FLOOD, FIELD, AND FOREST.* So many books have been written
about hunting and fishing from the sportsman's point of view that it is quite time for the quarry to have its turn, and to do its best towards reversing the picture. Mr. Rooper seems to have remembered the fable of "The Liou and the Man," and the lion's comment on the sculptured group which represented the man as triumphant. Yet if this be so, both the fox and the salmon that tell their stories in this book are the most generous and forgiving of all possible victims. In the " Autobiography of the late Saline Saler, Esq.," we have a confession from the salmon that it does not object to rod fishing so long as barbed gaffs are not used during the spawning season. The fox, indeed, talks of the hounds rushing up yelling like demons, and Mr. Itooper explains in a note that to his ear hounds discourse most excellent music. But if salmon and foxes really could speak they would not thus spare the human race. How eloquent a fish might be on the low trickery and cunning of the long awkward beings who make up gaudy imitation flies with various feathers, and tag them with bits of tinsel to divert attention from the deadly hook ! A fox would probably not enter so much into details, but would confine itself to more general maledictions. We must say that Mr. Rooper has not studied vraisemblance in his " Fox's Tale" as carefully as in the " Autobiography of the late Salim) Saler, Esq." The salmon only sees what takes place on the bank of the river or in the river itself. It hears the conversations of the fishers while the fly floats powerless, with half-drowning struggles, before it, and yet it rises at the same bait again and again, not perceiving the danger till it is fairly hooked. But the fox knows all the incidents of the run from the time of breaking covert to the finish. It sees the good riders clear the brook, and the bad ones flounder in the middle. Having probably read Mr. Trollope's Hunting Sketches, it can understand why the master and those worthy to keep up with him "rode at a swinging, even gallop, taking the fences as they came, but never jumping without losing their place, it could be avoided. They knew, one and all, how much each leap takes out of a horse, and felt that, hardly yet in condition, theirs would want all that was in them before the day was past. There were some few casualties, but good horsemen rarely fall ; and though they do not perpetually fly over gates, rivers, and fences, as on the receptacles for tally-ho sauce or in the hunting advertisements, still leas frequently do they perform acrobatic somersaults over bogbacked stiles and other impracticable fences as shown in the ordinary run of sporting pictures." All this is very good in itself, but it is not in keeping with the assumed character of the narrator. Duriug such a run, the fox would have quite enough to do to get over its own fences without casting a glance over its shoulder to criticize its pursuers. The pleasure of reading Mr. Rooper's stirring descriptions makes us forget this for a time, and even now we feel somewhat ashamed of our turn for hypercriticism. But what are we to say of the confession appended to the " Autobiography of the late Sahno Saler, Esq."? Mr. Itooper says calmly, "The narrator was killed by the author the latter end of last October." Much as we have heard about biographers, this beats them all. It even beats Lord Campbell. When Dr. Johnson threatened that he would prevent Boswell from writing his life by taking Boswell's, Ire never looked forward to the day when the same life would be taken and written. Mr. ltooper has been more merciful to his fox, and has pensioned it off after three famous runs and three narrow escapes. We do not object to the salmon being caught when it had reached the age of seven years and the weight of thirty pounds. But we do protest against such a cold-blooded admission as the one we have quoted, and we hope that whatever execution Mr. Rooper may do in future, he will not get possession of an autobiography by a murder. The real object of Mr. Rooper's book is laudable. Ile wishes to make natural history more palatable than it is in general, and to avoid time " didactic, stiff, statistical, quasi-scientific " style of most writers. Not only does he succeed in this, but he has many
other merits. He writes on sporting without exaggeration or vulgarity. Confining himself almost exclusively to what he has seen himself, or heard from trustworthy informants, he is at once original and accurate. The forcible language of Mr. Salmo Saler, when he enlarges upon the dangers which all men admit to be excessive, but which he feels as a personal outrage, may have the good effect of increasing the efficacy of the new Salmon Fishing Acts, and protecting that most valuable tribe. The breeding establishments do much in the way of guarding the spawn and the young fish from the attacks of insects, birds, trout, and eels. Mr. Rooper thinks that the young fish are kept too long in these ponds, and that it is only the first stage of salmon life which needs protection. But the perils he has described do not end when the fish is hatched. Take this telling sketch, which might be headed the t lshmaelites of the River,' but that the gantlets had not yet come to the active stage of reprisals :— " When I look back on the number of our enemies, I can only wonder that even one out of our numerous progeny should be left to tell the tale. Even the insect tribe was in arms against us ; I have seen a huge water-beetle seize an embryo samlet by the throat, and carry it off to devour at his leisure ; and the larvae of sundry insects fed upon us while we were in the egg, or newly hatched, more especially those of the dragon-fly, which, goggle-eyed, mis-shapen, repulsive, the hideous face furnished with a pair of unnaturally elongated eyebrows, and the mouth with sharpest teeth, would destroy, in the course of a few days, thousands upon thousands of eggs. There was a little brown-coated bird, with a white waistcoat, the neatest, pleasantest-looking creature imaginable, who would walk deliberately into the stream, and, setting at defiance all laws of gravitation, pack away at merino insects, floating morsels of spawn, and I have heard, though I never actually witnessed the atrocity, and do not believe it possible, little samlets like myself. There was a company of black-headed gulls, who, with loud laughing cry, perpetually hovered over the stream, and, though their professed object was to feed upon the March-brown fly which, dead or alive, in countless myriads lined the shore or covered the face of the waters, they never let slip an opportunity of snapping up some little brother or sister of mine who had carelessly left the place of refuge. Then the kingfisher, with rufous breast and glorious mantle of blue, would dart down like a plummet from his roost, and seize unerringly any little truant which passed within his ken. The appetite of this bird was miraculous ; I never saw him satisfied. lie would sit for hours on a projecting bough, his body almost perpendicular, his head thrown back between his shoulders ; eyeing with an abstracted air the heavens above or the rocks around him, he seemed intent only upon exhibiting the glorious lustre of his plumage, and the brilliant colours with which his azure back was shaded ; but let a careless samlet stray beneath him, and in a twinkling his nonchalant attitude was abandoned. With a turn so quick that the eye could scarcely follow it, his tail took the place of his head, and falling rather than flying, he would seize his victim, toss him once into the air, catch him as be fell, head foremost, and swallow him in a second. This manoeuvre he would repeat from morning till night ; such a greedy, insatiable little wretch I never saw."
As if this was not enough, other fish prey on the helpless little beings. "Our cousins the yellow and bull trout" are the worst enemies. The " cold, slimy, cruel eel " crawls along at the bottom of the water, "his flat, wicked head pressed against the gravel," and insinuates himself into every nook and corner where a small fish may have taken shelter. Worse still, Salmo Saler saw a hungry old kelt, like Saturn, devour fifty of his own progeny for breakfast. The narrow escape Saline Saler had front a hungry bull trout by leaping six inches or more out of the water on the dry shingle, is a foretaste of his subsequent adventures with artificial flies, nets, weirs, and milldams. The stake nets along the sea coast, the crowds of greedy dogfish and seals waiting just outside them to catch the terrified fugitives, the boats putting forth with enormous nets that enclose hundreds of salmon, the watchers on the bank of the river drawing nets above and below each ascending fish, the heavy net stretched across the river from Saturday to Monday to keep the fish from breaking the Sabbath and getting up the river while men could not catch them, are described in their turn with a soreness that is equally natural in Salmo Salar and in Mr. Rooper. If Salmo Saler is to be caught at all, he prefers to be caught fairly by a good flyfisher. He was hooked several times, first, as a parr, when be was thrown back ; then as a grilse, when a stone, which was thrown to dislodge him, hit the line instead ; and more titan once as a full-grown salmon. The way in which he and many of his companions tore themselves free from the hook affords Mr. Rooper one of his best descriptions. One noble salmon of some eighteen pounds in weight dashed down stream, running out the whole line, which had not been knotted at the end. Another rushed up a shelving bank three feet out of the water, and then profited by a momentary slackening of the fisherman's hold to shake the hook out of its mouth and jump back into the water. Others ran rapidly round a rock, and, getting a dead pull at the hook, either wrenched it out or broke the tackle. A favourite dodge with fresh-run salmon was to swim furiously down stream thirty or forty yards, keeping close to the surface, and then diving to the bottom, swim up stream again almost as rapidly. "The weighty water, bagging out the line, gave the fisher, more especially if a tyro, the idea that his intended victim's course was still downwards, and, paying out line rapidly, he enabled the fish to bring such a weight of water upon it as eventually to necessitate its breakage." Most of these expedients were practised in their turn by Salmo Saler, but they did not avail him against Mr. Reopen Nor do we think the friends he left behind him will be grateful for this exposure. Even tyros will in future be on their guard, and the rod will become yet more destructive.
The "Fox's 'Tale" is given up almost wholly to narrative, and does not teach as many lessons as are inculcated by Mr. Salmo Salar. But the whole life of the fox, from the time when his mother snatched hint up in her mouth on the litter being disturbed by the hounds, down to his last desperate escape into the kennel from which he had been stolen by a vendor of bag foxes, is told with great spirit and interest. In " Bolsover Forest," which forms an interlude between the " Fox's Tale" and its last joint, we have the record of a boyhood devoted to sport and natural history. One of the best incidents in this paper is the meeting between a buck rat and a delicate dos ferret. The rat had gnawed through the three-inch oak plank forming the floor of the schoolroom, taking rather more than a year to make a large enough hole, though he worked at it steadily every day. Even after part of his " long yellow teeth appeared above the board, shortly followed by the pinky-white tip of a restless inquiring nose," some weeks were spent in making way for his body. But the moment he got through the hole was stopped, and he was handed over to the tender mercies of a ferret. Our readers must go to Mr. Rooper for the denouement. From the same paper they will learn how two boys went out fen shooting, jumriug ditches twelve or sixteen feet wide with a pole, and making .a good bag of varied waterfowl. They will also read of snakes being caught, and badgers drawn, and eggs being taken from high branches which overhang a tarn, and from which the adventurous climber has a tumble. Amongst many similar experiences we must find room for the story of a pike :— " When the surface of the fens is covered with water these fish frequently come in with the flood into certain narrow pits or dykes out of which the turf has been cut, and are left as it recedes without the possibility of escape. It is no unusual thing to see a solitary jack in one of these watery graves ; but in a particular pit a brace had been left as nearly as possible of the same size and weight, between one and two pounds each. The water, though stained, is clear as wine, and I had watched those fish for a long timo previously. We always shot fish when they were big enough, but these hardly appeared worth powder besides, they lay in capital ground, and it is not pleasant to see a full snipe rise just within shot as you slay a worthless pike. On this day, however, only one of its accustomed occupants was visible in the pit, and that presented a singular appearance, floating uneasily near the surface. Aiming well beneath the fish, at least double his apparent distance below the surface, I fired, and on getting him out with the pole, found that so far as in him lay he had swallowed his companion ; the head and shoulders with the greater part of the body were actually digested, whilst the tail stuck out at one corner of its wicked mouth. As they lay in the water on former occasions I could not have said which was the bigger of the two, so nearly were they of a size ; but as the majus confines in se the minus, we may assume that it was the larger of the twain that I shot."
Our only objection to " Bolsover Forest" is that it ends poorly. Mr. Rooper is too honest a writer to need the help of the sensational, even if he managed it with as much skill as be shows in the other parts of his book. A murder (not of the biographical order), a mysterious escape from prison, and a still more mysterious repentance, do not follow aptly on rats and ferrets, wild ducks and herons, birds'-nesting and badger-baiting. We might as well expect the Rateatcher's Daughter to develop into the Woman in White.
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