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The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars · English · Gutenberg #17567 · 529,968 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Way of the Wild

Author: F. St. Mars

Illustrator: Harry Rountree


        
Release date: January 21, 2006 [eBook #17567]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17567

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAY OF THE WILD ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Frontispiece: "Jaws, monstrous and wet, grabbing at him in enraged
confusion"]






THE WAY OF THE WILD


BY

F. ST. MARS



WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRY ROUNTREE






NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS




COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHED IN ENGLAND UNDER THE TITLE "PINION AND PAW"


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




CONTENTS

     I  GULO THE INDOMITABLE
    II  BLACKIE AND CO.
   III  UNDER THE YELLOW FLAG
    IV  NINE POINTS OF THE LAW
     V  PHARAOH
    VI  THE CRIPPLE
   VII  "SET A THIEF"----
  VIII  THE WHERE IS IT?
    IX  LAWLESS LITTLE LOVE
     X  THE KING'S SON
    XI  THE HIGHWAYMAN OF THE MARSH
   XII  THE FURTIVE FEUD
  XIII  THE STORM PIRATE
   XIV  WHEN NIGHTS WERE COLD
    XV  FATE AND THE FEARFUL
   XVI  THE EAGLES OF LOCH ROYAL
  XVII  RATEL, V.C.
 XVIII  THE DAY




ILLUSTRATIONS


"Jaws, monstrous and wet, grabbing at him in enraged confusion" . . .
_Frontispiece_

"The owl had lost a foot on the turn

"A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead"

"This one had simply streaked out of the night from nowhere"

"Landed full upon the dumbfounded water-vole--splash!"

"A 'silver tabby' floated among the twigs, looking for him"

"An angry eagle-owl"

"Turning over and over, in one long, sickening dive back to earth"

"That little black-headed fellow doing the stalking act upon that
python was great"

"Shooting straight upwards on the top of what appeared to have been a
submarine mine in a mild form"

"He clutched, and tore, and gulped, and gorged"

"All allowed that he was the pluckiest beast on earth"







THE WAY OF THE WILD


I

GULO THE INDOMITABLE

If his father had been a brown bear and his mother a badger, the result
in outward appearance would have been Gulo, or something very much like
him.  But not all the crossing in the world could have accounted for
his character; that came straight from the Devil, his master.  Gulo,
however, was not a cross.  He was himself, Gulo, the wolverine, _alias_
glutton, _alias_ carcajou, _alias_ quick-hatch, _alias_ fjeldfras in
the vernacular, or, officially, _Gulo luscus_.  But, by whatever name
you called him, he did not smell sweet; and his character, too, was of
a bad odor.  A great man once said that he was like a bear cub with a
superadded tail; but that great man cannot have seen his face.  If he
had, he would have looked for his double among the fiends on the top of
Notre Dame.  There was, in fact, nothing like him on this earth, only
in a very hot place not on the earth.

He was, in short, a beast with brains that only man, and no beast,
ought to be trusted with; and he had no soul.  God alone knows if love,
which softens most creatures, had ever come to Gulo; his behavior
seemed to show that it had not.  Perhaps love was afraid of him.  And,
upon my soul, I don't wonder.

It was not, however, a hot, but a very cold, place in the pine-forest
where Gulo stood, and the unpitying moon cast a dainty tracery through
the tasseled roof upon the new and glistening snow around him--the snow
that comes early to those parts--and the north-east wind cut like
several razors.  But Gulo did not seem to care.  Wrapped up in his
ragged, long, untidy, uncleanly-looking, brown-black cloak--just his
gray-sided, black fiend's face poking out--he seemed warm enough.  When
he lifted one paw to scratch, one saw that the murderous, scraping,
long claws of him were nearly white; and as he set his lips in a
devilish grin, his fangs glistened white in the moonlight, too.

Verily, this was no beast--he would have taped four feet and a quarter
from tip to tip, if you had worn chain-mail and dared to measure
him--no beast, I say, to handle with white-kid ball gloves.  Things
were possible from him, one felt, that were not possible of any other
living creature--awful things.

Suddenly he looked up.  The branches above him had stirred uneasily, as
if an army were asleep there.  And an army was--of wood-pigeons.
Thousands upon thousands of wood-pigeons were asleep above his head,
come from Heaven knows where, going to--who could tell in the end?

All at once one fell.  Without apparent reason or cause, it fell.  And
the wolverine, with his quick, intelligent eyes, watched it fall, from
branch to branch, turning over and over--oh! so softly--to the ground.
When he had poked his way to it--walking flat-footed, like a bear or a
railway porter--it was dead.  Slain in a breath!  Without a flutter,
killed!  By what?  By disease--diphtheria.  But not here would the
terrible drama be worked out.  This was but an isolated victim, first
of the thousands that would presently succumb to the fell disease far,
far over there, to the westward, hundreds of miles away, in England and
Wales, perhaps, whither they were probably bound.

But the poor starved corpse, choked to death in the end maybe, was of
no use to the wolverine.  As he sniffed it he found that out.  The
thing was wasted to the bones even.  And turning away from it--he
suddenly "froze" in his tracks where he stood.

One of those little wandering eddies which seem to meander about a
forest in an aimless sort of way, coming from and going now hither, as
if the breeze itself were lost among the still aisles, had touched his
wet muzzle; and its touch spelt--"Man!"

If it had been the taint of ten thousand deaths it could not have
affected him more.  He became a beast cast in old, old bronze, and as
hard as bronze; and when he moved, it was stiffly, and all bristly, and
on end.

Animals have no counting of time.  In the wild, things happen as
swiftly as a flash of light; or, perhaps, nothing happens at all for a
night, or a day, or half a week.  Therefore I do not know exactly how
long that wolverine was encircling that scent, and pinning it down to a
certain spot--himself unseen.  All animals, almost, can do that, but
none, not even the lynx or the wild cat, so well as the wolverine.  He
is the one mammal that, in the wild, is a name only--a name to conjure
with.

He found, in the end, that there was no man; but there _had_ been.  He
found--showing himself again now--that a man--a hunter, a trapper, one
after fur--had made himself here a _cache_, a store under the earth;
and--well, the wolverine's great, bear-like claws seemed made for
digging.

He dug--and, be sure, if there had been any danger there he would have
known it.  He dug like a North-Country miner, with swiftness and
precision, stopping every now and again to sit back on his haunches,
and, with humped shoulders, stare--scowl, I mean--round in his
lowering, low-browed fashion.

Once a bull-elk, nearly a six-footer, but he loomed large as an
elephant, came clacking past between the ranked tree-boles, stopping a
moment to straddle a sapling and browse; while the wolverine, sitting
motionless and wide-legged, watched him.  Once a lynx, with its
eternal, set grin, floated by, half-seen, half-guessed, as if a wisp of
wood mist had broken loose and was floating about.  Once a fox,
somewhere in the utter silence of the forest depths, barked a hoarse,
sharp, malicious sound; and once, hoarser still and very hollowly, a
great horned owl hooted with disconcerting suddenness.  (The scream of
a rabbit followed these two, but whether fox or owl had been in at that
killing the wolverine never knew.)  Twice a wood-hare turning now to
match the whiteness of its surroundings, finicked up one of the still,
silent forest lanes towards him, stopped, faced half-round, sat
"frozen" for a fraction, and vanished as if it were a puff of
wind-caught snow.  (And, really, one had no idea till now that the
always apparently lifeless forest could have been so full of life in
the dark hours.)

But all these things made no difference to the wolverine, to Gulo,
though he "froze" with habitual care to watch them--for your wild
creature rarely takes chances.  Details must never be overlooked in the
wild.  He dug on, and in digging came right to the _cache_, roofed and
anchored all down, safe beyond any invasion, with tree-trunks.
And--and, mark you, not being able to pull tree-trunks out of the
ground, and being too large to squeeze between them, he gnawed through
one!  Gnawed through it, he did, and came down to the bazaar below.

So far, he had been only beast.  Now we see why I said he had more
brains than were good for any animal except man.

He bit through the canvas, or whatever it was that protected the
_cached_ articles.  He got his head inside.  He felt about
purposefully, and backed out, dragging a trap with him.  With it he
removed into the inky shadows, and it was never found again.

He returned.  He thrust his head in a second time, got hold of
something, and backed out.  It was another trap, and with it he
vanished also; and it, too, was never found.  He returned, and went,
and a third trap went with him.

The fourth investigation revealed an ax.  It he partly buried.  The
fifth yielded a bag of flour, which he tore up and scattered all over
the place.  The sixth inroad produced a haunch of venison, off which he
dined.  The seventh showed another haunch, and this he buried somewhere
unseen in the shades.  The eighth overhaul gave up some rope, in which
he nearly got himself entangled, and which he finally carried away,
bitten and frayed past use.  The ninth search rewarded him with tea,
which he scattered, and bacon, which he buried.

What he could not drag out, he scattered.  What he failed to remove, he
defiled.  And, at last, when he had made of the place, not an orderly
_cache_, but a third-rate _débâcle_, he sauntered, always slouching,
always grossly untidy, hump-backed, stooping, low-headed, and
droop-tailed, shabbily unrespectable, out into the night, and the
darkness of the night, under the trees.

By the time day dawned he was as if he never had been--a memory, no
more.  Heaven knows where he was!

Gulo appeared quite suddenly and very early, for him, next afternoon,
beside some tangled brush on the edge of a clearing.  He was sitting
up, almost bolt-upright, and he was shading his eyes with his forepaws.
A man could not have done more.  And, in fact, he did not look like an
animal at all, but like some diabolically uncouth dwarf of the woods.

A squirrel was telling him, from a branch near by, just what everybody
thought of his disgraceful appearance; and two willow-grouse were
clucking at him from some hazel-tops; whilst a raven, black as coal
against the white of the woods, jabbed in gruff and very rude remarks
from time to time.

But Gulo was taking no notice of them.  He was used to attentions of
that kind; it was a little compliment--of hate--they all paid him.  He
was looking persistently down the ranked, narrowing perspective of the
buttressed forest glade to where it faded in the blue-gray mist,
southward, as if he expected something to come from there.  Something
was coming from there now; and there had been a faint, uneasy sort of
whisper in that direction for some time.  Now it was unmistakable.

A cow-elk, first of the wary ones to move on alarm, came trotting by,
her Roman nose held well out; a red-deer hind, galloping lightly like
some gigantic hare, her big ears turned astern; a wolf, head up,
hackles alift, alternately loping and pivoting, to listen and look
back, a wild reindeer, trotting heavily, but far more quickly than he
seemed to be--all these passed, now on one side, now on the other,
often only glimpses between the tree-boles, while the wolverine sat up
and shaded his eyes with his paws.  Something was moving those beasts,
those haunters of the forest, and no little thing either.  Something?
What?

  Very softly down the glade runs a waiting, watching shade,
    And the whisper spreads and widens far and near;
  And the sweat is on thy brow, for he passes even now--
    He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear.


Down came Gulo in that grim silence which was, except for his domestic
arguments, characteristic of the beast, and trotted to a pool hard by.
The pool was spring-fed, and covered, as to every dead leaf and stone,
with fine green moss of incomparable softness.  He drank swiftly and
long, then flung about with a half-insolent, half-aggressive wave of
his tail, and set off at a rolling, clumsy, shuffling shamble.

At ordinary times that deceiving gait would have left nearly everything
behind, but this afternoon it was different.  Gulo had barely shed the
shelter of the dotted thickets before he realized, and one saw, the
fact.  He broke his trot.  He began to plunge.  Nevertheless, he got
along.  There was pace, of a sort.  Certainly there was much effort.
He would have outdistanced you or me easily in no time, but it was not
you or I that came, and who could tell how fast that something might
travel?

The trouble was the snow--that was the rub, and a very big and serious
rub, too, for him.  Now, if the snow had been a little less it would
not have mattered--a little more, and he could have run easily along
the hard crust of it; but it was as it was, only about two feet, just
enough to retard him, and no more.  And it is then, when the snow is
like that, just above a couple of feet deep, that man can overtake
friend wolverine--if he knows the way.  Most men don't.  On that he
trusted.  At any other time--but this was not any other time.

Sound carries a long way in those still parts, and as he hurried Gulo
heard, far, far behind in the forest, the faint, distant whir of a
cock-capercailzie--the feathered giant of the woods--rising.  It was
only a whisper, almost indistinguishable to our ears, but enough, quite
enough, for him.  Taken in conjunction with the mysterious shifting of
the elk and the red deer and the reindeer and the wolf, it was more
than enough.  He increased his pace, and for the first time fear shone
in his eyes--it was for the first time, too, in his life, I think.

A lynx passed him, bounding along on enormous, furry legs.  It looked
all legs, and as it turned its grinning countenance to look at him he
cursed it fluently, with a sudden savage growl, envious, perhaps, of
its long, springing hindlegs.  Something, too--the same something--must
have moved the lynx, and Gulo shifted the faster for the knowledge.

Half-an-hour passed, an hour slid by, and all the time Gulo kicked the
miles behind him, with that dogged persistency that was part of his
character.  Nothing had passed him for quite a while, and he was all
alone in the utterly still, silent forest and the snow, pad-pad-padding
along like a moving, squat machine rather than a beast.

At last he stopped, and, spinning round, sat up.  A gray-blue haze,
like the color on a wood-pigeon, was creeping over everything, except
in the west, where the sky held a faint, luminous, pinky tinge that
foretold frost.  It was very cold, and the snow, which had never quite
left off, was falling now only in single, big, wandering flakes.  The
silence was almost terrifying.

Then, as Gulo sat up, from far away, but not quite so far away, his
rounded ears, almost buried in fur, caught faintly--very, very
faintly--a sound that brought him down on all fours, and sent him away
again at a gallop with a strange new light burning in his little,
wide-set eyes.  It was the unmistakable sound of a horse
sneezing--once.  Gulo did not wait to hear if it sneezed twice.  He was
gone in an instant.  Man, it seemed, had not been long in answering
that challenge of the _cache_ escapade.

After that there was no such thing as time at all, only an everlasting
succession of iron-hard tree-trunks sliding by, and shadows--they ran
when they saw him, some of them, or gathered to stare with eyes that
glinted--dancing past.  The moon came and hung itself up in the
heavens, mocking him with a pitiless, stark glare.  (He would have
given his right forepaw for a black night and a blinding snowstorm.)
It almost seemed as if they were all laughing at him, Gulo the dreaded,
the hated hater, because it was his turn at last, who had so freely
dealt in it, to know fear.

Hours passed certainly, hours upon hours, and still, his breath coming
quickly and less easily now with every mile, Gulo stuck to the job of
putting the landscape behind him with that grim pertinacity of his that
was almost fine.

At last the trees stopped abruptly, and he was heading, straighter than
crows fly, across a plain.  The plain undulated a little, like a sea, a
dead sea, of spotless white, with nothing alive upon it--only his
hunched, slouching, untidy, squat form and his shadow, "pacing" him.
At the top of the highest undulation he stopped, and glowered back
along the trail.

Ahead, the forest, starting again, showed as a black band a quarter of
an inch high.  Behind, the forest he had already left lay dwarfed in a
ruled, serried line.  But that was not all.  Something was moving out
upon the spotless plain of snow, something which appeared to be no more
than crawling, ant-like, but was really traveling very fast.  It looked
like a smudged dot, nothing more; but it was a horse, really, galloping
hard, with a light sleigh, and a man in it, behind.  The horse had no
bells, and it was not a reindeer as usual.  Pace was wanted here, and
the snow was not deep enough to impede the horse, who possessed the
required speed under such conditions.

The horse had been trotting along the trail, till it came to the place
where Gulo had looked back and heard the sneeze, and knew he was being
followed.  Then it had started to gallop, and, with ears back and teeth
showing, had never ceased to gallop.  This, apparently, was not the
first wolverine that horse had trailed.  It seemed to have a personal
grudge against the whole fell clan of wolverine, and to be bent upon
trampling Gulo to death.

Gulo watched it for about one quarter of a second.  Then he quitted,
and the speed he had put up previously was nothing to that which he
showed now--uselessly.  And, far behind him, the man in the sleigh drew
out his rifle from under the fur rugs.  He judged that the time had
about come.  The end was very near.

But he judged wrong.  Gulo made the wood at length.  With eyes of dull
red, and breath coming in short, rending sobs, he got in among the
trees.  He did it, though the feat seemed impossible, for the trees had
been so very far away.  Got in among the trees--yes, but dead-beat,
and--to what end?  To be "treed" ignominiously and calmly shot down,
picked off like a squirrel on a larch-pole.  That was all.  And that
was the orthodox end, the end the man took for granted.

In a few minutes the horse was in the forest too, was close behind
Gulo.  In spite of the muffling effect of snow, his expectant ears
could hear the quadruple thud of the galloping hoofs, and--

Hup!  Whuff!  Biff-biff!  Grrrrrr!  Grr-ur-ururrh!  Grrrr-urr!

It had all happened quick as a flash of light.  A huge, furry, reeking
mass rising right in the wolverine's path from behind a tree, towering
over him, almost mountainous to his eyes, like the very shape of doom!
Himself hurling sideways, and rolling over and over, snarling, to
prevent the crowning disaster of collision with this terrible portent!
A blow, two blows, with enormous paws whose claws gleamed like skewers,
whistling half-an-inch above his ducked head!  Jaws, monstrous and wet,
grabbing at him in enraged confusion, and rumblings deep down in the
inside of the thing that ran cold lightning-sparks all up his spine.
That was what Gulo saw and heard.

The wolverine rolled, clawing and biting, three times, and without a
pause sprang to his feet again, and leapt madly clear, stumbled on a
hidden tree-root, rolled over again twice, and up, and hurled,
literally with his last gasp and effort, headlong through the air
behind a tree-bole, where he remained all asprawl and motionless,
except for his heaving sides, too utterly done at last for _any_ terror
to move him.

There followed instantly a horse's wild snort; another; a shout; the
crack of a rifle cutting the silence as a knife cuts a taut string;
another crack; an awful, hoarse growl; the furious thudding of horse's
hoofs stampeding and growing fainter and fainter; and an appalling
series of receding, short, coughing, terrifying, grunting roars.  Then
silence and utter stillness only, and the cold, calm moon staring down
over all.

Gulo picked himself up after a bit, and slouched round the tree to
investigate.  He found tracks there, and blood; and the tracks were the
biggest footprints of a bear--a brown bear--that he had ever come
across, and I suppose that he must have sniffed at a few in his time.

Presumably the man had fired at the bear when the startled horse shied.
Presumably, too, the bear was hit.  He had gone straight away in the
track of horse and man, anyway, and--he had saved the wolverine's life,
after, with paw and teeth, doing his best to end it.  Possibly he had
been disturbed in the process of making his winter home.

Gulo lay low, or hunted very furtively, after that for some time, until
it was little less dark in the east than it had been, and the gaunt
tree-trunks were standing out a fraction from the general gloom.  The
moon had apparently nearly burnt itself out.  Still, it yet appeared to
be night.

Gulo was a long way out of his own hunting-district, and guessed that
it was about time for him to get himself out of sight.  He had a
passionate hatred of the day, by the way, even beyond most night
hunters.

On the way he smelt out and dug up a grouse beneath the snow.

Dawn found him, or, rather, failed to find him, hidden under a tangled
mass that was part windfall, part brush-wood, and part snow.  The place
had belonged to a fox the night before, and that red worthy returned
soon after dawn.  He thrust an inquiring sharp muzzle inside, took one
sniff, and, with every hair alift, retired in haste, without waiting to
hear the villainous growl that followed him.  The smell was enough for
him--a most calamitous stink.

It snowed all that day, and things grew quieter and quieter, except in
the tree-tops, where the wind spoke viciously between its teeth.  When
Gulo came out that evening, he had to dig part of the way, and he
viewed a still and silent, white world, under a sky like the lid of a
lead box, very low down.  He stood higher against the tree-trunks than
he had done the night before, and, though he did not know it, was safe
from any horse, for the snow was quite deep.  The cold was awful, but
it did not seem to trouble him, as he slouched slowly southward.

There appeared to be nothing alive at all throughout this white land,
but you must never trust to that in the wild.  Things there are very
rarely what they seem.  For instance, Gulo came into a clearing, dim
under the night sky, though it would never be dark that night.  To the
ear and the eye that clearing was as empty as a swept room.  To Gulo's
nose it was not, and he was just about to crouch and execute a stalk,
when half the snow seemed to get up and run away.  The runners were
wood-hares.  They had "frozen" stiff on the alarm from their sentries.
But it was not Gulo who had caused them to depart.  Him, behind a tree,
they had not spotted.  Something remained--something that moved.  And
Gulo saw it when it moved--not before.  It was an ermine, a stoat in
winter dress, white as driven snow.  Then it caught sight of Gulo, or,
more likely, the gleam of his eyes, and departed also.

Gulo slouched on, head down, back humped, tail low, a most
dejected-looking, out-at-heels tramp of the wilderness.

Once he came upon a wild cat laying scientific siege to a party of
grouse.  The grouse were nowhere to be seen; nor was the wild cat,
after Gulo announced his intention to break his neutrality.  Gulo knew
where the grouse were.  He dug down into the snow, and came upon a
tunnel.  He dug farther, and came upon other tunnels, round and clean,
in the snow.  All the tunnels smelt of grouse, but devil a grouse could
he find.  He had come a bit early.  It was as yet barely night, and he
should have waited till later, when they would be more asleep.
However, he dug on along the tunnels, driving the grouse before him.
And then a strange thing happened.  About three yards ahead of him the
snow burst--burst, I say, like a six-inch shell, upwards.  There was a
terrific commotion, a wild, whirring, whirling smother, a cloud of
white, and away went five birds, upon heavily beating wings, into the
gathering gloom.  Gulo went away, too, growling deep down inside of,
and to, himself.

He was hungry, was Gulo.  Indeed, there did not seem to be many times
when he was not hungry.  Also, being angry--not even a wild animal
likes failure--he was seeking a sacrifice; but he had crossed the
plain, which the night before had been as a nightmare desert to him,
and the moon was up before his chance came.

He crossed the trail of the reindeer.  He did not know anything about
those reindeer, mark you, whether they were wild or semi-tame; and _I_
do not know, though _he_ may have done, how old the trail was.  It was
sufficient for him that they _were_ reindeer, and that they had
traveled in the general direction that he wanted to go.  For the
rest--he had the patience, perhaps more than the patience, of a cat,
the determination of a bulldog, and the nose of a bloodhound.  He
trailed those reindeer the better part of that night, and most of the
time it snowed, and part of the time it snowed hard.

By the time a pale, frozen dawn crept weakly over the forest tree-tops
Gulo must have been well up on the trail of that herd, and he had
certainly traveled an astonishing way.  He had dug up one lemming--a
sort of square-ended relation of the rat, with an abbreviated tail--and
pounced upon one pigmy owl, scarce as large as a thrush, which he did
not seem to relish much--perhaps owl is an acquired taste--before he
turned a wild cat out of its lair--to the accompaniment of a whole
young riot of spitting and swearing--and curled up for the day.

He was hungry when he went to sleep.  Also, it was snowing then.  When
he woke up it was almost dark, and snowing worse than ever.  If it
could have been colder, it was.

While he cleaned himself Gulo took stock of the outside prospect, so
far as the white curtain allowed to sight, and by scent a good deal
that it did not.  This without appearing outside the den, you
understand.  And if there had been any enemy in hiding, waiting for him
outside, he would have discovered the fact then.  He had many enemies,
and no friends, had Gulo.  All that he received from all whom he met
was hate, but he gave back more than he got.  In the lucid terms of the
vernacular, he "was a hard un, if you like."

Nothing and nobody saw the wolverine leave that lair that was not his.
He must have chosen one blinding squall of snow for the purpose, and
was half a mile away, still on the track of the reindeer, before he
showed himself--shuffling along as usual, a ragged, hard-bitten
ruffian.  And three hours later he came up with his prey.

Gulo knew it, but nobody else could have done.  There were just the
straight trees ahead, and all around the eternal white, frozen silence,
and the snow falling softly over everything; but Gulo was as certain
that there was the herd close ahead as he was that he was ravenous.
And thereafter Gulo got to work, the peculiar work, a special devilish
genius for which appears to be given to the wolverine.

He ceased to exist.  At least, nothing of him was seen, not a tail, not
an eye-gleam.  Yet during the next two hours he learnt everything,
private and public, there was to be learnt.  Also, he had been over the
surroundings almost to a yard.  Nothing could have escaped him.  No
detail of risk and danger, of the chance of being seen even, had been
overlooked; for he was a master at his craft, the greatest master in
the wild, perhaps.  The wolf?  My dear sirs, the wolf was an innocent
suckling cub beside Gulo, look you, and his brain and his cunning were
not the brain and the cunning of a beast at all, but of a devil.

When, after a very long time, he reappeared upon his original track, it
was as a dark blotch, indistinguishable from a dozen other dark blots
of moon-shadow, creeping forward belly-flat in the snow.  This
belly-creep, hugging always every available inch of cover, he kept up
till he came to a big clearing, and--there were the reindeer.  At
least, there was one reindeer, a doe, standing with her back towards
him--a quite young doe.  The rest were half-hidden in the snow, which
they had trampled into a maze of paths in and out about the clearing,
which was, in fact, what is called their "yard."

A minute of tense silence followed after Gulo had got as close as he
could without being seen.  Then he rushed.

The reindeer swung half-round, gave one snort, and a great bound.  But
Gulo had covered half the intervening space before she knew, and when
she bounded it was with him hanging on to her.

Followed instantly a wild upspringing of snorting beasts, and a mad,
senseless stampede of floundering deer all round and about the
clearing--a fearful mix-up, somewhere in the midst of which,
half-hidden by flying, finely powdered snow, Gulo did his prey horribly
to death.

There was something ghastly about this murder, for the deer was so big,
and Gulo comparatively small.  The fearful work of his jaws and his
immense strength seemed wrong somehow, and out of all proportion to his
size.  This remarkable power of his jaws had that sinister
disproportion only paralleled by the power of the jaws of a hyena;
indeed, his teeth very much resembled a hyena's teeth.

With the deer rushing all around him, Gulo fed, ravenously and
horribly, but not for long.  A new light smoldered in his eyes now as
he lifted his carmine snout, and one saw that, for the moment, the
beast was mad, crazed with the lust of killing, seeing red, and blinded
by blood.

Then the massacre began.  It was not a hunt, because each deer,
thinking only of itself, feared to break from the trodden mazy path of
the "yard," and risk the slow, helpless, plunging progress necessary in
the deep snow.  Wherefore panic took them all over again, and they
dashed, often colliding, generally hindering each other, hither and
thither, up and down the paths of the "yard" with the hopeless,
helpless, senseless, blind abandon of sheep.  The result was a shambles.

This part we skip.  Probably--nay, certainly--Nature knows best, and is
quite well aware what she is up to, and it is perhaps not meant that we
should put her in the limelight in her grisly moods.  Suffice it to say
that Gulo seemed to stop at length, simply because even he could not
"see red" forever, and with exhaustion returned sense, and with
sense--in his case--in-born caution.  He removed, leaving a certain
number of reindeer bleeding upon the ground.  Some of them were dead.

In an hour dawn would be conspiring to show him up before the world,
and he was not a beast sweet to look upon at that moment--indeed, at
any moment, but less so now.

Now, it is surprising how far a wolverine can shift his clumsy-looking
body over snow in an hour, especially if he has reasons.  This one had
good reasons, and he was no fool.  He knew quite well the kind of
little hell he had made for himself behind there, and he did not stay
to let the snow cover him.  He traveled as if he were a machine and
knew no fatigue; and the end of that journey was a hole in a hollow
among rocks.

Dawn was throwing a wan light upon all things when he thrust his short,
sharp muzzle inside that hole, to be met by a positively hair-raising
volley of rasping, vicious growls.

He promptly ripped out a string of ferocious, dry, harsh growls in
return, and for half-a-minute the air became full of growls, horrible
and blood-curdling, each answering each.

Then he lurched in over the threshold, and coolly dodged a thick paw,
with tearing white claws, that whipped at him with a round-arm stroke
out of the pitch-darkness.  The stroke was repeated, scraping, but in
nowise hurting his matted coat, as he rose on his hindlegs and threw
himself upon the striker.

Followed a hectic thirty seconds of simply diabolical noises, while the
two rolled upon the ground, grappling fiendishly in the darkness.  Then
they parted, got up, growled one final roll of fury at each other, fang
to fang, and, curling up, went to sleep.  But it was nothing, only the
quite usual greeting between Gulo and his wife.  They were a sweet
couple.

There appeared to be no movement, or any least sign of awakening, on
the part of either of the couple between that moment and sometime in
the afternoon, when, so far as one could see, Gulo suddenly rolled
straight from deep sleep out on to the snow, and away without a sound,
at his indescribable shamble and at top speed.

Mrs. Gulo executed precisely the same amazing maneuver, and at exactly
the same moment, as far as could be seen, on the other side, and
shuffled off into the forest.  They gave no explanation for so doing.
They said never a word--nothing.  One moment they were curled up,
asleep; the next they had gone, scampered, apparently into the land of
the spirits, and were no more.  Nor did there seem to be any reason for
this extraordinary conduct except--except----  Well, it is true that a
willow-grouse, white as the snowy branch he sat upon, _did_ start
clucking somewhere in the dim tree regiments, a snipe did come
whistling sadly over the tree-tops, and a raven, jet against the white,
did flap up, barking sharply, above the pointed pine-tops; but that was
nothing--to us.  To the wolverines it was everything, a whole wireless
message in the universal code of the wild, and they had read it _in
their sleep_.  Through their slumbers it had spelt into their brains,
and instantly snapped into action that wonderful, faultless machinery
that moved them to speed as if automatically.

Then the chase began, grim, steady, relentless, dogged--the chase of
death, the battle of endurance.

A pause followed after the vanishing of the hated wolverines.  A crow
lifted on rounded vans, marking their departure, and it was seen.  A
blackcock launched from a high tree with a whir and a bluster like an
aeroplane, showing their course, and it was noted.  An eagle climbed
heavily and ponderously over the low curtain of the snow mist, pointing
their way, and it was followed.  All the wild, all the world, seemed to
be against the wolverines.  The brigands were afoot by day.  The scouts
were marking their trail.

Then a lynx, moving with great bounds on his huge swathed paws, shot
past between the iron-hard tree-boles; a fox followed, scudding like
the wind on the frozen crest; a hare, white as a waste wraith, flashed
by, swift as a racing white cloud-shadow; a goshawk screamed, and drew
a straight streaking line across a glade.  And then came the men, side
by side, deadly dumb, with set faces, the pale sun glinting coldly
cruel upon the snaky, lean barrels of their slung rifles, moving with
steady, fleet, giant strides on their immense spidery ski that were
eleven feet long, which whispered ghostily among the silent aisles of
Nature's cathedral of a thousand columns.  The Brothers were on the
death-trail of Gulo at last; the terrible, dreaded Brothers, who could
overtake a full-grown wolf in under thirty minutes on ski, and whose
single bullet spelt certain death.  Now for it; now for the fight.  Now
for the great test of the "star" wild outlaw against the "star" human
hunters--at last.  The reindeer were to be avenged.

Then Time took the bit of silence between his teeth and seconds became
hours, and minutes generations.

No sound made the wolverines as they rolled along in Indian file,
except for the soft whisper of the snow underfoot.

No noise encompassed the Brothers as they sped swiftly side by side
over the glittering white carpet, save for the slither of the snow
under their weight.

All the wild seemed to be standing still, holding its breath, looking
on, spell-bound; and save for the occasional crash of a collapsing
snow-laden branch, sounding magnified as in a cave, all the forest
about there was as still as death.

Half-an-hour passed, and Gulo flung his head around, glancing over his
shoulder a little uneasily, but with never a trace of fear in his
bloodshot eyes.  Then he grunted, and the two fell apart silently and
instantly, gradually getting farther and farther from each other on a
diverging course, till his wife faded out among the trees.  But never
for an instant did either of them check that tireless, deceptive,
clumsy, rolling slouch, that slid the trees behind, as telegraph-poles
slide behind the express carriage window.

Half-an-hour passed, and one of the Brothers, peering up and along the
trail a little anxiously, saw the forking of the line ahead.  Then he
grunted, and the two promptly separated without a word, gradually
increasing the distance between them on the widening fork till they
were lost to each other among the marshaled trunks.  But never for an
instant did they relax that swift, ghostly glide on the wonderful ski,
that slid the snow underfoot as a racing motor spins over the ruts.

An hour passed.  Sweat was breaking out in beads upon the faces of the
Brothers, now miles apart, but both going in the same general direction
over the endless wastes of snow, and upon their faces was beginning to
creep the look of that pain that strong men unbeaten feel who see a
beating in sight; but never for a moment did they slacken their swift,
mysterious glide.

An hour passed.  Foam began to fleck the evilly up-lifted lips
glistening back to the glistening fangs of the wolverines, now miles
apart, but still heading in the same general line, and upon their faces
began to set a look of fiends under torture; but never for a moment did
they check their indescribable shuffling slouch.

After that all was a nightmare, blurred and horrible, in which endless
processions of trees passed dimly, interspersed with aching blanks of
dazzling white that blinded the starting eyes, and man and beast
stumbled more than once as they sobbed along, forcing each leg forward
by sheer will alone.

At last, on the summit of a hog-backed, bristling ridge, Gulo stopped
and looked back, scowling and peering under his low brows.  Beneath
him, far away, the valley lay like a white tablecloth, all dotted with
green pawns, and the pawns were trees.  But he was not looking for
them.  His keen eyes were searching for movement, and he saw it after a
bit, a dot that crept, and crept, and crept, and--_stopped_!

Gulo sat up, shading his eyes against the watery sun with his forepaws,
watching as perhaps he had never watched in his life before.

For a long, long while, it seemed to him, that dot remained there
motionless, far, far away down in the valley, and then at length,
slowly, so slowly that at first the movement was not perceptible, it
turned about and began to creep away--creep, creep, creep away by the
trail it had come.

Gulo watched it till it was out of sight, fading round a bend of the
hills into a dark, dotted blur that was woods.  Then he dropped on all
fours, and breathed one great, big, long, deep breath.  That dot was
the one of the Brothers that had been hunting him.

And almost at the same moment, five miles away, his wife had just
succeeded in swimming a swift and ice-choked river.  She was standing
on the bank, watching another dot emerge into the lone landscape, and
that dot was the other one of the Brothers.

They had failed to avenge the reindeer, and the wolverines were safe.
Safe?  Bah!  Wild creatures are never safe.  Nature knows better than
that, since by safety comes degeneration.

There was a warning--an instant's rustling hissing in the air
above--less than an instant's.  But that was all, and for the first
time in his life--perhaps because he was tired, fagged--Gulo failed to
take it.  And you must never fail to take a warning if you are a wild
creature, you know!  There are no excuses in Nature.

Retribution was swift.  Gulo yelled aloud--and he was a dumb beast,
too, as a rule, but I guess the pain was excruciating--as a hooked
stiletto, it appeared, stabbed through fur, through skin, deep down
through flesh, right into his back, clutching, gripping vise-like.
Another stiletto, hooked, too, worse than the first one, beat at his
skull, tore at his scalp, madly tried to rip out his eyes.  Vast
overshadowing pinions--as if they were the wings of Azrael--hammered in
his face, smothering him, beating him down.

Ah, but I have seen some fights, yet never such a fight as that; and
never again do I want to see such a fight as the one between Gulo and
the golden eagle that made a mistake in his pride of power.

All the awful, cruel, diabolical, clever, devilish, and yet almost
human fury that was in that old brute of a Gulo flamed out in him at
that moment, and he fought as they fight who go down to hell.  It was
frightful.  It was terrifying.  Heaven alone knows what the eagle
thought he had got his claws into.  It was like taking hold of a flash
of forked lightning by the point.  It was--great!

Still, flight _is_ flight, and lifting-power is lifting-power.  Gulo,
even Gulo, could not get over that.  He could not stop those vast vans
from flapping; and as they flapped they rose, the eagle rose,
he--though it was like the skinning of his back alive--rose too,
wriggling ignominiously, raging, foaming, snapping, kicking, but--he
rose.

Slowly, very slowly, the great bird lifted his terrible prey up and
up--ten, twenty, thirty, forty feet, but no higher.  That was the limit
of his lift, the utmost of his strength; and at that height parallel
with the ridge, he began to carry the wolverine along, the wolverine
that was going mad with rage in his grasp.

It was a mistake, of course--a mistake for the wolverine to be out on
the open ridge in stark daylight; another mistake for the eagle,
presuming on his fine, lustful pride of strength, to attack him.

And then suddenly Gulo got his chance.  It hit him bang in the face,
nearly blinding him as it passed--the tree-top.  Like lightning Gulo's
jaws clashed shut upon it, his claws gripped, and--he thought his back
was going to come off whole.  But he stuck it.  He was not called Gulo
the Indomitable for nothing.  And the eagle stopped too.  He had to,
for he would not let go; nor would Gulo.

An awful struggle followed, in the middle of which the pine-top broke,
gave way, and, before either seemed to know quite what was happening,
down they both came, crashing from branch to branch, to earth.

The fall broke the king of the birds' hold, but not the fighting fury
of the most hated of all the beasts.  He rose up, half-blind, almost
senseless, but mad with rage beyond any conception of fury, did old
Gulo, and he hurled himself upon that eagle.

What happened then no man can say.  There was just one furious mix-up
of whirling, powdered snow, that hung in the air like a mist, out of
which a great pinion, a clawing paw, a snapping beak, a flash of fangs,
a skinny leg and clutching, talons, a circling bushy tail appeared and
vanished in flashes, to the accompaniment of stupendous flappings and
abominably wicked growls.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

That night the lone wolf, scouting along the ridge-top, stopped to
sniff intelligently at the scattered, torn eagle's feathers lying about
in the trampled snow, at the blood, at the one skinny, mailed, mightily
taloned claw still clutching brown-black, rusty fur and red skin; at
the unmistakable flat-footed trail of Gulo, the wolverine, leading away
to the frowning, threatening blackness of the woods.  He could
understand it all, that wolf.  Indeed, it was written there quite
plainly for such as could read.  He read, and he passed on.  He did not
follow Gulo's bloody trail.  No--oh, dear, no!  Probably, quite
probably, he had met Gulo the Indomitable before, and--was not that
enough?




II

BLACKIE AND CO.

Blackie flung himself into the fight like a fiery fiend cut from coal.
He did not know what the riot was about--and cared less.  He only knew
that the neutrality of his kingdom was broken.  Some one was fighting
over his borders; and when fighting once begins, you never know where
it may end!  (This is an axiom.)  Therefore he set himself to stop it
at once, lest worse should befall.

He found two thrushes apparently in the worst stage of d.t.'s.  One was
on his back; the other was on the other's chest.  Both were in a
laurel-bush, half-way up, and apparently they kept there, and did not
fall, through a special dispensation of Providence.  Both fought like
ten devils, _and both sang_.  That was the stupefying part, the song.
It was choked, one owns; it was inarticulate, half-strangled with rage,
but still it _was_ song.

A cock-chaffinch and a hen-chaffinch were perched on two twigs higher
up, and were peering down at the grappling maniacs.  Also two blue
titmice had just arrived to see what was up, and a sparrow and one
great tit were hurrying to the spot--all on Blackie's "beat," on
Blackie's very own hunting-ground.  Apparently a trouble of that kind
concerned everybody, or everybody thought it did.

Blackie arrived upon the back of the upper and, presumably, winning
thrush with a bang that removed that worthy to the ground quite
quickly, and in a heap.  The second thrush fetched up on a lower
branch, and by the time the first had ceased to see stars he had
apparently regained his sanity.  He beheld Blackie above him, and fled.
Perhaps he had met Blackie, professionally, before, I don't know.  He
fled, anyway, and Blackie helped him to flee faster than he bargained
for.

By the time Blackie had got back, the first thrush was sitting on a
branch in a dazed and silly condition, like a fowl that has been waked
up in the night.  Blackie presented him with a dig gratis from his
orange dagger, and he nearly fell in fluttering to another branch.  And
Blackie flew away, chuckling.  He knew that, so far as that thrush was
concerned, there would be no desire to see any more fighting for some
time.

But, all the same, Blackie was not pleased.  He was worked off his feet
providing rations for three ugly youngsters in a magnificently designed
and exquisitely worked and interwoven edifice, interlined with rigid
cement of mud, which we, in an off-hand manner, simply dismiss as "A
nest."  The young were his children; they might have been
white-feathered angels with golden wings, by the value he put on them.
The thrush episode was only a portent, and not the first.  He had no
trouble with the other feathered people he tolerated on his beat.

Blackie went straight to the lawn.  (Jet and orange against deep green
was the picture.)

Now, if you and I had searched that dry lawn with magnifying-glasses,
in the heat of the sun, there and then, we should not have found a
single worm, not the hint or the ghost of one; yet that bird took three
long, low hops, made some quick motion with his beak--I swear it never
seemed to touch the ground, even, let alone dig---executed a kind of
jump in the air--some say he used his legs in the air--and there he was
with a great, big, writhing horror of a worm as big as a snake (some
snakes).

Thrushes bang their worms about to make them see sense and give in;
they do it many times.  Blackie banged his giant only a little once or
twice, and then not savagely, like a thrush.  Also, again, he may or
may not have used his feet.  Moreover, he gave up two intervals to
surveying the world against any likely or unlikely stalking death.  Yet
that worm shut up meekly in most unworm-like fashion, and Blackie cut
it up into pieces.  The whole operation took nicely under sixty seconds.

Blackie gave no immediate explanation why he had reduced his worm to
sections.  It did not seem usual.  Instead, he eyed the hedge, eyed the
sky, eyed the surroundings.  Nothing seemed immediately threatening,
and he hopped straight away about three yards, where instantly, he
conjured another and a smaller worm out of nowhere.  With this
unfortunate horror he hopped back to the unnice scene of the first
worm's decease, and carved that second worm up in like manner.  Then he
peeked up all the sections of both worms, packing them into his beak
somehow, and flew off.  And the robin who was watching him didn't even
trouble to fly down to the spot and see if he had left a joint behind.
He knew his blackbird, it seemed.

Blackie flew away to his nest, but not to a nest in a hedge.  To dwell
in a hedge was a rule of his clan, but the devil a rule did he obey.
Nests in hedges for other blackbirds, perhaps.  He, or his wife, had
different notions.  Wherefore flew he away out into the grass field
behind the garden.  Men had been making excavations there, for what mad
man-purpose troubled him not--digging a drain or something.  No matter.

Into the excavation he slipped---very, very secretly, so that nobody
could have seen him go there--and down to the far end, where, twelve
feet below the surface, on a ledge of wood, where the sides were shored
with timber, his mate had her nest.  Here he delivered over his carved
joints to the three ugly creatures which he knew as his children and
thought the world of, and appeared next flying low and quickly back to
the garden.  That is to say, he had contrived to slip from the nest so
secretly that that was the first time he showed.

A sparrow-hawk, worried with a family of her own, took occasion to
chase him as he flew, and he arrived in among the young lime-trees that
backed the garden, switchbacking--that was one of his tricks of escape,
made possible by a long tail--and yelling fit to raise the world.  The
sparrow-hawk's skinny yellow claw, thrust forward, was clutching thin
air an inch behind his central tail-feathers, but that was all she got
of him--just thin air.  There was no crash as he hurled into the green
maze; but she, failing to swerve exactly in time, made a mighty crash,
and retired somewhat dazed, thankful that she retained two whole wings
to fly with.  There is no room for big-winged sparrow-hawks in close
cover, anyway, and Blackie, who was born to the leafy green ways, knew
that.

Blackie's yells had called up, as if by magic, a motley crowd of
chaffinches, hedge-sparrows, wrens, robins, &c., from nowhere at all,
and they could be seen whirling in skirmishing order--not too
close--about the retreating foe.  Blackie himself needed no more
sparrow-hawk for a bit, and preferred to sit and look on.  If the
little fools chose to risk their lives in the excitement of mobbing,
let them.  His business was too urgent.

Twenty lightning glances around seemed to show that no death was on the
lurk near by.  Also, a quick inspection of other birds' actions--he
trusted to them a good deal--appeared to confirm this.

Then he flew down to the lawn, and almost immediately had a worm by the
tail.  Worms object to being so treated, and this one protested
vigorously.  Also, when pulled, they may come in halves.  So Blackie
did not pull _too_ much.  He jumped up, and, while he was in the air,
scraped the worm up with his left foot, or it may have been both feet.
The whole thing was done in the snap of a finger, however, almost too
quickly to be seen.

The worm, once up, was a dead one.  Blackie seemed to kill it so
quickly as almost to hide the method used.  In a few seconds more it
was a carved worm in three or four pieces--an unnice sight, but far
more amenable to reason that way.

Blackie was in rather long grass, and nerve-rackingly helpless, by the
same token.  He could not see anything that was coming.  Wherefore
every few seconds he had to stand erect and peer over the grass-tops.
It made no difference to the worm, however; it was carved just the same.

Blackie now hopped farther on in search of more worms, but found a big
piece of bread instead.  It was really the hen-chaffinch who found the
bread, and he who commandeered it from her.  Now he disclosed one fact,
and that was that bread would do for his children as well as worms.
Anyhow, he stuffed his beak about half up with bread, returned for the
pieces of worm, collected these, and retired up into the black cover of
a fir-tree.

No doubt he was expected to go right home with that load, then and
there.  Even a cock-blackbird with young, however, must feed, and, if
one judged by the excess amount of energy--if that were possible--used
up, must feed more than usual.  That seemed to be why he hid his whole
load in the crook of a big bough, and, returning to the lawn, ate
bread--he could wait to catch no worms for his own use, it appeared--as
fast as he could.  Three false alarms sent him precipitantly into his
tree upon this occasion, and one real alarm--a passing boy--caused a
fourth retreat.

These operations were not performed in a moment, and by the time he got
back to his nest--mind, he had to contrive to approach it so that he
was seen by nobody, and his was a conspicuous livery, too--his children
appeared to be in the last stages of exhaustion.  That, however, is
young birds all over; they expect their parents to be mere
feeding-machines, guaranteed to produce so many meals to the hour, and
hang the difficulties and the risks.

There was no sign of Blackie's wife.  Presumably she was working just
as hard on her own "beat" as he had been on his--their hunting-grounds
were separate, though they joined--and would soon be back.

Blackie did not wait.  He managed again the miracle of getting away
from his nest without appearing to do so, and next turned up on the
summer-house roof.  Fatherlike, he thought he had done enough for a
bit, and would enjoy a "sunning reaction" on the summerhouse roof.  It
was rather a good place, a look-out tower from which he could slip over
the side into the hedges, which met at the corner where it was, if
trouble turned up.

Trouble did turn up, but not quite what he had expected.  He had been
sitting there, wing-stretching, leg-stretching, and "preening" his
feathers, and had finally left off just to sit and do nothing,
when--lo! his wife popped up over the side without warning, and right
upon him.

She was very dark brown, not black, and had a paler throat than the
palish throat of most hen blackbirds--nearly white, in fact.  She said
nothing.  Nor did Blackie, but he looked very uncomfortable.  She did
more than say nothing.  She went for him, beak first, and very angrily
indeed; and he, not waiting to receive her, fled down to the lawn, and
began worm-hunting for dear life.  A whole lecture could not have said
more.

Mrs. Blackie remained on the roof for about a minute, looking round,
and then flew off to her own hunting-ground.  She was wilder and less
trusting of the world than Blackie, and did not care for his lawn in
full view of the house windows.  And Blackie did not even stop his work
to watch her go.  Apparently they had, previously in their married
life, arrived at a perfect understanding.

This time, too, Blackie got a big and a small worm.  The small he
coiled like a rope, and held up towards the base of his beak; the big
he carved up into sections, which he held more towards the tip.  The
large ones, it seemed, were too awkward and lively simply to carry off
rolled up whole.

The journey that followed was a fearful one in Blackie's life, for he
met half-way the very last foe in the world he was expecting--namely,
an owl.  Truly, it was a very small owl, scarce bigger than himself;
but it was an owl, and, like all its tribe, armed to the teeth.  Men
called it a little owl.  That was its name--little owl.  Blackie didn't
care what men called it; he knew it only as one of the hundred or so
shapes that death assumed for his benefit.

Just at that time it happened to be cloudy, and little owls often hunt
by day.  But how was Blackie to know that, little owls being a
comparatively new introduction into those parts?

Blackie screamed and fled.  The owl did not scream, but fled,
too--after Blackie.  Blackie had no means of judging how close _that_
foe was behind by the whir of its wings.  Owls' wings don't talk, as a
rule; they have a patent silencer, so to speak, in the fluffy-edged
feathers.  Therefore Blackie was forced to do his best in breaking the
speed record, and trust to luck.

It was a breathless and an awful few seconds, and it seemed to him like
a few hours.  The owl came up behind, going like a cloud-shadow, and
about as fast, and Blackie, glancing over his shoulder, I suppose,
yelled afresh.  The terror was so very close.

Then Blackie remembered another excavation, just like the one his nest
was in, a little off his course to the left, and he tacked towards it,
twisting his course wonderfully, thanks to the long tail.  And the owl
lost a foot on the turn.  I think it was expecting Blackie to make for
the hedge at all costs.  But, be that as it may, that foot was never
made up again, for Blackie vanished into the trench next instant, like
a blown-out light, and, though the hunter searched for him carefully,
he never put in an appearance again while that owl was within sight of
the place.

[Illustration: "The owl lost a foot on the turn"]

All signs of uproar on the passing of the little owl had died down some
time before Blackie turned up again, and then it was in the garden, so
he must have got from the tunnel unseen.

He still hung gamely to the food for his young, and now made another
attempt to deliver that food where it belonged.  He was half-way there,
indeed, before he saw the boys--three boys--with two rows of birds'
eggs threaded on strings.  They were passing so close to the trench
that one nearly fell into it, and, of course, any one could see that
they were bird-nesting.

Blackie swerved off sharply to the far hedge, his heart nearly bursting
with anxiety, little knowing that the boys had never even thought of
looking in the trench for nests.  It seemed the last place in the world
to find one.  It may have been, moreover, that he feared that his wife
was home, in which case she might have lost her head, and, dashing out
with a scream, "blown the whole gaff," as they say in the vernacular.

Apparently madam was not at home, by good luck, for the boys passed,
and Blackie once more executed the magic of getting into his nest
without seeming to do so.  And here he stayed.  Dusk was setting in,
and his young were fourteen days old.  They showed it in their
disobedience, and were not in the least inclined to keep as quiet as
they should, considering their father had but just warned them, in his
own way, to "lie doggo," because of the gray shape he had seen sliding
out into the field, a gray shape which was a cat.

They were more like thrushes than blackbirds, those youngsters, with
their speckly fawn breasts; and they were not like the adults of either
in their frog-like attitudes and heavy ways.  Frankly, they were not
beautiful, even at that stage; and a fortnight before, when they had
been larger than the eggs they had come out of, they were positively
reptilian and repulsive.

Blackie said the blackbird equivalent to "Be quiet, you little fools!"
as quietly and as sternly as he could three or four times, and perched
on the top of a wheelbarrow to watch the gray shadow which was a cat.
That sudden death, however, was more afraid of the open than Blackie,
even, and, moreover, wasn't expecting blackbirds' nests in the middle
of fields.  It turned back; and at length Mrs. Blackie, who had been on
a general survey round about to see what foes of the night were on the
move--and a fine hubbub she had made in the process--came home,
reporting all well.

Then they slept; at least, they ceased to be any further seen or heard.
Think, however, how you would sleep if every few minutes you could hear
sounds in your house one-third of which were probably the noises of a
burglar.  Think, also, how you would feel if you knew that that burglar
was a murderer, and that that murderer was, in all likelihood, looking
for you, or some one just like you.  Yet those birds were happy enough,
I fancy.

It was barely pale gray.  It was cold and wan and washed, and
wonderfully clean and sweet, and wet with dews, when a lark climbed
invisibly into the sky and suddenly burst into song, next morning.
There was something strange and out of place, in a way, in this song,
breaking out of the night; and as it and another continued to break the
utter silence for ten minutes, it seemed rather as if it were still
night, and not really dawn at all.  Dawn appeared to be waiting for
something else to give it authority, so to speak, and at the end of ten
minutes that something else came--the slim form of Blackie, streaking,
phantom-like, through the mist from the trench out in the field to the
summer-house in the garden.  Here, mounted upon the very top, he stood
for a moment, as one clearing his throat before blowing a bugle, and
then, full, rich, deep, and flute-like, he lazily gave out the first
bars of his song.  Instantly, almost as if it had been a signal, a
great tit-mouse sang out, "Tzur ping-ping! tzur ping-ping!" in
metallic, ringing notes; a thrush struck in with his brassy, clarion
challenge, thrush after thrush taking it up, till, with the clear
warble of robin and higher, squeaking notes of hedge-sparrow and wren
joining in, the wonderful first bars of the Dawn Hymn of the birds
rolled away over the fields to the faraway woods, and beyond.

Blackie sang on for a bit, in spite of the fact that people said that
it was not considered "the thing" for a blackbird with such domestic
responsibilities to sing.  And two other blackbirds helped him to break
the man-made rule.

As a matter of fact, I fancy he was not taking chances upon the ground
while the mist hung to cover late night prowlers, for as soon as the
gay and gaudy chaffinches had stuck themselves up in the limes and the
sycamores, and started their own smashing idea of song, he was down
upon the lawn giving the early worm a bad time.

Then it was that he heard a rumpus that shot him erect, and sent his
extraordinarily conspicuous orange dagger of a beak darting from side
to side in that jerky way of listening that many birds affect.

"Twet-twet-et-et-et! twet! twet-twet-twet-et-et-twet!" came the
unmistakable voice of one in a temper, scolding loudly.  And he knew
that scold--had heard it before, by Jove!  And who should know it if
not he, since it was the voice of his wife?

Perhaps he heaved a sigh as he rose from the deliciously cool, wet
lawn--where it was necessary to take long, high hops if you wanted to
avoid getting drenched--and winged his way towards the riot.  His wife
was calling him, and it came from the other side of the garden, _her_
side, behind the house.  Perhaps it was a cat, or a rat, or something.
Anything, almost, would set her on like that if experience, plus the
experience of blackbirds for hundreds of generations working blindly in
her brain--and not the experience of books--had taught her that the
precise creature whom she saw was a danger and a menace to young
blackbirds.

All the same, when Blackie arrived he _was_ surprised, for all that he
saw was a grayish bird with "two lovely black eyes," not by any means
as large as a blackbird.  When it flew it kept low, with a weak and
peculiar flight that was deceiving; and when Mrs. Blackie, following
it, and yelling like several shrews, got too close, it turned its head,
and said, "Wark! wark!" in a harsh and warning way.

Blackie joined in with his deeper "Twoit-twoit-twoit!" just by way of
lending official dignity to the proceedings.  Whereupon his wife,
feeling that he had backed her up, redoubled her excitement and shrill
abuse.

And they spent two solid hours at this fool's game, helped by a robin,
a blue tit, and a chaffinch or two--the chaffinch must have his finger
in every pie--following that gray bird from nowhere, while it moved
about the garden in its shuffling flight, or alternately sat and
scowled at them.  But it must be admitted that Blackie himself looked
rather bored, and might have gone off for breakfast any time, if he had
dared.

As a matter of fact, however, the bird did not stand upon the Register
of Bad Deeds as being a terror of even the mildest kind of blackbirds.
Red-backed shrike was her name, female was her sex, and from Africa had
she come.  Goodness knows where she was going, but not far, probably;
and the largest thing in the bird line she appeared able to tackle was
something of the chaffinch size.  But, all the same, Mrs. Blackie
seemed jolly well certain that she knew better.

Then arrived the bombshell.

One of the Blackie youngsters, stump-tailed, frog-mouthed, blundering,
foolish, gawky, and squawking, landed, all of a heap, right into the
very middle of the picnic-party.

Mrs. Blackie very nearly had a fit on the spot, and the shrike judged
that the time had about arrived for her to quit that vicinity.

Blackie himself, to do him justice, kept cool enough to do nothing.
Wives will say that he was just husband all over, but there were
reasons abroad.  One of them shot past Blackie, who was low down, a
second later and a yard away, and had he not been absolutely still, and
therefore as invisible as one of the most conspicuous of birds in the
wild can be, he would have known in that instant, or the next, what
lies upon the other side of death.

Another reason shot through the lower hedge, and, both together, they
fell upon the young bird.

They were the cat of the house and her half-grown kitten, and they were
upon the unhappy youngster before you could shout, "Murder!"

What followed was painful.  Mrs. Blackie went clean demented.  Blackie
went--not so demented.  (It always appeared to me that his was a more
practical mind than his wife's, perhaps because he wore a more
conspicuous livery.)  Mrs. Blackie kept passing and repassing the cats'
backs, flying from bough to bough, and sometimes touching and sometimes
not touching them.  It was useless, of course, this pathetic charging;
and it was foolish.

Blackie charged, too, but not within feet.

Suddenly the old cat, who had had one eye upon Mrs. Blackie the whole
time, sprang up and struck quickly twice.  There was a chain of shrieks
from Mrs. Blackie, and down she went in the grip of the clawed death.
She never got up again.

What had happened was simple enough.  One of the laborers working on
the trench, knowing of the nest, had, out of curiosity, approached a
little too close, when the bevy of youngsters, being ready to fly, but
not knowing it before this great fright, burst apart at his approach
like a silent cannon cracker.  The fear showed them they could use
their wings.

All three had made, flying low and weakly, for the nearest hedge, which
was the garden hedge--two to the side which comprised their father's
hunting-ground, and one to the side dominated by their ma.  And the old
cat and her kitten had seen them coming, and had given chase.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

Blackie discovered his remaining progeny sitting about in bushes,
squawking, a few minutes later, when he returned, somewhat agitated to
his precious lawn, and there he promptly proceeded to feed them.  The
task was such a large one, and took so long, and so many worms had to
be cut up, and so much bread, and, I may say, when all else failed, so
many daisies had to be picked, before he finally silenced their
ceaseless, craving remarks, that, by the time he had finished feeding
himself and had a clean up, something of the pain of the tragedy had
gone from him.

And fine fat blackbirds he made of those youngsters, too, in the end, I
want to tell you, for he stuck to 'em like a brick.




III

UNDER THE YELLOW FLAG

A little past noon each day the sun covered a crack between two boards
on the summer-house floor, and up through that aperture, for three
days, had come a leggy, racy-looking, wolfish black spider.  Each day,
as it grew hotter, she extended her sphere of jerky investigation,
vanishing down the crack again when the sun passed from it.

To-day she prolonged her roamings right up the wall of the summer-house
and along a joist bare of all save dust, and--well, the spider walked
straight on, moving with little jerks as if by intermittent clockwork,
and she seemed to stroll right on top of the wasp lying curled up on
her side.  Only when one of the latter's delicate feelers shifted round
towards her, as though in some uncanny way conscious of her approach,
did she leap back as if she had touched an electric wire.  Then she
froze--flat.  The wasp was lying curled up, as we have said, upon her
side, her head tucked in, her wings drawn down, her jaws tight shut
upon a splinter of wood.  She had been there half-a-year, asleep,
hibernating, and in that state, without any other protection than the
summer-house roof and walls, had survived the frosts of winter.

The wasp did not move further.

The spider appeared to be taking things in, measuring her chances,
weighing the risk against her famished hunger--possibly her late
husband had been her last meal, months ago--marking the vital spot upon
her prey, aiming for the shot, which must be true, for one does not
miss in attacking a wasp--and live.  Only, she would not have risked it
at all, perhaps, if the wasp had seemed alive, or more alive, at any
rate.

Then came the shot--one cannot in justice call it a spring; it was too
instant to be termed that.  The spider simply was upon the wasp without
seeming to go there; but the wasp was not there, or, rather, her vital
spot wasn't.  She had kicked herself round on her side, like a
cart-wheel, lying flat, with her feet, and the spider's jaws struck
only hard cuirass.  Before the spider, leaping back, wolf-like, could
lunge in her lightning second stroke, the wasp was on her feet, a live
thing, after all.

The warmth had been already soaking the message of spring into her
cold-drugged brain, and now this sudden attack had finished what the
warmth had begun.  She was awake, on her feet, a live and dangerous
proposition; groggy, it is true; dazed, half-working, so to speak; but
a force to be reckoned with--after half-a-year.  And one saw, too, at a
glance that she was different from ordinary wasps--would make two, in
fact, of any ordinary wasp; and her great jaws looked as if they could
eat one and comfortably deal with more; whilst her dagger-sting, now
unsheathed and ready--probably for the first time--could deliver a
wound twice as deep and deadly as the ordinary wasp.  She was, in
short, a queen-wasp; a queen of the future, if Fate willed; a queen as
yet without a kingdom, a sovereign uncrowned, but of regal proportions
and queenly aspect, for all that; for in the insect world royalties are
fashioned upon a super-standard that marks them off from the common
herd.

The spider hesitated.  She knew the danger of the stripes of
yellow--the yellow flag, so to speak.  The fear of it is upon every
insect that lives.  At the same time, the queen was undoubtedly yet
numb.

Antagonists decide in the insect world like a flash of light, and quick
as thought they act.  The spider attacked now so quickly that she
seemed to have vanished, and she met--jaws.  Back she shot, circled,
shot in again, and she met--sting!

It was never clear whether that sting went home.  The spider did.  She
fell--fell plump to the floor, only not breaking what spiders have in
place of a neck because of the fact that, being a spider, she never
moved anywhere, not even upon a spring, without anchoring a line of web
down first.  Therefore, an inch from the ground, she fetched up with a
jerk upon the line that she had anchored up on the joist, spun round,
let herself drop the rest of the way, and ran into the crack between
the boards of the floor.  Goodness knows if she lived.

The wasp, with that extremely droll, lugubrious look on her long,
mask-like face which makes the faces of insects so funny and uncanny,
like pantomime masks, sat down as if nothing had happened, apparently
to scheme out the best way to possess herself of a kingdom and become a
queen in fact as well as in name.  Really, she was cleaning
herself--combing her antennae with her forelegs, provided with bristle
hairs for the purpose, scraping and polishing her wings, as if they did
not already shine like mother-o'-pearl, and washing her quaint face.

She was still rather groggy from the effects of her long sleep and the
cold endured--it is a wonder how she had stood the latter at all--and
when, with a subdued inward sort of hum, she finally launched herself
in flight, she nearly fell to the ground before righting herself and
flying in a zigzag heavily across the lawn.

A cock-chaffinch up in the limes saw her, and condescending at last to
break his song, described a flashing streak of wine-red breast and
white wing-bars in the sun.  He appeared to recognize her sinister
yellow shield in time, however, and returned to his perch with a
flourish, leaving the wasp to go on and begin dancing up the wall of
the house till she came to the open window.  Here she vanished within.

The sunlight sat on the floor of the room inside, and the baby sat in
the sunlight; and the wasp, apparently still half-awake, went, or,
rather, nearly tumbled, and sat beside the baby.

They made an odd picture there--the golden sun, the sunny,
golden-headed baby, and that silent, yellow she-devil, crawling,
crawling, crawling, with her narrow wings gleaming like gems.

Then the child put out her chubby hand to seize that bright-yellow
object--how was she to know that it was the yellow signal of danger in
the insect world that she saw?  And, of course, being a baby, she was
going to stuff it into her mouth.  But Fate had use for that
wasp--perhaps for that baby.  Wherefore there was a little scream, a
pair of woman's arms swept down and whisked that baby into the air, and
a high-heeled shoe whisked the astonished wasp into a corner.  Here she
swore savagely, vibrating her head with tremendous speed in the
process, rose heavily and menacingly, made to fly out, hit the upper
window, which was shut, and which she could not see, but felt, and fell
to the floor again, where she apparently had brain-fever, buzzing round
and round on her back like a top the while.

And then, rising suddenly, the queen flew away, hitting nothing in the
process, but getting through the lower and open part of the window.
She seemed anxious to make sure of not getting into the house again.
She flew right away, rising high to top the garden hedge, and dropping
low on the far side, to buzz and poke about in and out, up along the
hedge-bank that bordered the hayfield.

She flew as one looking for something, and every insect in her way took
jolly good care--in the shape of scintillating streaks and dashes--to
get out of it.  The mere sight of that yellow-banded cuirass shining in
the sun was apparently quite enough for them--most of them, anyway.  As
a matter of fact, she was looking for a site for a city.  She had
ambition, and would found her a city, a city of her very own, with
generous streets at right angles, on the American plan; and she would
be queen of it.  It was a big idea, and we should have said an
impossible one, seeing that at that moment she was the city and its
population and its queen all rolled into one, so to speak.
Queen-wasps, however, also on the American plan, ruled the word
"impossible" out of their dictionary long ago.  They "attempt the end,
and never stand to doubt."

The queen came to rest on a bare patch of ground an front of a hole,
and a black and hairy spider, with two hindlegs missing on the offside,
spun round in the entrance of that hole to face her.  He had not been
noticeable until he moved.

She left him in a hurry, and thereafter resumed her endless searching
along the hedge-bank.  A dozen times she vanished into a hole, and,
after a minute or so, came out again with the air of one dissatisfied.
Half-a-dozen times she came out tail first, buzzing warnings and very
angry, at the invitation of a bumble-bee queen, a big, hook-jawed,
carnivorous beetle in shining mail, and so forth, but she never lost
her head.

Finally, she came to a mole-hole that suited her.  The other burrows
had all turned out to be field-mouse holes, leading ultimately into a
main tunnel that ran the whole length of the hedge apparently, and was
a public way for all the little whiskered ones.  But this tunnel, bored
by the miner mole, ran nowhither, having caved in not far from the
entrance, and was very sound of construction, with a nice dry slope.
She selected a wide spot where the tunnel branched, each branch forming
a _cul-de-sac_.  Here she slew swiftly several suspicious-looking
little tawny beetles and one field-cricket, who put up a rare good
fight for it, found loafing about the place.

It pleased the queen that here, in this spot, she would found her a
city.  But first she must, as it were, take the latitude and the
longitude of this her stronghold to be.  She must know where her city
was, must make absolutely dead sure, certain, of finding it again when
she went out.  Otherwise, if she lost it--well, there would be an end
to it before it had begun, so to speak.  For this purpose, therefore,
she rose slowly, humming to herself some royal incantation--rose, upon
a gradually widening corkscrew spiral, into the air.

She was, in point of fact, surveying the district round her capital to
be, marking each point--bush, stone, grass-tuft, tree-trunk,
flower-cluster, clod, branch, anything and everything, great and
small--and jotting down in indelible memory fluid, upon whatever she
kept for a brain, just precisely the position of every landmark.  And
as she rose her circles ever widened, so that at last her big compound
eyes took in quite a big stretch of sunlit picture, to be photographed
upon her memory, and there remain forevermore.

It took her some time, for it was some job; but once done, it was done
for good.

Next, alighting with great hustle--now that the work was once
begun--the queen ran into her tunnel, and made sure that nobody had
"jumped her claim" in the interval.  She found an ant, red and
ravenous, taking too professional an interest in the place, and she
abolished that ant with one nip; though, as you may be sure, the tiny
insect fought like a bulldog.

Then she executed a shallow excavation upon the site of the future city
itself, carrying each pellet of earth outside beyond the entrance.
This also took time, though she worked at fever-pitch, almost with
fury; but she managed to finish it, and fly away into the landscape in
a remarkably short while, considering.

Here once again she appeared to be searching for something through the
yellow sunshine and the falling blossom-petals--confetti from Spring's
wedding.  And presently she found it, or seemed to--an old gate, off
its hinges.  But the wood was rotting, and she was no fool.  She knew
her job--the job she had never done before, by the way--and after
humming around it in a fretful, undecided sort of fashion for some
while, she flew on.  Apparently she was looking for wood, but not _any_
wood.  Cut wood appeared to be her desire, and that oak; at least, she
put behind her a deal board lying half-overgrown, after one careful
professional inspection.

Her way was through a perilous world, beset by a thousand foes, mostly
in the nature of traps and lines and barbed-wire entanglements set by
spiders.  As a rule you didn't see these last at all--nor did she; but
her yellow-and-black badge usually won her a way of respect--and
hate--and she cut or struggled herself clear of such web-lines as her
feelers failed to spot in time.

At last she found some real oak rails, and set to work upon them at
once, planing with her sharp shear-jaws.  A tiger-beetle, gaudy and
hungry-eyed, sought to pounce upon her in this task.  He was
long-legged, and keen, and lean, and very swift; but she shot aloft
just in time; and when she came down again, with a z-zzzzp, as quickly
as she went up, sting first, he had wisely dodged into a cranny, where
he defied her with open and jagged jaws.

Again getting to work, she planed off a pellet of good sound wood--it
looked like a nail-scrape, the mark she made--and masticating it and
moistening it with saliva, whirred back like a homing aeroplane to her
city in the making.

There was a whir and a buzz as she passed through the portals of her
main gate from the light of day, and she reappeared again, backing out,
"looking daggers," as we say, and brandishing her poisoned dart--her
sting, if you insist, on the end of her tail--in the air.  But she
still hung on to her pellet.

Presumably some unlucky visitor had called in her absence.  More sounds
of concentrated argument followed, and finally there fell out, rather
than rushed out, a small and amazingly slender black wasp, one of those
hermits who seem to consecrate their lives to lonely working for a
family they never see.  This unhappy one slid down the bank, curled up
at the bottom, uncurled, curled up again, and--remained curled.
Apparently _her_ day's work was done, which comes of falling foul of
the yellow flag.

Arrived inside, at her hallowed chamber, our queen carefully selected a
rootlet in the roof--not just any old rootlet, mark you; never any
"old" anything, you will notice, but a good, sound, well-found rootlet
that you could hang five or six pounds' weight to; indeed, three
rootlets before she had finished.  To these rootlets she
fastened--gummed would be a more correct word--her pellet of
wasp-paper, in the form of a thin layer, and hurried away, singing, for
more.  This was, so to speak, the foundation-stone of the city, laid,
be it noticed, not haphazard--our queen never did any business that
way--but with mathematical regard as to what was to follow.  In very
fact, too, it was the foundation-stone of her city, only upside-down,
though that is nothing.  Wasps always do things that way, which is
unlike ants, those other and greater city builders.

Back came the queen very soon with another load, and pasted
that--thin--to the first layer, hurrying, bustling, humming a happy
song continuously to herself.  Then away again for more, and in the
process to a lively battle with a robber-fly, who appeared set upon
robbing her of her blood.  It tried, like the beetle, to stalk her and
pounce upon her back, what time she was planing out wood for
paper-pulp; but her back wasn't there when it pounced, and her jaws
were.  It "waited on," hovering like a falcon, and twice as keen, and
when she got to work again, dropped like a hurled lance-head, only to
be met with jaws, wide and ready, as before.

It went away, watching from afar--far for an insect--from "the little
speedwell's darling blue" upon the hedge-bank, and just as she was
moistening the load, gathered ready to fly off, delivered its final
ultimatum--a marvelously persistent murderer.  This time it, or,
rather, she, was received with the point--the poisoned point--and,
turning like a spent lightning-flash to avoid it, found the queen hard
on her heels, following all down the gay hedge-ditch, humming high, in
nearly a shriek of rage.  Finally, she turned, to do battle for her
life, and the two, grappling, fell as shooting-stars fall, gleaming,
athwart the sun, with a brrr-r like a fused wire, and finished the job,
rolling over and over on the ground--rolling over and over among the
stalks of bluebells, like the heavens "upraising from the earth."

It is written, however, that few in the insect world can withstand a
queen of the yellow devils, and in a few seconds the wasp got up and
flew home again, quite unperturbed.  The robber-fly did not get up, and
she was not quite unperturbed, but died as they die who are poisoned
with formic acid, and very soon was still.

By the time the shadows crept across the entrance to the derelict
mole-hole, warning the wasp back--for your true wasp is a worshiper of
the sun--the queen had formed a disc of paper, and suspended
there-from, in the middle, a stalk, also of paper, which widened out at
its base, and became, as it were, the outlines of four six-sided cells.
The cells were in the shape of a cross--that cross which you will
always find at the foundation of the cities of the waspfolk, and, in a
way, a sign or mark of their nationality--the cross in the
market-square, so to speak, outwards from which the city grew.

The queen, satisfied apparently with her new city so far, hung up and
went to sleep.  When anything or anybody came to prospect for house
lots, or edible victims, during the still, silent, silver night, she
hummed very severely, like an electric fan, to let the intruders know
who she was, and they mostly backed out again in a hurry.  If they took
a step nearer the hum rose an octave, and became very wicked, and that,
so far as most of them were concerned, finished it.

Two, however, there were who would not take even that hint.  One was a
shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead, and next
morning was found running about with his mouth somewhere concealed
behind his ear, if one may be pardoned the expression, in consequence;
and the other was a carnivorous beetle, in black, purple-shot armor,
and armed with jaws toothed like lobsters' claws.  The queen took some
nasty scars from those same jaws before she got home with the poisoned
point, a clean thrust 'twist breastplate and armlet, and the invader
doubled up on the spot where he was, and had to be dragged out in the
morning--not the dawning, for the sun had well stoked up before our
wasp would have anything to do with him.

[Illustration: "A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison
instead"]

She found the day already in full swing when she rose, buzzing, from
her front-gate, late--for wasps hate early morning chill, like Red
Indians--and, circling once, swung straight away.  She jumped into full
hustle right off, you see.  She did not merely work; she superworked.
Forced to short hours by her constitution, she had to make up for it in
the time she got, and she did.  She allowed nothing to stop her.  If
anything tried to, she mostly stopped it, for there was no compromise
about this nation-builder; she reached her goal every time.

It was on this journey that a spotted fly-catcher, sitting on a
gatepost, made a Euclid figure at her in midair as she passed.  She had
not power to fight the bird's beak, and her poison-dagger was useless
here; nor do fly-catchers often miss.  This, however, was an occasion
when one of them did--by an eighth of an inch--and only some
electric-spark-like dodging on the part of the insect in the air made
even that one miss possible.  It was so quick, you could not see what
happened.

That day the cross of cells in this budding city was developed further,
and a low wall built round each cell.  Moreover, more cells were built,
always taking the cross as the center of all things--six-sided cells,
with a low, incomplete wall, or, rather, parapet, partitioning each
off, to the number of about twenty-four cells in all.  Each cell was
closed, of course, at the top, the top being its floor, and open at the
bottom, the bottom being, if I may so put it, the top; for, as has
already been said, wasp cities are built upside-down, and everybody
walks and hangs on his head, being so fitted for the purpose.  If you
don't hang, you tumble straight down into the scooped-out cavity below;
but nobody ever does that till he dies, for that cavity is at once the
cemetery and the refuse-heap and the dust-bin of the city, a haunt of
tiny ghouls--beetle, spider, and fly ghouls--and other loathsome
horrors, the scavengers, hyenas, vultures, and jackals of the wasp
world.

Now, after making the first cell, or, rather, the part cell, with its
low parapet, the queen laid an egg--it was very minute, that
egg--inside the cell, gumming it against the top, on the angle nearest
the center of the city.  It had to be cemented there; otherwise it
would have fallen out.

In the next cell she laid an egg, too, cementing it up to the top in
the same manner--always in the angle nearest the center of the
city--and in the next another egg, and so on, up to the twenty-four or
so.  It is a little doubtful precisely how long she took over the
process, because, for one thing, she made so many journeys backwards
and forwards to get wood-pulp from the rails for paper manufacture--she
used paper for everything; and, for another thing, she began to roof
over the whole affair with a hanging umbrella made of layers of the
finest paper that you ever did see--much finer than that made by the
ordinary common or garden worker-wasp of the jam-pots and the
stewed-fruit dish, for was she not a queen, and therefore not common in
anything she did?--and it became, in consequence, rather hard to see
what she really was "at."  Most of the time that the sky remained
cloudy she used up at this job, and also when there was a shower of
rain, for she hated rain and all shadow and darkness.

Her purpose, in regard to this paper roofing, was to keep out any
possible dripping that might come through the earth roof in wet
weather, and to store up and multiply the heat from her body.  Terrific
heat, to be sure; nevertheless important in the scheme of things.  When
all was completed, this city, this mighty kingdom, measured about one
and a half inches round.

When all was completed, also, the wasp flew out for a drink and a feed.
But first she cleaned.  The most fastidious cat was a grimy tramp in
comparison to her in habits, and in all her spare time--goodness alone
knows how she squeezed in any spare time at all during those hustling
days!--her first, and generally her last, act was to clean.  She could
not afford dirt.  To be dirty, with her, was to die even more quickly
than she would, anyway; for, you see, she did not breathe through her
mouth, but all over herself, so to speak--through her armor, or
hair-like tubes in that same.

From bluebell to cowslip and lily she picked her way, sipping honey and
humming a wicked little hum through her teeth, as it were, and on to
where

  Daisies pied, and violets blue,
  And cuckoo buds of yellow hue,
  And lady-smocks all silver white,
  Do paint the meadows with delight.


Now she toyed with a yellow oxlip, now paused at a purple lungwort; but
most she went into the garden, and hovered, still as a humming-bird,
among the rose-leaves and branches, especially those growing against
the sun-bathed old wooden porch, and for so long that one wondered what
she was doing there.  She was licking up the "honey-dew," which,
translated, is the juice exuded by the plant-lice or "green-fly," which
swarmed all over the rose-trees.  This "honey-dew" was sweet, and in
great demand among such insects as had tastes that way; in fact, the
enterprising ants--who are always a decade ahead of everybody
else--were, in one place, building mud sheds over the said herds of
plant-lice to prevent their precious "honey-dew" being exploited by
others.

Thus a week passed, the queen fussing daily about her embryo city,
adding paper covering here, strengthening a wall there, warning off an
inquisitive insect somewhere else, and adding her heat to the natural
stuffiness of the place, though one would scarcely have thought she
could have made much difference.  At times, too, in the hot sun, she
appeared here or there outside, drinking honey from some flower, or
sipping "honey-dew," much to the ants' disgust and anger.

Then, at the end of the week, the first egg hatched out within the
city, and, frankly, what came forth was not lovely.  It was a legless
grub, fat, presumably blind, and helpless; and it would have fallen
head downwards out of the cell, as it hatched, if it had not had the
sense to hook its tail into its own egg-shell, which in turn, as we
know, was already fastened to the top of the cell.  But it had jaws,
and in addition, apparently, an appetite to use them.

Whether the queen loved it, her first baby, was hard to tell.  Did she,
indeed, ever love anything?  She certainly did her duty by it; but what
was the use of setting up to be a queen, anyway, if she could not do
that?  And, moreover, you've got to do your duty in the wild.  There's
no profit in monkeying with Nature, as is possible with civilization,
for the penalty thereof is death.

Wherefore did our queen, after making quite sure that the sack-like
atom with a mouth, hanging upside-down in the cell, and wriggling like
anything to show its hunger, was alive, sound, and quite all there,
quit home in a hurry, and with a loud buzz, in search of rations.  But
there was a change in her manner from that adopted when looking for
food for herself, and for good reason.  _Then_ her object had been
honey; now it was--scalps!

From force of habit, more perhaps than from force of reasoning, she
flew to the rose-trees, and there fixed in her shear jaws not more than
two of the helpless, fool, unarmed, soft, juicy green-fly, which are
really no more, if one may so put it, than living, infinitesimal
"white" grapes.  That she was challenged by a sentry ant--about as big
to her as a bulldog to us--that the sentry gave the alarm, that the
guard turned out from one of the ants' "cowsheds" over some of the
green-fly, and that she went away in a hurry, with half-a-dozen furious
ants on their hindlegs, trying to get hold of her retiring feet with
their jaws, was a matter treated by her with insolent unconcern.

She had got her scalps, and winging home in a hurry to her baby, fed it
upon green-fly.  The baby did not feed nicely, and the picture of the
glistening, corsleted devil queen-mother, with her lugubrious,
mask-like face, and the wriggling, hanging sack babe, and the luckless,
fool, helpless green-fly between them, was not a pretty one.  Here
maternity was not a Sunday-sermon subject, yet it was maternity all the
same.

By this time other eggs in other cells were splitting, and giving out
legless grub horrors, as seeds that give forth plants, each wriggling
mummy taking care to hook itself up to its shell by the tail at once,
lest it perish.  And the queen's work from that moment really began.
Till then she had only tinkered at it, apparently.  Now she got going
"real some," and--well, all the insect world outside knew it.  The
terror of the yellow flag spread.

Upon an hour she would appear, dropping, hawk-like and terrible, out of
the sun-glare, and neatly pick up a soft and juicy caterpillar from a
cabbage-stalk.  Upon another hour she would be discovered, feet tucked
up and wary, darting, like an iridescent gleam, around the angry ants,
among the green-fly on the rose-bushes.  The drowsy hum of the kettle
on the kitchen fire, and the steady, low hum of the house-fly dance in
the middle of the room, would be answered in the long, hot afternoons
by her wicked warning drone as she came sailing in at the open window,
like the insolent pirate that she was, to go out again a minute later
with a helpless fly between her jaws.  The first heat of the sun,
drinking up the dew, would discover her sailing forth to war; his full,
sizzling rays would reveal her waging violent warfare with the
bluebottle flies over some carcass; into his amber light of the noon
her yellow flag would suddenly rise from out the cool shade of the
larder, where she had been carving meat, and "when the sun mended his
twisted copper nets," he would flash in bronze from her glistening
cuirass as she droned by high over some wriggling grub, caterpillar, or
palsied fly fast locked in her jaws--and all for her young, all for her
couple of dozen legless horrors, hanging by their tails, each in its
narrow cell, in darkness and in dead silence, in the embryo city under
the secret earth.

Time was when these same grubs grew so fat and big that they no longer
hung, but became fast wedged in their dormitories; time when the queen
had to set to and extend downwards the wall of each cell lest the
growing inmates bulge over, and, obsessed with their ravening hunger,
incontinently eat each other; and time at last when, one after the
other, each grub, having grown out of more than one suit of clothes and
donned new ones, cast its skin for the last time, refused all further
food, spun a cocoon of silk with a dome-shaped silken floor to each
cell, and for a period retired from the prying eyes of the world, even
of its own mother, into the sacred sanctuary of the chrysalis state.
Then the queen's labor lightened a little for a period, so that you
could again see her at spare moments sucking nectar from the flowers
for herself, robbing the jam-dish, or lapping up the "honey-dew" of the
green-fly.

Finally came _the_ day.  It dawned all right, and there was nothing
about it to show that it was going to be different from any other fine
day; yet, as soon as the wasp woke up, she knew that, for her, it was
the day of Fate.

A very cursory inspection of the budding city showed at once that
during the night things had been happening and changes taking place.
The domed floors of several of the cells were palpitating with life
from within, and there were sounds of the gnawing and tearing of the
silken screens.

The queen became greatly excited, and began to hum and dance a little
step-dance to herself, all alone in the darkness among the cells, as
she saw her triumph evolving before her eyes.  And, almost as if the
hum had called it, there rushed at her, out of the blackness across the
comb, a--a thing.

She knew by instinct that it was an enemy.  Indeed, it could not well
be anything else, but it fought like a black devil.

It was, in point of fact, a mole-cricket, a creature just like its
namesake, if an insect can be said to resemble an animal, only that its
jaws were like unto the jaws of a lobster.  It was a fearsome
apparition, and very much larger even than the queen.  The good God
alone knoweth why it had chosen that moment and place to run apparently
amok.

But, if the mole-cricket ran amok, the queen-wasp went berserk.  It was
a thing unthinkable that in that moment of triumph she, and the
awakening city with her, should be cut off--unthinkable and impossible,
unthinkable and maddening.  Therefore she fought as few wasps have
probably fought before or since, and they are pretty expert exponents,
and scarcely backward ones, of warfare.

The battle that followed was awful.

Almost at the start the two insects, grappling, fell headlong to the
excavation the queen had made below the city, and there, rolling over
and over, continued the struggle in the dark among the refuse, the
queen eternally feeling with her poison-dagger for a space to drive
home her death-blow between the other's smooth, shining armor-plates;
the cricket eternally endeavoring to behead the queen between its awful
jaws.

It was a fight to the death, as most insect duels are, and it could not
last long.  It was too tense, too fiendish, too shockingly wicked for
that.

Suddenly the queen's body shot out like a spring.  The opening she had
been feeling for had appeared, and she had driven her death-blow home.
At the same instant, with a supreme effort, she bent double and shot
herself free, the last convulsive, shearing crush of her foe's laws
clashing to so close above her head that they actually caught in their
death-grip, and held, till she pulled them out by the roots, two
bristles of her neck.

And then--well, then the queen hurried back up to her city, just in
time to help out of its cell the first of her children--and citizens at
last--the first limp, clambering, damp, newly painted, freshly bedecked
young worker-wasp, perfect from feeler to sting, from wing to claw.

Quickly they broke out now from the cocoons, and the queen bustled from
one to the other, assisting, cleaning, encouraging; for it is a tricky
job for an insect to come out of its chrysalis-case.  The queen's work,
however, was really done; for, though for a day or two, till their
cuirasses and wings hardened, these new young worker-wasps only did
light labor, acting as nurses to the others that were following, and so
on, they quickly took upon their own shoulders the whole of the work of
the city: the nursing and feeding of the young, the hunting, the
building, the scavenging, and the waiting upon and feeding the
queen-mother herself completely, so that she should henceforth labor
not, nor fight, nor waste herself in the chase, but should keep at home
and lay countless eggs, and eggs, and always nothing but eggs, for the
workers to rear for the benefit of the State.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

To-day that city has a population of nearly 60,000, and contains over
11,000 cells; and the queen is still there, laying eggs, eggs, and
again eggs, till--




IV

NINE POINTS OF THE LAW

    Sharp's the word with her.--SWIFT.

Some people never know when they are well off.  It is a complaint which
afflicts cats, you may have noticed, and gets them into much trouble
that their contemptuous temper might otherwise leave them free from.
The silver tabby would have done better if she had remained asleep upon
Miss Somebody's arm-chair, instead of squatting, still as marble, out
in a damp field on a damp night, watching a rabbits' "stop"--which is
vernacular for a bunnies' nursery--and thinking how nice raw, pink
baby-rabbit would taste if she got the chance to sample it.  She
didn't.  At least, she hadn't for an hour and a half; but, then, what's
an hour and a half to a cat?  Apparently the silver tabby could wait,
just like that, utterly inert, till the crack of doom--or dawn.

Mind you, she was not alone.  She had company.  One always has in the
wild at night, or nearly always.  You couldn't see that company, but I
don't know whether the silver tabby could.  Who can tell how much a cat
sees, anyway?  Nor do I think the company could see her, she being
still, and wild eyes not being good at picking out the still form.
Neither could they hear her, for she said nothing; neither did she
purr.  They must have smelt her, though.  Anyway, she seemed to be a
little island in the mist--the faint, faint, ethereal dew-mist--where
nobody walked.  You could hear them--a rustle here, a squeak there, a
thud somewhere else, a displaced leaf, a cracked twig--this only
once--a drumming, a patter, a sniff, a snuffle, a sigh; but they all
passed by on the other side, so to say, and gave the silver tabby room
to think.  Apparently cats are not considered good company in the wild;
lonely creatures, they are best left alone.

No mother-rabbit came to the "stop"--which the cat knew to be there--to
feed her babies, which the cat, thanks to her nose, knew to be there,
too.  No baby-rabbits came out to be fed--or to feed the cat either.
"Stops" are secrets, kept from the rest of rabbitdom by the wise
mothers, and, they hope, from other inquisitive people also.  The
little short holes in the middle of the field are plugged up by the old
does with grass and fur when they are away, which is pretty often.

Then the silver tabby heard a thump come out of the night--a thud,
hollow, resounding, and noticeable.  It was repeated after an interval,
and again repeated.  There was a certain note of insistence about
it--like a signal.  And if the cat had been a wild creature she would
have thrown up the sponge, or gone away, and returned secretly later,
or, anyway, not persisted in crouching there; for those thuds were a
signal, and they meant that the game was up.  In other words, some wily
old mother circling the approach, or some wandering back-eddy of wind,
had given the cat away; she had been scented, and rabbit after rabbit,
squatting invisible in the night, was thumping the ground with its feet
to say so and warn all off whom it might concern.  The silver tabby,
however, neither wild nor satisfied to be tame, did not know.  She sat
on, and in doing so wondered, perhaps, at the scarcity of rabbits
thereabouts.

She sat, or hunched, or crouched, or couched, or whatever you call that
precise position of cats, which is neither lying down nor sitting up,
for some time longer--for another twenty minutes, to be precise; and
all the while the thuds of mystery serenaded her from nowhere in
particular out of the dark--and from down-wind.

Then she must have come to the conclusion that she was being made a
fool of, for she got up, stretched herself lazily, with arched back and
bared claws, and yawned a bored feline yawn.  And even as she did so
she was aware of a sudden final flourish of thuds, and then
dead-silence.  Next moment, in that same dead-silence, she distinctly
heard something coming towards her, and that something was taking no
pains to conceal the fact.

Now, in the wild it is not the custom to go towards anything and take
no pains to conceal the fact.  The unhealth of such a procedure is
swiftly borne in upon such rash ones as make the experiment, and they
seldom live long enough to pass their folly on.  Only the mighty can
afford not to walk circumspectly, and they are very few, and, with man
about, even they have learnt wisdom.  That is why the wild is so
guarded, and why self-effacement becomes almost a religion therein.

Even the cat knew this, I fancy.  Anyway, she looked surprised as she
crouched again, and quickly.

Now, of all the wild-people, probably one of the most brazen is the
pig; it is also one of the bravest.  I mean, the wild pig.  And it
would seem that he, or she, who came that way was a pig, only a
precious little one.  You know the ways of a pig?  How you can hear him
coming long before he comes; how he must snuffle, and grunt, and poke
dead leaves, and snort, and tread on things, and snore.  Very good.  So
it was here; and these things did this new-comer, who approached
through the mist--only all in a dwarfed way, as if they were done by a
tiny grown-up pig.  Its gruntings were almost to itself; its snortings,
snorings, and sniffings quite small; and its snorts little miniature
ones.  Only, in the profound silence of the night, and in comparison
with the furtive noises of all the rest of the night-wild, they sounded
quite loud.

The cat, as she crouched, passed from supercilious surprise to
amazement.  You could tell that by the roundness of her eyes.  She had
no knowledge of pigs, and had never met any of the wild-folk gone mad;
yet it seemed that one must have done so now, and that one--to her
growing uneasiness--was coming straight towards her.  I fancy that in
that moment she thought of the warm fire, the singing kettle, the
saucer of milk, and Miss Somebody's best arm-chair.

The thing, whatever it was, came straight on in a more or less zigzag
line, till the cat could make it out dimly in the moonlight, a
blotched, roughly egg-shaped form, less than a foot long, so low to the
ground that it appeared to be running on wheels, and covered all over
with prickles, like a Rugby ball into which tin tacks had been driven
head first, the sharp ends pointing outwards and backwards.  Its head
was the small end, and much lower than its back.  Its eyes, little and
pig-like, set in a black cowl, gleamed red in the tired moonlight; and
its face was the face of a pig, nothing else--just pure pig; insolent,
cunning, vulgar, and blatant.  Occasionally men name a wild beast
correctly, and this little beast could only have one name--hedgehog: It
was obvious on the face of it.

But the cat, being a cat and an aristocrat, knew, as has been said,
nothing about pigs, real or only so called.  She had killed a shrew
once, and spat it out for tasting abominably and smelling worse; and
shrews are cousins of the hedgehogs, of the same great clan,
Insectivora--far removed from the pigs, really--and that is the nearest
she had got.

She had never heard of hedgehogs, and never, never met a beast that
walked through the wild as if he owned it.  And, more, he expected her
to get out of his way, which she did with feline and concentrated
remarks; and he--by the whiskers and talons!--the fool exposed his
back--turned his back openly, a thing no wild beast in its senses would
do, unless running away.  And that, for a cat who had waited close on
two hours for baby business that didn't turn up, had got most
unfashionably drenched, and had, moreover, in her time, tackled more
than one grown-up rabbit, which was considerably larger than any
hedgehog--that, I say, was, for the silver tabby, too much.

She sprang.  Rather, she executed two bounds, and somewhat unexpectedly
found herself on top of the hedgehog.  I say "unexpectedly," because
she had hitherto bounded upon wild-folk who contrived mostly not to be
there.  This one contrived nothing, except to stop still.  And the cat
executed a third bound--_off_ the hedgehog, and rather more violently
and more quickly than the first two.  Also, she spat.

When she had got over the intense pain--and cats feel pain badly--of
sharp spines digging into her soft and tender forefoot-pads, she
stopped, about two yards away, and glared at the hedgehog as if he had
played off a foul upon her, and she was surprised to see that he was no
longer egg-shaped, but rolled up into himself like a ball, so to speak,
and utterly quiescent.  (I wonder if she remembered the little
wood-lice that she had so often amused herself playing with in idle
hours.  They rolled themselves up just like that.  Perhaps she thought
she'd come upon the Colossus of all the wood-lice.)  Anyway, after she
had spat off at him all the vile remarks she could think of for the
moment, without producing any more reply than she would get from the
average stone, she came back, drawn with curiosity as by strings.

The hedgehog did not move; there was no need.  It was for the cat to
make the next move--if she chose.  He did not care.  All things were
one to him, and all the views which he presented to the world were
points, a _cheval-de-frise_, a coiled ball of barbed wire, a living
Gibraltar, what you will, but, anyway, practically impregnable; and the
beggar knew it.  "He who believeth doth not make haste"--that seemed to
be his motto, and he had, by the same token, a fine facility for
withstanding a siege.

He felt the cat, that cat who did not know hedgehogs, pat him
tentatively.  Then he heard her swearing softly and tensely at the
painful result.  She did not pat again--at least, only once, and, in
spite of care, that hurt her worse than ever.  Then she began growling,
low and beastily--for all the cat tribe have a horrible growl; you may
have noticed it.  Perhaps the hedgehog smiled.  I don't know.  He knew
that growl, anyhow; had heard it before--the anger of utter
exasperation.  He was an exasperating brute, too, for he never said
anything, only shut himself up, and let others do the arguing, if they
were fools enough to do so.

Suddenly he heard the growl stop.  Followed a tense pause, during which
he tightened his back-muscles under his spines, and tucked himself in,
to meet any coming shock, more tightly than ever.  Followed the pause a
short warning hiss, jerked out almost in fright, it seemed--that cat's
hiss that is only a bluff, and meant to imitate a snake--a sudden
explosion of snarls, and a thud.  A fractional silence, then a perfect
boil-over of snarls, and thud upon thud.

Now, our friend hedgehog was an old hand, and he had heard many and
curious sounds take place outside himself, so to speak; but, all the
same, he was just tickled to death to know what, in claws and whiskers,
was happening out there in the leering moonlight now; so much so,
indeed, that at last he risked it, and took a furtive peep out of a
chink in himself, as it were.  And what he saw might have amazed him,
if he had not been a hedgehog and scarcely ever amazed at anything.  He
just got a snapshot view of the cat's fine ringed tail whirling round
and round as she balanced herself on the swerve, vanishing into the
ghostly moonlight haze of the night; and in front of him, close beside
him, squatting, stare-eyed and phlegmatic, he saw the form of a big,
gaunt, old doe-rabbit.  And I think he knew what had happened.  He
seemed to, anyway, and remained rolled up.

Rabbits are thoughtless, headstrong, headlong, hopeless, helpless
cowards as a race and a rule.  "The heart of a rabbit," they say in
France, speaking of a coward.  But all races and rules have exceptions.
Occasionally the exceptions are old buck-rabbits, who know a thing or
two; but more often they are old doe-rabbits with young.  And, mark
you, from the point of view of those wild-folk, there may be easier
rough handfuls to tackle than old doe-rabbits with young.  This one had
simply streaked out of the night from nowhere--and behind--and knocked
the cat flying before she knew.  Then, ere ever the feline could gather
her wits, the old doe had descended upon her with an avalanche of
blows--punches they were with the forefeet, all over the head and the
nose, where a cat hates to be hit--and all so swiftly, so irresistibly,
that that cat had never been given a chance to consider before she was
stampeded into the night.  It was the silver tabby's first experience
of Mrs. Rabbit doing the devoted-mother act, and, by the look of
her--tail only--and the speed at which she was going, it appeared most
likely that it would be her last.

[Illustration: "This one had simply streaked out of the night from
nowhere"]

Meanwhile the old doe-rabbit sat there in the moonlight as immovable
and impassive as a Buddha, and the hedgehog, peering at her, guessed
that the time to unroll was not yet.  He knew that it would hurt any
one to attack him; the cat knew it; all rabbits in their senses knew
it; but was that mother-rabbit in her senses?  He concluded to lie low
and remain a fortress, therefore.

Then, after waiting about five minutes, as if she knew that cats
sometimes steal back, the old doe-rabbit came to a "stop" quite close
to the hedgehog, and went in.  She remained there some time, during
which a fox came by and sniffed at the hedgehog, but was quite wise as
to the foolishness of doing more; and a deadly, curved-backed,
flat-headed little murderer of a stoat galloped by, and sniffed too,
but was no bigger fool than the fox, and went his way.

Both missed the "stop" by about two yards, though I don't know what
would have happened if they had found it.  Digging and death in the
former case, and battle and blood in the latter, perhaps.  But no
matter, they passed on their unlawful occasions; and half-an-hour after
the going of the stoat the old doe-rabbit came out, and dissolved into
the moon-haze.

Then the hedgehog came out, too--of himself, and--well, dissolved into
the "stop."

What happened in there it was too dark to see, but not to hear; and
what one could hear was--pitiful.  He was there some time, for your
hedgehog rarely hurries; and when he came out again, his little pig's
eyes gleaming red under their spined cowl, it was with the same
snuffling, softly grunting deliberation with which he had gone in; but
the pale moon, that showed the gleam in his eyes, showed also blood on
his snout, and on the bristles of his forefeet, blood.

Then, slowly, snorting, sniffing very audibly--as loud as a big dog
often does--grunting softly in an undertone, as if talking to himself,
he departed, rustling through the grass, leaving an irregular winding
track behind in the dew and the gossamer, as he searched, eternally
searched, for food.

The hedgehog moved through the night as if he owned it and had no fear
of anything on earth; but many, it would seem, had cause to fear him.
He turned and snorted, and snatched up a slug.  Three very quick and
suggestive--quite audible--scrunches, and it was gone.  He described a
half-circle, sniffing very loudly, and chopped up a grub.  He paused
for a fraction to nose out a beetle, and disposed of it with the same
quick three or four chopping scrunches.  (It sounded rather like a
child eating toast-crusts.)  He continued, always wandering devious,
always very busy and ant-like, always snorting loudly; grabbed another
beetle, and then a worm--all by scent, apparently--and reached the
hedge-ditch, where, in the pitch-darkness, he could still be heard
snorting and scrunching hapless insects, slugs, and worms at scarcely
more than one-minute intervals.  And he never stopped.  He seemed to
have been appointed by Nature as a sort of machine, a spiked "tank," to
sniff tirelessly about, reducing the surplus population of pests, as if
he were under a curse--as, indeed, the whole of the great order of
little beasts to which he belonged, the Insectivora, are--which,
afflicting him with an insatiable hunger, drove him everlastingly to
hunt blindly through the night for gastronomic horrors, and to eat 'em.
Anyway, he did it, and in doing it seemed to make himself worthy of the
everlasting thanks and protection of the people who owned that
land--thanks which to date he had never received.

Strange to say, he never stopped of his own free-will, though he was
stopped: once when he walked up to a man kneeling--and he was a
poacher--and did not see him till, if I may so put it, the man coughed,
when he ran like winkle into the hedge, and promptly became a ball for
ten minutes; and once when he came upon a low, long, sinister, big, and
grunting shadow, which again, if I be allowed the term, he did not see,
though quite close, till he heard it grunt, when he instantly jerked
himself into a ball on the spot and in the open.  In both cases it
seemed, on the face of it, more as if he had scented, rather than had
either seen or heard, the dangers, and in both cases he had come within
two yards of them--though they were not hidden--before scenting,
seeing, or hearing them, whichever he did do.

Now, books and men have said that friend hedgehog fears only two
things: gypsies and badgers--who eat him.  I should not be surprised at
anything the "gyp" did; nor, to this day, can we stake much on our
knowledge of the secret badger; but this badger, at any rate, seemed to
know nothing of books and men.  He was delving for roots when the
hedgehog cast up out of the night and jumped him to "attention" by his
loud sniffs--much like a big dog's, I said.  Thereafter, however, when
our prickly friend was represented as a ball only, and was as silent as
the grave, the badger took no further notice of him, beyond keeping one
eye--the weather eye--upon him, and treating him to a low growl, or
curse, truly, from time to time.

The hedgehog, however, once there, did not seem keen upon unrolling and
exposing himself till the badger had gone, which it did finally,
vanishing so suddenly and unexpectedly into the dark as almost to seem
to have been a ghost.  And after some minutes the hedgehog straightened
out, and ate his way--one can call it nothing else--to the hedge.  Here
he came upon a wounded mouse, complaining into the night in a little,
thin voice, because its back was broken, and it could not return to its
hole.  It was a harvest mouse, rejoicing in the enormous weight of 4.7
grains and a length of 57 mm., but with as much love of life and fear
of death as an elephant.  Heaven knows what had smitten it!  Perhaps it
was one of the very few who just escape the owl, or who foil that
scientific death, the weasel, at the last moment--but no matter.  The
result was the same--death, anyway.

The hedgehog saw its eyes shining like stars in a little jet of
moonlight, and I fear the hedgehog slew far less adroitly than the owl,
and not nearly so scientifically as the weasel; but he slew, none the
less, and he did that which he did.

From thence we find our hedgehog, still wandering devious, but with
always a direction, just as an ant has, heading his way down-ditch to a
farm, and all the way he ate--beetles mostly, but with slugs and worms
thrown in.

Now, those of the wild-folk who approach the farm, even by night, do so
with their life in their paws, and most of them know it.  Far, far
safer would it be to remain in wood or field-hedge, gorse-patch or
growing crop.  Yet they go, like the adventurers of old.

First of all, if he approached by ditch, before getting to the farm
proper, the hedgehog knew that he must pass the entrenchments of the
rat-folk, and that alone was enough to put off many, for the rat-folk
are no longer strictly wild, and, wild or tame, are hated with that
cordiality that only fear can impose.  I don't know that our hedgehog
was given to fearing anything very much.  He came of a brave race, and
one cursed, moreover, with a vile, quick temper, more than likely to
squash in its incipient stage any fear that might threaten to exist;
but he did most emphatically detest rats, except to eat them--a
compliment which the rats would have returned, if they had got a chance.

As a matter of fact, it is unlikely that Prickles--for such was the
name of our hedgehog--would have gone that risky way, traveled so
unhealthily far, left his more or less--mostly less--safe home wood at
all, had it not been that it is sometimes with hedgehogs as it is with
men--in the warm seasons--their fancy turns to thoughts of love.
Prickles's fancy had so turned, not lightly, for he was of an ancient
and antediluvian race, heavy in thought, but certainly to love.  And
love, I want you to realize, in the wild, or anywhere else, for the
matter of that, is the very devil.  "Unite and multiply; there is no
other law or aim than love," one great savant despairingly assorts is
Nature's cry, and adds that she mutters to herself under her breath,
"and exist afterwards if you can.  That is no concern of mine."

To be precise, Prickles, who did more business with his nose than all
the rest of his organs put together, was following a love-trail.  A
lady hedgehog, a flapper undoubtedly, and beautiful--all loves are
beautiful in imagination--had passed that way.  Why _that_ unhealthful
way, Heaven knew; but, allowing for the capriciousness of the sex, and
mad because in love, Prickles followed, slowly, deliberately, heavily,
as befitted one descended from one of the oldest races on earth.

The air was heavy with the scent of may and of honeysuckle, and his way
was a green-gold--silver where the moon cascaded down the hedge--and
blue-black bridal-path, arched with scented swords, strewn with pink
and rose and cream and white confetti of blossom.  But he only saw and
smelt one thing, and that, those who have known hedgehogs intimately
will agree, is not like unto the scent of any blossom.

Prickles was ruminating anciently upon these things, possibly, and
others, as he came down the trench--ditch, I mean--when the cry smote
him.  It smote everything--the filtered silence of the wonderful,
tranquil night, the pale moon half-light, the furtive rustling shadows
that stopped rustling, the wonderful breathing pulse of growing
vegetation.  And Prickles stopped as abruptly as if it had smitten him
on his nose, too.  He heard _that_, at any rate, whatever might have
been hinted about the value of his ears elsewhere.

There was no doubt about that cry, no possible shadow of doubt
whatever--it was a cry of extreme distress, a final, despairing S.O.S.,
flung out to the night in the frantic hope that one of the same species
would hear and help.

Several night-foraging wild-folk have S.O.S. signals of their own, but
none like this.  It was not a rabbit's cry, for bunny's signal is thin
and child-like; nor a hare's, for puss's last scream is like bunny's,
only more so; nor a stoat's, for that is instinct with anger as well as
pain; nor a cat's, for that thrills with hate; nor an owl's, for that
is ghostly; nor a fox's, for Reynard is dumb then; nor a rat's, for
that is gibbering and devilish; nor a mouse's, for that is weak and
helpless.  Then what?  And why had it touched up Prickles as if with a
live wire?  It was perhaps the rarest S.O.S. signal of all heard in the
wild, or one of the rarest, the peculiar, high, chattering, pig-like,
savage tremolo of a hedgehog booked for some extra deathly form of
death.  And Prickles--naturally he knew it.

It came from straightaway down the ditch; from ahead, where Prickles
had been heading for; from the farm, and Heaven know what it portended!
Perhaps, too, Prickles could tell a lady hedgehog's S.O.S. from that of
a gentleman of the same breed; or, perhaps--but how do I know?  He
certainly acted that way.

Prickles waited the one-fifth part of an instant, to listen and locate.
Then he got going, and provided one astonishment.  Till then he had
seemed slow as the times he had descended from--like a rhinoceros.
But, like a rhino, he proved that he could shift some when hustled.  He
did.  It looked like suddenly releasing a clockwork toy wound up to
breaking-point.  His short legs gave this impression, and his
next-to-no-neck, giving him a look of rigidity, assisted it.  He did
not run so much as rush, and his spines and bristles, coming low on
either side in an overhang, so to speak, like an armored car, made him
rustle and scuffle tremendously.  Three rabbits doing the same act, or
five cats, could scarce have made more row than he did.

It was not, however, so much the fact that Prickles had gone that was
so noticeable as the fact that he had _arrived_.  His arrival seemed to
follow his going as one slide follows another on a screen.  One would
never have believed such quickness of him; nor, as a matter of fact, do
I think he would have believed it of himself; but--well, love is a
mighty power, and makes folks do some strange things.

What he found was two ditch-banks, pock-marked with the untidy dug-outs
of the rat-people, smelling ratty, and looking worse, one original ray
of moonlight lighting the beaten ditch between.  In the moonlight one
young female hedgehog, who may have been pretty by hedgehog standards,
but was now pretty by none, and five rats, frankly beastly, very busy
indeed with that same hedgehog.  They must have caught that young lady
of the spikes "napping"--a rare thing.  Yet, allowing for the fact that
she was in love--with love and nothing else, so far--and careless, or
allowing that she may have mistaken the unclean ones momentarily, she
may have given them one brief half-instant.  And it doesn't do to give
a rat even the half of a half-instant.  If you do, he has got you, or
you haven't got him.

Apparently they had pretty well got her before she could quite roll up,
and in a half-rolled-up condition she was doing her best to meet the
jabs of five pairs of gnawing, cold-chisel, incisor, yellow-rats' teeth
at once.  To time, apparently, she had not been successful in the
attempt--you could see the dark stains of blood glisten in the
moonlight, and the end was certain, on the face of it.

Prickles, however, was a new factor that had got to short-circuit that
end, and Prickles didn't wait to meditate prehistorically _that_ time.
He came.  He came full tilt into the midst of the mêlée like--well,
like a clockwork toy still, that couldn't stop.  Only he did stop,
against the biggest rat of all, ducking his head, and jerking forward
his shoulder-muscles, and spines, with a sort of a thrust over his
head, and a noise like a pair of expiring bellows; and the prickles hit
home.

That rat removed about one foot in one bound in one-fortieth of a
second, and he let rip one squeal in the process that sent away every
other rat into the nearest available hole as if it had been fired there
from a spring.  Then the lady hedgehog took the Heaven-sent opportunity
to complete her rolling-up completely, and Prickles took his own
created opportunity to roll up almost more completely, and--well, they
were rolled up into two balls, you see, and there is nothing more to be
said about them.  The rats did that, but it was all they did, except
hurt their noses presently, and delicate, pink, hand-like fore-paws,
and make 'em bleed on prickles.  They were very angry indeed, those
unspeakable ones--very angry; but it didn't make any difference to the
hedgehogs.  They were there; they were rolled up; they were together.
What _could_ make any difference after _that_?  And at last, when the
rats gave them up as a very bad job, they went away _together_, and
that's all there is to say.  _Together_ clinches it, you understand.




V

PHARAOH


I

Upon a day Hawkley came to the district, and took up his abode in a
cottage of four rooms.  He "did" for himself.  Every housekeeper will
know what "did" for himself means.  But he did for himself in another
way also.  He came to read up for an exam.  He told everybody this,
which was one reason why he would be seen at ungodly hours, when no one
was about, going to and from lonely spots, with a pair of blue glasses
on his nose, a book under one arm, and a walking-stick with a silver
band and a tassel--he was always careful to display the silver band and
the tassel--under the other.

Then Nemesis descended upon him.

He was caught by Colonel Lymington's head-keeper on Colonel Lymington's
most strictly preserved wild-bird sanctuary, shooting certain rare
birds--many rare birds.  Now, the colonel prided himself on his
sanctuary, and upon the number of rare birds he had living therein, and
the colonel was wroth.  Hawkley had, in fact, ruined the sanctuary, and
taken or slain pretty well every other bird worth having in the place,
so that five years would not make good the harm he had done.  Moreover,
it was shown in the evidence that Hawkley had been able to accomplish
his work by aid of a folding pocket-rifle with a silencer on, and his
cat--especially the cat, whose name was Pharaoh.

No words of the keeper's could be found sufficiently to revile that
cat.  Indeed, the head-keeper went speechless, and nearly had epilepsy,
in trying to describe it to the Court, and if it had done only one-half
the things that the keeper asserted, it must have been a very
remarkable beast indeed; the magistrate said so.  In consequence
Hawkley got rather heavily fined, and went.  He went more quickly than
was expected, because the police got a telephone message from the
police of another district--several other districts, I think--to say
that he was "wanted" for precisely the same game there: and Hawkley
must have expected this, for he walked out of the court with a grin on
his face, and was no more seen.

So quickly did he go that he had no time to take the cat.  He left it
at home in the cottage--which shows that he must have been badly
scared, for such a cat must have been worth a lot to a collector's
agent, such as Hawkley was.  But perhaps he left it by way of revenge.
I do not know.  Anyway, there it was in his cottage, asleep on the sofa
before the fire--just as Hawkley, at the invitation of the authorities,
had left it that morning.

It was about five o'clock in the afternoon when the cat, Pharaoh, woke
up, and transformed himself instantly from deep sleep to strained
alertness, in that way which is peculiar to the children of the wild,
but has been lost by their domestic degenerates.  The sun was shining
full in at the little diamond-paned window.  The window was open, and a
late fly of metallic hue was shooting about with a pinging noise, like
the twang of some instrumental string.  But neither fly, nor sun, nor
the tick of the little clock on the mantelpiece had awakened the cat.
It was the click of the little front-gate latch.

The cat--the pupils of his eyes like vertical slits in green-yellow
stone--gave one quick look at, and through, the open window.  He had
the impression, framed in the window, of a bobbing, black, "square"
bowler hat--not often seen these days--and a red face with small eyes,
and a sticking-out beard of aggressiveness.  This was no Hawkley.  The
cat knew it, as he knew, probably, the alien tread.  Hawkley had a
white, clean-shaven face, and big eyes--the eyes that an animal may
love and trust.  Possibly the cat knew even the profession of him who
came that way so softly and alone in the still afternoon.  Anyway, he
acted as if he did.

Like a snake, and with rather less noise, Pharaoh slid off the sofa and
to the door leading into the scullery.  For a moment he stopped,
looking back over his shoulder, one paw uplifted, body drooping on bent
legs, inscrutable, fierce eyes staring.  Then he was gone.

I don't know how he went.  He just seemed to fade out in the frame of
the doorway and into the shadowed coolth of the scullery like a
dissolving picture.

A pause followed, while the little clock on the mantel-piece ticked
hurriedly, as if anxious to get on and pass over an awkward moment.

Came then the click of the front-door latch, the flinging open of the
door wide, the bar-like gleam of hastily raised gun-barrels in the new
flood of light, and--silence.  Only the one or two late flies "pinged,"
while the little clock fairly raced.

The tall, uncompromising figure of the head-keeper was standing in the
doorway, with a double-barreled 12-bore gun half-raised.

He stood there a moment with his dog, bent a little, peering in.  He
had come to find "that there pesky cat."  And in this, perhaps, he
showed more sense than most people gave him credit for.  Apparently, he
had seen enough to know that the cat was quite unlike any ordinary
cat--and cats of any kind are bad enough--and certainly he guessed that
the cat under control of its master was one, and away from that
questionable influence likely to be another, and very much worse,
calamity.

The keeper searched that cottage from chimney to doorstep.  No cat
there.  His dog did not, as might have been expected, help him in this
search.  Indeed, his dog, he now discovered, had vanished--had, in
fact, gone out at the back-door and cleared off.

Meanwhile the cat was, for his sins, being horribly pricked by the
holly-hedge through which he was sliding.  He growled under the
punishment.  Ordinary domestic cats do not, as a rule, growl in such
cases, though they may "swear."

Once through the hedge, the cat dropped into the ditch on the other
side, turned to his right, and galloped up it.  It ran upwards,
skirting a sloping wet field, to a dark, damp, black wood, as woods
always are that stand on cold clay and have much evergreen growth.
They remind one of a wet, chill rhododendron forest of Tibet.

The cat's gallop was in itself peculiar, loose, long, his head low, his
forepaws straight, his hindlegs trailing out behind.  So does the tiger
gallop across the jungle glade when the beaters rouse him.

There were other things peculiar about Pharaoh also, now that one had
him on the move and could see.  He was, perhaps, a fraction big for his
kind; his coat was yellowish, fading beneath, with "faint pale stripes"
well marked on the sides; his tail was long, and oddly slender and
"whippy," ringed faintly to the black tip; his fur was short and harsh,
quite unlike that of a domestic cat, and the expression of his eyes was
one of permanent, unsleeping fierceness.

Once he stopped and stared back, and in the pause which followed one
could distinctly hear a faint but rapidly increasing drumming sound
following his trail up the ditch.  And least of all beasts had that cat
delusions.  He turned and galloped on.  The keeper's dog was of an
independent turn of mind.  He had quietly run that cat's trail,
forgetting that, in the long-run, dogs are not fitted to maneuver
independently, and may suffer if they do so.  You see him flying up the
trail, square nose to ground, tracking really very cleverly indeed, and
with a fine amount of what huntsmen call "drive."

Ho had overtaken Pharaoh before the hunted one could reach the wood.
He realized it as he took the last bend in the ditch, when he saw a
yellow streak rise under his nose, and bound, with all four legs stuck
out quite straight, and claws spread abroad, like a rubber ball out of
his path, avoiding his clumsy, murderous snap by an inch, and then felt
it rebound right on to his back.

The next few seconds were quite crowded, and that dog had the time of
his life.

Even an ordinary domestic "puss" can make wonderful havoc of a dog's
back when once it gets there; and stays, as it does, like a burr, and
this one could go a bit better than most; and when that dog at last got
the cat's "leave to go," he went rather sooner than at once,
proclaiming his misery aloud to all the world, so that his master,
coming at that moment out of the back-door of the cottage, heard him
afar off, and swore.

As for the cat, he turned about, all bristling, and went too.  He went
straight up to, and through, the wood, disturbing in clouds the
starlings, who had just come in to roost in the rhododendrons, so that
they rose with a rushing of wings like the voice of a thunder-shower on
forest leaves, and incidentally drenched the cat with a deluge of
raindrops collected in the leaves as he raced through underneath.  A
lesser beast, it may be noted, would have climbed a tree, but Hawkley,
I think, had convinced his cat of that folly when a man might be
following up behind.

Straight through the wood galloped Pharaoh, and into a stretch of
age-old furze, or gorse, if you like, beyond.  That showed strategy.
The furze was a maze of a million spikes, and branches, and twisted,
gnarled stems tough as wire-rope; a wonderful place, all honeycombed
with rabbit-runs; a world unto itself.

The cat moved on quickly into the heart of the furze, pausing every few
strides to listen and glare round.  Several times he sniffed the sickly
grass and the carpet of dead spikes.

Once or twice something moved ahead; a branch was shaking as he came
up, a blade of grass slowly righting itself, as if something that had
been sitting upon it had but just stolen away.  All round were hints of
life, but no life was visible.  It was as if the cat were moving
through an army of ghosts.

Then, in a flash, without any kind of hint or warning to prepare one
for the unnerving contrast of the change, was war--raw, red war.

There had come up a rabbit-run--a regular rabbit-turnpike--a creature.
It was strikingly colored, that creature, and big--nearly three feet
long, to be exact; but it looked much bigger in the ghostly
twilight--and yet till it was actually upon him he, even he, had failed
to see it.

Long, low, bear-like, and burly, with claws caked with earth, gashed
and bleeding on flank and shoulder it was, red-fanged and wild-eyed.
It charged home upon Pharaoh without a second's pause, and with an
obscene chatter that was unnerving to any one, let alone so highly
strung a bag of tricks as a cat.

Men and dogs had been besieging this badger in its den for twelve
hours.  It had in the end made a desperate _sortie_, upset one man who
had failed to grab its tail, run into and bitten another, and got clean
away.  Pharaoh was unfortunate in that he stood between the half-mad
beast and another den for which it was making.

There was no time to go back, no room to execute one of those beautiful
lightning side-leaps which are the pride of all the cats, and less to
spring into the air, a neat trick of the tribe which it has also
perfected.

The cat was cornered, and, being cornered, fought like--a cornered cat!
That is to say, an electrified devil.

He reared up.  He struck, pat! pat! right and left, with the terrible,
rending, full stroke of his kind.  He met open jaws with open jaws--you
could hear fang clash against fang.  He grabbed, scrunched, drew back,
grabbed, scrunched again, as a lion will--for the cats neither hold
fast like a weasel nor snap like a wolf.  Then, as the full force of
the charge and the weight of the enemy's body--some twenty-seven and a
half pounds--took him, he hugged, round-arm fashion, with his talons,
and, still grabbing and scrunching, rolled over backwards.

Cat and badger turned into a ball--a parti-colored ball, very lively as
to its center, and it whirled.  Unfortunately there was not much room
to whirl in.  That made things all the more grisly.  You could almost
see the grim skeleton shape of death, hovering over that growling,
snarling, spitting, worrying, tearing, kicking, gnashing, scrunching,
foaming, blood-flecked Catherine-wheel--almost see death, I say,
bending down with upraised arm ready to strike.  But death never struck.

In an instant there came, sounding strangely hollow in that still, damp
air of dusk, as though it were in a cave, the unmistakable noise of a
deep, dry, hacking cough.  Truly, it was nothing much--just a good old
churchy and human cough.  But it might have been a blast from the
trumpet of the archangel Gabriel himself by the effect it had upon the
two combatants.  They shot apart like released electrified dust-atoms,
and--pff!--they were gone--wiped out.  Like pricked bubbles, they had
ceased to be.  And neither gave any explanation.  Being wild things, of
course they wouldn't.

The cough had only come from a laborer, who, passing along a pathway
through the furze, had heard the commotion, and stopped.  He never saw
anything, though he crashed into the furze and hunted--he never saw
anything, which was no wonder, seeing that he could hardly have
selected a way to see less.  The cat was four hundred yards away by
that time, and goodness knows where the badger was---deep down in his
den, one presumes.

Later the cat slept, in a fortress of nature safe enough, surrounded by
a hundred unseen sentries with brown jackets and white tails--rabbits,
who would give him all the warning he required.


II

The lean night wind next evening came down, and day went out almost
imperceptibly.  Blackness grew under the furze caverns, and the last
glimpse of the estuary faded away in a steely glimmer; a brown ghost of
an owl slid low over the spiked ramparts, and wings--the wings of
fighting wild-duck coming up from the sea to feed--"spoke" like swords
through the star-spangled blue-black canopy of heaven.

The night-folk began to move abroad.  You could hear them pass--now a
faint rustle here, now a surreptitious "pad-pad" there.  Once some
bird-thing of the night cried out suddenly, very far away in the sky,
"Keck! keck!" and was gone.

It was not Pharaoh, however, that you would have heard move.  None of
the wild-folk could tell how at midnight he managed to land himself far
out over the marsh, unperceived.  He was there--you must take my word
for it--just two faintly luminous yellow-green lamps floating on the
mist.

Not many men knew their way across the marsh by day; certainly not five
even of the oldest wildfowlers could have got over safely by night.  It
was not man, therefore, that was causing the cat to melt into the
short, salt grass, so closely that there was nothing of him left.
Something else was coming his way.

Along the edge of the dike it came--tall, thin, pale, ghostly,
and--yes, I could have sworn it, though night does play odd tricks with
the human eyesight--faintly phosphorescent.  At least, it seemed to
glow ever so dimly, like one that moves in a nearly burnt-out halo.

Every yard or two it paused, that thing.  Once there was a splash, as
if some one were spearing fish and had missed.

The cat moved rather less than an average stone.  He knew that in the
wild to be motionless is, in nine cases out of ten, to be invisible.
The tenth case doesn't matter, because the creature that discovers it
usually dies.  Moreover, there was no cover to move to, and cover is
the cat's trump card.

Now, everything would have gone off all right if--well, if the cat
hadn't been a cat, I suppose; that is, if he had been able to stop the
ceaseless twitching of the black tip of his tail.  Tiger-hunters know
that twitching, and those who have stalked the lion will tell you of
it, as also the sparrow on the garden wall, whose life may have been
saved from somebody's pet "tabby" by that same twitching.  It is a
characteristic habit of the tribe, I take it.

The luminous ghost-thing was close now.  Heaven knows whether it saw
that twitching then!  I think so.  It stopped, anyway, and became a
pillar of stone.  The cat, almost under it, fairly pressed himself into
the grass.

Then--whrrp!

Something shot through the air like a lance, and pinned that twitching
tail-point to the ground.  There had been no warning--nothing!  Just
that javelin from the ghost, and---the cat on his hindlegs, screaming
like a stricken devil, clawing at the ghost, now revealed as a very
big, long-legged bird which flapped.  It flapped huge wings and danced
a grotesque dance, and it smelt abominably, with the stench of ten
fish-markets on a hot day.

Then at last, the cat clawing and yelling the whole time, the bird's
slow brain seemed to realize the mistake.  The javelin, which was its
beak, was withdrawn from the protesting tail-tip hurriedly--to be
driven through the cat's skull as a sheer act of necessary
self-defense, I fancy.  But the cat did not wait to see.  Imagine the
infamy, the absolute sacrilege, from a cat's point of view, of spitting
a feline tail in that disgusting fashion.  Why, if you only tread on
one, you hear about it in five-tenths of the average second, and offend
the supercilious owner for a month afterwards!

There was a vision, just a half-guessed vision, of our cat shooting
straight upwards through the air, and outwards over the still waters of
the dike; there was a number one splash that set the reflected stars
dancing, and the water-voles ("rats," if you like) bolting to their
holes; and there was the sighing "frou-frou-frou!" of great wings as
the big bird rose and fled majestically.  There was the sucking gurgle
and drip-drip of a furred body leaving the water on the far side, eyes
that glared more hate than pen can set down, and a deep, low, malignant
feline curse.  That cat had swum the rest of the way over the dike
which he could not jump.

The bird was only a heron, and that does not sound much unless you are
acquainted with the ways of the heron and all his beak implies.  A
heron is one of those birds that can fight at need, and--knows it.
Moreover, in his long beak, set on his steel-spring neck, he has a
weapon of awful "piercefulness," and--knows that too.  The bird is an
example of armed defense.

This one had merely been fishing for eels in that pessimistic way
peculiar to all fishermen, and seeing the tail-tip waving in the grass,
and nothing else, had mistaken the same for his quarry.  And this will
be the easier to believe because we know, and probably the heron did
also, that eels are given at times to overland journeys on secret
errands of their own.

The cat crawled away down the dike in offended silence.  He was wet,
and the only cat I ever knew who did not seem to be scandalized past
speech at the fact.  Indeed, he went farther.  He came upon a ripple
and a dot, some fifty yards farther on, which to the initiated such as
he, represented a water-vole ("rat," if you will) swimming.

Then, before you could take your pipe from your mouth to exclaim, the
water-vole was not swimming.  He was squealing in a most loud and
public-spirited fashion from between Pharaoh's jaws, and it was the cat
who was swimming.  He had just taken a flying leap from the bank and
landed full upon the dumbfounded water-vole--splash!  Then he swam
calmly ashore and dined, all wet and cold.  Now, what is one to say of
such a cat?

[Illustration: "Landed full upon the dumbfounded water-vole--splash!"]


III

Long did the keepers, in Colonel Lymington's woods and along the
hedges, search with dog and gun for Pharaoh, and many traps did they
set.  The dogs truly found a cat--two cats, and the guns stopped them,
but one had a nice blue ribbon round his neck, and the other had
kittens; the traps were found by one cat--and that was the pet of the
colonel's lady--one stoat, one black "Pom"--and that was the idol of
the parson's daughter--and one vixen--and she was buried secretly and
at night--but Pharaoh remained where he had chosen to remain, and he
remained also an enigma.

Then the colonel's rare birds began to evaporate in real earnest.
Hawkley's little efforts at depleting them were child's-play to those
of Pharaoh that followed, although, of course, Pharaoh himself did not
know, or care the twitch of a whisker, whether the birds he slew were
rare or not.

Now, if there was one thing more than another about which the colonel
prided himself in his bird sanctuary, it was the presence of the
bittern.  I don't know where the bittern came from, nor does the
colonel.  Perhaps the head-keeper knew.  Bitterns migrate sometimes,
but--well, that keeper was no fool, and knew his master's soft spot.

It was a night or two later that Pharaoh surmounted the limit, so to
speak, and "sprung all mines in quick succession."  He had been curled
up all day in his furze fortress, that vast stretch of prickly
impenetrability which, even if a dog had been found with pluck enough
to push through to its heart, would still, in its massed and tangled
boughs, have given a cat with Pharaoh's fighting prowess full chance to
defy any dog.

He was beautifully oblivious of the stir his previous doings had kicked
up, and of the winged words the colonel had used to the head-keeper; of
the traps set all about, of the gins doubled and trebled in the wood
and round the park, and of the under-keepers who, with guns and
tempting baits, took up their positions to wait for him as night fell.

No one seemed to have suspected the furze a mile away, and still less
the marsh and the coverless bleak shore of the estuary, as his home.
Indeed, no one looks for a cat on a wind-whipped marsh when woods are
near at all.  Yet this open, wet country seemed to be a peculiarly
favorite hunting-ground of Pharaoh's.

It was a night of rain-squalls and moonlit streaks when Pharaoh,
wandering devious among the reeds, first became aware of the bittern,
in the shape of reptilian green eyes steadily regarding him from the
piebald shadows.  Possibly the cat's whiskers first hinted at some new
presence by reason of the "ancient and fish-like smell" which pervaded
this precise reed jungle.

Pharaoh stopped dead.  Pharaoh, with cruel, thin ears pressed back,
sank like a wraith into the soft ground.  Pharaoh ceased to be even a
grayish-yellow, smoky something, and became nothing but eyes--eyes
floating and wicked.  A domestic cat, after one frozen interval, would
have crept away from the foe it could not fathom, but Pharaoh had other
blood in his veins.

To begin with, he was wondering what manner of beast the owner of those
saurian-like orbs might be.  To go on with, he was hungry, and--smelt
fish.  But though he was looking full at the big bird, he could not see
it, which is the bittern's own private little bit of magic.

Nature has given him a coat just like a bunch of dried reeds and the
shadows between, and he does the rest by standing with his bead stuck
straight up and as still as a brass idol.  Result--invisibility.

None know how long those two sought to "outfreeze" the "freezer," while
the rain-showers came up and passed hissing, and the moon played at
hide-and-seek.  None knew when Pharaoh, flat as a snake, first began
that deadly, silent circling, which was but acting in miniature the
ways of the lion.  None knew, either, at what point of bittern first
begun to sink and sink, till he crouched, and puffed, his neck curved
on his back like a spring ready set, his beak, like a sharpened
assegai, upright.

Only the short-eared owl, with his wonderful eyes, beheld Pharaoh make
his final rush; watched that living spring _sprung_ quick as light,
shooting out straight at the cat's glaring eyes, and saw--greatest
miracle of all the lot--Pharaoh dodge his head aside in the twentieth
of a second, and blink, letting the blow that spelt death whiz by.

And only those same owl's ears--sharpest of all the ears of the
wild--heard the diabolical yell of Pharaoh as the long, sharp beak
pierced through the loose skin of his shoulders, and, thanks to that
same looseness, came out again an inch or two farther on, transfixing
him; or listened to the devilish noise of the "worry," as the cat
turned in agony on himself and buried his fangs where he could behind
those expressionless green reptilian eyes; or caught the stupendous
flurry and whirl of wings and fur and gripping claws and scaly legs, as
a cloud put out the moon and darkness fell with silence, like the
falling curtain that ends a play.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

The very last pale rays of a watery setting sun slid bar-like through
the cottage window, and fell, twirling, aslant the floor.

A late spider had spun a web across the fireplace, and the one last fly
that always lingers sat in the sunbeam.  It was Hawkley's cottage,
dismantled and derelict.

Something like a furry round hassock, lying motionless in a far corner,
moved at the sound of rain, and lifted a round head with round eyes
that glared with so terrible an expression that one caught one's
breath.  There was blood--dried blood--by the furry shape, and drops of
dried blood across the floor from the window in the next room, that it
had been nobody's business to shut.

The day went out in gloom and howling rain-rushes.  Darkness took
possession of the room.  And--_the gate clicked_.

Truly, it might only have been the wind, but--Pharaoh was on his feet
in a flash, growling, and there was a glint of green-yellow light as
his eyes whipped round.

Followed a pause.  Then, in a lull, once, twice, the unmistakable
crunch of a shod foot on gravel.

Another pause.  Pharaoh was crouching close now, trembling from head to
foot.

"Pharaoh!  Pharaoh!  Pharaoh, old cat, are--are you in there?"

The voice, strained and husky, came in at the open window.  In the last
lingering afterglow of dying day, a face, haggard and set, showed
there, framed in the lead casement.

"Phar----  Ah!"

Pharaoh was up.  Pharaoh had given a strange, coaxing little cry, such
as a she-cat gives to her kittens.  Pharaoh, lame and stiff, but with
tail straight as a poker, was running to the window in the next room,
was up on the sill, was rubbing against and caressing the haggard face
like a mad thing.

There was a long, tense pause, broken only by a continuous purring.
Then the creaking sound as of the lid of a wicker basket being opened.
The purring ceased.  The creaking came again, as if the lid were being
shut.  There came the crunch once more of stealthy shod feet on gravel,
the click of the gate, and--silence!

Hawkley had come for, and found, his cat.




VI

THE CRIPPLE

It was gradually getting colder and colder as he flew, till at last, in
a wonderful, luminous, clear, moonlit sunset, when day passed,
lingering almost imperceptibly, into night, the wind fixed in the
north, and a hard white frost shone on the glistening roofs--far, far
below.

Up there, at the three-thousand or four-thousand feet level, where he
was flying, the air was as clear and sparkling as champagne, and as
still as the tomb.  If he had been passing over the moon instead of
over the earth, the effect would have been something like it, perhaps.

He was only a thrush, _Turdus philomelus_ the songster, but big and
dull and dark for his kind, and he had come from--well, behind him, all
shimmering and restless in the moonlight, like a fountain-basin full of
quicksilver, lay the North Sea; ahead and beneath lay England; and
across that sea, three hundred miles, as I count it, at the very least,
to the lands of melting snow, he was going when late cold weather had
caught him and warned him to come back.  And alone?  No, sirs, not
quite.  Ahead, just visible, blurredly--a little phantom form rose and
fell on the magic air; behind, another; on his right, a third--all
thrushes, flying steadily westward in silence; and there may have been
a few more that could not be seen, or there may not.

His crop, as were the crops of the others, was perfectly empty.
Indeed, he appeared to prefer traveling in ballast that way.  But his
eyes shone, and his wing-strokes, with little pauses of rigidity
between, such as many birds take--only one doesn't notice it much--were
strong and sure.

Once a large-winged, smudged shape, making no sound as it slipped
across the heavens, came flapping almost up to him, peering this way
and that at him and his companions, with amber flaming eyes set in a
cat-like, oval face.  The thrush's heart gave a great jump, and seemed
threatening to choke him, for that shape--and it howled at him
suddenly, in a voice calculated to make strong men jump--was death of
the night, otherwise a short-eared owl.

But a gun went "boomp!" with that thick, damp sort of sound that smacks
of black powder, somewhere down on earth, and a huge "herd" of green
plover, _alias_ peewits, which are lapwings, rose, as if blown up by an
explosion, to meet them, their thousand wings flickering in the
frost-haze like a shower of confetti, and the owl was so disconcerted
by the disturbance that he dropped back into the night whence he came,
as one who falls into a sea.

Then suddenly the thrush--all the thrushes, indeed--tipped tails, and
flew downward--offering no explanation to help one to understand
why--till they dropped, each one entirely on his own hook, apparently,
in or about some gardens, as if they had tumbled out of the sky; and
our thrush, in twenty seconds, had slipped into some apple-trees, and
thence to some laurels round a shed, and--was asleep!  I say "was
asleep."  Out of the starry sky, down, in under, and asleep--all
without emotion, and like a machine.  Now, what is one to make of such
a bird?

He did not see, or, more correctly, did not appear to see--for I do not
know what he saw and what he pretended not to see, really--the lean,
lithe, long, low weasel that passed, climbing and sniffing, beneath
him--within six inches--possibly scenting out a rat.  He did not hear,
or show that he heard, the blackbird--she was rusty, dark brown, as a
matter of actual fact--scream, a piercing and public-spirited scream,
when the very big claws of a little, round, spotted-feathered ball with
wings, like a parody of a cherub--but men call it a little owl,
really--closed upon her and squeezed, or pierced, out her life.  He did
not feel, or let on that he felt, the branches gently sway as two eyes,
glinting back the light of the moon--eyes which were the property of a
"silver tabby" female cat--floated among the twigs, looking for him,
him most certainly, whom she seemed faintly to smell, but never saw.

[Illustration: "A 'silver tabby' floated among the twigs, looking for
him"]

These things represented tense moments dotted through hours of cold,
dark silence, and the blue-black dome of night arched, and the moon
drifted, all in rigid, cold, and appalling stillness.

Then the wind changed, and our thrush awoke to a "muggy" day, under a
soaked, cotton-wool, gray sky, all sodden with streaming showers of
rain.  And, by that token alone, he must have known that he was in
England.  No other climate is capable of such crazy, unwarned,
health-trying changes.  He had come in an icy, practically petrified
silence.  He left in a steaming, swishing, streaming gale.

But that was not before he had been down to scratch like a fowl among
the dead leaves under the privet-hedge for grubs, who "kidded"
themselves that they were going to be fine, flashing insects next
summer.  He also prospected a snail or two, and broke through their
fortifications by hammering the same upon a stone.  And, by some magic
process that looked akin to the way in which some men divine water, he
divined a worm out of seemingly bare earth.  It was there, too, and it
came up, not joyfully, but tugged, to be hammered and shaken into
something not too disgustingly alive to be swallowed.

Then, while a robin mounted to a spruce-spire and acted as Job's
comforter to all the birds of the garden by singing--ah, so plaintively
and sweetly!--of the dismal days of frost and snow, he "preened"--i.e.
went over and combed every feather, and tested and retested, cleaned
and recleaned, each vital quill.  Then, in one single, watery, weak
stab of apology for sunshine, on the top of a fowl-shed, he surrendered
himself to what, in wild-bird land, is known as the "sunning reaction,"
which really consists of giving body and mind utterly to the sun and
complete rest.

And then he left.

Now, it was no chance that he left.  Birds don't do business that way.
To you or me, that location and its climate would have seemed as good
for him to "peg out a claim" in as any other.  He knew better.
Something--Heaven alone knows what--within him told him what was
coming.  He had the power to take a draft on the future, and by that
means to save himself--if he could.  Wherefore he flew on
southward--always south.

And six hours after he had gone, the wind swung like a weather-cock,
swung and stopped at northeast, and frost began to grip that garden in
an iron fist that threatened to squeeze the life out of every living
thing in it, and the sky hung like the lid of a lead box.

The thrush flew, with a few halts, practically all day and well into
the night, and the northeast wind and the Frost King chased him south.

He roosted in a great fastness of age-old holly-bushes within a wood,
whose branches were packed with his relations--redwings, thrushes, and
blackbirds, and also starlings--all tired out, all booked for the south.

Some woods seem to hold a curse of gloom.  One cannot say why.  And
this was one of them.  And the tawny owl that nobody saw but everybody
heard, and the white stoat that everybody saw and nobody heard, and the
amorous dog-fox with the cruel bark that everybody saw and heard, did
not, taken together or singly, add to the gayety of the scene.

The thrush was just ahead of the cold when he went to roost in pouring
rain.  In the night, however, the cold had overtaken him, and the
thousand-jeweled beauty of frost-flakes flashed to his waking eye.

He was numbed and puffed out and peevish, and disinclined to move, but
anything was better than sticking about in this roosting-place, this
casual ward and clearing-house of the wild.  The keen starlings were
already off, swinging away, regiment by regiment, with a fine, bold
rush of wings; the blackbirds were dotting the glades; the redwings
were slipping "weeping" away, to find soft fields to mope in; and the
pigeon host--what was left alive of it after diphtheria had taken its
toll--had streamed onwards, heading southwest.

_Turdus philomelus_ spelt L-u-c-k for our friend that morn, for he had
not prospected two hundred yards when he came on a place where a
vagrant "sounder" of half-grown, domestic, unringed pigs had been
canvassing the wood for beech-mast, acorns, and roots during the night.
The soil was all torn up for a space of about an acre, probably the
only soil for miles--except along streams and by springs--penetrable by
beaks until the sun came out; and the thrush feasted royally upon
hibernating caterpillars and chrysalids that would have become moths,
beetle larvae all curled up and asleep, and other pests; and he must
have done a considerable amount of good in that place during the next
hour or so.

But feasts do not go begging long in a frost-bound wild, even if they
are hidden; and by the time our thrush had driven several other
thrushes away--for he was a jealous feeder--and had been driven away by
blackbirds himself more than once, starlings descended upon the place
with their furious greed, and our thrush concluded that it was about
time to "step off."  The crowded place might become a quick-lunch
resort for some others, not insect-feeders--hawks, for instance--and
was unhealthful for that reason.  Indeed, he had not more than moved
away into the shelter of the rhododendrons when a shadow with a hooked
bill shot round the corner, going like the wind.  He had time to see it
dive like a dipping kite--but it was a sparrow-hawk--and to hear the
death-scream of a feeding blackbird, before he went completely from
that place, and it knew him no more.

Soon after that he sighted the sea, wide-stretched and restless, ahead,
and turned westward parallel with the coast-line, till, in the
afternoon, he came unto "a land where it was always afternoon"--a flat,
damp, dwarf-treed, relaxing, gray land, mild, as a rule, and
melancholy--a land full of water.  But for once it was a cold land, and
the thrush realized that the bitter frost had leapt ahead of him, and
that he might now never outstrip it again, perhaps.  I do not know if
he realized, too, that the lead sky, that looked as if it were going to
come down and crush one, meant snow.

In a bare orchard he was attracted by the sight of several blue titmice
and two robins, feeding upon one or two odd apples that had been left
unpicked at the very top of a tree.  It seemed strange and out of place
to behold apples in midwinter like that; but, for some reason, he took
only a few pecks, and his devil prompted him down to peck at some
soaked bread among the violets, and to drink at a spring so exquisitely
encrusted with moss that it looked as if everything, every floating
dead leaf, stone, and root, had been upholstered in plush.

Then Fate struck--hard.

A snap, a thump, and he was bouncing over and over, with an air-rifle
bullet in his thigh.  It was a blow that knocked him half-silly, and he
was down before he knew, but only for a second, because of what he saw.
He beheld a boy, with an air-rifle in hand, running towards him; but
ahead of the boy was the boy's young cat, who evidently had learnt to
look for a meal when the air-rifle went off.

The cat, being young, however, managed to bungle his pounce for the
fraction of a second, and that is long enough for most of the
wild-folk.  Came a mad fluttering, a beating of wings, a quick mix-up,
and, before he knew, that cat found himself frantically chasing that
thrush across the orchard, striking wildly always at a thrush that just
wasn't there, as the latter part flew, part hopped, with every ounce of
strength and agility that clean, hard living had given him, till he was
clear of the trees.  Then--up and away, with his heart in his beak, so
to speak, and his brain whirling, till the orchard lay "hull down" on
the horizon, and was only another bitter experience, and a warning,
seared into the bird's memory.

So far, so good.  He had made his escape, had euchred Fate, but--the
payment for laziness, the terrible cess for a momentary lapse from
vigilance, which great Nature, in her grim, wise cruelty, always
demands, had to be met, and the end of it was not yet.

It began, however, now.

The thrush discovered that he was not alone in the air, and that he had
all at once got himself, as it were, fixed in the public eye, and was
"wanted."  A swish in the sky made him look up, to see a rook, with a
leering eye, coming down upon him.  He cleverly "side-slipped" in
mid-air, and let the rook, braking wildly, go diving by.  Perhaps he
wondered what had turned the rook hawk.  As a matter of fact, the
weather had, partly, and the rifle had, the rest; for the rook could
see what the thrush did not yet realize.

The rook went away astern, shouting bad language, and another foe came
to take his, or her, place.  Again our thrush discovered that he was
not alone.  Little, white, silent, cruel, dancing flakes of white were
traveling more or less with him and downwards, upon the following wind.
The snow!  The snow at last!  And he was trapped, for it was to keep
ahead of the snow that he had journeyed all that way back again.
Indeed, you can hardly realize, unless you have almost lived their
life, what the snow and the frost mean to all the thrush people, but
more especially to the common song-thrush and the redwing.  At the
worst it means death; at the best, little more than a living death.

However, to race the snow were useless.  Yet he flew on, and on, and
on, like a stampeded horse, blindly, one-sidedly, while the ordnance
survey map beneath turned from brown, and chocolate, and silver-gray,
and dull green, first to pepper and salt, then to freckled white, then
all over to the spotless white eider-down quilt of the winter returned,
as far as the eye--even his binocular orbs--could reach, muffling tree
and house, and garden and copse, and farm and field, and fallow and
plow and meadow in the one mystical, silent, white disguise of winter.
And the thrush at length came down.

His eye had spotted a little corner of a garden that might have been a
spread table in the wilderness.  It was only a small triangle of lawn,
with a summer-house at its apex, and a spruce-fir and a house at its
base, and privet-hedges marking off the rest.  But it had a
"bird-table," and a swept-clean circle on the grass, and there was
sopped bread upon both.  And that place was given over entirely to
chaffinches, _all hens_, tripping, mincing, pecking, feasting,
fighting--because they were chaffinches, I suppose, and must fight--all
over the place.

The thrush came to anchor upon the roof of the summer-house,
and--straightway fell upon his beak!  And that was Fate's punishment
for laziness, one second's relaxation from vigilance.

Righting himself, he almost overbalanced the other way, and only
finally managed to come to an intricate halt on one leg.  The other
leg--the right one--was twisted back under him, in line with his closed
wings and tail; that is to say, it was pointing the wrong way for a
bird's leg, or, rather, so far as could be seen among the feathers,
that was how it seemed.  But the leg was not broken; he could still
move his toes and expand his foot.  Otherwise he could do nothing with
it.  The leg might not have been there, for all the use it was to him;
it would have been better if it had not been there, for it hampered his
flight, or unbalanced him, or something, so that he was incapable of
traveling now beyond the snow, even if he would.  Undoubtedly the
air-rifle had done its work.

Now, in the wild it is a fairly sound maxim that an injured wildling is
a dead wildling--that is, unless the injury is quite slight.  There are
exceptions, of course.  Flesh-wounds and quick-healing wounds are
exceptions.

However, our thrush seemed to be no coward, and he at once buckled to,
to fight Fate and all the world--one bird _v_. the rest.  It was
appalling odds, and I guess no darn fool could have been found to back
that bird's chance of winning through.

Then he showed that he had at least one trump up his sleeve.  A shape
like unto the shape of a silken kite came floating in ample circles
across the low-hung sky.  And the color of that shape was brown--pale
brown; and the shape was alive, and had the appearance of eternally
looking for something, which it always could not find.  So hunts the
kestrel falcon, and by the same token the thrush knew that this was a
big hen-kestrel.  I say "big" advisedly, because in kestrel society it
is the ladies who have the weight and the vote.

And the thrush, who had by that time flown to the ground, promptly
"froze "--froze to stillness, I mean--and vanished.  It was a startling
little trick of his, almost an eccentricity; but the fact was that so
long as he kept still on the dark ground where the snow had been swept
away--and earth and grass mingled almost to a black whole against the
white--he was practically invisible.  This was because of his peculiar
somber color.  Had he been light of dress, like an ordinary
song-thrush, any eye could have picked him up in that spot.

Now, that kestrel was in a bad temper and vicious.  She was cursing the
snow which covered the doings of the field-mice, which ordinarily were
her "staff of life"; and she had not killed since dawn.  Hence she was
a public danger, even to wild-folk she usually left alone, and just now
she was looking for our thrush, who she had seen fly down and--vanish.

There he was, however, bang in the open, unshielded by any cover,
motionless on one leg, looking upwards, and, to all intents and
purposes, not there.  The kestrel came shooting up superbly, going at a
great pace on the wind, cutting the cold air like a knife, twisting and
turning her long tail tins way and that, but moving her quarter-shut
wings not one stroke.  Right over him she dived, her wonderful eyes
stabbing down, so close that you could see her small, rounded head
turning and craning.  But no thrush did she see.  She "banked," hung,
swept round, and came back.  Then she hovered, like a bird hung from
the sky by an invisible hair; and for our thrush she was indeed the
sword of Damocles, for the spot in the air where she hung was directly
over him.  If anybody had shot her dead at that instant, she would have
fallen upon his back.  At that instant, or the next, she might fall
upon his back, anyway, without anybody shooting her.  Indeed, the
betting seemed a good few hundred to one that she would.

Very few human beings know the full meaning of the word "still"--not
even bluejackets!--but most of the wild-folk do.  They have to.  So did
the thrush, but never before had he kept so utterly, stonily, frozenly,
strickenly motionless.  If he had moved an eyelid even, winked, or
gulped too hard, it would have been all up with him.  But he didn't and
it was not all up; though the kestrel seemed as if she were going to
hover there, in that spot, through all eternity.  And when at last she
condescended to surrender to the wind and vanish like a falling star
into the horizon, our friend was as near nervous prostration and
hysteria as a bird can be.  A very little longer and I believe he would
actually have died from sheer overstrain, instead of from kestrel.

Then the thrush fed.  He did it against time, before dark, for if night
came and caught him with an empty crop, he froze.  Perhaps he would
freeze, anyway; but no matter.

The hen-chaffinches, presumably at the end of a journey, or part way
along it, too, were in a like hurry, and for the same reason.  He could
see them now only as faint splashes of white, as they opened tail and
wing to fight; but they could not fight _him_, and he savagely kept the
little clearing in the snow free of all save himself.  It was as if he
knew that he was "up against it," and the fact had developed a grim
fierceness in his character.

An owl must have gone over about this time, because an owl did go over
that garden about the same time every night; but perhaps she was not
expecting thrushes in that gloom, or was in a hurry to keep an
appointment with a rat.  Anyway, the owl did not develop.

Thereafter and at last the thrush went to sleep in a spruce-fir.

Dead silence reigned over the garden, and Cold, with a capital C,
gripped the land.  Heaven help any bird who roosted on an empty stomach
on such a night!  It would freeze to its perch before morning, most
like.

Indeed, our thrush had a neighbor, a hedge-sparrow just newly arrived
from "somewhere up north."  It had come in after dark, and therefore
had no time to feed.  The thrush just took his head out from under his
wing and opened one eye, as the poor little beggar perched close to him
for company.  He could see it plainly in the petrified moonlight.

When next he opened one eye and looked, dawn was at hand, and the poor
little bird was still there.  When at last, with shoulders humped and
feathers puffed, our thrush flew down to feed in the first pale-gold
glimmer of very-much-diluted sunlight, the hedge-sparrow did not move.
Now, in opening his wings, possibly from a vague idea of frightening
the hedge-sparrow away from the magic swept circle on the lawn close
by, and its bread, the thrush brushed heavily against that
hedge-sparrow, so that--oh, horror!--it fell, or swung over backwards,
rather, and hung head downwards, swaying slightly, like a toy acrobat
on a wire, before it fell, so rigidly and so stiffly immovable that one
expected it to shatter to pieces like glass as it hit the ground.  It
did not, however.  But it did not matter.  The hedge-sparrow was quite,
quite dead before it fell, frozen stiff and stark in the night.  And
none of the other birds seemed to care.  Why should they?  Such a fate
might overtake themselves.

The thrush, much tucked up, but still with some fight in him, was late.
Big flocks of peewits or green plover--he could see them between the
spruce-boughs--had gone drifting by, winking like floating silver, high
overhead, bound westward; and skylarks were passing over the garden,
one by one, heading southwest towards the warm, and chortling to each
other as they went.  Starlings--some of them with extraordinarily
bright-yellow dagger-beaks, and some with dull beaks--were before him,
squabbling and sparring over the bread on the lawn.  A robin dropped a
little chain of melancholy silvery notes, and a great titmouse bugled
clearly, "Ting-ling!  Ting-ling!  Ting-ling!"  Some one opened a window
of the house giving on to the lawn, and the last house-fly blundered
out into the cold air; and a company of gnats--surely the most hardy of
insects--was dancing in the pale sunlight by the summer-house, _above
the snow_.

The opening of the window had erupted the starlings into the
surrounding trees, there to whistle and indulge in a "shiveree," such
as is dear to the heart of the excitable, social starling.  And our
thrush was standing motionless in the middle of the swept circle on the
lawn almost at once.  No one saw him go there.  Indeed, unless the
observer looked closely, no one saw him at all, for even then he was,
unless he moved, difficult to see, and, whatever had been his custom
before, in those days he moved but little.

He had come at even to a garden given over to hen-chaffinches--no
cocks, as we said--but at dawn, or, rather, his later hour for rising,
he found the garden given over to song-thrushes, all pale beside him,
all slim, all snaky of build--Continental song-thrushes, most like, and
the same only come to those parts in very hard weather, for they come a
long way.

Our song-thrush, standing on his one leg, looked at them with one
shrewd eye.  There were two of them in the snowless circle on the lawn,
which had been swept clear of the snow, that was now deep, before he
was up, and had also been replenished with bread.  Two thrushes sat in
the spruce-fir, and one on the top of the summer-house, and every jack
of them was ravenous.  He could expect no mercy from _them_.  They must
live, if they could, and there was not enough food for all.  And he
asked no mercy himself, either.  Still, it was long odds.

Then he showed that he, even a bird, knew the laws of strategy, the
essence of which is surprise.  He surprised everybody by suddenly
charging at the thrush on the lawn near him with a murderous ferocity
that took one's breath away.  It certainly would have taken away that
of the other song-thrush, if our friend had not knocked it out of him
by the impact.  By all the laws of precedence, of course, any one of
those others ought to have sent him, with his one leg, into headlong
retreat by merely threatening.  But our friend was not concerned with
the laws of precedence, it seemed.  He became a law unto himself, and a
most amazing "character" to boot.  Also, he fought like several demons,
and, by sheer reckless fury, removed that dumbfounded rival of his from
the lawn in twenty-one hectic seconds.

Then he fed--it was enough only to glance, just glance, at the other
thrushes and the chaffinches, after that astounding exhibition of his
character.  He fed, and, after he had stuffed full, he stood still a
little way off.

This was the signal for two of the thrushes in the spruce-fir to flap
down to the bread.  One got there.  The other saw what was coming, and
turned hastily back.  The one that got there snatched up a piece of
bread.  But he never ate it.  Something hit him on the side.  It felt
like the point of a skewer, but it was our thrush's beak, really, and
by the time he had recovered from that blow he found himself so busy
saving his eyesight that he was glad enough to drop his bread and go.

That, however, was not enough for our thrush.  He appeared to "see
red," and with a terrible cruel, relentless "redness."  He followed the
retreating foe to the spruce-fir, flying heavily and awkwardly by
reason of his smashed leg.  He perched beside him on the branch he
settled upon, nearly overbalancing, and perilously swaying and
wobbling, with wings wildly flapping, and he drove that thrush to
another branch, with such a rain of pecks that the feathers flew.  Nor
was even that enough.  He followed up the attack, and hustled the
thrush from that other branch, so that he flew down the snowed-up road.
Then our cripple, spinning in a whirl of snow, hurled himself upon the
other thrush in the tree, and drove him out of it into the road.

But even that did not suffice him, for devils seemed to have possessed
him, and the thought of opposition sent him crazy.  He blundered into
the privet-hedge, and unearthed a half-frozen _confrère_, who fled,
squawking peevishly, leaving one tail-feather in our friend's beak; and
finally he flew down to the road.

In the road, he first of all buried his face in snow, then fell on his
side, deep snow not being, he discovered, an ideal medium in which to
get about on one leg.  During that performance his rivals could have
abolished him five times over if they had had the heart to unite.  But
they seemed to think otherwise, and had not the heart for anything.
They sat still, with that helpless abandon that afflicts fowls and
other birds in disaster, and they seemed about to starve practically on
the spot, if left alone.

Our thrush, however, did not leave them alone.  They were a direct
threat to his only line of communication with life, so to
speak--namely, food.  Wherefore, either they or he must go.  Soon he
found that cart-ruts make convenient roads for the birds in the snow,
or perhaps it was the chaffinches, who were following one another in
lines along the cart-ruts, who showed him.

Then and there, in the road, our thrush seemed to go berserk.  He
landed upon the thrush nearest to him, spread-eagled and hammering like
a feathered devil.  There was a whirl of brown feathers and finely
powdered snow for about ten seconds, at the end of which time that
other thrush detached himself and fled, oven as his conqueror hurled
himself upon the next bird.

There were two here, side by side, but neither was quick enough to
parry our friend's lightning lunges, after he had beaten down their
guard with his wings; and they, too, got up and winged into the leaden,
frowning sky.  The others did not wait.  They had seen all they wanted
to, apparently, and would take no part in the play.  They faded out
among the drifting snowflakes, over the still, white fields, and our
thrush was left to the lawn, and the bread, and the swarming
chaffinches, whom he easily kept aloof, and--yes, there was no getting
away from it--the one thrush on the summer-house who, you will note,
had never moved.  But when he looked he found that thrush was not on
the summer-house, but on the lawn, eating bread; and when he flew down
to the lawn to investigate--he flew and landed very clumsily--he made a
discovery that seemed to surprise him; or did he already know it?
Anyway, the thrush on the lawn was a lady, and--well, what would you?
The cripple balanced as well as he could, and looked foolish.  It was
all he could do.

The day passed swiftly, and faded out in blinding snow.  Most of the
time the cripple stood motionless, watching his companion and guarding
his swept circle, and, as often as he could, he fed.  And neither then
nor at any other time, except once when the gardener nearly trod upon
him before he would move, did he utter a sound.  The last glimmer of
day showed him still at his post, motionless, all but invisible.  But
he roosted, as a matter of fact, in the privet-hedge, on the south side
of the summer-house, and this time he was not alone.

The day had been trying enough, with its fights and its three cats,
which passed within reach of him, and could have slain him--for his
injuries made him slow to get under way--if they had not failed to see
him, because so still.  The night, however, was a clouded terror.

Certainly he went to bed--if one may so call it--full, if not warm
exactly; but that was the only advantage.  It snowed with ghastly,
relentless steadiness, and it blew like the hacking of sharp knives.

But through it all, because full fed, the cripple, with all his
handicap, and his lady companion lived; lived to see the hard dawn pale
tardily; lived to watch the kind gardener--under strict orders
assuredly, or he would never have done it--sweep a space clear on the
lawn and spread food for the birds; lived to ruffle his feathers and
fly down; and lived to see the thaw which came that afternoon, when the
warm sou'-wester came romping over the land, and winter's last stand
was overcome by the forces of spring, and all the wild breathed a sigh
of relief and went abroad gayly to feed.

But the cripple lived to see other things.  For there came a day, about
a week later, when our cripple, who had been "keeping company" all the
time with his lady friend, heard the whole dawn awaken to a sudden
mighty chorus of thrush song.  I don't know why they all chose to burst
into song thus as at a given signal, but they did, and the effect upon
the cripple and his companion was curious.  He had just landed upon the
top of the summer-house on his one leg, in a particularly awkward and
unbalanced manner, and he perched, listening, as if rooted to the spot,
and with something nearly approaching horror in his eyes, it seemed to
me.

The female bird listened, too, for about a minute, and then, ignoring
the poor cripple as if he had never existed, hopped towards the
spruce-fir--atop of which a particularly fine and strong-voiced
songster was warbling--as if she were drawn by ropes.  And--oh,
horror!--the songster came down to _her_.

The cripple never uttered a sound, not a song, or a call, or a sign.
He hurled himself straight at this new rival like a bolt shot from a
crossbow, and he fought.  My word, how he fought!  But this new
antagonist was no half-frozen, half-starved Continental song thrush.
He was a Britisher, thick-set, bullet-headed, thick-necked, who had
wintered, perhaps, in the south of Ireland or farther, and he fought
like a Trojan.

All up and down the lawn the fight raged, and in and out of the hedges,
into the mountain ash and out again, down to the ground and up again;
but in the end--ah, but it could have only one end!--the Britisher was
on the top of the summer-house, literally shouting his song of triumph.
And the cripple was on the ground at the foot of the hedge, beneath the
spruce-fir, lying on his side, blood-stained and panting.  Nobody saw
him creep away.  Nobody cared--certainly not his lady acquaintance, who
was too busy receiving glad eyes from the conqueror.

Also, nobody saw him die.  Yet next morning he was dead, stiff and
still on the ground beside the summer-house.  Some think that it was
the injuries he received in his last great fight that killed him.  I do
not.  I could find no wounds upon him sufficiently severe to sustain
that theory.  I think he died of a broken heart.  Don't you?




VII

"SET A THIEF"----

Cob arrived in a snowstorm of unparalleled ferocity.  He came upon
extended vans sixty-nine inches from tip to tip, which he seemed as if
he were never going to flap.  All black above, all white below, he was.
The fact was worth noting, because, as seen from below, he looked
neither black nor any other hue, but just indiscriminate dark, unless
he swerved against the little light, and then his white "hull" shone
like silver.

In his calm tacking, in his effortless play, in his superb mastery of
the furious gale, one realized that here was one of Nature's
masterpieces.  He arrested the gaze with his serenity, and in his
majesty of flight marked himself as a bird apart.

Here was a bird accustomed to power, to respect, and to wield fear, as
a king might do; but he was no king, even among birds.  He was a great
black-backed gull, immense, austere, and cruel, with eyes as cold as
the waves whose glitter they reflected, and a heart as implacable as
the storm that cherished it; sea-rover, pillager, pirate, swashbuckler,
son of the storm in whose fierce buffetings he rejoiced, master of the
gale upon whose fury he flourished--the very spirit of the ocean's
frontiers, arrayed in the spotless uniform of the sea, sailing under
her bold colors.

And then, as he suddenly came, the watcher, had there been one, would
have looked at him expectantly, for an eagle, bristling with weapons,
so to speak, fierce-eyed, mighty, and scowling, came flapping heavily
across the white-fretted bay.  There is expression in birds, and most
have their feelings and their character stamped upon their whole body.
But there was no expression in Cob.  His cold eyes continued to stare
with steady stoniness, his vast vans to waft an occasional shallow,
lazy quarter-flap, his spotless head to peer down at times.  Once only,
as the real king of the birds, on his course, drew very near, so that
you could hear the deep, dry "hough! hough!" of the powerful wings, did
Cob open his red-stained--as it were blood--yellow beak, and give
utterance--one could call it no more--and so instantly close his beak
again and revert to his absolute expressionlessness that one had a job
to realize what, or who, in all that vast scene, had spoken.

"I'm-Great-Black-Back!" he said very quietly, quickly, gratingly, and
tersely; and then, as if expecting an answer, added, "Eh?" in a hollow
undertone.

The eagle's imperial head jerked round as he flew, and he shot a
stabbing, sheathed glance at the great sea-bird, as a king might at a
man in a crowd who begins to fumble at his hip-pocket.  But, save for
that, he took no further notice, and beat on with his terrific,
piston-like, regular wing-beats; and the gull, that speckless,
dazzling, hardened, hard giant, laughed--laughed, I say, softly and to
himself, hoarsely and insolently: "How-how-how-how!"  It was as if he
laughed in derision.

And then a strange thing happened.  From the opposite stupendous
cliffs, draped in snow, bejeweled with icicles, frowning and desolate,
an ominous black shape flung itself furiously, and made straight for
the eagle, barking hoarsely with rage as it came.  Another hollow bark
followed, and a second evil ebony form hurled down from the tottering
cliff-top, and flapped towards the eagle in the path of the first.
Bark echoed bark above the deep mutter of the breakers, and the echoes
along the cliffs answered both uncannily and mockingly.

They were a raven, disturbed from her wool-quilted nest, and her mate;
but if they had been hobgoblins straight from an evil dream, they could
not, in that immense, grim setting, have been much more impressive.

The great black-backed gull said no more, but wheeled on as if nothing
had happened.

The eagle said nothing, and tried to beat on as if nothing had
happened, too.  He did not succeed, for the ravens who had been
addressing him most particularly soon addressed themselves personally
to him; and before he knew just how it all came about, they had
summoned a quite amazing and unexpected aerial acrobatic power, and
were shooting and diving, striking and flapping, about his regal head
in a manner that even _he_ could not pretend any longer to ignore.  No
one, not even a king of all the birds, feels comfortable under the
imminent possibility of losing an eye--and such a haughty, wonderful
eye, too.  Nor did the eagle.  And he showed it.  One presumes he might
have abolished the pair--one or both--but the eagle never let on what
he presumed.  What he _knew_ was that he had nothing to gain in a fight
with such super-hooligans, and everything to lose, for one wound only
might mean a dead eagle _viâ_ starvation and a dead raven--what was a
dead raven worth, anyway, to him, or anybody else?

Therefore the eagle changed his mind about continuing his course, which
would have taken him above the ravens' nest.  He did it grandly, and
without giving the impression that the ravens had anything to do with
it--he could have squeezed the life out of them with one awful
handshake, if his heart had been as big as his claws.  But they had
something to do with it.  And they knew it.  So did Cob, who laughed
again, hoarsely and as one appreciating a joke, while he wheeled and
wheeled over the following waves, seeing all things and never appearing
to see anything.

Then at last, when the king of all the birds had sunk, like a speck of
floating burnt paper, away over the far, white-mantled hills, the
ravens suddenly evaporated into nowhere.  Probably no one had seen them
go except Cob, and Cob was by now a lonely, dwindling speck away over
the restless ocean.  Then he was not.  He was coming back, swinging
along with great, easy, shallow half-flaps, so sublimely lazy that he
seemed merely to swim through the gale.  But he covered distance; there
was speed as well as majesty in his flight, for all that.

In a very short time he was above the cliffs, silent, sinister, almost
stealthy.  One of the ravens came back suddenly, diving over the crest,
half-demented with anxiety to cover her eggs from that stony stare of
the sea-rover; and Cob, seeing where she had come from, surrendered
himself to the gale, hurtled down-wind, veered, tacked, circled,
rocking, and came down in a series of his oblique plunges--smack-bang
into the middle of a gory dinner-party, consisting of the male raven,
five gray or hooded crows, and one silver herring-gull, feasting upon
the carcass of a dead sheep.

Every head went up, every eye blinked, every wing half-opened, every
beak shut tight as Cob, whom everybody had thought to be miles away by
that time, threw forward his wings, umbrella-fashion, flung them up,
hat-fashion, fanning wide his tail, dropped his giant webbed feet, and
came to anchor with a rush.  Then he folded those wonderful pinions of
his, foot by rustling foot, stared stonily at the amazed, mute company
around him, and, throwing back his immaculate, smooth, low-browed,
spotless head, laughed to the winds, hoarsely, loudly, wildly--a rude,
baleful, transport of mirth:

"How-how-how-how-how!"

The raven did not laugh.  He had to feed his sitting wife--not counting
his big self--in that bitter weather, and he was pluming himself upon
having turned the eagle from sight of this gift banquet from Providence
as well as his nest.  The gray crows saw no cause for merriment,
remembering how big the great gull was, and how small are these little,
long-wooled, black-faced hill sheep.  Moreover, sheep do not often
oblige by getting turned turtle in a cleft of rock, and being unable to
right themselves before poor, starving, wild hunters--I won't swear
who, but it was not the raven _this_ time--can come and peck their eyes
out.

Cob looked at them again--all five of the gray crows sitting staring
straight down their own black gouge-beaks, hunched, cold, out-at-heels,
and dejected.  Then he laughed again--burst into another wild, jeering
fit of merriment, and fell to work.

First of all, he pointed out to the raven--his beak was the
pointer--that he was sitting upon the choicest portion of that sheep,
and must make way therefrom _instantly_.  Next, he turned his head and
looked--only looked--at a gray crow that had presumed, upon the turning
of his broad, black back, to recommence feeding, and that hooded crow
moved one yard in one second--out of reach.  And next, Cob, who
apparently loved discipline and cherished good manners, started his
banquet, and allowed the others to start theirs.

But it was an unholy feast.  Cob tugged and tore like a butcher without
any knives.  At times he nearly fell backwards, when the meat gave way;
at times he bolted, and gulped, and choked horribly; at times he was
nearly standing upon his head, and at other times upon his tail; and,
in case the others should find the woolly outside, where they alone
could feed, too easy, he was continually breaking off, to rush--a
red-headed demon from hell now--at the raven, or glare at the crows and
remove them yards, as if his eyes could kill.  As for the herring-gull,
he raced and danced in a crazy circle round his giant clansman,
apparently smitten with delirium at the luscious titbits he was obliged
to watch vanishing down Cob's bright throat.

The raven, however, was growing desperate.  He was under contract to
Fate to feed his wife.  She would freeze there on her nest in the snow
among the icicle-studded ledges else.  And every time he had got hold
of a big enough dainty to tug free and fly off with, Cob had cut in and
collared the said morsel.  As a matter of fact, friend raven was a
better carver than the sea-pirate, had a beak better suited for the
grisly purpose.  Finally, the black one got hold of a piece of meat,
and did not let go.  He hung on, and, before anybody realized that he
had moved, Cob's yellow-and-red-painted bill--nearly all red now--had
closed upon that raven's neck.  There was one wild, asthmatical croak
from the raven, a whirl of sturdy black and overshadowing
black-and-white wings, and the raven was jerked clean head-over-heels,
where, among the heather, he lay for a brief second, kicking
ignominiously, on his sable back.

Here the crows fled to strategic positions upon bowlders, waist-deep in
heather, hard by, expecting a like fate, and leaving the herring-gull
to gobble up what he could in the confusion, and risk his life in the
process, when suddenly, above the beating of wings and the hiss of
wind, all distinctly heard, and jumped at, the sound of a single,
horrible, instantaneous, metallic clash.

Cob's agonized yell, the clash itself, and the whir and rush of wings,
as every bird there present literally flung itself into the air, seemed
really, though of course they were not, coincident--such is the
quickness with which these wild creatures act.  But Cob alone remained.

He stopped in mid-spring horribly, and suddenly, as if a Hand had
reached up and plucked him back.  For a second his wonderful wings beat
and beat tremendously, frenziedly, with a noise you could hear all up
the hill; then he fell back in one demented, frenzied mix up of
bashing, smashing pinions, legs, tail, and whirling feathers.

That clash, which had jarred Cob's frame from head to hind-toe, was a
trap, _alias_ a gin, _alias_ a clam, and the rack of man's Inquisition
of the wild.  He had stepped upon it; it had gone off, and caught him
by the right leg, and, being anchored by a chain, had refused to let
him go when he sought to remove himself, trap and all.

What followed during the next minute or two it would scarcely be fair
to so fine a bird to print.  Moreover, it was unnice to behold.
Wild-folk have a habit often of going temporarily insane when they
first find themselves trapped, because the trap represents to them the
most supreme, the most unbearable, of all terrors--loss of freedom; and
freedom is to them more than life, especi

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