Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches Part 3

On great occasions the veteran keeper donned a helmet, or a gray three-cornered hat, of so ridiculous a shape--so royally absurd--that for my life, when he was thus attired, I could not, even in the presence of his master, refrain from laughter; then he would tell you, with a gravity it was impossible to disturb, that it had taken him fifteen days, eight skins of wild cats, and twelve squirrel's tails, to achieve this happy _chef-d'oeuvre_ of the tailoring art. But I once said to him, "My good Navarre, in the name of heaven tell me, from what j.a.panese ma.n.u.script did you fish out that odious hat? Why, with such a shed, you might very well be mistaken for Chin-ko-fi-ku-o, high-priest of the temple of Twi. Do give me the address of your hatter, my dear friend."

Navarre, furious, gave no reply.

But the time really to admire him--to see the head gamekeeper in all his splendour--was in winter, in a hard frost, when, covered with skins and motionless, he lay in ambush in a black ravine, waiting for a boar. Oh!

then, for certain, the sight of him was anything but encouraging; for he looked like some unknown animal, some variety of the species _Bona.s.sus_, a crocodile on end, a crumpled-up elephant, or a great bear on the watch. And when he loaded his rifle--a sort of culverin or wall-piece, which no one but himself knew how to manage--gracious powers! he was something to see. His first movement was to seize the gigantic weapon in the middle, as a policeman would fasten upon a favourite thief; and then he set himself to blow into the barrel with such fury, that had there been an ounce of wadding left, the blast would have blown it all through the enormous touch-hole. Being well a.s.sured after this that neither an adder nor a slow-worm had taken up his domicile within the barrel, he began to load. One charge--two charges--then a third, "as a compliment,"

and after this, a fourth, "for good luck." On this infernal charge--imperial, as he called it--this Vesuvius, this volcano of saltpetre, he threw half-a-dozen b.a.l.l.s, or, if he was out of them, a handful of nails; and then he rammed--rammed--rammed away, like a pavior.

My hair stood on end, and every limb trembled when he fired it off--holy St. Francis!--the very forest bent, and coughed, and sighed; and it made as much flame, smoke, noise, and carnage, as a battery of horse artillery. One might have heard it all over Burgundy, or Provence for what I know; and hence, no doubt, his _sobriquet_ of "the Four-Pounder."

I always thought his shoulder must be made of heart of oak. On one occasion he did me the incomparable favour of loading my gun in this fas.h.i.+on, but luckily for me, informed me of this piece of civility before we started; and greatly was he chagrined when I declined to fire it. In the common occurrences of life, Navarre was a right good fellow; he had great good sense, could take a joke, was simple and modest in his manners, and very kind-hearted and retiring. But once in the forest, the dogs uncoupled, and the business of the chase commenced, he bounded to the front; his eyes flashed, his nostrils dilated, he took a deep breath, listened, and snuffed the air; he limped no longer; and as his courage was unequalled, and his knowledge of wood-craft profound, the proudest of every rank were content to follow where he led.

CHAPTER VI.

Bird's-eye view of the forests--The student's visit to his uncle in the country--Sallies forth in the early morning--Meets a cuckoo--Follows him--The cuckoo too much for him--Gives up the pursuit--Finds he has lost his way--Agreeable vespers--Night in the forest--Wolves--Up a beech tree--A friend in need--The student bids adieu to Le Morvan.

We have alluded in the opening chapters to the inexhaustible wealth drawn by the inhabitants from the woods of Le Morvan, though we have as yet touched but slightly on their beauties. To see them at one _coup d'oeil_, in all the splendour of their extent, one ought to call for the veteran, Mr. Green, and, safely (?) lodged in his car, with plenty of sandwiches and champagne, fly and soar above these forests of La Belle France. By St. Hubert, gentle reader, your eyes would be feasted with a glorious sight. Beneath your feet you would, in autumn, behold a verdant expanse in every variety of light and shade--a sea of leaves, which, though sometimes in repose, more often moan and murmur, while the giant arms they clothe rock to and fro in the gale, like the restless waves of the troubled deep.

Here Nature displays all her sylvan grandeur; here she has scattered, with a liberal hand, every charm that foliage can give to earth, and many a lovely flower to scent the evening breeze. Descend, and in this immense labyrinth you will find a tangled skein of forest paths, in which it is never prudent to ramble alone; as will be seen by the following adventure, which befell a young student who once went to Le Morvan, antic.i.p.ating infinite pleasure in spending a few weeks at the house of an old uncle, a rich proprietor and owner of a large farm in the forest of Erveau.

Residing from his infancy in the department of the Seine, he was quite ignorant of a forest life; and the morning was yet early when he arose from his bed and sallied forth to enjoy the fresh and fragrant air, of which he had a foretaste at his open window, and take a ramble till the hour of breakfast summoned him to his uncle's hospitable fare. All without was life and sweetness; every bush had its little chorister; the sun brilliant, but not as yet high in the heavens, threw his bright rays in chequered light and shade between the trees, and made the pearly tears of night, which hung quivering on each bending blade of gra.s.s, sparkle like diamonds of the purest water. The student was in raptures, and after a brief survey of the garden, he cast a longing eye upon the woods which he so much wished to penetrate. On he walked, stopping occasionally to muse on the enchanting scene around him, when all at once he espied, on the lofty branches of an ash, a cuckoo! At the sight of this splendid bird, our Parisian sportsman felt his heart pit-a-pat and jump like a girl's in love; and without stopping any longer to admire the marvels of Nature, he turned hastily back to his uncle's abode, in search of a gun, with which to annihilate the luckless harbinger of spring. He soon found one, ready loaded, in the hall; and, with his heart full of hope and his legs full of precaution, he glided mysteriously from one tree to another, endeavouring, by all possible means, to conceal his approach from the wily cuckoo, which, perched on high, was throwing into s.p.a.ce his two dull notes, regular and monotonous as the tick-tick of an old-fas.h.i.+oned clock.

Warily and stealthily did the student approach; bent nearly double, he scarcely drew his breath, as his distance from the tree grew less; but, says the song of the poacher,--

"If women smell tricks, cuckoos smell powder."

And again,--

"'Tis a difficult thing to catch woman at fault, More difficult still, an old cuckoo with salt."

Without appearing to do so, from the height of his leafy turret, the prudent cuckoo kept a wary eye upon the tortuous movements of his enemy; but as he saw at a glance what sort of a customer he had to deal with, he evidently did not feel any particular hurry to s.h.i.+ft his quarters: only every time he saw the double barrel moving up to the Parisian's shoulder, and that hostilities on his part were about to be opened, he, as if just for fun, dropped his own dear brown self on the branch below him, flapped his wings, and soon perching himself on a tree a little further off, gravely re-opened his beak and resumed his monotonous chant.

The young student, piqued and mortified at this discreet behaviour of the cuckoo, which, like happiness, was always on the wing, perseveringly followed the provoking bird--one walked, the other flew, the distance increased at every flight, and thus they got over a great deal of ground; the young man still believing his uncle's farm was close behind him--the cuckoo perfectly easy, knowing full well he could find his leafy home whenever he might please to return to it. So, for the fiftieth time, perhaps, the cuckoo was vanis.h.i.+ng in the foliage, when a sudden thought cramped the legs and cut short the obstinate pursuit of the young lawyer; he then, for the first time, remembered the wholesome advice his uncle had given him on his arrival.--"Beware, my fine fellow, beware of going alone in the forest, for to those who know not how to read their way, that is, on the bark of the trees, the mossy stones, and dry or broken twigs, the forest is full of snares and danger, of deceitful echos and strange noises that attract and mislead the inexperienced sportsman."

"By Juno," thought our hero, "as it is most certain that in Paris they are not yet clever enough to teach us geography on the bark of trees, I am an uncommonly lucky fellow to have just remembered the dear old gentleman's warning. Hang the infernal cuckoo! Go to the devil, you hideous cuckoo! Good morning, sir, my compliments at home." And then, with his terrible carbine under his arm, he retraced his steps, expecting every moment to see peeping through the trees in front of him, his uncle's large white house and lofty dove-cote.

But, alas! no such thing met his hungry eyes; still on he walked, trees after trees were pa.s.sed, glade after glade, and many a long avenue, but neither white farm-house nor gay green shutters greeted his anxious sight. "How odd," thought he, "how very odd; this, I feel confident, is the identical spot near which I first noticed that odious cuckoo; here is the self-same little regiment of white daisies that my feet pressed not half an hour ago; see now, this chestnut, this immense chestnut, whose monstrous roots lie twisting about the ground like a black brood of ugly snakes--certainly this was the way I came, surely I saw these roots, and yet no house appears." And thus, from time to time, he reasoned with himself, looking on either side for some object that he could recognize with certainty; at last, grown thoroughly hungry and impatient, he hallooed and shouted, but no voice replied, not the slightest sound was floating in the air. It was then he felt he had lost his way,--that he was alone, yes, alone in the forest of Erveau, in a leafy wilderness stretching many miles.

Many a vow he made and many a blackberry he picked as he walked hither and thither, in every direction. The day wore on, the sun had long pa.s.sed the meridian, and with the coming evening rose a gentle breeze, which moaned in the dry ferns; and this and the rustling of the giant creepers that reached from tree to tree, and swung between the branches, fell mournfully on the student's ear. A vague fear, a fatal presentiment of evil began to creep over him; again he shouted, the echo from a dark wild ravine alone replied; he fired his gun again and again, the echo alone answered his signal of distress, and nothing could he hear, except at intervals, far, far away in the green depths of the forest, the notes cuckoo--cuckoo.

Faint and weary, from hunger and fatigue, the young man, no longer able to proceed, fell down at the foot of a spreading beech, and gave way to an agony of grief; drops of cold sweat stood upon his brow; the clammy feeling of fear took possession of his heart, and though, perhaps, he would have had no objection to try the fortune of the pistol or the sword, in any college broil or senseless riot of the populace, the circ.u.mstances under which he then stood were so new to him, that he was quite unmanned and incapable of further exertion.

In blood-red streaks sank the setting sun, his large yellow orb glancing through the trees like the dimmed eye of some giant ogre; twilight came, and soon after every valley lay in shadow; the breeze, as if waking from its gentle slumbers, whistled in the highest branches, and, increasing in force, rocked the lower limbs, which moaned mournfully as the night closed in.

Hungry and alarmed, and now quite worn out with his lengthened walk, the young Parisian lay stretched on the moss, listening with painful anxiety to this melancholy conversation of the woods, when, suddenly, and as night fell, spreading over the earth her sable wings and shaking from the folds of her robe the luminous legions of stars, he heard a prolonged and sonorous howl in the distance--a strolling wolf--

"Cruel as Death! and hungry as the grave!

Burning for blood! bony and gaunt and grim,"

had scented the Parisian and was inviting his good friends with the long teeth, to come and sup on the dainty morsel. Touched as if by a hot iron, up got the terrified youth, and striking his ten nails into the friendly tree near him like an Indian monkey, he was in an instant many feet above its base. Here, astride upon a branch, s.h.i.+vering and shaking, each hair on end, and murmuring many a Pater and Ave Maria, unsaid for years, he pa.s.sed the most horrific night that any citizen of the department of the Seine had ever been known to spend in the middle of the forest of Erveau.

The following morning, but not until the sun had already run nearly half his course, for he never dared to leave his timber observatory before, _le pauvre diable_ dropped down from his perch like an acorn--and, marching off with weary steps, and scarcely a hope that ere another night fell he should gain the shelter of some cottage, he dragged himself along. On he rolled from side to side, torn with the thorns and bitten by the gnats that swarmed around him, sometimes calling upon his mother, sometimes upon the saints--when a wood-cutter happily met, and seeing his exhausted condition, threw the slim student over his shoulders like a bundle of straw, and carried him to a neighbouring village. There, he was put to bed and attended with every care, when he soon recovered--and received the charming intelligence that he was about forty miles from his uncle's house--that he had been wandering for that distance in the most beautiful part of the forest of Erveau, and that if by any chance he had deviated a little more to the right in his unpleasant steeple-chase across the woods, he would have gone, in a straight line, eighty-six miles without meeting house or cottage or human soul until he found himself at the gates of Dijon, chief town of the Cote-d'Or, where he might and would, no doubt, have been able to refresh himself with a bottle of Beaune and inspect the Gothic tombs of the great Dukes of Burgundy.

Grateful was the unlucky lad to think that he had not taken this road, and truly glad was he when, under the woodcutter's care, he reached his uncle's white house. No sooner, however, was he fairly recovered from his misadventure, than he packed up his superb cambric s.h.i.+rts, his Lyons silk socks, patent leather boots, and white Jouvin gloves; squeezed the hand of his aunt, gave a doubtful shake to that of his uncle, and started in the _malle poste_ for the capital. His father's brother and Le Morvan never saw him more.

Such adventures, however, as these are rare, and you must have, indeed, a double dose of bad fortune to be lost in such a woful way, and spend, without meeting any mortal soul, thirty long hours in the woods: for though the tract of forest is very extensive, there are strewed, here and there, several merry villages, large farms, and hunting-boxes, snugly hidden, it is true, beneath the trees,--but which an experienced huntsman very soon discovers when he stands in need of a.s.sistance or a night's lodging.

CHAPTER VII.

Charms of a forest life to the sportsman--The Poachers--Le Pere Seguin--His knowledge of the woods and of the rivers--The first buck--A bad shot.

However dangerous the forests of Le Morvan may be, and certainly are, to the citizen of Paris, whose knowledge of wood-craft, whatever may have been his delightful visions of forest life, of fairy revels, and hair-breadth escapes, is about equal to his proficiency in navigation, they are no labyrinth to the true sportsman of this province; in his mind, they are mapped with an accuracy perfectly astonis.h.i.+ng to the uninitiated in the countless indications of nature, of which the eye of man becomes so keenly observant when thrown constantly into her fascinating society. Let a man of a vigorous health, active frame, and contemplative mind once enter, even for a short time, upon the enjoyments of sporting, wild and varied as are those of Le Morvan, it would be difficult to withdraw him from its delights, and persuade him that it is in any way desirable to return to the crowded haunts of men, and condemn himself to resume the hara.s.sing struggle for wealth or a competence in his own legitimate sphere.

No; there scarcely breathes the human being who could be so insensible to the charms of scenery like that of Le Morvan as to do so without a pang. 'Tis a chalice of gold, brimful of real pleasures for those who love the joys of the open air; 'tis alive with fish and game, and has its vineyards and its cornfields too.

But we are thinking of the forests only, of the boar--that potentate of the solitudes--and the wild cat: of the ravines and caves, to which the hardy and venturous hunter, through bush, brake, or briar, over streamlet or torrent, will chace the ravenous wolf,--who, bearing the iron ball in his lacerated side, ever and anon gnaws the wound in his rage, and slinks on weeping tears of blood. The roebuck and the hare, the feathered and the finny tribe, are ever presenting an endless alternation of amus.e.m.e.nt more or less exciting; and the sportsman has but to settle with himself, when the rosy morn appears, whether he will bestride his gallant steed, or throw the rod or rifle over his shoulder,--his day's pleasure is safe.

It matters not whether the falling leaf announces that the woods are clearing for him, the deep snow warns him to look to the protection of his flocks from the dangerous intrusion of the wolves, or the genial air and the brilliant flies tell him that the silvery tenants of the many streams and rivers that intersect the forest are ready to provide him sport.

Arouse thee, sportsman! when the dark clouds of night fly before the rays of Phoebus as a troop of timid antelopes before the leopard,--when the lark abandons his mossy bed, and soaring sends forth his joyous carol,

"----blythe to greet The purpling East,"

then, O sportsman, up, and to horse! Away! bending over the saddle-bow, follow the wild deer across the heath--inhale the perfume of the trampled thyme. Draw bridle for a moment, and pity the thousands of thy fellow-men to whom the pure air and light are denied, and let thy heartfelt thanksgivings for thy free and happy lot ascend to the azure battlements of heaven. Beneath your gaze lie valleys whence rise the morning mists as do the clouds from the richly-perfumed censer, and float over the bosom of the plain ere they wreathe the mountain side; all the bushes sing, every leaf is s.h.i.+ning to welcome the glorious sun as he rises majestically over that high dark range, and the bright blue dome of day is revealed in all its purity.

Plunge onward to the forest--you will perhaps fall in with one of the _braconniers_--must I call them poachers?--of which there are many; all alike, in one sense, yet each having the most whimsical characteristics.

The reader knows my friend Navarre, but I must now introduce him to another of the cronies of my youth, the Pere Seguin, the thoughts of whom revive all the sweet recollections of my home when my family lived in the ancient and picturesque Vezelay.

Seguin's "form and feature" are as well impressed upon my memory as those even of Navarre. Could any one forget him? I should think not; for he was so fantastic and mysterious, such a determined sportsman and eccentric desperado, that he was known to all Le Morvan.

As well as I remember, he was about fifty-five years of age when I first knew him; from his earliest boyhood he had fancied and loved a forester's life, and for more than forty years had realized his dreams of its wild independence. The woods, the rocks, the streams had no secrets for him; he understood all their murmurs and their silence--he knew the habits of every bird and beast of these forests and the whereabouts of every large trout in his clear cold hole.

But it is of no use to describe Pere Seguin; to know him you must hunt with him, and that pretty often, too--as I have done from my earliest youth. I am now with him, on one of those joyous mornings of my boyhood, and having threaded the woods for an hour, he has placed me in ambuscade at the corner of a copse. Here, after a short delay, he pulls out his watch, a time-piece weighing about two pounds, and after a mute consultation with the hands, says in a low decided tone:

"Good! Three o'clock. Stop here, youngster, and in an hour I shall send you a buck."

"A buck at four o'clock? How are you to tell that?" And I felt that I opened my eyes as an oyster does his bivalve domicile at high water. "A buck! you are joking."

"I never joke," said the Pere Seguin with a hoa.r.s.e grunt, walking away, and his face did not belie his words.

"Well, then, but how can you possibly--Stop, do, for one moment. Hear me! holla! Pere Seguin! I say, you old humbug.--By Socrates, he is off."

But Pere Seguin was already striding fast and far through the bending branches, wilfully, if not really out of hearing, and I had nothing to do but to watch for the promised game. I had no watch, and it seemed to me long after the appointed hour, when my reverie was disturbed by a low voice, from I knew not where,--from heaven, from earth, from a murmuring brook, from a tree,--which dropped these words in my ear.