in flight, twitters overhead. Later eight bullfinches, of which I could see only shape, not colour, swoop into some scrub behind me.
I glass the glade, the ground mists still knee-high, hoping to glimpse the shape of a deer, but can find nothing in this damp, dripping world.
Soaring heavenwards a pair of buzzards crosses the brightening sky, which is now the yellow, milky colour of a poor-quality egg yolk. On a broken larch top within a canvas of yellow, a kestrel alights. I watch as it bends its head downwards towards its talons, which hold a small furry blob; with a ripping motion the kestrel tosses the guts of a recently caught vole to the ground. As the bird looks up it notices me and is forced to leave its post. The larch top is left swaying, abandoned against the backdrop of sky. Two green woodpeckers seem to laugh, mocking me for sitting so still, waiting for the expected deer that never appear. I shrug as they laugh again from behind a birch that still retains some of its yellowing leaves.
The sun is higher now and the scene has changed completely: the trees no longer just shapes; the mist a memory; the glade now recognizable.
During the morning I receive a phone call from a member of the public about a deer found tied to a tree. As the message is relayed to me second hand, the exact location of the deer is, to say the least, vague, although I do know which wood it is in. Once there, I find various landmarks that have been indicated during the phone call, but the deer still takes a long time to track down, even with my dogs. It certainly would have made my life a lot easier if the lady could have waited to show me or marked the area.
When I come upon the poor unfortunate creature, I quickly call both dogs to heel and sit them back, well away from the hysterical fallow buck that is leaping in all directions. It circles the tree and with every frantic leap the line that is caught around its antlers shortens, causing the deer to collapse violently to the ground. Its antlers are flailing in all directions, and the closer I get the more stressed it becomes. It is a good-sized fall
ow buck, and, if I could, I would gladly release him from the nylon cord that binds him. The bare ground around the tree is evidence enough that he has been tethered like this for several days. Not wishing to put myself at risk, or frighten the poor animal any more, I sadly end the struggle with a shot.
It takes two knives to cut the cord from the tree and from the buck’s antlers, each knife quickly losing its edge on the thick orange plastic baling twine that has been tripled for strength. The nylon rope and the pieces of fertilizer bags attached to it, known as ‘sewelling’, is used to raise pheasants off the ground to waiting guns and is suspended across a ride on a series of forked sticks between two beaters. When the pheasants are driven up to the line by the beating team, the sudden pull of the line on their approach frightens the birds into flight, which, in the shooting field, is known as ‘flushing’. It is sad that the lengths of sewelling could not have been rolled up by the gamekeeper and stored away until the next shoot day instead of being left in the woods for the deer to find. Most male deer are attracted to anything that swings or moves with the clout of an antler. Once they start playing with it, they find themselves ensnared. The sewelling deer was added to my tally of unusual finds, alongside the deer with the rope ladder attached to its antlers, and the roe doe with the bucket covering her whole head.
Having cleared the last rabbit out of the fenced area that holds the Christmas trees, I see that someone has kicked up the lower part of the fence, possibly to let their dog through, which has allowed rabbits back into the site. I very soon find signs of them: with fresh scraping around the hole entrance and scattered droppings on top of some nearby grass tufts. I ferret the two short holes, but nothing bolts. I fill both holes in with clots of earth and use my Labrador, Liv, to hunt the whole area again after I have checked the perimeter of the fence in a steady rain. But if there is a rabbit somewhere, it is reluctant to move. Then, after practically walking on top of it, Liv flushes a rabbit from a small bramble bush, allowing me a shot. In the short period of time the rabbit has spent within the fence, he has bitten off the tops of fifteen Norway spruce, all in the same row.
