PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
The coming of Spring, 2005: I walked into the Parker's Arms (pictured below, right), one-time haunt of the old gamekeeper, and asked the barman whether Joe Pye was still around after all these years. "Often heard talk of him," said a companion. "But I don't know whether he's alive or not." Pity if he died. It was a warm, sun-washed day for trailing around the Trough of Bowland - Newton, Slaidburn and Dunsop Bridge, to be precise. He would have liked that. The weather was not so pleasant when we met in 1966.
The coming of Spring: 1966.
(Picture of Joe Pye and dog by Brian Duff, former chief photographer of the Daily Express in Manchester- reproduced badly here, I am afraid, because of my copying limitations). The other pictures were taken by me on my recent visit.
SPRING is a red blooded time, a killing time and a time for birth, an agony and waiting time. Joe Pye, gamekeeper, strides
,remote,, snow whipping like glass, clutching the lungs, burning the chest with pain and this is his domain, 4,000 acres of it. Today is the equinox, the start of spring, and spring is all things to all people, a capricious season. It is harsh here in the hills of north-west England, Ribble and Hodder country, where Trough of Bowland broods through chasm and canyon. Soft plain to hard hill, Lancashire nudging Yorkshire, and on the heights the carrion crow wheels, a sentry. Around the towns and far up as Waddington village the lambs are arriving and soon they will be at this place where the crow waits to stab at the eyes of the new born and rip out their tongues and jab the beak into young heads, dragging for blood.
Joe Pye's spring is not a pretty thing ; not the city spring of a shorter skirt, a quickening breath, less hair in the comb, a sprightliness in the morning, quite suddenly, when wind turns North to West. Not their spring. Not elms bursting into green, beech leaves coppery in pale sun, coltsfoot and Creamy Butterbur, a crocus, virginal, the naturalists' spring . Not the wheatear, white-rumped, or the willow warbler or the oyster catcher, long beaked, fresh from coastal flats, soon to nest among stones where eggs will be .the colour of gravel. . '
When the cairnion crow goes to roost Joe Pye and others like him are by the tree trunks, firing upwards, and there the birds will die so that they end up black heaps by the cottage “How many to ground?" shouts Joe Pye to another gamekeeper, met by chance. "twenty-six." A good tally for one dusk. A thought to be washed down in ale at the Parker's Arms when the darkness is too deep for working.
Remote on his hilltop he surveys all, walking proud as he should, a king of all this, not like a townsman, huddled inside a coat, a tortoise, loving what he sees but afraid of it The snow is thin on high ground, but it has fallen softly through a misted dawn and tracks are covered so that today the fox will not die. Tomorrow he may die. Not with a tally-ho or a red jacket or a whooping over fences but efficiently, by the gun. Hounds will trail. Joe Pye and farmers and other gamekepers will seek the lair and dig and probe, maybe for hours, diligently and silently. Townspeople know little of this evil they seek. A lamb taken by fox is an ugly helplessness, its guts strewn, a red sight that makes you feel like retching. Across this valley, Joe Pye and others dug for two hours for a fox, days ago, their skins against metal of shovel, fused by frost, and the dog - Patch, the terrier, thumping his tail now and smelling like old cheese, had to be carried down in a sack in case the cold killed him; learning, like men, by the season, for a lifetime is not enough to discover all truths. Keeper here learned no more than two seasons ago a great deception. The hounds fanning off on lost trails.
Dog fox and vixen were walking in ever widening circles around their lair, like water ripples when a pebble is thrown, then running off in opposite directions. Hounds found only the stronger scent, the outer circle, and the two scents away from the circle divided them. The lair was in the centre of all this. A losing battle. There are fewer keepered areas these days and here is where a fox will breed. To bag a pregnant vixen is a satisfying thing for country folk. . Joe Pye takes coloured film of such events. Twenty ruddy-faced men all in line, the blood, the carnage, and then the foxes lined up like the men, neatly, but dead. One and sixpence a time— that's what they get for skins. Not much.
Out in the snows by the woods he whistles at the wilderness, and by ones and twos the pheasant arrived to be fed from the bucket, cocking their heads at the sky for trickery, cocks blazing colour and fat against snow; hens drab. Some he catches and crates—one cock to seven hens—and these go to the pens near his cottage to be cosetted until the eggs arrive, a tape around one wing root and third flight feather, so that they can not breach the fence, near tame.
There by the pheasant pen is the rhododendron bush where a thrush nested and each day he took the four young a worm each, talking to them – “One for you, one for you” – and they looked for his coming, mouths agape, until one day, when all were dead, holes drilled through their heads, and he could have wept, he said, but instead killed the magpie that killed them.
All nature has within it the seeds of its own destruction.
Here is a stream, here by the cottage—Dunsop Brook (the picture below is of Dunsop Bridge), which flows into the Hodder, which flows into the Ribble, which flows
into the sea, salmon and trout country. And here he placed £400-worth of tiny brown trout, feeding them every day for three years and all went in an hour. One hour of cloudburst where they died in mud and boulder.
A place for strength, the 'keepers' fox kills quaintly recorded in a book inscribed: Visitors. More than 360 since 1961 dying in places like Jumbles Quarry, Birkett Fell, Ireland Clough, Beatrix Fell, Bracken Hill, Jolly Boys and Blue Delph.
No season like another, because all nature shifts. Myxomatosis ravaged rabbits. The stoat sucked the rabbit's blood and the shrieks drew the crows and magpies so that they were sated. Lambs and pheasant were left in peace, as were the wrens, the robins, the linnets.
But now they are ravaged where rabbit is sparse and there is less dawn song and there are more flies in the cottages come summer.
Down from these hills Bill Dickinson clumps his way, old against the weather, a camouflage of cloth and hat and for him, too, nature shifts. He is water bailiff, tending six miles of river seven days a week, taking his holiday at Blackpool in winter because he cannot abide the crowds.
Salmon disease ravaged the fish and the following generations so that he will not know the real effects for four or five years yet. Meanwhile, the water runs low, too low, and he is hoping for rain and looking for a fresh run of early fish.
When conditions are right he will phone what he calls " my gentlemen" away in the cities and they will descend to find this silence and his peace.
Around Easter, the brown trout will be well under way. A good time for this man who never lost his wonder. "I once saw a kestrel hawk kill a full- grown partridge. Would you believe that ? " A month ago he saw black birds mating, but it was trickery again, the capricious spring of their deception, and winter returned.
Down in the town, in Clitheree, is Horace Cook to whom all life is nature, and he remembers the first oyster-catcher in these parts, 30 years ago, nesting in gravel between railway lines. Now they are plentiful. Years ago the hen harriers began to arrive regularly and they spend more time in Bowland; and the osprey comes, an exciting thing, possibly, as he puts it, " to take up residence."
The sun will come and one pair of foxes will kill 20 lambs or a score of grouse. The magpie will swoop on new nests. The badger will smell rabbit through earth and plough through to take the young. The sparrow-hawk will tear a bird to pieces and with summer, the guns will be heard, missing out the hen pheasant for the first two shots, because man alone is prudent.
Blood and talon, death and rebirth, this season of spring. Early morning of youth to Horace Cook for whom summer is a nothing. Autumn is, to him, the character in a face and winter is the ageing of all—" like people, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything. Devoid.'
" If you don't obey the law of nature, you've had it.. You're burning yourself up. Life is a great mosaic. Each piece fits. Preachers miss the point."
He waits for the wheatear and the willow-warbler, joyously aflame at the thought.
And of such is spring.
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
4 March, 2007