You're missing the point!
The most dramatic encounter with a stoat pack, however, was that of Suzanne Luff. It took place in the 1950s and, just as in folklore stoats bridge the natural and supernatural worlds, so Suzanne's story also bridges a great divide, between the Surrey of the stockbroker belt as we know it today, and the Surrey of barely a generation ago, the still almost mediæval landscape near Dorking where she grew up.
"Shire horses were still worked on the steep slopes of the downs above the town," she recalls, "and Ranmore Common, by the Denbies estate on which generations of our family had lived and worked, was cut off by snow for months at a time in winter."
Two or three cars would pass in a week, and along with the cuckoo came the friendly, seasonal tramps, "such as one-eyed Jack who spent the summer in a yew tree behind the post office."
...
"It was sometime between 1950 and 1952," Suzanne said, "when I was eight or nine":
"I was going home from the dairy one evening in late September and I met two of the estate workers - Bob Tester, the ostler who looked after the work horses and Ted Moore, a gardener, cutting back hedges, and I stopped to chat. 'This is the second black winter we're going to have,' they told me, meaning iron-cold, 'and the stoats will probably pack. If you hear this noise' - and Ted made a high-pitched chittering noise - 'just you bloody run for it. And if you're too far from home, get up a tree. Those packs have been known to bring down horses, cattle, deer.'
"Well no, I wasn't really frightened by this warning; you take things as a matter of course as a child. So I thought no more of stoats until the following January.
"I was returning from the dairy at about six o'clock on a bitterly cold night, but not dark because of starlight reflecting on the snow. I had gone past the ash tree at the crossroads when I heard a shrilling noise, a chittering of many tiny voices; it was exactly the noise that the gardener had made. I stopped and looked towards the wood and saw a shadow emerge from it about 70 yards away, and move over the snow towards me as if a cloud were passing over the moon.
"I ran back to the ash tree knowing I had to get up it somehow. I had never climbed it before, but, driven by desperation I jumped up and caught hold of the end of one of the low, sweeping branches, threw my legs over it, and shinned my way upside down towards the trunk. I scrambled into a V of branches and watched a wave of stoats break against the tree. There could have been 50 of them swarming round it, eyes glowing, for what must have been 10 minutes but which seemed like hours. I was alternately praying and cursing, getting more and more frozen. Then they must have heard something because one of them suddenly gave a sharp commanding call. All the others immediately packed behind it and swarmed through the hedge on the other side of the lane. From my vantage point, I could see them move over the adjoining field. When they were out of sight, I collapsed out of my tree and ran all the way home." |
