Making sound use of grass in the countryside
When I was a wee boy and walking along with my father to see how the cows were, he suddenly bent down and plucked a single blade of grass. What he did next has stayed with me ever since.
He placed the blade of grass along the length of the thumb of his left hand; then he put the thumb of his right hand on the other side of the grass and lifted both hands up to his face and blew.
As all country folk know, the noise that came forth was that strange, strangulated shriek of a sound that only blown grass can make.
The cows lifted their heads from the sward and shook their ears. From that time on I had a new and special life skill, one that I still amuse myself with now and again.
But that wasn’t all, because much later, when I was first a councillor, I was walking near Portmahomack with an old friend of my father’s, the late Jim Paterson, sometime Easter Ross farmer, gifted raconteur, and local councillor himself. Over a fence and out in a field he pointed to something moving in the long grass.
"Look, over there, I’m pretty sure it’s a hare. Do you know how to call a hare, Jamie?"
Slightly surprised I confessed that I did not.
"To work properly it has to be a thin piece of grass like this. It needs to be high pitched – an old piece of cock’s foot would never do the job," and with that he did the same as my father and blew into his hands.
The hare jumped straight up in the air, all four feet off the ground, and twisted round and landed again, this time directly facing us.
"She thinks the sound is a leveret, a baby hare, in distress," whispered Jim, and then he blew the grass again.
Now the hare cautiously came closer. A third, fourth and fifth squeak from the grass and by zigzags the beast almost came right up to us. And then Jim laughed out loud, and the hare was away again like a rocket.
I was fascinated by this ruse and have used it myself over the subsequent years. It almost always works.
Writing of hares, I once had a pet one. She was called Fleur – not after the French witch Fleur Delacour in Harry Potter, but after the character Fleur in the Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy.
I was in my teens and I was cutting the grass – surprisingly close to the house – when I spied something small and brown lying ahead of the mower, and some instinct or other made me stop the machine and go forward to see what it was.
A leveret! Small and perfect, I did what I shouldn’t have done and picked it up. It fitted in the palm of my hand and gazed at me with its big eyes. I was utterly smitten.
Of course I ought have left the leveret where it was and gone and cut the grass somewhere else, because that is what mother hares do, they leave their young hidden away in the grass, and then return to them from time to time to check on them and feed them.
A leveret’s life can be a surprisingly solitary one for much of the day, until some callow youth blunders along and picks it up and gives it an entirely new home.
As it turned out, Fleur, as she shortly came to be, quickly took to being a member of the Stone family.
My cousin’s dolly’s bottle filled with warm milk did the trick, and she grew by the day. Soon she had graduated to lettuce, small slivers of carrot and of course, her pièce de résistance, dandelion leaves. She adored them.
Like father, like son – my old man was also a Ross-shire councillor – and on some days I would accompany him on his trips back and forth to Dingwall. With the two of us came Fleur; and if I shut my eyes I can still see her, by this time a fully grown hare, stretched out on the back seat fast asleep.
"One for the pot, Reggie?" once asked a fellow councillor in the car park at the County Buildings. "Did you hit it on the road?" And then Fleur sat up and looked at him: it gave him quite a start.
The story has a happy ending too. Eventually Fleur did return to the wild and learnt how to be a hare again. For all I know the one I saw in the back field during the winter is her great great granddaughter.
I would certainly like to think so.