The Forest (4 page)

It was illegal, of course. Chopping down trees or stealing a piece of the king’s land was a crime of
vert
. A tiny encroachment like this, termed a
purpresture
, was not a serious offence, but a punishable crime all the same. It was also, to Pride, a secret blow for freedom.

Normally he would have finished long before this time and the pigs would already have been moved in with as much general mess as possible. But today, because of the big deer drive, he saw no need to hurry. The king’s servants would all be up at Lyndhurst where the deer would be caught.

There were several woodland settlements in the middle section of the Forest. First there was Lyndhurst with its deer trap. Since
hurst
in Anglo-Saxon meant ‘wood’, the name probably signified that a grove of lime trees had once grown there. From Lyndhurst a track led south through ancient woodland until, after four miles, it reached the village in a break in the woods known as Brockenhurst, where there was a hunting lodge in which the king liked to stay. From there the track continued south beside a small river running down in a tiny, steep valley, past the village of Boldre, where there was a small church, towards the coast. The little hamlet containing Pride’s homestead lay over a mile to the east of this river and nearly four miles south of Brockenhurst, at a point where the belt of ancient woodland gave on to a large heath. Even as the crow flies, the hamlet was nearly seven miles away from Lyndhurst.

The huntsmen, he knew, were going to drift the deer down from the north into the trap. Every one of the king’s Forest servants would be up there; none of them would be coming down his way that morning.

With an almost deliberate slowness, therefore, he was taking his time, inwardly chuckling to himself at his wife’s anxiety and annoyance.

So he was more than surprised, a moment later, when he heard his wife give a little cry of alarm and looked up to see two riders approaching.

The morning had gone by quietly for the pale deer. For several hours her little herd had remained feeding in the open as the sun rose higher.

They were all does or fawns, since the adult males had mostly begun by this season to dwell apart. A slight swelling of their flanks indicated that a number of the does were pregnant; in another two months they would give birth. The fawns who still accompanied them were weaned now. The male fawns exhibited the bumps which later in the year would grow into their first horns – the little spikes which, when they are yearlings, give them the name of prickets. Very soon, now, the prickets would forsake their mothers and move away.

Time passed. The birds’ chorus subsided to a tuneful twittering, which was joined, in the increasing warmth, by the quiet whirr, drone and buzz of the countless forest insects. It was mid-morning before the senior doe who was the leader indicated by stalking into the trees that it was time to go to the day rest.

Deer are creatures of habit. True, in spring, they might wander away in search of choice feeding – visiting the fields of grain by the forest edge or, leaping his fences like silent shadows in the night, raiding the smallholdings of men like Pride. But the old doe was a cautious leader. Only twice that spring had she left the square mile that the herd usually inhabited; and if some of the younger does, like the pale deer, had felt restless, she had showed no sign that she meant to satisfy them. They followed the same path, therefore, that they always used to reach the day rest – a pleasant and sheltered glade in the oak woods – where the does obediently sank down to their usual position, lying with legs tucked in and head erect, their backs to the faint breeze. Only some of the prickets, unable to contain themselves, moved about, playing in the glade under the old doe’s watchful eye.

The pale deer had just lain down when she thought about her buck.

He was a handsome young fellow. She had noticed him at the time of the last rut in the autumn. She had been too young to take part then, although she had seen the fully grown does being serviced. He had been watching with the other junior bucks beside one of the lesser rutting stands; she had guessed from the size of his antlers that the next year he would be ready to claim a stand of his own.

The male fallow went through a series of growth stages, marked by the size of their antlers, which they cast each spring in order to grow a new and finer set for the next rutting season. After the spikes of the yearling pricket came the little antlers of the two-year-old, the sorel. The next year he became a sore, then a bare buck and then, at five, the proper antlers of the buck appeared. Even now, another two or three years would pass before he was fully grown and his antlers developed into the magnificent crowning set of the great buck.

Her buck was still young. She did not know where he had come from: for the bucks usually made their way to their rutting stands from home bases in other parts of the Forest. Would he be at the same stand this coming autumn, or would he perhaps be large and strong enough to dislodge the occupant of some more important stand? Why had she especially noticed him? She did not know. She had seen the great bucks with their mighty antlers, their powerful shoulders and swollen necks. Crowds of does clustered eagerly around their stands where the air was thick with the pungent odour they exuded and which made the pale deer almost dizzy. But when she had seen the young buck waiting modestly by the stand, she felt something else. This year his antlers would be bigger, his body thicker. But his scent would be the same: the sharp but, to her, sweet smell of him. It was to him, when the rutting season came, that she would go. She stared at the treetops in the morning sun and thought of him.

The terror began suddenly.

The sound of the hunters came from the west. They were travelling faster than the breeze, which might have carried their scent. They made no attempt to be quiet; they came loudly through the Forest, straight towards the glade.

The leading doe got up; the others followed her. She began to spring towards the trees. The prickets were still playing at the other side of the glade. For a moment they did not heed the calls of their mothers, but in another instant they, too, realized that something was amiss and began to spring.

The spring of the fallow deer is an extraordinary sight. It is known as a pronk. All four feet leave the ground while the legs appear to be hanging down straight. They seem to bounce, hover and fly forward through the air as if by magic. Normally they make several of these gravity-defying springs before running only at intervals, to spring again. With a beautiful, magical motion the whole group fled towards the covert. In seconds they had melted from the glade and were strung out in a line behind the senior doe who was leading them north towards the deepest part of the wood.

They had gone a quarter-mile when she abruptly halted. They did the same. She listened, ears flicking nervously. There was no mistaking it. There were horsemen in front of them. The leader turned, headed south-eastwards, away from both dangers.

The pale deer was frightened. There was something deliberate, sinister about this double approach. The leader obviously thought so too. They were at full gallop now, leaping over fallen trees, bushes, anything in their path. The dappled light through the leaves above seemed to flicker and flash with menace. Half a mile they went, came to a larger light, broke cover into a long grassy glade. And stopped dead.

There were about twenty riders, waiting only yards away. The pale deer had just time to notice them before the leading doe turned and made back towards the trees.

But she only made two springs before realizing that there were more hunters in the trees too. Checked, she turned again and started to run down the glade, darting this way and that, looking for a chance of safety. The rest of the deer, sensing that the leader had no idea what to do, followed her in an increasing state of panic. The hunters were racing behind them now, with whoops and cries. The doe veered right into a belt of trees.

The pale deer had gone about a hundred yards into the trees when she caught sight of yet more hunters – on their right flank this time, a little way ahead. She uttered a warning cry, which the others, in their panic, did not notice. She paused in her run. And then she saw the strangest thing.

From ahead of them a small party of bucks, half a dozen of them, suddenly ran into view from a thicket. Presumably there was a danger behind them. Seeing the does in panic, however, and the hunters on their flank, the bucks did not join the does but, after only a flicker of hesitation, dashed, leaping splendidly, straight towards the horsemen, flashing clean through their line and away through the trees before the startled hunters could even raise their bows. It was as quick and magical as it was unexpected.

And most astonishing of all, to her, was that her buck was one of them. There was no mistaking him. She spotted his antlers and his markings at once, as he passed like a leaping shadow in the trees. For a moment, just before their daring dash, he turned his face fully in her direction and she saw his large brown eyes staring straight towards her.

The leading doe had seen the bucks and their brave dash through the hunters, but she did not attempt to follow them. Instead, blindly, no longer knowing what to do, she led them in headlong flight; so that the pale deer found herself streaming eastwards; the only way left open, the way the hunters wanted.

Adela had watched the gathering at Lyndhurst with excitement. Parties from several estates had arrived, although they were all under the general direction of Cola. The royal manor was a small collection of wooden buildings with a fenced paddock sitting on a small rise in the oak forest. But a short distance away, on its south-eastern side, the trees were broken by a series of glades, before giving on to a large, long expanse of lawn, beyond which lay open moor. It was to this lawn that Cola had led them to inspect the great trap.

Adela had never seen anything like it. The thing was huge. At the entrance, surrounded by green lawn, was a small round knoll, like a mound for a miniature castle or lookout post. Two hundred yards south-east of the knoll a natural ridge rose and ran for half a mile in a straight line, with the green lawn on one side and the brown heath on the other. All this was impressive enough. But as the ridge slowly dipped at its south-eastern end, man had taken over and built a lower extension to the ridge. First, on the inner lawn side, was a deep ditch; then a large earthwork bank and, surmounting the bank, a stout fence. For a short distance this barrier stretched in a straight line. Then it began, very gently to curve inwards, crossing the lawn where a rise in the ground made a natural line, then continuing on its way round towards the west, through wooded ground and glade, until it curved right round and ran back up towards the manor. This was the park pale of Lyndhurst.

‘It’s like a fortress in the Forest,’ she exclaimed. Once in this inclosure, the deer had no hope of leaping the pale as they were turned and driven, infallibly, towards the hunters’ nets.

‘We shall take about a hundred deer today.’ Cola’s younger son, Edgar, had placed himself at her side during this inspection. The business within the park pale was always carefully managed, he explained. Of the huge number of game driven into the great trap, the pregnant does would not be killed, but the bucks and other does would be culled. When Cola had his hundred the rest would be released.

She was glad to have the handsome Saxon for company. Walter, as usual, had left her alone and as she saw him now, walking his horse beside Hugh de Martell and talking to him, she wondered if he would introduce the Norman to her and decided he probably would not. ‘Do you know the man my cousin is talking to?’ she asked Edgar.

‘Yes. Not well. He’s from Dorset. Not the Forest.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘My father has a high opinion of him.’

‘And you?’ Her eyes were still on Martell.

‘Oh.’ His voice sounded uncomfortable. ‘He’s a big Norman lord.’

She glanced across at him. What did that mean? That Edgar was a Saxon with no love for Normans? That he thought Martell arrogant? That he was even a little jealous of the knight, perhaps?

There was quite a crowd assembled on the lawn by the knoll. Besides the riders there were men with spare horses, others with carts for removing the carcasses and others who had simply come to watch. One figure particularly caught her attention. He was making his way across to a cart piled with sections of wattle fencing: a thickset man who, with his bushy eyebrows and forward stoop, seemed to Adela more like some stunted but sturdy old forest tree than a human being. She noticed, however, that Edgar saluted him as he passed and that the peasant returned the greeting by a slight nod. She wondered who he was.

There had been no time to think about this, however, for just then Cola had sounded his hunting horn and the great deer drive had begun.

It was actually a series of drives. The area around Lyndhurst was split into sectors; the hunters, organized into parties, were carefully co-ordinated to draw over a wide area in each sector, drifting as many deer as possible towards the centre. It was skilful work: the deer could prove elusive or, on the outer fringes, escape. When one sector had been drifted, the riders would be sent out on to the next and might go out several times until Cola decided they had enough.

Though deer might be missed out in the woods, as they approached the great trap their chances soon faded to nothing. Looking around, Adela observed that other, smaller earthworks and fences radiated out from the entrance so that as the deer from each sector approached they would find themselves in a kind of funnel that narrowed down towards the trap. It was hard not to admire the cleverness of the thing.

Having sounded the horn, Cola went up to the knoll from which vantage point, like a general, he could watch the whole proceedings. The riders all had their instructions. To her disappointment, Edgar left them before, with only Walter and four others for company, she rode out.

Their station was not an exciting one. The first drift was in the south-eastern sector. Here the heath beyond the park pale extended in a broad swathe about two miles across to the south-east, with long fingers of woodland pointing into it from the darker forest on the other side. While the riders drove the deer in from these various woods, their job was to fan out in a line from the pale to make sure that none of the animals made a dash down that way at the last minute. In all probability, she realized, there would be nothing to do at all. As the parties of riders disappeared into the distant woods, she prepared for a long wait.