The Poacher. 



347 



It was a curious thing, but whenever any great poaching visit 

 was planned to a favourite preserve, our keepers always seemed to 

 know of it beforehand, and to be prepared. In fact sometimes, 

 out of sheer bravado, the poachers would send word to say that 

 they were coming on such a night, and hoped the keepers would 

 meet them like men. 



Now on this night there was to be a grand " gathering of the 

 clans " to sweep the home preserves before the Christmas battues 

 Degan. Four gangs from four different villages had agreed to meet 

 at the old " trysting place," a gravel pit by the side of the forest. 

 Twenty of the best men with guns were to be told off to shoot the 

 pheasants in the home woods, and the rest were quietly to net hares 

 and rabbits in the forest. The poachers reckoned that they should 

 muster about thirty-five men, which they did. As I said before, 

 Johnson was prepared for them ; but with all his watchers he could 

 rot reckon on more than eight men, so he applied for help to the 

 head keeper of the Earl of D., whose preserves joined. Now on 

 this estate every labourer was obliged to take his turn at night 

 watching, so he had no difficulty in borrowing twelve men for this 

 cccasion (in fact it was a common cause with the keepers, for if the 

 poachers had swept our woods first, they would certainly on another 

 night have gone on to the next estate) 3 and the earl's head keeper, 

 as resolute a fellow as Johnson, agreed to head them, just for the 

 fun of the thing. Johnson's men were never allowed any other 

 weapons besides sticks (each had a handkerchief tied round his hat 

 to distinguish him a rather useful precaution in a night affray, 

 where the rule used to be, wherever you see a head hit at it), but 

 Johnson himself used a singular but far more effective weapon, a 

 stout hayfork, about three feet long in the shaft, " a tolloch over the 

 head from which (I use his own expressive phrase) would bring the 

 strongest man down on his knees like a bullock," I saw this 

 identical hayfork at his house a few days after this battle, and the 

 tines were bent crooked over Bill Hammerton's head. The 

 keepers of the Earl of D. always fought with short dog-spears. 

 The keepers on this night mustered about twenty, the poachers 



