XVIII. A MOORLAND FIRE.

The frosts of last winter—that terrible, pitiless winter—killed down two-thirds of the gorse in England; and now that summer has come again, the dry brown branches stand bare and leafless in mute accusation in every moor and common in the country. Only an exceptionally hardy bush here and there puts forth, in a straggling and tentative fashion, a few timid shoots, or struggles ineffectually into feeble bloom on a protected bough or so. The bumble-bees wander about, disconsolate, like the hungry sheep in “Lycidas,” and are not fed; thousands and thousands of them have died this spring from so unexpected a failure of their staple food-stuff. Honey and pollen have been quoted for the bees at starvation prices. We have natural selection here on a large scale in actual action before our very eyes: only the hardiest furze-bushes have this year survived the bitter frost; only the busiest, strongest, and most enterprising bumble-bees are now surviving the serious loss of their accustomed provender. Even heather has suffered much, which is a surprising fact, for heather belongs to a high sub-arctic type, that spreads in both its familiar British forms far north into Scotland, Scandinavia, and even Russia; while gorse, a shrub of much more southern and western nature, is rare in the Highlands, unknown in Norway or Sweden, and, in its smaller form, at least, incapable of enduring the severe winters of Germany to the east of the Rhine.

As a consequence of this dryness and deadness of the gorse, and to some extent of the heather-tops, heath fires have raged this spring in England with a fierceness and commonness I have never seen equalled. Every year, of course, especially about Eastertide, when furze and heather are normally at their driest, owing to the winter sleep, heath fires are frequent enough in times of drought on all sandy moorlands; but, as a rule, they cease altogether for the year when the gorse begins to burgeon and the heath to send up its long green summer shoots. As the sap mounts in the plants, and the spiky leaves grow green, the amount of moisture in stem and branches suffices to preserve the commons and moors from the danger of burning. This summer, however, the dead dry gorse-bushes catch a spark like tinder; and in the district where I live, among pines and heather, we have been nightly surrounded for many weeks by constant heath fires. Sometimes, perhaps, they are kindled of malice prepense, or out of pure boyish mischief; more often, however, I fancy they are due to mere human carelessness in flinging down a match among the arid fuel. A bicyclist’s cigarette thrown lightly by the roadside, a labourer’s pipe turned out casually upon the footpath—any such small thing is enough to set it going; and once lighted, the flames spread before the wind with astonishing rapidity, licking up with their fiery tongues whole leagues of dry gorse, and leaping with frantic glee and in crackling haste from bough to bough of the pines and hollies.

It is a strange sight, indeed, to see at night one of these lurid deluges, sweeping onward irresistibly, amid clouds of smoke and loud snapping of boughs, on its work of devastation. Terrible as it all is, it is yet beautiful while it lasts: the red sibilant flames, the fierce glare on the sky, the beaters beating it down on its leeward edge with branches of pine-trees, and silhouetted in black against the bright glow of the fire, all unite to make up a weird and intensely impressive picture. But to the beasts and birds whose home is on the moor, it is a cataclysm inexpressible, appalling, unthinkable. Lizards run before the advancing phalanx of flames in trembling terror till it catches them by the hundred, and calcines them as they run into fine white ashes; rats squeal from their holes in the bank with piteous screams of agony, as they are slowly roasted alive by the remorseless inundation; rabbits wait in silence in their stifling burrows, and are burned without one sound, for, true to their instincts, they prefer to meet death in their own scorching homes, rather than expose themselves to the dogs who follow every fire, and pounce with mad joy on hapless creatures that run for dear life from its devouring onslaught.

Next day—ah! next day—the area over which the flames have swept is pitiful to behold: blackened soil, charred bushes, naked boughs of burnt fir-trees. Among them, one morning, I saw a poor belated squirrel, exposed on the open, and picking his way painfully over the smoking ground. Beneath his paws the loose black peat still smouldered sullenly. With dazed and doubtful steps, like a stupefied thing, he picked his way among the burning tufts. He had lost his mate, no doubt—his mate, and his little ones. The whole world he knew had been blotted out and effaced in one wild half-hour of indescribable terrors. Now he walked gingerly on tip-toe over the burning soil, as you and I might walk over the ashes of Mayfair if a fissure eruption had spread hot sheets of lava above the site of London. Just such a catastrophe to my squirrel was that awful night’s work. He was stunned and mazed by it. I thought, indeed, for a time, he was half dead and roasted, till a dog ran after him; then, quick as lightning, he darted up a charred tree, and looked down from the bare boughs upon his baffled pursuer. But none of the usual sly triumph was there in his look; the manifold experiences of that deadly night had killed all slyness and all archness out of him for ever. He wandered like a ghost among the blackened branches; his universe was gone; his life was blasted. I never saw a more pathetic sight, nor one that brought home to me in sadder colours the ruthlessness of nature.