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Updated: May 15, 2025
Since my earliest years of friendship with Ianto the fisherman and Philip the poacher, I have regarded night watching in the woods or by the riverside as a fascinating sport, in which my knowledge of Nature is put to its severest test.
I was not surprised, for on the previous night, long after the moon had risen and sleep had descended on the village, I, with Ianto the fisherman, had passed the spot on returning from an angling expedition eight or ten miles up-stream, and had stayed awhile to watch the most expert of all river-fishers, as she dived and swam from bank to bank, and sometimes, turning swiftly into the backwater, landed on the shingle close by Brighteye's reed-bed, to devour at leisure a captured trout.
Promise me, sir, as you'll never go nigh that cave when he's alive. It's his secret place, as only him and me knows anything about. He told me to ask you that favour." Long after both Ianto and Philip were dead, I happened one day, while in the woods, to remember the incidents I have just related, and I made my way to the foot of the Crag.
Ianto, Philip, and I at last settled quietly to watch for the badger's visit to the clearing.
On the way to the bridge, Ianto gave me further instructions. Philip'll understand. But if everything goes well till you get to the Crag, make that other signal the noise of young wood-owls waking up for the night and Philip's sure to answer with a hoot. Then let him come up to you; but, mind, don't you go to him."
Philip told in a whisper of jokes he had played on the keeper; Ianto capped these stories with reminiscences of younger days and nights; and I, though hating bitterly the ruffian loiterers of the village who subsisted on the spoils of the trap, the snare, and the net, and were guilty of cowardly acts of revenge when checkmated in the very game they chose to play, felt a certain sympathy with the two old men by my side, who, as I was convinced, had fairly and squarely entered into the game, and taken their few reverses without retaliation, only becoming afterwards keener than ever to avoid all interference.
By close, patient observation alone, can the naturalist learn the habits of the creatures of the night; and if it should be his good fortune to become the friend of such men as I have mentioned he would find their help of inestimable value. To Ianto and Philip I owe a debt of gratitude, of which I become increasingly conscious with the passing of the years.
Becca Penffos prays that the dealer's eyes are closed to the disease of her hen; Shon Porth asks the Big Man to destroy his pregnant sister into whose bed Satan enticed him; Ianto Tybach says: "Give me a nice bit of haymaking weather, God bach. Strike my brother Enoch dead and blind and see I have his fields without any old bother.
On another occasion, in early days when my ignorance of the river and of fishing sorely troubled both Ianto and myself, as I was wading down-stream along the edge of a pool a grilse rose, "head and tail," about twenty yards below my fly. Using my long gaff-handle as a staff, I walked slowly towards the fish, casting carefully all the way.
Soon, the fisherman and I turned homewards, and left the poacher to less innocent sport. As we gained the crest of the hill, the melancholy cry of the brown owl came to our ears; and Ianto said, "Philip is a big vagabond bigger than me, I think. No doubt he's fetched his nets from the cave beneath the Crag, and is down at the river by now.
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