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Updated: May 25, 2025
We now leave the home coverts and start away for a withybed about a mile up the river, where we are told there is a litter. Here, however, we do not find, though it is the likeliest place in the world for a fox.
These Cotswold streams are fed at intervals of about half a mile by the most beautiful springs, and from the rock comes pouring forth an everlasting supply of the purest and clearest of water. I was shown such a spring in a withybed hard by the old manor house.
Whilst walking by the river one day in May I noticed a brood of wild ducks about a week old. The old ones are wonderfully tame at this time of year. The mother evidently disliked my intrusion, for she started off up stream, followed by her offspring, making towards a withybed a hundred yards or so higher up, where a secluded spring gives capital shelter for duck and other shy birds.
As the hounds dash into the withybed a whole string of wild ducks get up, circle round us, and then fly straight away up stream in the shape of the letter V a sight unsurpassed if you happen to be a lover of nature. Our next draw is an isolated artificial gorse of about six acres.
When to the withybed we spy, A hungry hern or mallard fly, "Bedad! we'll bag un by and by," Tom Peregrine. "Creep up wind, sir, without a sound, And bide thy time neath yonder 'mound, Then knock un over on the ground," Tom Peregrine. And so one might go on ad infinitum. A more amusing companion or keener fisherman never stepped.
Such lovely, mysterious creatures are becoming far too scarce nowadays, and ought to be rigidly preserved. Last October we were shooting a withybed of two acres on the river bank, when the beaters suddenly began shouting, "An otter! An otter!" And sure enough a large dog otter ran straight down the line. This small withybed also contained three fine foxes and a good sprinkling of pheasants.
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