Wandering over moor and heath, and through the deep woods, Skewbald while yet a foal got to know the wild life of the forest, for, as with all young things, life to him was more than mere eating, and he was full of curiosity about everything that went on around him.

In the evenings he would see the rabbits, first little and then big, come out of their holes, their white scuts flashing as they gambolled. If they “froze,” their quiet umber tint assimilated with the surrounding hues, so that their outline was lost, and sometimes the colt, going towards a patch of herbage, saw nothing but a great black eye gazing at him, until, on a nearer approach, a young rabbit materialized, and loped away. On summer mornings when the dew was heavy, the bunnies looked almost black because of their drenched fur. They would have all day to comb and smooth it out underground. Early one morning he saw a doe rabbit with a mouthful of grass, sticking out on both sides of her muzzle, like a great green moustache; she went below with it, her two little ones following.

Hares he did not see so often, and they sat so quietly in their “forms,” that he was not aware of their presence until he nosed up against them. But he once saw a hare anything but quiet. On a bare patch of gravel near the railway, where hares were in the habit of crossing, a big jack hare was writhing and squirming without moving from the spot, and Skewbald went up to see this strange sight. The creature, of course, was in a gin, though the foal was not to know that. Not being afraid of hares, he got quite close, and, as the entrapped one did not move off, but still strained and struggled, he gave a mischievous little stamp to drive him away. Now, the poor hare was caught by a fore toenail only, and Skewbald happening to press with his hoof on the spring the jaw opened, and the prisoner was set free; but his fore-leg was so strained by the tension, that when he put weight on it, he fell over, and squirmed as before.

Skewbald, very interested, touched him, and the hare made off on to the track, where again he fell and writhed, Skewbald watching through the railings, until the noise of an oncoming train reminded the stricken one that he still had three legs to run on. The following spring Skewbald again witnessed the hare in motion, and this time there were two. The pair were on a level stretch, and indulging in an orgy of violent movement. They chased one another, turning and doubling, taking turns to be pursued and pursuer, till one stopped and crouched, the other jumping over its back. Then they ran apart in tangential circles which brought them face to face, whereupon they stood up on their hind-legs, and thumped one another with their forepaws like boxers. They acted as madly as any other pair of March hares.

Instinct and his mother taught Skewbald to notice all that was going on, to keep his eyes “skinned.” When they were in the woods, the harsh notes of the jays made him start, and from his mother’s movements, he learned that someone was about. Once in spring, browsing on the young shoots of a hawthorn-bush, he almost nosed against two dormice fresh from their long rest, sleek and tawny bright, among the green tufts.

The squirrels he could not help seeing, and when he stopped, and looked at them sitting on the low boughs of a fir, making short work of the cones, they stamped peevishly with their hind-feet, making quite a noise, as the rabbits did on the ground. Once he witnessed a curious and beautiful sight which lasted but a moment. A squirrel pursued another, going round and round a tree-trunk as they descended, so quickly that they left on the eye the impression of a reddish streak, drawn spirally round the trunk. This again was in spring, and, like the mad antics of the hares, a love chase.

Sometimes a fox trotted by, or sat up and looked at him impudently, and, as it happened, he got tolerably familiar with a family of foxes. The lair was in a bank between the roots of an old oak. Skewbald’s mother, as she went by, snuffed the air, and indeed, the smell, whether of fox or high viands, was perceptible even to human nostrils. So Skewbald snuffed too, and whenever he passed the hole, the odour reminded him of what dwelt there. One fine evening, as he idled at a little distance, he perceived movement outside the hole. It was not rabbits, so he went closer, and saw the little fox cubs, lithe and furry. One lay on its back gnawing at a moorhen’s wing, two were engaged in a tussle, and one curled into a ball with his tail over his nose, pretending to be asleep; but when the vixen came up, and, after looking round, sat down calmly amidst her family, the mischievous cub got up, came behind her and worried her tail, until she turned, and seized him in her jaws, so that he yelped.

After this, Skewbald, when his company came that way, looked out for the cubs, but he saw little more of them, for the older they grew, the later they came out, until it was night before they emerged, and then it was not for play but work, learning to hunt for their living.

Skewbald and his mother sometimes sunned themselves by a bank crowned with lichened thorns. It was quite a badger fortress, being honeycombed with passages. A certain family which camped by it one August must have occasioned the badger some inconvenience, for they used the great holes as dustbins, stuffing down newspapers, tins, tea-leaves and coffee grounds, and other rubbish. But they never set eyes on him, not even on moonlight nights. Probably he used an exit on the other side of the bank while the campers were about. But Skewbald sometimes saw him after dusk, coming or going with his rolling gait, or appearing at the mouth of his den with sniffing snout and uplifted paw. Once the foal came upon him in broad day, and sunny at that. He was fast asleep, nearly hidden in a great nest of dried grass and bracken in a sheltered corner.

Sometimes, though probably he was unaware of it, the colt walked over little sharply pitted tracks which were the slots of the deer. Only once did he see that rare and shy British mammal, the roedeer. Skewbald was strolling in a forest ride, when, all at once, a delicate fawn-coloured shape with two uplifted sharp horn spikes emerged from a fern brake, and paused with raised fore-foot and twitching ears before venturing across the grassy space, and like a shadow his mate followed him.

In the thick woods, he sometimes saw the other deer, mostly fallow, the buck with widely branching palmate antlers, but occasionally a great red deer.

One September midday, mother and foal were wandering down a wide drive in the woods, when strange noises came to the foal’s ears, people shouting, baying of hounds and blowing of horns. He ran close to his mother, who, though not alarmed, raised her head and snuffed the air with interest. People with horns no longer hunted ponies, and she had no apprehensions of capture.

Presently a buck topped the bank, and shot across the drive, a mere rusty brown streak, gone as soon as seen. The noise of the hounds wavered, and grew fainter. The buck had eluded them. Then in the distance a huntsman appeared coming up the drive on a tall white horse. He was a fine sight in his black velvet cap, dark green coat with brass buttons, and his horn ready to hand. He stopped by a gate watching the drive, not knowing he was too late. On the hill out of sight were the three men in brown velveteen, each holding a team of the leashed hounds; young and swift these, waiting to be put on the track of the quarry when the slow old hounds, or “tufters,” had got the scent, and mounted hunting folk waiting or patrolling the forest glades. But the noise and the sight of the buck was all that Skewbald experienced, that day, of a forest buck-hunt.

After being warned by his mother, Skewbald kept as respectful a distance from harmless grass-snakes and slow-worms as from vipers. He even jumped when the little brown lizard ran across the path in front of him. And doubtless he sometimes found the open door of the home of the underground wasp, and quickly removed his nose and himself from its proximity. More rarely he saw the brown paperish globe of the wood-wasp hung from a low branch, with a hovering swarm of wasps like a yellow halo round it.

As for “stoats,” heathflies, and the tickling, crawling New Forest fly, they are, in hot weather, the torment of a forest pony’s life, and the less said about them the better.

Of birds, he knew most familiarly the stonechat, always on the topmost spray of a gorsebush, both in summer and in winter, with his little jerking tail and monotonous “tick-tack” note. Sometimes he would see the stonechat’s relative, the wheatear, standing on a stone or clod of earth, with the same flirting of the tail; the attitude alert and vigilant, his black eye-streak emphasizing his suspicious glance.

In the evening he heard the “hoo-hoo” of the tawny owl, and might have seen him sitting upright on the low branch of a willow, close to the trunk; and once in broad daylight, as he was nibbling at the bark of the branches of a stubby hollow holly, a blotched form appeared at the opening as if in response to the noise he made before her door; then with a couple of wing-beats, the little owl flew up into the higher branches and looked at him with fierce gold-rimmed eyes, and irritable movements of her head.

Now and then he came across a small covey of partridges dusting themselves in a sandy patch, or sunning on a bank. Once in May, as he put his nose to a tussock, a sitting partridge gave it a sharp peck. All that season he looked into tussocks warily, and one day he came upon what looked like two partridges sitting together; but the one outside the nest was a cock-bird, as could be seen by his red ear-lobes and absence of cross-bars on his wings. As Skewbald looked, a little head peeped out from under his father’s wing and piped. Then there was more chirping, and from under the mother emerged a tiny chick, and in a moment was lost in his male parent’s feathery recesses. That faithful husband and father was on duty, receiving each little chick as it hatched, and “drying them off.”

One of Skewbald’s most interesting glimpses of his bird neighbours concerned another family party. He was standing one evening in June by a great brake of gorse on a bank, near a little stream, when he heard a flutter of wings, and a great bird alighted, a shelduck, glorious in her black, white, and chestnut plumage, crimson neb, and coral legs—a bird which one associates with the sandy shores of North Wales or the dunes of Norfolk. Yet here she was, and after looking round, she walked towards a rabbit-hole at the foot of a gorsebush, put her head in, and vanished.

A little later the foal and his mother were drinking at the stream very early in the morning, when a subdued but anxious croaking was heard, accompanied by a “cheeping” from tiny throats, and the shelduck came into view marshalling a long line of the prettiest, fluffy, pied little ducklings, negotiating all sorts of obstacles. And not one parent only, for the father, larger and still more resplendent than his mate, and quite as concerned and anxious, brought up the rear of the procession. Once or twice he whistled shrilly, as he intercepted an errant ball of down, and sent it into the right path. When they tumbled into the tiny stream, at once the youngsters were at home and self-confident. The drake saw them all afloat, and again the procession re-formed to paddle down-stream to the sea. What adventures were they to meet with, and how many would the parents bring safely to the seashore, to run along the margin of the tide, in their pied down indistinguishable from the foamy froth washing over the seaweed? It was perhaps ten miles to their destination, with many enemies in wait—hawks, foxes, badgers, pike, and man.

Later in the season a naturalist, not a sportsman or collector, armed only with his monocular prismatic, passed the shelduck’s burrow, and a feather caught his eye. He stooped, and picking it up, scrutinized it closely. By its white, black and chestnut, he knew at once from what bird it had fallen and that doubtless this was her nesting site.

But perhaps one of the most thrilling sights to be seen in the forest by a lover of birds was what Skewbald first beheld one cold April morning. A rough untidy yearling after his winter outdoors, he wandered down to the brook, where on a muddy patch broad three-toed footprints had been freshly impressed. Loose feathers, white, black, and brown, caught his eye, and as he sniffed at them he heard a strange musical phrase, with a humming vibratory timbre—