Some of the people round about are not so scrupulous in the way of poultry claims.  We have had to investigate a large number in, recent years.  It is a difficult matter to distinguish bona-fide from “bogus” claims; they vary in amount from one to twenty pounds.  Once only have we been foolish enough to rear a litter of cubs by hand, having obtained them from the big woods at Cirencester.  Before the hunting season had commenced we had received claims of nineteen and fourteen pounds from neighbouring farmers for poultry and turkeys destroyed.  One bailiff declared that the foxes were so bold they had fetched a young heifer that had died from the “bowssen” into the fox-covert.  Whether the bailiff put it there or the foxes “fetched” it I know not, but the white, bleached skull may be seen hard by the earth to this day.

One of the claimants above named farms three hundred acres on strictly economical principles.  He has allowed the land to go back to grass, and the only labour he employs on it is a one-legged boy, whom he pays “in kind.”  This boy arrived the other day with another poultry claim, when the following dialogue occurred:—­

“I see you have got down sixteen young ducklings on the list?”

“Yaas, the jackdars fetched they.”

“How do you know the jackdaws took them?” “’Cos maister said so.”

“Do you shut up your fowls at night?”

“Yaas, we shuts the daar, but the farxes gets in.  It be all weared out.  There be great holes in the bowssen where they gets through and fetches them.”

How can one pay poultry claims of this kind?  It being absolutely impossible to verify these accounts properly, the only way is to take the general character of the claimant, paying according as you think him straightforward or the reverse.  It is an insult to an honest man to offer him anything less than the amount he asks for; therefore claims which have every appearance of being bona fide should be settled in full.  But the hunt can’t afford it, one is told.  In that case people ought to subscribe more.  If men paid ten pounds for every hunter they owned, the income of most establishments would be more than doubled.

The farmers are wonderfully long-suffering on the whole, but they cannot be expected to welcome a whole multitude of strangers; nor can they allow large fields to ride over their land in these bad times without compensation of some sort.  Slowly, but surely, a change is coming over our ideas of hunting rights and hunting courtesy; and the sooner we realise that we ought to pay for our hunting on the same scale as we do for shooting and fishing, the better will it be for all concerned.

Talking of hunting and foxes reminds me that a short time ago I went to investigate an earth to see if a vixen was laid down there.  Finding no signs of any cubs, I was just going away when I saw a feather sticking out of the ground a few yards from the fox-earth.  I pulled four young thrushes, a tiny rabbit, and two young water-rats out of this hole, and re-buried them.  The cubs, it afterwards appeared, were laid up in a rabbit burrow some distance away.  But the old vixen kept her larder near her old quarters, instead of burying her supplies for a rainy day close to the hole where she had her cubs.  Perhaps she was meditating moving the litter to this earth on some future occasion.