Poachers and Poaching Author:John Wilson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. BADGERS AND OTTERS. Hazelhurst was a long line of woodland, on one side skirted by the sea and on the other by a crumbling limestone escarpmen... more »t. It was woodland, too, with the deep impress of time upon it—a forest primeval. The branches and boles of the oaks were tortured out of all original conception. Save for colour they might have been congealed water or duramen muscles. Down in the hollows there was deep moss, elastic and silent, over all. For centuries the pines had shed their needles undisturbed. These and the pine trunks sent up a sweet savour from the earth—an odour that acted as a tonic to the whole being. There were sun-flashes in the glades, where the jays chattered and the cushats cooed, and where ever and anon a rabbit rustled through. Often over these the kestrel hung and vibrated its shadow on the spot beneath ; or the sparrow-hawk with its clean-cut figure stared with the down on his beak on a dead pine bough. In the summer red creatures that were bits of light gracefully glided among green tassels, and the chatter of squirrels was heard. The older trees attracted woodpeckers, and the nuthatch threw out fine fibres of rotten wood. Sometimes a pheasant or a partridge would startle, getting up from its olive eggs by a log left by the charcoal-burners. Thus rudely disturbed, it had no time to scatter leaves over its nest, as is its wont. The shaggy and corrugated bark of the old trees is larvae-haunted, and consequently mouse-like creepers abound. These little creatures on every trunk showed conspicuously as they ran their marvellous adaptation to an end, and fulfilled it perfectly. All the wood-birds were there—the White- throat, the Wood and the Willow Wren, the Chiff- chafF, and Garden-warbler. These sang from the leafy boughs. But higher up,...« less