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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 52010
   :PG.Title: Some Animal Stories
   :PG.Released: 2016-05-06
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Charles \G. \D. Roberts
   :DC.Title: Some Animal Stories
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1921
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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SOME ANIMAL STORIES
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      :alt: Charles \G. \D. Roberts, title page

      Charles \G. \D. Roberts, title page

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      SOME
      ANIMAL
      STORIES

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      BY

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      CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

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      NEW YORK \E. \P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
      \J. \M. DENT & SONS LTD LONDON & TORONTO

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      All rights reserved

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      FIRST PUBLISHED . . . 1921
      REPRINTED . . . 1923, 1925, 1926, 1928, 1930, 1932

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      PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

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   CONTENTS

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`Do Seek their Meat from God`_

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`"The Young Ravens that Call upon Him"`_

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`Strayed`_

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`The Watchers in the Swamp`_

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`Quills the Indifferent`_

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`Stripes the Unconcerned`_

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`The Black Mule of Aveluy`_

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`Star-Nose of the Under Ways`_

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`Kroof, the She-Bear`_

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`The Initiation of Miranda`_

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`A Royal Marauder`_

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.. _`DO SEEK THEIR MEAT FROM GOD`:

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   SOME ANIMAL STORIES

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   DO SEEK THEIR MEAT FROM GOD

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One side of the ravine was in darkness.  The darkness
was soft and rich, suggesting thick foliage.  Along the
crest of the slope tree-tops came into view—great
pines and hemlocks of the ancient unviolated
forest—revealed against the orange disc of a full moon just
rising.  The low rays slanting through the moveless
tops lit strangely the upper portion of the opposite
steep,—the western wall of the ravine, barren, unlike
its fellow, bossed with great rocky projections, and
harsh with stunted junipers.  Out of the sluggish dark
that lay along the ravine as in a trough, rose the brawl
of a swollen, obstructed stream.

Out of a shadowy hollow behind a long white rock,
on the lower edge of that part of the steep which lay
in the moonlight, came softly a great panther.  In
common daylight his coat would have shown a warm
fulvous hue, but in the elvish decolourising rays of
that half hidden moon he seemed to wear a sort of
spectral grey.  He lifted his smooth round head to
gaze on the increasing flame, which presently he
greeted with a shrill cry.  That terrible cry, at once
plaintive and menacing, with an undertone like the
fierce protestations of a saw beneath the file, was a
summons to his mate, telling her that the hour had
come when they should seek their prey.  From the lair
behind the rock, where the cubs were being suckled
by their dam, came no immediate answer.  Only a
pair of crows, that had their nest in a giant fir-tree
across the gulf, woke up and croaked harshly their
indignation.  These three summers past they had
built in the same spot, and had been nightly awakened
to vent the same rasping complaints.

The panther walked restlessly up and down, half a
score of paces each way, along the edge of the shadow,
keeping his wide-open green eyes upon the rising light.
His short, muscular tail twitched impatiently, but he
made no sound.  Soon the breadth of confused brightness
had spread itself further down the steep, disclosing
the foot of the white rock, and the bones and
antlers of a deer which had been dragged thither and
devoured.

By this time the cubs had made their meal, and
their dam was ready for such enterprise as must be
accomplished ere her own hunger, now grown savage,
could hope to be assuaged.  She glided supplely forth
into the glimmer, raised her head, and screamed at
the moon in a voice as terrible as her mate's.  Again
the crows stirred, croaking harshly; and the two
beasts, noiselessly mounting the steep, stole into the
shadows of the forest that clothed the high plateau.

The panthers were fierce with hunger.  These two
days past their hunting had been wellnigh fruitless.
What scant prey they had slain had for the most part
been devoured by the female; for had she not those
small blind cubs at home to nourish, who soon must
suffer at any lack of hers?  The settlements of late had
been making great inroads on the world of ancient
forest, driving before them the deer and smaller game.
Hence the sharp hunger of the panther parents, and
hence it came that on this night they hunted together.
They purposed to steal upon the settlements in their
sleep, and take tribute of the enemies' flocks.

Through the dark of the thick woods, here and there
pierced by the moonlight, they moved swiftly and
silently.  Now and again a dry twig would snap
beneath the discreet and padded footfalls.  Now and
again, as they rustled some low tree, a pewee or a
nuthatch would give a startled chirp.  For an hour
the noiseless journeying continued, and ever and anon
the two grey, sinuous shapes would come for a moment
into the view of the now well-risen moon.  Suddenly
there fell upon their ears, far off and faint, but clearly
defined against the vast stillness of the Northern forest,
a sound which made those stealthy hunters pause and
lift their heads.  It was the voice of a child
crying,—crying long and loud, hopelessly, as if there were no
one by to comfort it.  The panthers turned aside
from their former course and glided toward the sound.
They were not yet come to the outskirts of the
settlement, but they knew of a solitary cabin lying in
the thick of the woods a mile and more from the
nearest neighbour.  Thither they bent their way,
fired with fierce hope.  Soon would they break their
bitter fast.

Up to noon of the previous day the lonely cabin had
been occupied.  Then its owner, a shiftless fellow, who
spent his days for the most part at the corner tavern
three miles distant, had suddenly grown disgusted
with a land wherein one must work to live, and had
betaken himself with his seven-year-old boy to seek
some more indolent clime.  During the long lonely
days when his father was away at the tavern the little
boy had been wont to visit the house of the next
neighbour, to play with a child of some five summers,
who had no other playmate.  The next neighbour was
a prosperous pioneer, being master of a substantial
frame house in the midst of a large and well-tilled
clearing.  At times, though rarely, because it was
forbidden, the younger child would make his way by
a rough wood road to visit his poor little disreputable
playmate.  At length it had appeared that the five-year-old
was learning unsavoury language from the elder
boy, who rarely had an opportunity of hearing speech
more desirable.  To the bitter grief of both children,
the companionship had at length been stopped by
unalterable decree of the master of the frame house.

Hence it had come to pass that the little boy was
unaware of his comrade's departure.  Yielding at last
to an eager longing for that comrade, he had stolen
away late in the afternoon, traversed with endless
misgivings the lonely stretch of wood road, and reached
the cabin only to find it empty.  The door, on its
leathern hinges, swung idly open.  The one room had
been stripped of its few poor furnishings.  After
looking in the rickety shed, whence darted two wild and
hawklike chickens, the child had seated himself on
the hacked threshold, and sobbed passionately with a
grief that he did not fully comprehend.  Then seeing
the shadows lengthen across the tiny clearing, he had
grown afraid to start for home.  As the dusk gathered,
he had crept trembling into the cabin, whose door
would not stay shut.  When it grew quite dark, he
crouched in the inmost corner of the room, desperate
with fear and loneliness, and lifted up his voice
piteously.  From time to time his lamentations would
be choked by sobs, or he would grow breathless, and
in the terrifying silence would listen hard to hear if
any one or anything were coming.  Then again would
the shrill childish wailings arise, startling the
unexpectant night, and piercing the forest depths, even to
the ears of those great beasts which had set forth to
seek their meat from God.

The lonely cabin stood some distance, perhaps a
quarter of a mile, back from the highway connecting
the settlements.  Along this main road a man was
plodding wearily.  All day he had been walking, and
now as he neared home his steps began to quicken
with anticipation of rest.  Over his shoulder projected
a double-barrelled fowling-piece, from which was slung
a bundle of such necessities as he had purchased in
town that morning.  It was the prosperous settler, the
master of the frame house.  His mare being with foal,
he had chosen to make the tedious journey on foot.

The settler passed the mouth of the wood road
leading to the cabin.  He had gone perhaps a furlong
beyond, when his ears were startled by the sound of
a child crying in the woods.  He stopped, lowered his
burden to the road, and stood straining ears and eyes
in the direction of the sound.  It was just at this time
that the two panthers also stopped, and lifted their
heads to listen.  Their ears were keener than those of
the man, and the sound had reached them at a greater
distance.

Presently the settler realised whence the cries were
coming.  He called to mind the cabin; but he did not
know the cabin's owner had departed.  He cherished
a hearty contempt for the drunken squatter; and on
the drunken squatter's child he looked with small
favour, especially as a playmate for his own boy.
Nevertheless he hesitated before resuming his journey.

"Poor little devil!" he muttered, half in wrath.
"I reckon his precious father's drunk down at 'the
Corners,' and him crying for loneliness!"  Then he
reshouldered his burden and strode on doggedly.

But louder, shriller, more hopeless and more appealing,
arose the childish voice, and the settler paused
again, irresolute, and with deepening indignation.  In
his fancy, he saw the steaming supper his wife would
have awaiting him.  He loathed the thought of retracing
his steps, and then stumbling a quarter of a mile
through the stumps and bog of the wood road.  He was
foot-sore as well as hungry, and he cursed the
vagabond squatter with serious emphasis; but in that
wailing was a terror which would not let him go on.
He thought of his own little one left in such a position,
and straightway his heart melted.  He turned, dropped
his bundle behind some bushes, grasped his gun, and
made speed back for the cabin.

"Who knows," he said to himself, "but that
drunken idiot has left his youngster without a bite
to eat in the whole miserable shanty?  Or maybe he's
locked out, and the poor little beggar's half scared to
death.  *Sounds* as if he was scared"; and at this
thought the settler quickened his pace.

As the hungry panthers drew near the cabin, and the
cries of the lonely child grew clearer, they hastened
their steps, and their eyes opened to a wider circle,
flaming with a greener fire.  It would be thoughtless
superstition to say the beasts were cruel.  They were
simply keen with hunger, and alive with the eager
passion of the chase.  They were not ferocious with
any anticipation of battle, for they knew the voice
was the voice of a child, and something in the voice
told them the child was solitary.  Theirs was no hideous
or unnatural rage, as it is the custom to describe it.
They were but seeking with the strength, the cunning,
the deadly swiftness given them to that end, the food
convenient for them.  On their success in accomplishing
that for which nature had so exquisitely designed
them depended not only their own, but the lives of
their blind and helpless young, now whimpering in
the cave on the slope of the moon-lit ravine.  They
crept through a wet alder thicket, bounded lightly over
the ragged brush fence, and paused to reconnoitre on
the edge of the clearing, in the full glare of the moon.  At
the same moment the settler emerged from the darkness
of the wood-road on the opposite side of the clearing.
He saw the two great beasts, heads down and snouts
thrust forward, gliding toward the open cabin door.

For a few moments the child had been silent.  Now
his voice rose again in pitiful appeal, a very ecstasy of
loneliness and terror.  There was a note in the cry that
shook the settler's soul.  He had a vision of his own boy,
at home with his mother, safe-guarded from even the
thought of peril.  And here was this little one left to
the wild beasts!  "Thank God!  Thank God I came!"
murmured the settler, as he dropped on one knee to
take a surer aim.  There was a loud report (not like the
sharp crack of a rifle), and the female panther, shot
through the loins, fell in a heap, snarling furiously and
striking with her fore-paws.

The male walked around her in fierce and anxious
amazement.  Presently, as the smoke lifted, he discerned
the settler kneeling for a second shot.  With a
high screech of fury, the lithe brute sprang upon his
enemy, taking a bullet full in his chest without
seeming to know he was hit.  Ere the man could slip in
another cartridge the beast was upon him, bearing
him to the ground and fixing keen fangs in his shoulder.
Without a word, the man set his strong fingers
desperately into the brute's throat, wrenched himself
partly free, and was struggling to rise, when the
panther's body collapsed upon him all at once, a dead
weight which he easily flung aside.  The bullet had
done its work just in time.

Quivering from the swift and dreadful contest, bleeding
profusely from his mangled shoulder, the settler
stepped up to the cabin door and peered in.  He heard
sobs in the darkness.

"Don't be scared, sonny," he said, in a reassuring
voice.  "I'm going to take you home along with me.
Poor little lad, *I'll* look after you if folks that ought to
don't."

Out of the dark corner came a shout of delight, in
a voice which made the settler's heart stand still.
"*Daddy*, daddy," it said, "I *knew* you'd come.  I was
so frightened when it got dark!"  And a little figure
launched itself into the settler's arms, and clung to him
trembling.  The man sat down on the threshold and
strained the child to his breast.  He remembered how
near he had been to disregarding the far-off cries, and
great beads of sweat broke out upon his forehead.

Not many weeks afterwards the settler was following
the fresh trail of a bear which had killed his sheep.  The
trail led him at last along the slope of a deep ravine,
from whose bottom came the brawl of a swollen and
obstructed stream.  In the ravine he found a shallow
cave, behind a great white rock.  The cave was plainly
a wild beast's lair, and he entered circumspectly.  There
were bones scattered about, and on some dry herbage
in the deepest corner of the den, he found the dead
bodies, now rapidly decaying, of two small panther cubs.





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.. _`"THE YOUNG RAVENS THAT CALL UPON HIM"`:

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   "THE YOUNG RAVENS THAT CALL UPON HIM"

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It was just before dawn, and a greyness was beginning
to trouble the dark about the top of the mountain.

Even at that cold height there was no wind.  The
veil of cloud that hid the stars hung but a hand-breadth
above the naked summit.  To eastward the peak broke
away sheer, beetling in a perpetual menace to the
valleys and the lower hills.  Just under the brow, on a
splintered and creviced ledge, was the nest of the
eagles.

As the thick dark shrank down the steep like a
receding tide, and the greyness reached the ragged heap
of branches forming the nest, the young eagles stirred
uneasily under the loose droop of the mother's wings.
She raised her head and peered about her, slightly
lifting her wings as she did so; and the nestlings,
complaining at the chill air that came in upon their
unfledged bodies, thrust themselves up amid the warm
feathers of her thighs.  The male bird, perched on a
jutting fragment beside the nest, did not move.  But
he was awake.  His white, narrow, flat-crowned head
was turned to one side, and his yellow eye, under its
straight, fierce lid, watched the pale streak that was
growing along the distant eastern sea-line.

The great birds were racked with hunger.  Even the
nestlings, to meet the petitions of whose gaping beaks
they stinted themselves without mercy, felt meagre
and uncomforted.  Day after day the parent birds had
fished almost in vain; day after day their wide and
tireless hunting had brought them scant reward.  The
schools of alewives, mackerel, and herring seemed to
shun their shores that spring.  The rabbits seemed to
have fled from all the coverts about their mountain.

The mother eagle, larger and of mightier wing than
her mate, looked as if she had met with misadventure.
Her plumage was disordered.  Her eyes, fiercely and
restlessly anxious, at moments grew dull as if with
exhaustion.  On the day before, while circling at her
viewless height above a lake far inland, she had marked
a huge lake-trout, basking near the surface of the
water.  Dropping upon it with half-closed, hissing
wings, she had fixed her talons in its back.  But the
fish had proved too powerful for her.  Again and again
it had dragged her under water, and she had been
almost drowned before she could unloose the terrible
grip of her claws.  Hardly, and late, had she beaten her
way back to the mountain-top.

And now the pale streak in the east grew ruddy.
Rust-red stains and purple, crawling fissures began
to show on the rocky face of the peak.  A piece of
scarlet cloth, woven among the faggots of the nest,
glowed like new blood in the increasing light.  And
presently a wave of rose appeared to break and wash
down over the summit, as the rim of the sun came
above the horizon.

The male eagle stretched his head far out over the
depth, lifted his wings and screamed harshly, as if in
greeting of the day.  He paused a moment in that
position, rolling his eye upon the nest.  Then his head
went lower, his wings spread wider, and he launched
himself smoothly and swiftly into the abyss of air as
a swimmer glides into the sea.  The female watched
him, a faint wraith of a bird darting through the gloom,
till presently, completing his mighty arc, he rose again
into the full light of the morning.  Then on level, all
but moveless wing, he sailed away toward the horizon.

As the sun rose higher and higher, the darkness
began to melt on the tops of the lower hills and to
diminish on the slopes of the upland pastures, lingering
in the valleys as the snow delays there in spring.
As point by point the landscape uncovered itself to
his view, the eagle shaped his flight into a vast circle,
or rather into a series of stupendous loops.  His neck
was stretched toward the earth, in the intensity of
his search for something to ease the bitter hunger of
his nestlings and his mate.

Not far from the sea, and still in darkness, stood a
low, round hill, or swelling upland.  Bleak and
shelterless, whipped by every wind that the heavens could
let loose, it bore no bush but an occasional juniper
scrub.  It was covered with mossy hillocks, and with a
short grass, meagre but sweet.  There in the chilly
gloom, straining her ears to catch the lightest footfall
of approaching peril, but hearing only the hushed
thunder of the surf, stood a lonely ewe over the lamb
to which she had given birth in the night.

Having lost the flock when the pangs of travail
came upon her, the unwonted solitude filled her with
apprehension.  But as soon as the first feeble bleating
of the lamb fell upon her ear, everything was changed.
Her terrors all at once increased tenfold,—but they
were for her young, not for herself; and with them
came a strange boldness such as her heart had never
known before.  As the little weakling shivered against
her side, she uttered low, short bleats and murmurs of
tenderness.  When an owl hooted in the woods across
the valley, she raised her head angrily and faced the
sound, suspecting a menace to her young.  When a
mouse scurried past her, with a small, rustling noise
amid the withered mosses of the hillock, she stamped
fiercely, and would have charged had the intruder been
a lion.

When the first grey of dawn descended over the
pasture, the ewe feasted her eyes with the sight of the
trembling little creature, as it lay on the wet grass.
With gentle nose she coaxed it and caressed it, till
presently it struggled to its feet, and, with its
pathetically awkward legs spread wide apart to preserve its
balance, it began to nurse.  Turning her head as far
around as she could, the ewe watched its every motion
with soft murmurings of delight.

And now that wave of rose, which had long ago
washed the mountain and waked the eagles, spread
tenderly across the open pasture.  The lamb stopped
nursing; and the ewe, moving forward two or three
steps, tried to persuade it to follow her.  She was
anxious that it should as soon as possible learn to
walk freely, so they might together rejoin the flock.
She felt that the open pasture was full of dangers.

The lamb seemed afraid to take so many steps.  It
shook its ears and bleated piteously.  The mother
returned to its side, caressed it anew, pushed it with
her nose, and again moved away a few feet, urging it
to go with her.  Again the feeble little creature refused,
bleating loudly.  At this moment there came a terrible
hissing rush out of the sky, and a great form fell upon
the lamb.  The ewe wheeled and charged madly, but
at the same instant the eagle, with two mighty buffetings
of his wings, rose beyond her reach and soared
away toward the mountain.  The lamb hung limp from
his talons; and with piteous cries the ewe ran beneath,
gazing upward, and stumbling over the hillocks and
juniper bushes.

In the nest of the eagles there was content.  The
pain of their hunger appeased, the nestlings lay dozing
in the sun, the neck of one resting across the back of
the other.  The triumphant male sat erect upon his
perch, staring out over the splendid world that
displayed itself beneath him.  Now and again he
half-lifted his wings and screamed joyously at the sun.  The
mother bird, perched upon a limb on the edge of the
nest, busily rearranged her plumage.  At times she
stooped her head into the nest to utter over her
sleeping eaglets a soft chuckling noise, which seemed to
come from the bottom of her throat.

But hither and thither over the round bleak hill
wandered the ewe, calling for her lamb, unmindful of
the flock, which had been moved to other pastures.





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.. _`STRAYED`:

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   STRAYED

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In the Cabineau Camp, of unlucky reputation, there
was a young ox of splendid build, but of a wild and
restless nature.

He was one of a yoke, of part Devon blood, large,
dark-red, all muscle and nerve, and with wide
magnificent horns.  His yoke-fellow was a docile steady
worker, the pride of his owner's heart; but he himself
seemed never to have been more than half broken in.
The woods appeared to draw him by some spell.  He
wanted to get back to the pastures where he had
roamed untrammelled of old with his fellow-steers.
The remembrance was in his heart of the dewy mornings
when the herd used to feed together on the sweet
grassy hillocks, and of the clover-smelling heats of
June when they would gather hock-deep in the pools
under the green willow-shadows.  He hated the yoke,
he hated the winter; and he imagined that in the wild
pastures he remembered it would be for ever summer.
If only he could get back to those pastures!

One day there came the longed-for opportunity;
and he seized it.  He was standing unyoked beside
his mate, and none of the teamsters were near.  His
head went up in the air, and with a snort of triumph
he dashed away through the forest.

For a little while there was a vain pursuit.  At last the
lumbermen gave it up.  "Let him be!" said his owner,
"an' I rayther guess he'll turn up agin when he gits
peckish.  He kaint browse on spruce buds an' lung-wort."

Plunging on with long gallop through the snow he
was soon miles from camp.  Growing weary he slackened
his pace.  He came down to a walk.  As the lonely
red of the winter sunset began to stream through the
openings of the forest, flushing the snows of the tiny
glades and swales, he grew hungry, and began to
swallow unsatisfying mouthfuls of the long moss which
roughened the tree-trunks.  Ere the moon got up he
had filled himself with this fodder, and then he lay
down in a little thicket for the night.

But some miles back from his retreat a bear had
chanced upon his foot-prints.  A strayed steer!  That
would be an easy prey.  The bear started straightway
in pursuit.  The moon was high in heaven when the
crouched ox heard his pursuer's approach.  He had no
idea what was coming, but he rose to his feet and
waited.

The bear plunged boldly into the thicket, never
dreaming of resistance.  With a muffled roar the ox
charged upon him and bore him to the ground.  Then
he wheeled, and charged again, and the astonished
bear was beaten at once.  Gored by those keen horns
he had no stomach for further encounter, and would
fain have made his escape; but as he retreated the ox
charged him again, dashing him against a huge trunk.
The bear dragged himself up with difficulty, beyond
his opponent's reach; and the ox turned scornfully
back to his lair.

At the first yellow of dawn the restless creature was
again upon the march.  He pulled more mosses by the
way, but he disliked them the more intensely now
because he thought he must be nearing his ancient
pastures with their tender grass and their streams.
The snow was deeper about him, and his hatred of the
winter grew apace.  He came out upon a hill-side,
partly open, whence the pine had years before been
stripped, and where now grew young birches thick
together.  Here he browsed on the aromatic twigs, but
for him it was harsh fare.

As his hunger increased he thought a little longingly
of the camp he had deserted, but he dreamed not of
turning back.  He would keep on till he reached his
pastures, and the glad herd of his comrades licking salt
out of the trough beside the accustomed pool.  He had
some blind instinct as to his direction, and kept his
course to the south very strictly, the desire in his heart
continually leading him aright.

That afternoon he was attacked by a panther, which
dropped out of a tree and tore his throat.  He dashed
under a low branch and scraped his assailant off, then,
wheeling about savagely, put the brute to flight with
his first mad charge.  The panther sprang back into
his tree, and the ox continued his quest.

Soon his steps grew weaker, for the panther's cruel
claws had gone deep into his neck, and his path was
marked with blood.  Yet the dream in his great wild
eyes was not dimmed as his strength ebbed away.  His
weakness he never noticed or heeded.  The desire that
was urging him absorbed all other thoughts,—even,
almost, his sense of hunger.  This, however, it was easy
for him to assuage, after a fashion, for the long, grey,
unnourishing mosses were abundant.

By and by his path led him into the bed of a stream,
whose waters could be heard faintly tinkling on thin
pebbles beneath their coverlet of ice and snow.  His slow
steps conducted him far along this open course.  Soon
after he had disappeared, around the curve in the
distance there came the panther, following stealthily
upon his crimsoned trail.  The crafty beast was waiting
till the bleeding and the hunger should do its work,
and the object of its inexorable pursuit should have
no more heart left for resistance.

This was late in the afternoon.  The ox was now
possessed with his desire, and would not lie down for
any rest.  All night long, through the gleaming silver
of the open spaces, through the weird and chequered
gloom of the deep forest, heedless even of his hunger,
or perhaps driven the more by it as he thought of the
wild clover bunches and tender timothy awaiting him,
the solitary ox strove on.  And all night, lagging far
behind in his unabating caution, the panther followed him.

At sunrise the worn and stumbling animal came out
upon the borders of the great lake, stretching its leagues
of unshadowed snow away to the south before him.
There was his path, and without hesitation he followed
it.  The wide and frost-bound water here and there had
been swept clear of its snows by the wind, but for the
most part its covering lay unruffled; and the pale
dove-colours, and saffrons, and rose-lilacs of the dawn were
sweetly reflected on its surface.

The doomed ox was now journeying very slowly,
and with the greatest labour.  He staggered at every
step, and his beautiful head drooped almost to the
snow When he had got a great way out upon the
lake, at the forest's edge appeared the pursuing
panther, emerging cautiously from the coverts.  The round
face and malignant green eyes were raised to peer out
across the expanse.  The labouring progress of the ox
was promptly marked.  Dropping its nose again to
the ensanguined snow, the beast resumed his pursuit,
first at a slow trot, and then at a long, elastic gallop.
By this time the ox's quest was nearly done.  He
plunged forward upon his knees, rose again with
difficulty, stood still, and looked around him.  His eyes
were clouding over, but he saw, dimly, the tawny
brute that was now hard upon his steps.  Back came
a flash of the old courage, and he turned, horns lowered,
to face the attack.  With the last of his strength he
charged, and the panther paused irresolutely; but
the wanderer's knees gave way beneath his own
impetus, and his horns ploughed the snow.  With a deep
bellowing groan he rolled over on his side, and the
longing, and the dream of the pleasant pastures, faded
from his eyes.  With a great spring the panther was
upon him, and the eager teeth were at his throat,—but
he knew nought of it.  No wild beast, but his own
desire, had conquered him.

When the panther had slaked his thirst for blood,
he raised his head, and stood with his fore-paws
resting on the dead ox's side, and gazed all about him.

To one watching from the lake shore, had there been
any one to watch in that solitude, the wild beast and
his prey would have seemed but a speck of black on
the gleaming waste.  At the same hour, league upon
league back in the depth of the ancient forest, a lonely
ox was lowing in his stanchions, restless, refusing to
eat, grieving for the absence of his yoke-fellow.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`The Watchers in the Swamp`:

.. class:: center large bold

   THE WATCHERS IN THE SWAMP

.. vspace:: 2

Under the first pale lilac wash of evening, just where
the slow stream of the Lost-Water slipped placidly from
the open meadows into the osier-and-bulrush tangles
of the swamp, a hermit thrush, perched in the topmost
spray of a young elm tree, was fluting out his lonely
and tranquil ecstasy to the last of the sunset.  *Spheral,
spheral, oh, holy, holy, clear,* he sang; and stopped
abruptly, as if to let the brief, unfinished, but
matchlessly pure and poignant cadence sink unjarred into
the heart of the evening stillness.  One minute—two
minutes—went by; and the spaces of windless air were
like a crystal tinged with faint violet.  And then this
most reticent of singers loosed again his few links of
flawless sound—a strain which, more than any other
bird-song on this earth, leaves the listener's heart
aching exquisitely for its completion.  *Spheral, spheral,
oh, holy, holy*—but this time, as if seeking by further
condensation to make his attar of song still more rare
and precious, he cut off the final note, that haunting,
ethereal—*clear*.

Again the tranced stillness.  But now, as if too far
above reality to be permitted to endure, after a few
seconds it was rudely broken.  From somewhere in the
mysterious and misty depth of the swamp came a
great booming and yet strangulated voice, so dominant
that the ineffable colours of the evening seemed to fade
and the twilight to deepen suddenly under its sombre
vibrations.  Three times it sounded:—*Klunk-er-glungk*
... *Klunk-er-glungk* ... *Klunk-er-glungk*, an
uncouth, mysterious sound, sonorous, and at the same
time half muffled, as if pumped with effort through
obstructing waters.  It was the late cry of the bittern,
proclaiming that the day was done.

The hermit-thrush, on his tree-top against the pale
sky, sang no more, but dropped noiselessly to his mate
on her nest in the thickets.  Two bats flickered and
zigzagged hither and thither above the glimmering
stream.  And the leaf-scented dusk gathered down
broodingly, with the dew, over the wide solitudes of
Lost-Water Swamp.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1



It was high morning in the heart of the swamp.
From a sky of purest cobalt flecked sparsely with
silver-white wisps of cloud, the sun glowed down with
tempered, fruitful warmth upon the tender green of the
half-grown rushes and already rank water-grasses—the
young leafage of the alder and willow thickets—the
wide pools and narrow, linking lanes of unruffled
water already mantling in spots with lily-pad and
arrow-weed.  A few big red-and-black butterflies
wavered aimlessly above the reed-tops.  Here and
there, with a faint elfin clashing of transparent wings,
a dragon-fly, a gleam of emerald and amethyst fire,
flashed low over the water.  From every thicket came
a soft chatter of the nesting red-shouldered blackbirds.

And just in the watery fringe of the reeds, as brown
and erect and motionless as a mooring stake, stood
the bittern.

Not far short of three feet in length, from the tip
of his long and powerful dagger-pointed bill to the end
of his short rounded tail, with his fierce, unblinking
eyes round, bright and hard, with his snaky head and
long, muscular neck, he looked, as he was, the
formidable master of the swamp.  In colouring he was a
streaked and freckled mixture of slaty greys and
browns and ochres above, with a freckled whitish
throat, and dull buff breast and belly—a mixture
which would have made him conspicuous amid the
cool light green of the sedges, but that it harmonised
so perfectly with the earth and the roots.  Indeed,
moveless as he stood, to the undiscriminating eye he
might easily have passed for a decaying stump by the
water side.  His long legs were of dull olive which
melted into the shadowy tones of the water.

For perhaps ten minutes the great bird stood there
without the movement of so much as a feather,
apparently unconcerned while the small inhabitants of the
swamp made merry in the streaming sunshine.  But
his full round eyes took in, without stirring in their
sockets, all that went on about him, in air, or sedge,
or water.  Suddenly, and so swiftly that it seemed one
motion, his neck uncoiled and his snaky head darted
downward into the water near his feet, to rise again
with an eight-inch chub partly transfixed and partly
gripped between the twin daggers of his half-opened
bill.  Squirming, and shining silverly, it was held aloft,
while its captor stalked solemnly in through the sedges
to a bit of higher and drier turf.  Here he proceeded
to hammer his prize into stillness upon an old half-buried
log.  Then, tossing it into the air, he caught it
adroitly by the head, and swallowed it, his fierce eyes
blinking with the effort as he slowly forced it down his
capacious gullet.  It was a satisfying meal, even for
such a healthy appetite as his, and he felt no immediate
impulse to continue his fishing.  Remaining where
he was beside the old log, thigh deep in the young
grasses and luxuriously soaking in the sunshine, he
fell once more into a position of rigid movelessness.
But his attitude was now quite different from that
which he had affected when his mind was set on fish.
His neck was coiled backwards till the back of his head
rested on his shoulders, and his bill pointed skyward,
as if the only peril he had to consider seriously during
his time of repose might come, if at all, from that
direction.  And though he rested, and every nerve and
muscle seemed to sleep, his gem-like eyes were sleeplessly
vigilant.  Only at long intervals a thin, whitish
membrane flickered down across them for a fraction
of an instant, to cleanse and lubricate them and keep
their piercing brightness undimmed.

Once a brown marsh-hawk, questing for water-rats,
winnowed past, only ten or a dozen feet above his head.
But he never stirred a muscle.  He knew it would be
a much more formidable and daring marauder than
the marsh-hawk that would risk conclusions with the
uplifted dagger of his bill.

In about half-an-hour—so swift is the digestion of
these masters of the swamp—the bittern began to
think about a return to his easy and pleasant hunting.
But, always deliberate except when there was need for
instant action, at first he did no more than uncoil his
long neck, lower his bill to a level, and stand
motionlessly staring over the sedge-tops.  One of the big
red-and-black butterflies came wavering near, perhaps
under the fatal delusion that that rigid yellow bill
would be a good perch for him to alight on.  A lightning
swift dart of the snaky head; and those gay wings,
after curiously adorning for a moment the tip of the
yellow bill, were deftly gathered in and swallowed—an
unsubstantial morsel, but not to be ignored when
one is blest with a bittern's appetite.

After a few minutes more of statuesque deliberation,
having detected nothing in the landscape particularly
demanding his attention, the bittern lazily lifted
his broad wings and flapped in slow flight, his long
legs almost brushing the sedge-tops, back to the post
of vantage where he had captured the chub.  As soon
as he alighted he stiffened himself erect, and stared
about as if to see whether his flight had been noticed.
Then, presently, he seemed to remember something of
importance.  This was the season of mating joys and
cares.  It was time he signalled his brown mate.  First
he began snapping his bill sharply, and then he went
through a number of contortions with his throat and
neck, as if he were trying to gulp down vast quantities
of air, and finding the effort most difficult.  At length,
however, the painful-looking struggle was crowned
with achievement.  Once more, as on the preceding
evening, that great call boomed forth across the swamp,
sonorous yet strangulated, uncouth yet thrilling and
haunting, the very voice of solitude and
mystery:—*Klunk-er-glungk—Klunk-er-glungk—Klunk-er-glungk*.

Almost immediately came an acknowledgement of
this untuneful love-song—a single hoarse *quaw-awk*;
and another snaky brown head and yellow dagger bill
were raised above the tops of the sedges.  The hen
bittern, in response to her mate's cry, had just come
off her nest.

For some tranquil moments the two eyed each other
without stirring, and it almost seemed as if their very
immobility was a mode of expression, a secret code for
communication between them.  The result, if so,
appeared to be satisfactory.  The hen came stalking
solemnly through the grass and sedges towards the
water's edge, only pausing on the way to transfix
and gulp down a luckless frog.  And the stately male,
once more spreading his spacious vans, flapped slowly
over and dropped again into the grass some ten or a
dozen feet from the nest.

The nest was a rather casual structure of dry grass
and weeds, in a hollow of the turf, and more or less
concealed by leaning tufts of swamp-grass.  It contained
three large eggs of a dull greenish buff, clouded
with darker tones, and blending elusively with the
soft colourings of the nest.  These precious eggs the
male bittern had no intention of brooding.  His object
was merely to stand guard over them, with jealous
vigilance, while his mate was away foraging.  The sun
was softly warm upon them, through the thin shadows
of the grass blades, and he knew they would not chill
during her brief absence.  He took his post just near
enough to keep his eye upon the nest, without unduly
drawing attention to its hiding-place.

This patch of water-meadow, perhaps a half-acre in
extent, on which the bitterns had their nest, was one
of many such tiny islands scattered amid the
interlacing channels of Lost-Water Swamp.  It formed a
congenial refuge for all that small life of the wilderness
which loves to be near water without being in it.  It
was particularly beloved of the meadow-mice, because
the surrounding watercourses and morasses were an
effectual barrier to some of their worst enemies, such
as foxes, skunks, and weasels; and they throve here
amazingly.  To be sure the bittern would take toll of
them when they came his way, but he did not deliberately
hunt them, rather preferring a diet of frogs and
fish; and moreover, his depredations upon the mice
were more than counterbalanced by his eager
hostility to their dreaded foes, the snakes.  So, on the
whole, he might have been regarded by the mouse
community as a benefactor, though a rather costly one.

Even now, as he stood there apparently thinking of
nothing but his guardianship of the nest, he gave a
telling example of his beneficence in this regard.  There
was a tiny, frightened squeak, a desperate small
rustling in the grass-stems, and a terrified mouse scurried
by, with a two-foot black snake at its tail.  The
bittern's head flashed down, unerringly, and rose again,
more slowly, with the snake gripped by the middle.
Held high in air, as if on exhibition, between the
knife-edge tips of that deadly yellow bill, the victim
writhed and twisted, coiling itself convulsively around
its captor's head and neck.  But with two or three
sharp jerks it was drawn further back, towards the
base of the mandibles, and then, with an inexorable
pressure, bitten clean in two, the halves uncoiled and
fell to the ground, still wriggling spasmodically.  With
grave deliberation the bittern planted one foot upon the
head half, and demolished the vicious head with a tap
of his bill.  This done, he swallowed it, with determined
and strenuous gulpings.  Then he eyed the other half
doubtfully, and decided that he was not yet ready for
it.  So, placing one foot upon it with a precise air, as
if in assertion of ownership, he lifted his head again
and resumed his motionless guarding of the nest.  If
any mice were watching—and their beady bright eyes
are *always* watching—they may well have congratulated
themselves that the pair of bitterns had chosen
this particular island for their nesting-place.

A little later in the morning—perhaps fifteen or
twenty minutes after the incident of the snake—the
mice found yet another potent reason for congratulating
themselves on the presence of their expensive
champion.  The hen bittern, apparently, had not been
very successful in her foraging.  She had shown as yet
no sign of returning to the nest.  The male was just
beginning to get impatient.  He even went so far as
to move his head, though ever so slightly.  Indeed, he
was on the very point of beginning those grotesque
snappings of the bill and gulpings of air, which would
be followed by his booming triple call, when he caught
sight of a dark form moving through the grass, beyond
the nest.  Instantly he stiffened again into rigidity.
Only, very slowly, the long slender feathers which
crowned his head and lay along his neck began to rise.

The dark form, gliding stealthily among the grasses,
was that of an animal about two feet in length, low on
the legs, slender, sinuous, quick-darting.  The bittern
had never chanced to observe a mink before, but he
needed no one to tell him that this creature was
dangerous.  Ferocity and efficiency were written all over
the savage, triangular head, and lithe, swift body.
But the intruder had evidently not yet discovered the
precious nest.  He was half a dozen paces away from
it, and not moving directly towards it.  He seemed
quite otherwise occupied.  Indeed, in the very next
moment he pounced upon a mouse, which he tore and
devoured with an eagerness which showed him to be
hungry.  The bittern, being blest with prudence and
self-control, made no move to meet trouble half-way.
He waited, and hoped anxiously that the treasure of
the nest might escape discovery.

The mink, to do that sanguinary marauder justice,
was not at the moment thinking of any such luxury
as eggs.  A restless and far-ranging slayer, and almost
as much at home in the water as on dry land, he had
entered the swamp in the hope of finding just such a
happy hunting ground as this bit of mouse-thronged
meadow.  He had just arrived, after much swimming
of sluggish channels, scrambling over slimy roots, and
picking a fastidious way about dark pools of treacherous
ooze, and he was now full of blood-thirsty excitement
over the success of his adventure.  His acute ears and
supersensitive nostrils had already assured him that
the meadow was simply swarming with mice.  His
nose sniffed greedily the subtle, warm mousy smells.
His ears detected the innumerable, elusive mousy
squeaks and rustlings.  His eyes, lit now with the red
spark of the blood-lust, were less fortunate than his
ears and nose, because word of a new and dreadful
foe had gone abroad among the mouse-folk, and
concealment was the order of the day.  But already, he
had made one kill—and that so easily that he knew
the quarry here was not much hunted.  He felt that,
at last, he could afford to take life easily and do his
hunting at leisure.

He licked his lips, gave his long whiskers a brush
with his fore-paws, to cleanse them after his rather
hasty and untidy meal, and was just preparing to
follow a very distinct mouse trail which lay alluringly
before his nose, when a chance puff of air, drawing
softly across the grass, bore him a scent which
instantly caught his attention.  The scent of bittern was
new to him, as it chanced.  He knew it for the scent of
a bird, a water-bird of some kind,—probably, from its
abundance, a large bird, and certainly, therefore, a
bird worth his hunting.  That the hunting might have
any possible perils for himself was far from occurring
to his savage and audacious spirit.

Curious and inquiring, he rose straight up en his
hind-quarters in order to get a good view, and peered
searchingly over the grass-tops.  He saw nothing but
the green and sun-steeped meadow with the red-and-black
butterflies wavering over it, the gleam of the
unruffled water, and the osier-thickets beyond, their
leafage astir with blackbirds and swamp-sparrows.
He looked directly at, and *past*, the guardian bittern,
not discovering him for a bird at all, but probably
mistaking that rigid, vigilant shape for an old brown
stump.  For the mink's eyes, like those of many other
animals, were less unerring than his ears and nostrils,
and much quicker to discern motion than fixed form.
Had the bittern stirred by so much as a hair's breadth,
the mink would have detected him at once for what
he was.  But there in the full glare of the open, his
immobility concealed him like a magic cloak.  The
mink looked at him and saw him not; nor saw another
similar form, unstirring, tensely watchful, over by
the water-side.  The hen bittern, warned perhaps by
some subtle telepathic signal from her mate, had
stopped her fishing and stood on guard.

Having failed to detect the source of that strange,
intriguing smell, the mink concluded, from past
experiences with partridge, grouse, and duck, that it
must come from a brooding mother, hiding on a nest
in the grass.  Nothing could be more satisfactory.  His
eyes blazed blood-red at the prospect of slaughter.
Dropping down again upon all fours, he darted forward,
up the trail of the scent, soundless as a shadow
and swift as a shifting beam of light,—and came full
upon the nest with its three unsheltered eggs.  Instantly
seizing the nearest one between his agile forepaws,
he crunched the shell and began greedily sucking
up the contents.

But the savour of the feast had hardly thrilled his
palate when it seemed as if the skies had fallen upon
him.  A scalding anguish stabbed his hunched-up
shoulders, a smother of buffeting wings enveloped him,
and he was borne backward from the nest in an
ignominious bundle, the broken egg-shell still clinging to
his nose.

At that moment when he had dropped upon all
fours and darted forward through the grass toward
the nest, all the immobility of the watching bittern
had vanished.  His long crest standing straight up
in his fury, he had launched himself to the attack,
covered the intervening distance with two tremendous
thrusts of his powerful wings, and fallen like a cyclone
upon the violator of his home.  The dagger of his bill
had struck deeply, though at random; his hard
wing-elbows had landed their blows effectively; and the
impetus of his charge had swept the battle clear of
the nest, thus saving the two remaining eggs from
destruction.  The same impetus carried him clear of
his foe and a couple of paces past, but he turned
adroitly in the air and landed facing about, ready for
the inevitable counter-attack.

Amazed and startled though he was, and handled
with a roughness quite new to his experience, the mink
was in no way daunted.  Rather he was so boiling
with rage that his wonted wariness forsook him
completely.  With a snarl that was almost a screech he
sprang straight at the long, exposed, inviting throat
of his adversary.  Had those keen white fangs of his,
still dripping with egg, reached their aim, the fight
would have been over.  His leap was swift, true, and
deadly.  But equally true, and more swift, was the
counter-stroke.  He was met, and stopped in mid-air,
by a thrust of the bittern's bill, which, had he not
twisted his head just in time, would have split his
skull.  As it was, it laid open one side of his snarling
face, destroyed one eye, and brought him heavily to
the ground.  Even under this punishment, however,
he would not acknowledge defeat.  Springing aside,
with a lightning zigzag movement to confuse the aim
of that terrific bill, he darted low and made a leap at
his antagonist's long, vulnerable legs.  He missed only
by a hair's breadth, as the bittern, keenly alive to the
risk of such a manoeuvre, leapt nimbly aside and
baulked him with a stiff wing-stroke.  He seized the
baffling wing and strove to pull his tall adversary down.
But two great pinion feathers came away in his jaws,
and the next moment he got another terrible, driving
stab from the dagger beak, well forward on the flank.
It was a slanting thrust, or it would have pierced his
lungs; but it nearly knocked the wind out of him, and
ploughed a deep red gash in his glossy coat.

Screeching furiously, he doubled on himself like a
snake to meet this attack.  But at the same moment
he cringed under another excruciating stab, this time
in the haunch; and looking up, he saw himself
enveloped in a cloud of blinding wings.  The hen bittern
had arrived to join in the defence of her nest.

Now, bloodthirsty and merciless marauder though
he was, the mink's courage was a thing beyond
dispute; and terribly though the fight had so far gone
against him, with a single foe to confront he would
probably have held on to the death.  But for all his
fury he was not quite mad; and this reinforcement
of the enemy was too much for him.  Suddenly
straightening himself out long and small like an eel,
he slipped from under the terrifying storm of wings
and stabs, and made off through the grass at the best
speed that in all his swift career he had ever attained.
He made for the water, which he felt would be his
safest refuge.  The angry bitterns were after him on
the instant, flying as low as possible and stabbing down
at him through the grass-stems.  But his cunning and
slippery zigzags enabled him to dodge most of their
thrusts; and in their eagerness they got in each other's
way—which probably saved him his bare life.  At
length, streaming with blood, and leaving behind him
a red trail to proclaim his discomfiture to the mice,
he reached the water, and dived in.  Without daring
to come to the surface he swam across the channel—here
about two score paces in width—and cautiously
raised his head behind a screen of over-hanging weeds.
He saw his two pursuers standing, motionless and
erect, on the opposite bank, watching with fierce eyes
for him to reappear.  He decided not to reappear.
Submerging himself again, he swam on down stream
till he had rounded a sharp bend of the channel.  When
he thought it prudent to show himself once more, he
was sheltered from those avenging eyes by a dense
screen of alder and willows.  These bushes were full
of nesting red-wings, who chattered at him angrily.
He paid no heed to their scolding, but hurried through
the thicket, and on down the bank till he found an
ancient musk-rat hole.  Into this he crept eagerly,
and lay down in the grateful dark to nurse his wounds
and his humiliation.

After the disappearance of the mink the hen bittern
soon returned to her nest.  But the male stayed where
he was.  From time to time he would snap up a butterfly
or beetle, or spear a passing frog or chub or sucker.
But always his indignant heart was hoping that the
mink would return.  After an hour or two, however,
his wrath died down and he began to forget.

Then he would occasionally vary his still-hunting,
by walking with slow, meditative steps up and down
the strip of bare ooze between the grass and the water,
feeling out with his sensitive claws the little freshwater
clams which lay hidden in the mud.  The clams
were scarce, however, so along about the middle of
the afternoon he flapped lazily back to his old fishing
station on the other side of the meadow.

Later in the day, when the osiers were beginning to
throw long shadows across the water, and the red-and-black
butterflies had grown too indolent to dance, and
the blue-and-amethyst dragon-flies had ceased their
hawking of mosquitoes over the lily-pads and arrow-weed,
the great bittern, full fed and at ease with life,
flapped languidly up from the water-side and dropped
close beside the nest.  His brooding mate lifted her head,
as if in greeting, and laid it back at once between her
shoulders, with her yellow bill pointing skyward as
was her vigilant custom.

Soon the first warm tints of sunset began to stain
the edges of the clouds above the far fringes of the
swamp.  Motionless and erect beside his mate, the
bittern watched the oncoming of the enchantment as his
day drew to its quiet close.  Suddenly the coloured
quiet of the air was disturbed by the beating of hurried
wings.  He glanced upward, without moving.  A mallard
drake, in frantic flight, whirred past, fifteen or
twenty feet above his head, making for the water.
Close after the fugitive, and swiftly overhauling him
with long, tremendous thrusts of his mighty wings,
came that most dreaded cut-throat of the air, a great
blue goshawk.  Swift and bullet-like was the flight
of the desperate fugitive; but that of the hawk was
far swifter.  Had the water been two feet further away
the fate of the glossy drake would have been sealed.
He would have been overtaken, his throat torn out in
mid-air, his body carried off to the nearest tree-top
to be plucked and devoured.  But this time the
inscrutable Fates of the wilderness, too seldom so lenient
to the weak, decided to favour him.  With a heavy-sounding
splash he shot down into the blessed water,
and disappeared into safety beneath the lily-pads, just
in time.

The destroying talons of the great hawk clutched
convulsively at the dandy curled tips of his tail as he
vanished.

With his arrowy speed, his precision of stroke, his
audacity and fiery spirit, the blue goshawk was little
accustomed to the experience of being baulked of his
prey.  He knew well enough that his quarry would not
show itself again, but would swim away under water
and only come up to breathe in the safe shelter of some
dense thicket of rushes.  With a sharp yelp of wrath,
he swept up from the water on a long, graceful curve,
wheeled sharply above the osiers, and sailed back low
above the bittern's island, seeking other prey.  And
his piercing gaze fell upon the bittern, standing rigid
beside the nest.

His swoop was instantaneous, straight and swift as
a bolt from a cross-bow.  But that coiled steel spring
of the bittern's neck was even swifter; and as his
talons struck downward, the bittern's dagger thrust
caught him in the very centre of the impending claw,
splitting the foot fairly and disabling it.  Nevertheless,
by the shock of the attack the bittern was borne
downward, and would have been caught in the breast or
throat by the other talon; but at the same instant
his watchful mate, who had half risen on the nest that
her eggs might not be crushed in the mêlée, delivered
her thrust.  It went true.  And it had not only the drive
of her sinewy neck behind it, but also the full force of
her powerful thighs, as well as the assailant's descending
weight to drive it home.  It caught the goshawk
full in the base of the neck, pierced clean through,
and severed the spine.  And in a wild confusion of
sprawled legs and pounding wings the three great
birds fell in a heap in the grass, just beyond the nest.

The two bitterns nimbly extricated themselves, and
with wings pounding, stabbed savagely, again and
again, at the unresisting body of the hawk.  Presently,
as if by one impulse, they both stood up, erect and
still as images, their yellow bills dripping with blood.
The male had a bleeding gash along the side of his head,
and had lost several of his haughty crest feathers.
But this concerned him little.  His heart swelled with
triumph.  He was forced to give it utterance.  He
snapped his bill sharply, gulped a few mouthfuls of
air, and then sent forth his booming challenge across
the swamp:—*Klunk-er-glungk ... Klunk-er-glungk
... Klunk-er-glungk*.

His mate spread her broad wings, shook herself till
her ruffled plumage fell into place, wiped her conquering
bill on the grass, stepped delicately back into the
nest, and softly settled herself down upon her two
eggs, so miraculously preserved.

Silence fell on Lost-Water Swamp.  The air became
gradually transfused with amethyst and pale rose.
And then, far and faint, tranquil and poignant, came
the entrancing cadence—*Oh, spheral, spheral, oh, holy,
holy, spheral*—the silver vesper ecstasy of the
hermit-thrush, in his tree-top against the pellucid sky.





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.. _`QUILLS THE INDIFFERENT`:

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   QUILLS THE INDIFFERENT

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Quills was born in a capacious hole in the heart of
a huge and ancient red maple, near the banks of the
Tobique River, in New Brunswick.

The hole had to be capacious, for Quills's mother
was a fine porcupine, in her prime, fully two and a half
feet in length, massive in build, and a good twenty
pounds in weight; and, moreover, her armament of
long, bristling spines made it essential that she should
not be unduly crowded in her nest.  But the entrance
was only large enough for her to squeeze through it
without discomfort, so the dusky interior was sheltered,
warm and dry.  It was also safe; for in all the wilderness
there was no savage marauder reckless enough to
invade a porcupine's nest while the owner was at home.

In proportion to the size of his mother, Quills, like
all young porcupines, was an amazingly big baby—hardly
smaller, indeed, than the new-born cub of the
black bear.  His length was about eleven inches, his
weight a shade over two pounds—and this when he
was not yet twenty-four hours old.  He was richly
clothed with long, dark fur, almost black, under which
lay hidden his sprouting armament of spines, already
formidable, though only about half an inch in length.
Born with the insatiable appetite of his tribe, he lay
stretched out between his mother's stumpy fore-legs,
nursing greedily, with an incessant accompaniment of
tiny squeaks and squeals of satisfaction.  The sounds
were loud enough to attract the notice of two little
black-and-white woodpeckers who had just alighted
on the trunk near the hole.  With sleek heads cocked
alertly, and bright eyes keen with interrogation, they
listened to the curious noises inside the tree.  Then
they clambered on up the trunk to a safer height,
wondering, no doubt, that any youngling should be
guilty of such an indiscretion as thus to betray the
secret of its hiding-place.  They could not know that
the porcupine baby, almost alone among the babes
of the wild, was exempted, through the reputation of
his spines, from the law of silence as the price of life.
Young or old, the porcupine will make a noise whenever
it pleases him to do so, and with a lofty indifference
as to who his hearers may be.

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It was spring, and spring comes late to the high
valley of the Tobique stream.  The ancient red maple,
still full of vigorous life in the sap-wood of its outer
shell, in spite of the great hollow at its decaying heart,
was mantled over every branch and twig with a glowing
veil of tiny rose-bud blooms, though the green of
its leaf-buds was hardly yet showing through the brown
sheaths.  The ice had been broken up and been swept
away in tumbling masses, and the current of the swift
river, swollen with the spring freshet, filled the air
about the porcupine's nest with a pleasant, softly
thunderous roar.  From all the open glades the snow
was gone, though masses of it, shrunken and greyish
and sprinkled with dead leaves and twigs, still lingered
in the fir thickets and the deeper hollows.  On the
drier hillocks and about the rotting stumps a carpet
of round, flat, yellowish-green and bronzy leaves
shielded the lurking pink-and-white blossoms and
haunting perfumes of the Mayflower, or trailing arbutus,
the shy darling of the Northern spring.  The fairy
fragrance came and went elusively across the pervading
scent of moist earth and spicy balsam-tips, as the
mild breeze pulsed vaguely through the forest.

It was mid-afternoon of the second day of Quills's
life.  Pleasantly fatigued from his double duty of
nursing and growing, he fell into a sound sleep.  Then
his mother, spurred by the now insistent demands of
her own appetite, gently disentangled herself from the
clutch of his baby claws in her fur, crawled from the
hole, and descended the trunk to seek a hasty meal.

But what was haste for a porcupine would have been
regarded at the extreme of lazy loitering in any other
creature of the wild.  At the foot of the old maple she
stood for some moments loudly sniffing the air with
her blunt nostrils.  Then, as if making up her mind
that it was hemlock she wanted, she ambled off with
heavy deliberation to the nearest hemlock tree, climbed
it with a noisy rattling of claws, settled herself
comfortably in the first crotch, and fell to gnawing the
rough bark.  When she had taken the edge off her
appetite with this fare—which no stomach but a
porcupine's could ever digest—she crawled out along a
branch, as far as it would bear her weight, and, gathering
a lot of the slender twigs between her fore-paws, made
a hearty dessert of the dark-green, glossy frondage.
Other hemlocks, standing at a greater distance from
her nest, already bore the conspicuous marks of her
foraging; but this one she had hitherto left untouched
against the day when she would be wanting to take her
meals near home.

While his mother was away feeding, Quills had slept,
soundly and silently, for perhaps an hour or more.
Then he woke up—hungry, of course, as befitted a
healthy young porcupine.  Finding no warm mother
to snuggle him and feed him, he at once set up his
small but earnest complaint of whines and squeals
and grumbles, all unconcerned as to who or what
might overhear him.

As it chanced at this moment, a hungry weasel—the
most insatiably bloodthirsty of all the wilderness
prowlers—was just approaching the foot of the old
maple, nosing out the somewhat stale trail of a rabbit.
As his keen ear caught these tell-tale sounds from
within the tree, he stopped short, and his malignant
little eyes began to blaze.  Then he glided around the
great trunk, halted just below the hole, and sniffed
discriminately at the strong fresh scent upon the bark.
But at this point he hesitated—and it is not usual for
a hungry weasel to hesitate.  The scent was porcupine,
and a grown-up porcupine was a proposition which
not even his audacity was prepared to tackle.  The
sounds from within that tempting hole, to be sure,
were the voice of a baby porcupine.  But was the baby
alone, or was the mother with it?  In the latter case,
he would as soon have jumped into the jaws of a lynx
as enter that hole.  The fresh scent on the bark offered
no solution to the problem.  Was it made in coming
out or going in?  He sniffed at it again, growing fiercer
and more hungry every moment.

Suddenly he heard behind him a dry rattling of
quills and a confused noise of squeals and chattering
grunts.  The mother porcupine was hurrying across
the moist turf, gnashing her jaws, and looking twice
her natural size with every quill on end.  In her rage
and anxiety she was making remarkable speed for a
porcupine.  The weasel, his long white fangs bared
and his eyes red with disappointed fury, whipped
about and stood facing her till she was within three
or four feet of him.  But for all his rage he was no
fool.  For her gnashing yellow teeth he had no respect
whatever.  But those deadly, poisonous, needle-sharp
spines of hers!  He had no wish to interview them too
closely.  With eleventh-hour discretion he slipped aside
to make way for her, and glided off to pick up again
the trail of the rabbit.

The mother porcupine never even turned her head to
see where the enemy had gone to.  Wild with anxiety,
she scrabbled up the trunk and into her nest.  Her
experienced nose, however, at once assured her that
the weasel had not been inside.  Instantly appeased,
she stretched herself on her side, drew the complaining
youngster to her breast, licked and nosed him for a
few moments, and settled into a comfortable doze.

Having this hearty mother's attention all to himself—an
exceptional advantage, as a porcupine baby has
generally one brother or sister, if not more, to share
the maternal supply—young Quills grew and throve
amazingly.  And his armoury of spines throve with
him.  In a few weeks he was out of the hole and following
his mother up into the hemlock trees, where he
speedily learned to feed on the glossy green tips of the
frondage.  From this diet he passed quickly to the
stronger fare of the harsh and bitter bark, the gnawing
of which was a delight to his powerful, chisel-like teeth.
By the time the full flush of the Tobique summer,
ardent and swift, had crowded the rich-soiled valley
with greenery and bloom, Quills's mother had grown
altogether indifferent to him.  She had long ago refused
him her breasts, of which, indeed, he had no further
need.  But she still permitted him to follow her about,
if he wanted companionship, so long as he did not
trouble her.  And in this way he learned the few
things—astonishingly few, it would seem—that a porcupine
needs to know in order to hold his own in the struggle
for existence.  He learned, among other things, that
nearly all the green stuff that the forest produced was
more or less fit for his food, that there were other trees
besides the hemlock whose bark was tasty and nourishing
and pleasantly resistant to his teeth, and that in
a broad, sunny backwater of the river there grew a
profusion of great round flat leaves, the pads of the
water-lily, which were peculiarly thrilling to his palate.
In fact, most of his learning had to do with food,
which was what he appeared to live for.  His enemies
were few, and seldom enthusiastic.  And he never
troubled his head about avoiding them.  With an
indifference nothing less than colossal, he left it to
them to avoid him, if they wished; and they did so
wish, ninety-nine times out of the hundred.

Along towards the latter part of August, Quills
found that his mother was no longer indifferent.  She
had grown actively unfriendly.  Whenever he came
near her she grunted and chattered to him in such an
irritable fashion that it was obvious, even to a not
over-sensitive spirit like his, that his companionship
was distasteful to her.  This attitude neither grieved
nor angered him, however.  She was no longer of any
importance to him.  He simply quit following her, went
his own way, and forgot her.  Striking off on his own,
and impelled by instinct to seek a fresh range for
himself, he plunged into the still, warm tide of the sunny
backwater and swam, with much splashing and little
speed, to the opposite bank.  Swimming was no task
to him, for his coat of hollow quills made it impossible
for him to sink.  The backwater was not more than
thirty or forty yards in width, but when he had crossed
it, and crawled forth upon the opposite bank, he felt
that he had found a new world, and owned it.  He
ambled joyously along the bank to a point where he
had marked a bed of bright-green arrow-weed, and
gorged himself to his great content on the shapely,
pointed leaves and stout succulent stalks.  Then he
climbed a big poplar and curled up to sleep,
self-sufficient and pleased to be alone.

Quills was by this time more than half grown up,
and, moreover, thanks to his happily selected parentage
and his ample nourishment when a baby, he was
as big and strong as many a less favoured porcupine
achieves to be at maturity.  In colour he was of a very
dark brown, verging on black, and peppered with a
dingy yellowish white, his long fur being dark with
light tips, and his spines cream-coloured with black
tips.  The spines on his body ranged from two to four
inches in length, and when he was not angry, they were
partly concealed by the fur, which was considerably
longer.  The quills on his head and the sides of his face
were about an inch in length.  His short, blunt muzzle
was free from spines, but closely furred to the lips,
and conspicuously adorned by his large and prominent
front teeth, his gnawing teeth, which were of a vivid
dark yellow colour.  His legs and all the under parts
of his body were clothed in dense, soft fur, entirely
without spines.  His tail, about five inches in length,
was very thick and powerful, and heavily armed with
spines to the tip.  The spines on his body were for his
protection, but this armed tail was his one weapon
of offence—a weapon with which at a single stroke
he could fill an enemy's mouth or paws with a hundred
barbed and poisonous needles; and the peculiar deadliness
of these needles, large and small alike, lay in their
power of swift and inexorable burrowing.  Once their
subtle points penetrated the skin, their innumerable,
microscopic, scale-like barbs would begin working
them inwards through the muscles, setting up violent
inflammations as they went, till they would reach
some vital part and put their wretched victim out of
his misery.

So far in his career young Quills had had no occasion
to test the efficiency of that formidable tail of his as
a weapon, though from time to time he would stretch
himself elaborately, leg after leg and claw after claw,
ruffle up all his spines as if to see that they were in
working order, and lash out alarmingly with the
aforesaid tail by way of keeping it efficient and ready for
action.  And now, as luck would have it, the first
enemy he was to encounter was the very one against
whom his best defences were of least avail—namely,
Man himself.  But fortunately for young Quills, and
for this his brief biography, the man in question was
neither needing meat—least of all, such harsh meat as
porcupine—nor of a destructive disposition.  He was
magnanimous, and Quills never knew that he held on
to his little lease of life by favour.

The man had come up to the Tobique in a canoe,
partly for the fishing, partly to refresh his spirit with
the clean airs of the wilderness.  He left his guide
frying bacon and trout for the midday meal, and strolled
up the backwater to cast a fly and see if there were any
big fish lurking in the shade of the lily-pads.  He
forgot about his fishing, however, when he caught sight of
Quills, looking somewhat like a big dilapidated bird's
nest, curled up asleep in the crotch of a young poplar.
Being interested in all the kindred of the wild, the man
reeled in his line, stood his rod carefully in a bush,
and went and shook the tree as hard as he could, to
see what Quills would do.

Quills woke up with a startled squeak, dug his claws
into the bark to secure himself, and peered down to
see what was the matter.  At sight of this wanton
disturber of his dreams he grew very angry.  He chattered
and grunted, and clashed his big yellow teeth loudly,
and ruffled up his deadly spines as a clear warning to
the intruder to keep off.

The man laughed, as if pleased at this bold defiance.
He looked about for a long pole, thinking to poke
Quills from his perch, so as to study him a little nearer
at hand.  But poles for poking porcupines do not lie
about the Tobique wilderness, as he presently realised.
He decided to climb the poplar, for a closer—but not
too close—investigation.  But the moment he began to
climb, Quills, boiling with indignation, started down
to meet the danger half-way.  He came down backwards,
with his tail lashing savagely.  And he came
down so astonishingly fast that the man had barely
time to drop to the ground and jump out of the way,
chuckling at the speedy success of his experiment.

"Half a jiffy, and the beggar would have made
my face look like a pin-cushion," he muttered
approvingly.

Reaching the ground, Quills stopped and stood
chattering his defiance.  The man, some paces distant,
eyed him humorously for a few seconds, then went
and got his fishing-rod out of the bush.  With a bit
of string from his jacket pocket he tied his cloth cap
over the butt of the rod, and then, like a fencer
with a button on his foil, with this weapon of courtesy
he came and made a gentle thrust at Quills's blunt
nose.  Quick as a flash Quills whisked around and
lashed at the impertinent weapon with his tail.  The
man at once withdrew it and examined his cap.  It was
stuck full, at that one slashing blow, with beautiful,
polished, black-tipped white quills.

"Thanks awfully, old chap," said he.  "They are
lovely specimens, so I won't tease you any more."
And, carrying his prize carefully before him, he turned
back to the canoe.  Quills glared after him, till his long
form had vanished through the trees.  Then his anger
cooled, and exultation at this easy and signal triumph
took its place.  His spines went down till they were
hidden beneath the dark fur and he seemed to have
shrunk to half his size.  The stress of his emotions
having made him hungry—*anything* will do to make a
porcupine hungry—he crawled down to the edge of
the water and fell to feasting in a patch of arrow-weed.

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Autumn on the Tobique passed swiftly in a blaze
of colour.  A few sudden touches of frost in the night,
and then the maples stood glorious in scarlet and
crimson, the birches and poplars shimmered in pale gold,
the ash trees smouldered in dull purple, and the rowans
flaunted their great bunches of waxy orange-vermilion
berries against the solid dark-green background of
hemlock and spruce.  The partridge-coveys whirred on
strong wing across the glowing corridors of the forest,
under a sky of sharp cobalt.  For a day or two every
tree-top was elusively vocal with the thin-drawn single
notes of the migrating cedar wax-wings—notes which
were mere tiny beads of sound.  The ice which formed
each night along the edges of the shallow pools flitted
away each morning before the unclouded sun was two
hours high.  And the air, stirred with light breezes,
sparkling, and rich with earth-scents, was like wine
in the veins of every creature alive.  One night came a
light sifting of snow, in gossamer flakes which vanished
at the first touch of the sun.  Then the breezes died
away; the air, losing its crisp tang, grew balmy and
languorous, the sharp blue of the sky veiled itself in
a tender opaline haze; the wilderness seemed to fall
asleep, its silence broken only by the whispers of
the falling leaves and, once in a while, the startling
*chirr-rr-rr* of a red squirrel exulting over his hoard of
beech-nuts.  Life for the moment had taken on the
tissue of a dream.  It was the magic "Indian Summer."  And
folk in the scattered settlements, drinking in the
beauty and the wonder of it, were sad because they
knew how swiftly it must pass.

It passed, as it had come, in a night.  Day broke
steel-grey and menacing, with a bitter wind cutting
down out of the North, and in a few hours everything
was rigid with frost.  Quills, though cold in reality had
small terror for his hardy and well-clad frame, had
been disturbed and annoyed by the sudden change.
He didn't like the wind.  It occurred to him that a warm
and sheltered retreat, like his dimly-remembered nest
in the heart of the old maple, would be a better
sleeping-place than the draughty branches of a hemlock
or a spruce.  In this frame of mind he thought of a
tempting-looking hole which he had noticed under a
big boulder some fifty yards or so up the backwater.
He knew, to be sure, that the hole belonged to an old
dog-fox, but that fact did not trouble him.  His brain
had only room for one idea at a time.  He set out
straightway for that hole.

At the entrance to the den the strong smell of fox
seemed to him like a challenge, and his spines rose
angrily.  He had no idea whether the owner was at
home or not, and he made no attempt to find out.  By
way of precaution, however, he turned round before
entering and backed in, slashing vigorously with his
armed tail as he did so.  The fox was not at home.
He found the retreat dry and warm—in fact, just what
he wanted.  So, having well breakfasted before leaving
his tree, he settled himself down with his hind-quarters
to the entrance, pretty well blocking it, and
unconcernedly went to sleep.

Presently the fox came trotting home, intent on
getting out of the wind and having a nap in his snug
den.  But just before the threshold he stopped short,
the fur on his neck stood up, and his eyes went green.
He had scented the trail of Quills, and it led straight
into his lair.  Stealthily he tiptoed forward, peered in,
and saw confronting him that spiny tail and rump,
just inside the doorway.

His blood boiled at the intruder's insolence.  But
he was a wise old beast, and in his rash youth he had
once been lame for a month, with a steely quill burning
and festering under his knee-joint, through having
tried to interfere with a most insignificant-looking
porcupine.  Curbing his righteous wrath—as there was
nothing else to do—he turned about and with his
scratching hind paws insultingly sent a shower of soiled
earth upon the slumbering Quills.  Then he trotted off
to seek another retreat.  Quills, thus rudely awakened,
crawled forth, chattering indignantly, and shook out
the defilement from his long coat.  But, as the fox was
nowhere in sight, he promptly forgot his wrath and
turned into the den again to resume his nap.

Gradually, but inexorably, winter now closed down
upon the valley of the Tobique.  And it was a hard
winter—for all the hunting beasts and birds, a desperate
winter.  The rabbits that autumn had been smitten
with one of their periodical epidemics, and died off like
flies.  This did not trouble Quills directly—a strict
vegetarian, he was assured of plenty so long as the
forest stood.  But indirectly it made a vital difference
to him.  All the prowling and pouncing kindred—the
great horned owls and the eagles, the lynxes, foxes,
martens, and minks, and even certain surly old
he-bears who were too restless to "hole-up" for the
winter—soon found themselves goaded by such a
hunger as might at any moment drive them to take
unwonted risks.  Quills little guessed how often, as he
was gnawing complacently at his meal of hemlock
bark, he would be watched longingly by savage and
hungry eyes.  But, had he guessed it, his indifference
would have remained quite unruffled.  He had all he
could eat, and a warm hole to sleep in, and why should
he borrow trouble?

But one biting December afternoon, when the
straight shadows of the fir trees were stretching long
and blue across the snow, Quills's complacency got
something of a shock.  Just as he was crawling
luxuriously into his den, one of those great horned owls
which are the feathered Apaches of the wilderness
came winnowing low overhead on wings as silent as
sleep.  His round staring eyes caught sight of Quills's
hind-quarters just vanishing into the hole.  There
was no time to note exactly what it was, and hunger
had made the great bird rash even beyond his wont.
He swooped instantly and struck his terrible talons
into the tail and haunch.

With a loud hiss, like that of an angry cat, he let go
precipitately and fairly bounced up into the air again,
both murderous talons stuck deep with spines which
seemed to burn into his sinews.  He flew in haste to
the nearest branch, steadied himself with difficulty
on the perch, and set himself to the painful task of
plucking out the torments with his beak, holding up
first one claw and then the other.  With some of the
spines he was successful, but others he merely managed
to nip off close to the skin.  His feet began to swell
immediately.  For several weeks he could do no hunting,
for the fiery anguish in them, but could only sit
moping in his hollow tree, where he would soon have
starved but for the food brought to him by his faithful
mate.

As for Quills, this was his first experience of physical
pain, and it was his first taste of fear.  Whining and
squealing and grunting all at once, he shrank into his
den, and, carefully parting the spines and fur with his
nose, strove to lick the wounds made by those steel-sharp
talons.  For a day or two he had no appetite,
and stayed sulking in the den.  But the healthy flesh,
being unpoisoned, soon healed, and Quills was himself
again, except for a certain unaccustomed watchfulness.
He did not know what creature it was which had
dared to attack him, so at sight of any strange beast
whatsoever, up would go his spines and he would put
himself on guard.  Even a malevolent—but to him
harmless—little weasel, or a scouting mink, he would
honour with his suspicions; and one day, when a
gigantic bull moose came and stood beneath the tree
in which he was feeding, he chattered down at him
furiously and arrayed all his defences as if expecting
immediate attack.  But as the huge black beast did not
even trouble to look at him, his fears were soon allayed.

A porcupine's memory, however, seems to be
extraordinarily short, and Quills's was no exception to the
rule.  In the course of three or four weeks, when his
wounds no longer pricked him to remembrance, he
forgot all about the affair and recovered his old
indifference.  One day when he was returning to his den
for a doze—and only a score of yards away from the
entrance—right into his pathway, with a noiseless
pounce, dropped a great, grey, furry beast with tufted
ears, and long, white snarling teeth, and huge pads
of paws.  It crouched before him, its stub of a tail
twitching, and glared upon him with pale, cruel,
moon-like eyes.  Up went Quills's spines at once, and he
ducked his nose between his fore-paws; but he was
determined to get to his den, so he came right on.
Seeing, however, that the intruder showed no sign of
getting out of the way, Quills suddenly turned round
and came on backwards, lashing out fiercely with his
tail.  The lynx was wild with hunger, but not to the
pitch of suicidal recklessness.  He ached intolerably
for the well-nourished flesh that he knew lay hidden
beneath those bristling spines, but he knew the price
that he would have to pay for it.  With a screech of
disappointed rage, he restrained himself and slipped
from the path; and Quills, chattering noisily,
disappeared into his hole.

As the long and bitter winter drew on, burying the
wilderness under five or six feet of snow and scourging
it with storm and iron frost, Quills had many more or
less similar encounters with the lynxes, and twice with
a surly old black-bear.  Paradoxical as the statement
may appear, he usually faced the foe with his tail.
And the result was always the same.  No prowler was
prepared to pay the price which Quills would have
exacted for his carcase.  But along in March, when the
snow had begun to settle heavily under a week of thaw,
Quills was confronted by a new enemy before whom
his indifference melted more swiftly than the snow.

Very early one morning, when the first ghost-grey
light of dawn was beginning to glimmer through the
windless forest, Quills had just come down out of an
old hemlock, when he caught sight of a strange beast
gliding over the snow some thirty or forty yards away.
The stranger, dark brown in colour, with a bushy tail,
long and low-set body, weasel-shaped head, and grizzly-grey
face with black snout, was somewhat under three
feet in length.  It was distinctly smaller, and at first
glance less dangerous-looking, than a lynx.  But some
inherited instinct told Quills at once that this was an
enemy far more to be dreaded than the fiercest of
lynxes.  He had never seen a fisher before.  Fortunately
for the porcupine tribe, fishers were very scarce
in the valley of the Tobique.  But a chill of ancestral
fear struck to Quills's heart.

The fisher, catching sight of him, whirled in his
tracks and darted at him with a light swiftness and
deadly intensity of purpose very different from the
hesitating attitude of Quills's other foes.  And Quills's
tactics were now different.  Jutting from the snow,
near the trunk of the hemlock, was a heavy windfall,
its top supported by the lower branches of a neighbouring
beech tree.  Under this protection Quills thrust his
nose and head, clear to the shoulders, leaving only
his armed back and fiercely-slashing tail exposed to
the assault.  He was no more than in position ere the
enemy was upon him.

Now, in nine cases out of ten—perhaps even in
ninety-nine out of a hundred—the fight between a
porcupine and a fisher has but one result.  The fisher
eats the porcupine.  He is incomparably the stronger.
He is, taking it all in all, the most savage, swift, and
crafty of all the marauders of the wilderness, and,
above all else, for some reason as yet unexplained by
the naturalists, the porcupine's quills, so deadly to
others, have for him comparatively few terrors.  They
do not poison or inflame his flesh, which seems to
possess the faculty of soon rejecting them and casting
them forth again through the skin.  All he has to do is
to flip the victim over on its back—annexing as few
spines as possible in the act—and he has the
unprotected throat and belly at the mercy of his fangs.

In the present case, however, the too-confident
fisher had an exceptional porcupine to deal with.
Quills was not only unusually large and vigorous, but,
*for a porcupine*, sagacious.  He had settled himself
down solidly into the snow, and when the fisher,
dodging a blow of his tail, and accepting a sharp dose
of spines in the shoulder, tried to turn him over with
a twist of the paw, Quills resisted successfully, and,
with a timely swing of his haunches, stabbed his
assailant's whole flank full of spines.

The fisher had expected some resistance, some more
or less futile defence, but this was attack.  Always short
in temper, he flew into a blind rage at the pain and
the surprise of it.  He drew back a few inches to gain
impetus for the next effort, and this was his mistake—this,
and underrating his opponent.  At that very
instant he got a full, flailing stroke across his face from
Quills's tail.  It filled his nose and mouth with
spines—that was to be expected; but—for the blow had
surely been guided by the patron spirit of all the
porcupines—it also filled both his eyes.

With a screech of anguish he flung himself full on
Quills's back and strove to bite down through the
armour of spines.  But he was now totally blind, and
his jaws were stuck so full of spines as to be practically
powerless.  Meanwhile his mad struggles were simply
driving deeper and deeper into all his tender underparts
those terrible four-inch spikes which clothed the
back of his intended victim.  All at once the agony
grew too appalling for even his indomitable spirit.  He
lurched off and dragged himself away, stumbling and
staggering, and bumping into tree trunk and bush,
till he reached a thicket which he felt to be dense
enough to hide his defeat.  And here death came to
him, not too soon.

For some minutes after his defeated foe had gone,
Quills remained with his head thrust under the branch,
chattering fierce defiance and lashing wildly with his
tail.  Then very cautiously he backed off and looked
about him.  He had been roughly mauled.  His spines
and fur were dishevelled, and he was bleeding from
some deep scratches where his assailant's claws had
got home.  But he was not seriously the worse from
his terrible encounter, and he had beaten, fairly and
overwhelmingly, the terrible killer of porcupines.  His
sombre and solitary spirit glowed with triumph.
Rather hurriedly he crawled on to his lair, and there
set himself to a much-needed toilet.  And outside his
retreat the first long, level rays of the sunrise crept
across the snow, touching the trunks of the birches
and the poplars to a mystical rose-pink and saffron.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`STRIPES THE UNCONCERNED`:

.. class:: center large bold

   STRIPES THE UNCONCERNED

.. vspace:: 2

On the edge of evening, when the last of the light was
gathered in the pale-green upper sky, and all the world
of the quiet backwoods clearings was sunken in a soft
violet dusk, a leisurely and self-possessed little animal
came strolling among the ancient stumps and mossy
hillocks of the open upland sheep-pasture.  He was
about the size of an average cat, but shorter of leg,
with a long, sharp-muzzled head, and he carried his
broad feathery tail very high in a graceful arch, like a
squirrel in good humour.  Unlike most other creatures
of the wild, his colouring was such as to make him
conspicuous rather than to conceal him.  He was black,
with a white stripe down his face, a white patch on
the back of his neck, and a white stripe all the way
along each side of his body.  And, also unlike the rest
of the furtive folk, he seemed quite unconcerned to
hide his movements from observation.  Neither was he
for ever glancing this way and that, as if on the watch
for enemies.  Rather he had the air of being content
that his enemies should do the watching—and avoid him.

The skunk—for such was the undignified appellation
of this very dignified personality of the wilderness—was
pleasantly engrossed in his own business.  That
business, at the moment, consisted in catching the big,
fat, juicy, copper-brown "June-bugs" as they emerged
from their holes in the sod, crawled up the bending
grass-stems, and spread their wings for their heavy
evening flight.  It was easy hunting, and he had no
need of haste.  To snap up these great slow and clumsy
beetles as they clung upon the grass-stems was as easy
as picking strawberries, and, indeed, not altogether
dissimilar, as he would nip off the hard, glossy wing-cases
of the big beetles as one nips off the hull of the
berry before munching the succulent morsel.

Having slept the day through in his snug burrow, in
the underbrush which fringed the forest edge of the
clearing, he had come forth into the dewy twilight
equipped with a fine appetite.  He had come with the
definite purpose of hunting "June-bugs," this being
the season, all too brief, for that highly-favoured
delicacy.  At first he had thought of nothing else; but
when he had taken the edge off his hunger, he began
to consider the chances of varying his diet.  As he seized
an unlucky beetle, close to the edge of a flat, spreading
juniper bush, a brooding ground-sparrow flew up, with
a startled *cheep*, from under his very nose.  He dropped
the beetle and made a lightning pounce at the bird.
But her wing had flicked him across the eyes,
confusingly, and he missed her.  He knew well enough,
however, what her presence there among the warm
grass-tussocks meant.  He went nosing eagerly under
the juniper bush, and soon found a nest with four
little brown-mottled eggs in it.  Tiny though they were,
they made a tit-bit very much to his taste, all the
more so that they were very near hatching.  Having
licked his jaws and fastidiously polished the fur of
his shrewd, keen face, he sauntered off to see what
other delicacies the evening might have in store for him.

A little further on, toward the centre of the pasture,
he came upon a flat slab of rock, its surface sloping
toward the south, its southward edge slightly
overhanging and fringed with soft grass.  He knew the
rock well—knew how its bare surface drank in the
summer sun all day long, and held the warmth throughout
the dew-chill nights.  He knew, too, that other
creatures besides himself might very well appreciate
this genial warmth.  Stealthily, and without the
smallest disturbance of the grassy fringe, he sniffed
along the overhanging edge of the rock.  Suddenly he
stiffened, and his sharp snout darted in under the
rock.  Then he jerked back, with the writhing tail of
a snake between his jaws.

The prize was a big black-and-yellow garter snake,
not far from three feet long—not venomous, but full
of energy and fight.  It tried to cling to its
hiding-place; but the shrewd skunk, instead of attempting
to pull it out straight, like a cork from a bottle-neck,
ran forward a pace or two and, as it were, "peeled"
it forth.  It doubled out, struck him smartly in the
face with its harmless fangs, and then coiled itself
about his neck and fore-legs.  There was a moment of
confused rough-and-tumble, but the skunk knew just
how to handle this kind of antagonist.  Having bitten
the reptile's tail clean through, he presently, with the
help of his practised little jaws, succeeded in getting
hold of it by the back, an inch or two behind the head.
This ended the affair, as a struggle, and the victor
proceeded to round off his supper on snake.  He
managed to put away almost all but the head and tail,
and then, after a meticulous toilet to fur and paws—for
he was as fastidiously cleanly as a cat—he sauntered
back toward his burrow in the underbrush, to
refresh himself with a nap before seeking further
adventures.

Directly in his path stood three or four young seedling
firs, about two feet high, in a dense cluster.  Half
a dozen paces beyond this tiny thicket a big red fox,
belly to earth, was soundlessly stalking some quarry,
perhaps a mouse, which could be heard ever so faintly
rustling the grass-stems at the edge of the thicket.
To the skunk, with his well-filled belly, the sound had
no interest.  He rounded the thicket and came face to
face with the fox.

Neither in size, strength, nor agility was he any
match for the savage red beast which stood in his
path, and was quite capable, indeed, of dispatching
him in two snaps of his long, lean jaws.  But he was
not in the least put out.  Watchful, but cool, he kept
straight on, neither delaying nor hastening his
leisurely and nonchalant progress.  The fox, on the other
hand, stopped short.  He was hungry.  His hunting was
interfered with, for that rustling under the fir-branches
had stopped.  His fine red brush twitched angrily.
Nevertheless, he had no stomach to tackle this easy-going
little gentleman in the black-and-white stripes.
Showing his long white teeth in a vindictive but
noiseless snarl, he stepped aside.  And the skunk, glancing
back with bright eyes of vigilance and understanding,
passed on as if the twilight world belonged to him.  He
knew—and he knew his enemy knew as well—that he
carried with him a concealed weapon of such potency
that no fox, unless afflicted with madness, would ever
willingly run up against it.

Reaching his burrow in the underbrush without
further adventure, he found it empty.  His mate and
her young ones—now three-quarters grown—were
scattered away foraging for themselves over the
wide, forest-scented clearings.  It was a spacious
burrow, dug by a sturdy, surly old wood-chuck, who,
though usually as pugnacious as a badger and an
obstinate stickier for his rights, had in this case yielded
without a fight to the mild-mannered little usurper,
and humped off in disgust to hollow a new abode much
deeper in the forest, where such a mischance would not
be likely to happen to him again.  Under the tenancy
of the skunk family the burrow was sweet and dry
and daintily kept.  With a little grumble of content
deep in his throat he curled himself up and went to
sleep.

When he woke and set forth again to renew his
foraging, although he had only slept an hour, his
vigorous digestion had quite restored his appetite.
He had no more thought for June-bugs.  He wanted
bigger game, more red-blooded and with some
excitement in it.  He thought of the farmyard, half
a mile away across the clearings, down over the
round of the upland.  It was weeks now since he had
visited it.  There might be something worth picking
up.  There might be a mother-hen with chickens, in a
pen which he could find a way into.  There might be
a hen sitting on her clutch of eggs in a stolen nest
under the barn.  He had discovered in previous
seasons that most sitting hens had their nests provided
for them in secure places which he could in no way
manage to come at.  But he had also found that
sometimes a foolish and secretive—and very young—hen
will *hide* her nest in some such out-of-the-way place
as under the barn floor, where the troublesome human
creatures who preside over the destinies of hens cannot
get at it.  Here she keeps her precious eggs all to
herself till she has enough to cover comfortably, and
then she proceeds to the pleasant task of brooding
them, and has things all her own way till some
night-prowler comes along and convicts her, finally and
fatally, of her folly.

A full moon, large and ruddy like a ripe pumpkin,
was just rising behind the jagged black tops of the
spruce forest.  It threw long, fantastic, confusing
shadows across the dewy hillocks of the pasture.
Hither and thither, in and out and across the barred
streaks of light, darted the wild rabbits, gambolling
as if half beside themselves, as if smitten with a
mid-summer madness by the capricious magic of the
night.  But if mad, they retained enough sound sense
to keep ever at a prudent distance from the leisurely
striped wayfarer who appeared so little interested in
their sport.  Though they were bigger than he, they
knew that, if they should venture within reach of his
pounce, his indifference would vanish and his
inexorable fangs would be in their throats.

Knowing his utter inability to compete with the
speed of the rabbits, now they were wide awake, the
skunk hardly noticed their antics, but kept on his
direct path toward the farmyard.  Presently, however,
his attention was caught by the rabbits scattering
off in every direction.  On the instant he was all alert
for the cause.  Mounting a hillock, he caught sight
of a biggish shaggy-haired dog some distance down
the pasture.  The dog was racing this way and that
as crazily, it seemed, as the rabbits, with faint little
yelps of excitement and whines of disappointment.
He was chasing the rabbits with all his energy; and
it was evident that he was a stranger, a new-comer to
the wilderness world, for he seemed to think he might
hope to catch the fleet-foot creatures by merely
running after them.  As a matter of fact, he had just
arrived the same day at the backwoods farm from the
city down the river.  His experience had been confined
to streets and gardens and the chasing of cats, and
he was daft with delight over the spacious freedom of
the clearings.  The skunk eyed him scornfully, and
continued his journey with the unconcern of an
elephant.

A moment later the dog was aware of a little,
insignificant black-and-white creature coming slowly
towards him as if unconscious of his presence.  Another
rabbit!  But as this one did not seem alarmed, he
stopped and eyed it with surprise, his head cocked to
one side in inquiry.  The skunk half turned and moved
off slowly, deliberately, at right angles to the path he
had been following.

With a yelp of delight the dog dashed at this easy
victim, which seemed so stupid that it made no effort
to escape.  He was almost upon it.  Another leap and
he would have had it in his jaws.  But the amazing
little animal turned its back on him, stuck its tail
straight in the air, and jerked up its hindquarters
with a derisive gesture.  In that instant something
hot and soft struck the inexperienced hunter full in
the face—something soft, indeed, but overwhelming,
paralysing.  It stopped him dead in his tracks.
Suffocating, intolerably pungent, it both blinded him and
choked him.  His lungs refused to work, shutting up
spasmodically.  Gasping and gagging, he grovelled on
his belly and strove frantically to paw his mouth and
nostrils clear of the dense, viscous fluid which was
clogging them.  Failing in this, he fell to rooting
violently in the short grass, biting and tearing at it and
rolling in it, till some measure of breath and eyesight
returned to him.  Thereupon, his matted head all
stuck with grass and moss and dirt, he set off racing
madly for the farmhouse, where he expected to get
relief from the strange torment which afflicted him.
But when he pawed and whined at the kitchen door
for admittance, he was driven off with contumely and
broomsticks.  There was nothing for him to do but
slink away with his shame to a secluded corner between
the wagon-shed and the pig-pen, where he could soothe
his burning muzzle in the cool winds and fresh earth.
On the following day one of the farm hands, with
rude hands and unsympathetic comment, scrubbed
him violently with liquid soap and then clipped close
his splendid shaggy coat.  But it was a week before he
was readmitted to the comfortable fellowship of the
farmhouse kitchen.

For a moment or two, with a glance of triumph in
his bright eyes, the skunk had watched the paroxysms
of his discomfited foe.  Then, dropping the tip of his
tail into its customary disdainful arch, he had turned
back towards his burrow.  This was a redoubtable foe
whom he had just put to rout, and he had expended
most of his armoury upon him.  He had no wish to
risk another encounter until the potent secretion
which he carried in a sac between the powerful muscles
of his thighs should have had time to accumulate
again.  He dropped, for that night, all notion of the
distinctly adventurous expedition to the farmyard,
contenting himself with snapping up a few beetles
and crickets as he went.  He was lucky enough to
pounce upon an indiscreet field-mouse just as she
emerged from her burrow, and then a few minutes'
digging with his powerful and expert fore-paws had
served to unearth the mouse's nest with her half-dozen
blind sucklings.  So he went home well satisfied with
himself.  Before re-entering he again made a careful
toilet; and as the opening of the sac from which he
had projected the potent fluid into his enemy's face
had immediately closed up tight and fast, he carried
no trace of the virulent odour with him.  Indeed, that
fluid was a thing which he never by any chance allowed
to get on to his own fur.  Always, at the moment of
ejecting it, the fur on his thighs parted and lay back
flat to either side of the naked vent of the sac, and the
long tail cocked itself up rigidly, well out of the way.
It was a stuff he kept strictly for his foes, and never
allowed to offend either himself or his friends.

On entering his burrow he found there his mate and
all the youngsters, curled up together in the sleep of
good digestion and easy conscience.  He curled himself
up with them, that the supply of his high-explosive
might accumulate during another forty winks.

About an hour before the dawn he awoke again,
feeling hungry.  The rest of the family were still
sleeping, having gorged themselves, as he might have done
had it not been for that encounter with the misguided
dog.  He left them whimpering contentedly in their
cosy slumber, and crept forth into the dewy chill
alone, his heart set on mice and such-like warm-blooded
game.

The moon was now high overhead, sailing honey-coloured
through a faintly violet sky.  The rough
pasture, with its stumps and hillocks, was touched
into a land of dream.

Now, it chanced that an old bear, who was
accustomed to foraging in the valley beyond the cedar
swamp, had on this night decided to bring her cub on
an expedition toward the more dangerous neighbourhood
of the clearings.  She wanted to begin his education
in all the wariness which is so necessary for the
creatures of the wild in approaching the works and
haunts of man.  On reaching the leafy fringe of bushes
which fringed the rude rail-fence dividing the forest
from the pasture, she cautiously poked her head
through the leafage, and for perhaps a minute, motionless
as a stone, she interrogated the bright open spaces
with eyes and ears and nostrils.  The cub, taking the
cue from his mother, stiffened to the like movelessness
at her side, his bright little eyes full of interest and
curiosity.  There was no sign of danger in the pasture.
In fact, there were the merry rabbits hopping about
in the moonlight undisturbed.  This was a sign of
security quite good enough for the wise old bear.  With
crafty and experienced paws she forced a hole in the
fence—leaving the top rail, above the binder, in its
place—and led the eager cub forth into the moonlight.

The special notion of the bear in coming to the
pasture was to teach her cub the art of finding,
unearthing, and catching the toothsome wild mice.
Keeping along near the fence, she sniffed the tussocky,
uneven grass with practised nose.  But the first thing
she came upon was a bumble-bees' nest.  This was far
more to her taste than any mice.  She gave a low call
to the cub; but the cub was preoccupied now, sniffing
at the rabbit tracks, and lifting himself on his
hindquarters to stare longingly at the rabbits, who were
hopping off to discreeter distance.  The mother did
not insist on his coming to watch her tackle the bees'
nest.  After all, he was perhaps a bit young to face the
stings of the angry bees, and she might as well have
the little hoard of honey and larvæ and bee-bread for
herself.  The cub wandered off a little way, with some
vague notion of chasing the elusive rabbits.

Just then through the edge of the underbrush
appeared the skunk, stretching himself luxuriously
before he started off across the pasture.  He saw the
bear, but he knew that sagacious beast would pay
him no attention whatever.  He trotted out into the
moonlight and pounced upon a fat black cricket as
an appetiser.

The cub caught sight of the pretty little striped
creature, and came darting clumsily and gaily to the
attack.  He would show his mother that he could do
some hunting on his own account.  The striped
creature turned its back on him and moved off slowly.
The cub was delighted.  He was just going to reach
out a rude little paw and grab the easy prize.  Then
the inevitable happened.  The pretty striped creature
gave its stern a contemptuous jerk, and the deluded
cub fell in a heap, squealing, gasping, choking, and
pawing convulsively at the horrible sticky stuff which
filled his mouth and eyes.

Just before the catastrophe occurred, the old bear
had looked up from her business with the bees, and
had uttered a loud *woof* of warning.  But too late.  The
last thing in the world she wanted to do was to try any
fooling with a skunk.  But now her rage at the suffering
and discomfiture of her little one swept away all
prudence.  With a grunt of fury she charged at the
offender.  One glance at the approaching vengeance
convinced the skunk that this time he had made a
mistake.  He turned and raced for the underbrush as
fast as his little legs would carry him.  But that was
not fast enough.  Just as he was about to dart under
the fence, a huge black paw, shod with claws like steel,
crashed down upon him, and his leisurely career came
to an end.

The bear, in deep disgust, scraped her reeking paw
long and earnestly in the fresh earth beneath the
grass, then turned her attention to the unhappy cub.
She relieved her feelings by giving him a sharp cuff
which sent him sprawling a dozen feet.  Then, relenting,
she showed him how to clean himself by rooting
in the earth.  At length, when he could see and breathe
once more with some degree of comfort, she indignantly
led him away back into the depths of the
consoling forest.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE BLACK MULE OF AVELUY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   THE BLACK MULE OF AVELUY

.. vspace:: 2

The mule lines at Aveluy were restless and unsteady
under the tormented dark.  All day long a six-inch
high-velocity gun, firing at irregular intervals from
somewhere on the low ridge beyond the Ancre, had
been feeling for them.  Those terrible swift shells,
which travel so fast, on their flat trajectory, that
their bedlam shriek of warning and the rending crash
of their explosion seem to come in the same breathless
instant, had tested the nerves of man and beast
sufficiently during the daylight; but now, in the shifting
obscurity of a young moon harrowed by driving cloud-rack,
their effect was yet more daunting.  So far they
had been doing little damage, having been occupied,
for the most part, in blowing new craters in the old
lines, a couple of hundred yards further east, which
had been vacated only two days before on account of
their deep-trodden and intolerable mud.  All day our
'planes, patrolling the sky over Tara Hill and the lines
of Regina, had kept the Boches' airmen at such a
distance that they could not observe and register for
their batteries; and this terrible gun was, therefore,
firing blind.  But there came a time, during the long
night, when it seemed to reach the conclusion that its
target must be pretty well obliterated.  Squatting in
its veiled lair behind the heights of Ancre, it lifted its
raking muzzle, ever so slightly, and put another two
hundred yards on to its range.

The next shell screamed down straight upon the
lines.  The crash tore earth and air.  A massive column
of black smoke vomited upwards, pierced with straight
flame and streaked with flying fragments of mules and
ropes and tether-pegs.  Deadly splinters of shell hissed
forth from it on all sides.  The top of the column spread
outwards; the base thinned and lifted; a raw and
ghastly crater, like some Dantesque dream of the
mouth of Hell, came into view; and there followed a
faint, hideous sound of nameless things pattering down
upon the mud.

Near the edge of the crater stood a big, raw-boned
black mule.  His team mate and the three other mules
tethered nearest to him had vanished.  Several others
lay about on either side of him, dead or screaming in
their death agonies.  But he was untouched.  At the
appalling shock he had sprung back upon his haunches,
snorting madly; but the tethering-rope had held, and
he had almost thrown himself.  Then he had lashed
out with his iron-shod heels.  But he was tough of
nerve and stout of heart far beyond the fashion of
his kind, and almost at once he pulled himself together
and stood trembling, straining on the halter, his long
ears laid back upon his head.  Then his eyes, rolling
white, with a green gleam of horror at the centre, took
note of the familiar form of his driver, standing by
his head and feeling himself curiously, as if puzzled at
being still alive.

This sight reassured the black mule amazingly.  His
expressive ears wagged forward again, and he thrust
his frothing muzzle hard against the man's shoulder,
as if to ask him what it all meant.  The man flung an
arm over the beast's quivering neck and leaned against
him for a moment or two, dazed from the tremendous
shock which had lifted him from his feet and slammed
him down viciously upon the ground.  He coughed
once or twice, and tried to wipe the reek of the
explosion from his eyes.  Then, coming fully to himself, he
hurriedly untethered his charge, patted him reassuringly
on the nose, loosed the next mule behind him on
the lines, and led the two away in haste toward safer
quarters.  As he did so, another shell came in, some
fifty yards to the left, and the lines became a bedlam
of kicking and snorting beasts, with their drivers,
cursing and coaxing, according to their several methods,
clawing at the ropes and hurrying to get their charges
away to safety.

At any other time the big black mule—an unregenerate
product of the Argentine, with a temper which
took delight in giving trouble to all in authority over
him—might have baulked energetically as a protest
against being moved from his place at this irregular
hour.  But he was endowed with a perception of his
own interests, which came rather from the humbler
than the more aristocratic side of his ancestry.  He
was no victim of that childish panic which is so liable,
in a moment of desperation, to pervert the high-strung
intelligence of the horse.  He felt that the man knew
just what to do in this dreadful and demoralising
situation.  So he obeyed and followed like a lamb;
and in that moment he conceived an affection for his
driver which made him nothing less than a changed
mule.  His amazing docility had its effect upon the
second mule, and the driver got them both away
without any difficulty.  When all the rest of the
survivors had been successfully shifted to new ground,
far off to the right, the terrible gun continued for
another hour to blow craters up and down the deserted
lines.  Then it lengthened its range once more, and
spent the rest of the night shattering to powder the
ruins of an already ruined and quite deserted street,
under the impression that it was smashing up some of
our crowded billets.  A little before daylight, however,
a shell from one of our forward batteries, up behind
Regina Trench, found its way into the lair where the
monster squatted, and rest descended upon Aveluy in
the bleak autumnal dawn.

This was in the rain-scourged autumn of 1916, when
the unspeakable desolation of the Somme battlefield
was a sea of mud.  The ruins of the villages—Ovillers,
La Boisselle, Pozières, Courcelette, Martinpuich, and
all the others which had once made fair with flowers
and orchards this rolling plateau of Picardy—had been
pounded flat by the inexorable guns, and were now
mere islands of firmer ground in the shell-pitted wastes
of red mire.  Men went encased in mud from boots to
shrapnel helmet.  And it was a special mud of
exasperating tenacity, a cement of beaten chalk and clay.
The few spidery tram-lines ran precariously along the
edges of the shell-holes, out over the naked, fire-swept
undulations beyond Mouquet Farm and Courcelette,
where they were continually being knocked to pieces
by the "whizz-bangs," and tirelessly rebuilt by our
dauntless pioneers and railway troops.  Scattered all
about this dreadful naked waste behind our front
trenches lurked our forward batteries, their shallow
gun-pits cunningly camouflaged behind every little
swell of tumbled mud.

And this foul mud, hiding in the deep slime of its
shell-holes every kind of trap and putrid horror, was
the appropriate ally of the Germans.  Stinkingly and
tenaciously and treacherously, as befitted, it opposed
the feeding of the guns.  Two by two or four by four,
according to their size, the shells for the guns had to
be carried up from the forward dumps in little wicker
panniers slung across the backs of horses and mules.
It was a slow process, precarious and costly, but it
beat the mud, and the insatiable guns were fed.

After the night when the mule-lines at Aveluy were
shelled, the big black mule and his driver were put on
this job of carrying up shells to the forward batteries.
The driver, a gaunt, green-eyed, ginger-haired
teamster from the lumber camps of Northern New
Brunswick, received the order with a crooked grin.

"Say your prayers now, Sonny," he muttered in the
mule's big, waving ear, which came to "attention"
promptly to receive his communication.  "You'll be
wishing you was back in them old lines at Aveluy afore
we're through with this job.  Fritzy over yonder ain't
goin' to like you an' me one little bit when he gits on
to what we're up to.  It ain't like haulin' fodder, I tell
you that.  But I guess we've got the nerve all right."

Instead of rolling the whites of his eyes at him, in
surly protest against this familiarity, the black mule
responded by nibbling gently at the sleeve of his muddy
tunic.

"Geezely Christmas," murmured the driver, astonished
at this evidence of goodwill, "but it's queer,
how a taste o' shell-fire'll sometimes work a change o'
heart, even in an Argentine mule.  I only hope it'll last,
Sonny.  If it does, we're goin' to git along fine, you an'
me."  And the next time he visited the canteen he
brought back a biscuit or two and a slab of sweet
chocolate, to confirm the capricious beast in its mended
manners.

Early that same afternoon the black mule found
himself in new surroundings.  He was at the big
ammunition dump which lay concealed in an obscure
hollow near the ruins of Courcelette.  He looked with
suspicion on the wicker panniers which were slung
across his sturdy back.  Saddles he knew, and harness
he knew, but this was a contraption which roused
misgivings in his conservative soul.  When the shells
were slipped into the panniers, and he felt the sudden
weight, so out of all proportion to the size of the burden,
he laid back his long ears with a grunt, and gathered
his muscles for a protesting kick.  But his driver,
standing at his head, stroked his muzzle soothingly and
murmured: "There, there, steady, Son!  Keep your
hair on!  It ain't goin' to bite you."

Thus adjured, he composed himself with an effort,
and the lashing kick was not delivered.

"What a persuasive cuss you must be, Jimmy
Wright!" said the man who was handling the shells.
"I wouldn't trust you round with my best girl, If you
can get a bucking mule locoed that way with your soft
sawder."

"It ain't me," replied the New Brunswicker.  "It's
shell-shock, I guess, kind of helped along with
chocolate an' biscuits.  He got a bit of a shaking up when
they shelled the lines at Aveluy night afore last, an'
he's been a lamb ever since.  Seems to think I saved
his hide for him.  He was the very devil to handle afore
that."

For some way from the dump the journey was
uneventful.  The path to the guns led along a sunken
road, completely hidden from the enemy's observation
posts.  The dull, persistent rain had ceased for a
little, and the broad patches of blue overhead were
dotted with our droning aeroplanes, which every now
and then would dive into a low-drifting rack of
grey cloud to shake off the shrapnel of the German
"Archies."  Of German 'planes none were to be seen,
for they had all sped home to their hangars when our
fighting squadrons rose to the encounter.  The earth
rocked to the explosions of our 9.2 howitzers ranged
about Pozières and Martinpuich, and the air clamoured
under the passage of their giant shells as they went
roaring over toward the German lines.  Now and again
a vicious whining sound would swell suddenly to a
nerve-racking shriek, and an enemy shell would land
with a massive cr-r-ump, and a furious blast of smoke
and mud would belch upwards to one side or other of
the sunken road.  But none of these unwelcome visitors
came into the road itself, and neither the black mule
nor Jimmy Wright paid them any more attention than
the merest roll of an eye to mark their billet.

"Change o' heart hain't spoiled old Sonny's nerve,
anyhow," thought the driver to himself, with deep
approval.

A little further on and the trail up to "X's Group,"
quitting the shelter of the sunken road, led out across
the red desolation, in the very eye, as it seemed to the
New Brunswicker, of the enemy's positions.  It was a
narrow, undulating track, slippery as oil, yet
tenacious as glue, corkscrewing its laborious way between
the old slime-filled shell-pits.  From the surface of one
of these wells of foul-coloured ooze the legs of a dead
horse stuck up stiffly into the air, like four posts on
which to lay a foot-bridge.  A few yards beyond, the
track was cut by a fresh shell-hole, too new to have
collected any water.  Its raw sides were streaked red
and white and black, and just at its rim lay the mangled
fragments of something that might recently have been
a mule.  The long ears of Wright's mule waved
backwards and forwards at the sight, and he snorted
apprehensively.

"This don't appear to be a health resort for us,
Sonny," commented the New Brunswicker, "so we
won't linger, if it's all the same to you."  And he led
the way around the other side of the new shell-hole,
the big mule crowding close behind with quivering
muzzle at his shoulder.

However urgent Wright's desire for speed, speed was
ridiculously impossible.  The obstinate pro-German
mud was not lightly to be overcome.  Even on the
firmer ridges it clung far above the fetlocks of the
black mule, and struggled to suck off Wright's
hob-nailed boots at every labouring step.  Though a
marrow-piercing north-easter swept the waste, both man
and mule were lathered in sweat.  Half their energy
had to be expended in recovering themselves from
continual slithering slides which threatened to land
them in the engulfing horrors of the shell-holes.  For
all that he had so little breath to spare, Jimmy Wright
kept muttering through his teeth strange expletives
and objurgations from the vocabulary of the lumber
camps, eloquent but unprintable, to which the black
mule lent ear admiringly.  He seemed to feel that his
driver's remarks, though he could not understand them,
were doubtless such as would command his fullest
accord.  For his own part he had no means of
expressing such sentiments except through his heels, and
these were now all too fully occupied in their battle
with the mud.

By this time the black mule had become absolutely
convinced that his fate was in the hands of his
ginger-haired driver.  Jimmy Wright, as it seemed to him,
was his sole protection against this violent horror
which kept bursting and crashing on every hand about
him.  It was clear to him that Jimmy Wright, though
apparently much annoyed, was not afraid.  Therefore,
with Jimmy Wright as his protector he was safe.  He
wagged his ears, snorted contemptuously at a 5.9
which spurted up a column of mud and smoke some
hundred yards to the left, and plodded on gamely
through the mud.  He didn't know where he was going,
but Jimmy Wright was there, and just ahead of his
nose, where he could sniff at him; and he felt sure
there would be fodder and a rub down at the end of
the weary road.

In the midst of these consoling reflections something
startling and inexplicable happened.  He was enveloped
and swept away hi a deafening roar.  Thick blackness,
streaked with star-showers, blinded him.  Though half
stupefied, he kicked and struggled with all his strength,
for it was not in him to yield himself, like a stricken
horse, to any stroke of Fate.

When he once more saw daylight, he was recovering
his feet just below the rim of an old shell-hole.  He
gained the top, braced his legs, and shook himself
vigorously.  The loaded panniers thumping heavily
upon his ribs restored him fully to his senses.
Snorting through wide red nostrils, he stared about him
wildly.  Some ten paces distant he saw a great new
crater in the mud, reeking with black and orange fumes.

But where was Jimmy Wright?  The mule swept
anxious eyes across the waste of shell-holes, in every
direction.  In vain.  His master had vanished.  He felt
himself deserted.  Panic began to clutch at his heart,
and he gathered his muscles for frantic flight.  And
then he recovered himself and stood steady.  He had
caught sight of a ginger-haired head, bare of its
shrapnel helmet, lying on the mud at the other side of the
shell-hole from which he had just struggled out.

His panic passed at once, but it gave place to anxious
wonder.  There, indeed, was Jimmy Wright, but what
was he doing there?  His body was buried almost to the
shoulders in the discoloured slime that half filled the
shell-hole.  He was lying on his face.  His arms were
outstretched, and his hands were clutching at the
slippery walls of the hole as if he were striving to pull
himself up from the water.  This effort, however,
seemed anything but successful.  The mule saw, indeed,
that his protector was slowly slipping deeper into the
slime.  This filled him with fresh alarm.  If Jimmy
Wright should disappear under that foul surface, that
would be desertion complete and final.  It was not to
be endured.

Quickly but cautiously the mule picked his way
around the hole, and then, with sagacious bracing of
his hoofs, down to his master's side.  But what was to
be done next?  Jimmy Wright's face was turned so that
he could not see his would-be rescuer.  His hands were
still clutching at the mud, but feebly and without effect.

The mule saw that his master was on the point of
vanishing under the mud, of deserting him in his
extremity.  This was intolerable.  The emergency
quickened his wits.  Instinct suggested to him that to
keep a thing one should take hold of it and hold on
to it.  He reached down with his big yellow teeth,
took hold of the shoulder of Jimmy Wright's tunic,
and held on.  Unfamiliar with anatomy, he at the same
time took hold of a substantial portion of Jimmy
Wright's own shoulder inside the tunic, and held on
to that.  He braced himself, and with a loud,
involuntary snort began to pull.

Jimmy Wright, up to this point, had been no more
than half conscious.  The mule's teeth in his shoulder
revived him effectually.  He came to himself with a
yell.  He remembered the shell-burst.  He saw and
understood where he was.  He was afraid to move for
a moment, lest he should find that his shoulder was
blown off.  But no, he had two arms, and he could
move them.  He had his shoulder all right, for
something was pulling at it with quite sickening energy.
He reached up his right arm—it was the left shoulder
that was being tugged at—and encountered the furry
head and ears of his rescuer.

"Sonny!" he shouted.  "Well, I'll be d——d!"  And
he gripped fervently at the mule's neck.

Reassured at the sound of his master's voice, the
big mule took his teeth out of Wright's shoulder and
began nuzzling solicitously at his sandy head.

"It's all right, old man," said the New Brunswicker,
thinking quickly, while with his left hand he secured a
grip on the mule's head-stall.  Then he strove to raise
himself from the slime.  The effort produced no result,
except to send a wave of blackness across his brain.
Wondering sickly if he carried some terrible injury
concealed under the mud, he made haste to pass the
halter rope under his arms and knot it beneath his
chest.  Then he shouted for help, twice and again, till
his voice trailed off into a whimper and he relapsed
into unconsciousness.  The mule shifted his feet to
gain a more secure foothold on the treacherous slope,
and then stood wagging his ears and gazing down on
Jimmy in benevolent content.  So long as Jimmy was
with him, he felt that things were bound to come
all right.  Jimmy would presently get up and lead him
out of the shell-hole, and take him home.

Shell after shell, whining or thundering according to
their breed, soared high over the hole, but the black
mule only wagged his ears at them.  His eyes were
anchored upon the unconscious sandy head of Jimmy
Wright.  Suddenly, however, a sharp voice made him
look up.  He saw a couple of stretcher-bearers standing
on the edge of the shell-hole, looking down
sympathetically upon him and his charge.  In a second or
two they were beside him, skilfully and tenderly
extricating Jimmy's body from the mud.

"He ain't gone west this time," pronounced one,
who had thrust an understanding hand into the breast
of the tunic.

Jimmy Wright opened his eyes wide suddenly.

"Not by a d——d sight I ain't, Bill!" he muttered,
rather thickly.  Then, his wits and his voice coming
clearer, he added: "But if I ain't, it's thanks to this
here old —— of an Argentine mule, that come down
into this hole and yanked me out o' the mud, and
saved me.  Eh, Sonny?"

The big mule was crowding up so close to him as to
somewhat incommode the two men in their task on
that treacherous incline.  But they warded off his
inconvenient attentions very gently.

"He's some mule, all right," grunted one of the
bearers, as they got Jimmy on to the stretcher and
laboriously climbed from the shell-hole.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`STAR-NOSE OF THE UNDER WAYS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   STAR-NOSE OF THE UNDER WAYS

.. vspace:: 2

He was in a darkness that was dense, absolute,
palpable.  And his eyes were shut tight,—though it made
no difference, under the circumstances, whether they
were shut or open.  But if his sense of sight was for the
moment off duty, its absence was more than compensated
for by the extreme alertness of his other senses.
To his supersensitive nostrils the black, peaty soil
surrounding him was full of distinct and varying
scents.  His ears could detect and locate the wriggling
of a fat grub, the unctuous withdrawal of a startled
earth-worm.  Above all, his sense of touch was so
extraordinarily developed that it might have served
him for eyes, ears and nostrils all in one.  And so it
came about that, there in the blackness of his close
and narrow tunnel, deep in the black soil of the swamp,
he was not imprisoned, but free and at large as the
swift hares gambolling overhead,—far freer, indeed,
because secure from the menace of prowling and
swooping foes.

Star-nose was a mole.  But he was not an ordinary
mole of the dry uplands and well drained meadows,
by any means, or he would not have been running his
deep tunnel here in the cool, almost swampy soil
within a few yards of the meandering channel of the
Lost-Water.  In shape and colour he was not unlike
the common mole,—with his thick, powerful neck of
about the same size as his body, his great, long-clawed,
immensely strong, hand-like fore-feet, and his mellow,
velvety, shadowy, grey-brown fur.  But his tail was
much longer, and thicker at the base, than that of his
plebeian cousin of the lawns.  And his nose,—that was
something of a distinction which no other beast in
the world, great or small, could boast of.  From all
around its tip radiated a fringe of feelers, no less than
twenty-two in number, naked, flexible, miraculously
sensitive, each one a little nailless, interrogating finger.
It entitled him, beyond question, to the unique title
of Star-Nose.

This tireless worker in the dark was driving a new
tunnel,—partly, no doubt, for the sake of worms,
grubs, and pupæ which he might find on the way,
and partly for purposes known only to himself.  At
the level where he was digging, a scant foot below the
surface, the mould, though damp, was fairly light and
workable, owing to the abundance of fine roots and
decayed leafage mixed through it; and his progress
was astonishingly rapid.

His method of driving his tunnel was practical and
effective.  With back arched so as to throw the full
force of it into his fore-shoulders, with his hind feet
wide apart and drawn well up beneath him, he dug
mightily into the damp soil straight before his nose
with the long, penetrating claws of his exaggerated
and powerful fore-paws.  In great swift handfuls (for
his fore-paws were more like hands than feet), the
loosened earth was thrown behind him, passing under
his body and out between his roomily straddling hind
legs.  And as he dug he worked in a circle, enlarging
the tunnel head to a diameter of about two-and-a-half
inches, at the same time pressing the walls firm and
hard with his body, so that they should not cave in upon
him.  This compacting process further enlarged the
tunnel to about three inches, which was the space he
felt he needed for quick and free movement.  When
he had accumulated behind him as much loose earth
as he could comfortably handle, he turned around,
and with his head and chest and forearms pushed the
mass before him along the tunnel to the foot of his
last dump-hole,—an abrupt shaft leading to the upper
air.  Up this shaft he would thrust his burden, and
heave it forth among the grass and weeds, a conspicuous
and contemptuous challenge to would-be pursuers.  He
did not care how many of his enemies might thus be
notified of his address, for he knew he could always
change it with baffling celerity, blocking up his tunnels
behind him as he went.

And now, finding that at his present depth the
meadow soil, at this point, was not well-stocked with
such game—grubs and worms—as he chose to hunt,
he slanted his tunnel slightly upward to get among the
grass-roots near the surface.  Almost immediately he
was rewarded.  He cut into the pipe-like canal of a
large earth-worm, just in time to intercept its
desperate retreat.  It was one of those stout, dark-purplish
lob-worms that feed in rich soil, and to him the most
toothsome of morsels.  In spite of the eagerness of his
appetite he drew it forth most delicately and gradually
from its canal, lest it should break in two and the
half of it escape him.  Dragging it back into his tunnel
he held it with his big, inexorable "hands," and felt it
over gleefully with that restless star of fingers which
adorned the tip of his nose.  Then he tore it into short
pieces, bolted it hurriedly, and fell to work again
upon his tunnelling.  But now, having come among the
grass-roots, he was in a good hunting-ground, and his
work was continually interrupted by feasting.  At one
moment it would be a huge, fat, white grub as thick
as a man's little finger, with a hard, light-copper-coloured
head; at the next a heavy, liver-coloured
lob-worm.  His appetite seemed insatiable; but at
last he felt he had had enough, for the moment.  He
stopped tunnelling, turned back a few inches, drove
a short shaft to the surface as a new exit, and heaved
forth a mighty load of débris.

In the outer world it was high morning, and the
strong sunlight glowed softly down through the tangled
grasses of the water-meadow.  The eyes of Star-Nose
were but two tiny black beads almost hidden in fur,
but after he had blinked them for a second or two in
the sudden light he could see quite effectively,—much
better, indeed, than his cousin, the common mole of
the uplands.  Though by far the greater part of his
strenuous life was spent in the palpable darkness of
his tunnels in the under world, daylight, none the
less, was by no means distasteful to him, and he was
not averse to a few minutes of basking in the tempered
sun.  As he sat stroking his fine fur with those restless
fingers of his nose, and scratching himself luxuriously
with his capable claws, a big grasshopper, dropping
from one of its aimless leaps, fell close beside him,
bearing down with it a long blade of grass which it had
clutched at in its descent.  Star-Nose seized the
unlucky hopper in a flash, tore off its hard inedible legs,
and started to eat it.  At that instant, however, a faint
swish of wings caught his ear and a swift shadow
passed over him.  At the touch of that shadow,—as if
it had been solid and released an oiled spring within
his mechanism,—he dived back into his hole; and the
swooping marsh-hawk, after a savage but futile clutch
at the vanishing tip of his tail, wheeled off with a
yelp of disappointment.

It was certainly a narrow shave; and for perhaps a
whole half-minute Star-Nose, with his heart thumping,
crouched in his refuge.  Then, remembering the
toothsome prize which he had been forced to abandon, he
put forth his head warily to reconnoitre.  The hawk
was gone; but the dead grasshopper was still there,
green and glistening in the sun, and a burly blue-bottle
had just alighted upon it.  Star-Nose crept forth
cautiously to retrieve his prey.

Now at this same moment, as luck would have it,
gliding along one of the tiny run-ways of the meadow-mice,
came a foraging mole-shrew, a pugnacious cousin
of the Star-Nose tribe.  The mole-shrew was distinctly
smaller than Star-Nose, and handicapped with such
defective vision that he had to do all his hunting by
scent and sound and touch.  He smelt the dead grasshopper
at once, and came straight for it, heedless of
whatever might stand in the way.

Under the circumstances Star-Nose might have
carelessly stood aside, not through lack of courage,
but because he had no special love of fighting for its
own sake.  And he knew that his cousin, though so
much smaller and lighter than himself, was much to
be respected as an opponent by reason of his blind
ferocity and dauntless tenacity.  But he was no weakling,
to let himself be robbed of his lawful prey.  He
whipped out of his hole, flung himself upon the prize,
and lifted his head just in time to receive the furious
spring of his assailant.

Between two such fighters there was no fencing.  The
mole-shrew secured a grip upon the side of the
immensely thick and muscular neck of his antagonist,
and immediately began to worry and tear like a terrier.
But Star-Nose, flexible as an eel, set his deadly teeth
into the side of his assailant's head, a little behind the
ear, and worked in deeper and deeper, after the
manner of a bulldog.  For a few seconds, in that
death-grapple, the two rolled over and over, thrashing the
grass-stems.  Then the long teeth of Star-Nose bit into
the brain; and the mole-shrew's body, after a
convulsive stiffening, went suddenly limp.

But the disturbance in the grass—there being no
wind that golden morning—had not escaped the eyes
of the foraging marsh-hawk.  She came winnowing
back to learn the cause of it.  The sun being behind
her, however, her ominous shadow swept over the
grass before her,—and Star-Nose, unfailingly vigilant
even in the moment of victory, caught sight of it
coming.  He loosed his hold on his dead adversary and
plunged for the hole.  At least he tried to plunge for
it.  But the plunge was little more than a crawl; for
the teeth of the mole-shrew, set deep in his neck, had
locked themselves fast in death, and all that Star-Nose
could do was to drag the body with him.  This, however,
he succeeded in doing, so effectively that he was
in time to back down into the hole, out of reach, just
as the hawk swooped and struck.

The clutching talons of the great bird fixed
themselves firmly in the protruding hind-quarters of the
mole-shrew, and she attempted to rise with her capture.
But to her amazed indignation the prize resisted.
Star-Nose was holding on to the walls of his tunnel
with all the strength of his powerful claws, while at
the same time struggling desperately to tear himself
loose from the grip of those dead teeth in his neck.
The contest, however, was but momentary.  The
strength of Star-Nose was a small thing against the
furious beating of those great wings; and in two or
three seconds, unable either to hold on or to free
himself from the fatal incubus of his victim, he was
dragged forth ignominiously and swept into the air,
squirming and dangling at the tip of the dead
mole-shrew's snout.

Star-Nose was vaguely conscious of a chill rush of
air, of a sudden dazzling glare of gold and blue, as the
victorious hawk flapped off towards the nearest
tree-top with her prize.  Then, suddenly, the grip of the
dead jaws relaxed and he felt himself falling.
Fortunately for him the hawk had not risen to any great
height,—for the marsh-hawk, hunter of meadow-mice,
and such secretive quarry, does not, as a rule, fly high.
He felt himself turn over and over in the air, dizzily,
and then he landed, with a stupefying swish, in a dense
bed of wild parsnips.  He crashed right through, of
course, but the strong stems broke his fall and he was
little the worse for the stupendous adventure.  For a
few moments he lay half stunned.  Then, pulling
himself together, he fell to digging with all his might,
caring only to escape from a glaring outer world which
seemed so full of tumultuous and altogether bewildering
perils.  He made the earth fly in a shower; and in an
unbelievably brief space of time he had buried himself
till even the tip of his tail was out of sight.  But even
then he was not content.  He dug on frantically, till
he was a good foot beneath the surface and perhaps a
couple of feet more from the entrance.  Then, leaving
the passage safely blocked behind him, he enlarged the
tunnel to a large chamber, and curled himself up to
lick his wounds and recover from his fright.

It was perhaps half an hour before Star-Nose completely
regained his composure and his appetite.  His
appetite—that was the first consideration.  And second
to that, a poor second, was his need of tunnelling back
into his familiar maze of underground passages.
Resuming his digging with full vigour, he first ran a new
shaft to the surface, gathering in several fat grubs in
his progress through the grass-roots.  Then, at about
six inches below the surface—a depth at which he
could count upon the best foraging—he began to drive
his tunnel.  His sense of direction was unerring; which
was the more inexplicable as there in the thick dark
he could have no landmarks to guide him.  He headed
straight for the point which would, by the shortest
distance, join him up with his own under-ways.

It happened, however, that in that terrible journey
of his through the upper air the swift flight of the
hawk had carried him some distance, and across the
course of a sluggish meadow brook, a tributary of
the Lost-Water.  Suddenly and unexpectedly his
vigorous tunnelling brought him to this obstacle.
The darkness before him gave way to a glimmer of
light.  He hesitated, and then burrowed on more
cautiously.  A screen of matted grass-roots confronted
him, stabbed through with needles of sharp gold which
quivered dazzlingly.  Warily he dug through the screen,
thrust forth his nose, and found himself looking down
upon a shimmering glare of quiet water, about a foot
below him.

Glancing upwards to see if there were any terrible
wings in the air above, Star-Nose perceived, to his
deep satisfaction, that the steep bank was overhung
by a mat of pink-blossomed wild roses, humming
drowsily with bees.  The concealment, from directly
overhead, was perfect.  Reassured upon this point,
he crawled forth, intending to swim the bright channel
and continue his tunnel upon the other side.  The
water itself was no obstacle to him, for he could swim
and dive like a musk-rat.  He was just about to plunge
in, when under his very nose popped up a black,
triangular, furry head with fiercely bright, hard eyes
and lips curled back hungrily from long and keen
white fangs.  With amazing dexterity he doubled back
upon himself straight up the slope, and dived into
his burrow; and the mink, springing after him, was
just in time to snap vainly at the vanishing tip of his
tail.

The mink was both hungry and bad-tempered, having
just missed a fish which he was hunting amid the tangle
of water-weeds along the muddy bottom of the stream.
Angrily he jammed his sharp snout into the mouth of
the tunnel, but the passage was much too small for him,
and Star-Nose was well out of reach.  He himself could
dig a burrow when put to it, but he knew that in this
art he was no match for the expert little fugitive.
Moreover, keen though his appetite was, he was not
over-anxious to allay it with the rank and stringy flesh
of the Underground One.  He shook his head with a
sniff and a snarl, brushed the earth from his muzzle,
and slipped off swiftly and soundlessly to seek more
succulent prey.

It was ten or fifteen minutes before Star-Nose again
ventured forth into the perilous daylight.  His last
adventure had not in the least upset him,—for to his
way of thinking a miss was as good as a mile.  But he
was hungry, as usual, and he had found good hunting
in the warm, light soil just under the roots of the wild
rose bushes along the bank.  At length his desires
once more turned towards the home tunnels.  He
poked his starry nose out through the hole in the bank,
made sure that there were no enemies in sight, slipped
down to the water's edge, and glided in as noiselessly
as if he had been oiled.  He had no mind to make a
splash, lest he should advertise his movements to some
voracious pike which might be lurking beneath that
green patch of water-lily leaves a little further up
stream.

Deep below the shining surface he swam, straight
and strong through a world of shimmering and pellucid
gold, roofed by a close, flat, white sky of
diaphanous silver, upon which every fallen rose-petal or
drowning fly or moth was shown with amazing clearness.
As he reached the opposite shore and clambered
nimbly up through that flat silver sky, he glanced back
and saw a long grey shadow, with terrible jaws and
staring round eyes, dart past the spot from which he
had just emerged.  The great pike beneath the lilypads
had caught sight of him, after all,—but too late!
Star-Nose shook himself, and sat basking for a few
moments in the comfortable warmth, complacently
combing his face with his nimble fore-paws.  He had
an easy contempt for the pike, because it could not
leave the water to pursue him.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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Some fifty yards away, on the side of the brook from
which Star-Nose had just come, beside a tiny pool
in the deeps of the grass stood an immense bird of a
pale bluish-grey colour, motionless as a stone, on the
watch for unwary frogs.  The rich grasses were about
two feet in height, and the blue heron towered another
clear two feet above them.  He was all length,—long,
stilt-like legs, long, snake-like neck, long, dagger-like
bill, and a firm, arrogant crest of long, slim, delicate
plumes.  All about him spread the warm and sun-steeped
sea of the meadow-grass,—starred thick with
blooms of purple vetch and crimson clover, and sultry
orange lilies,—droning sleepily with bees and
flies,—steaming with summer scents, and liquidly musical
with the songs of the fluttering, black-and-white bobolinks,
like tangled peals of tiny silver bells.  But nothing
of this intoxicating beauty did the great heron heed.
Rigid and decorative as if he had just stepped down
from a Japanese screen, his fierce, unwinking, jewel-bright
eyes were intent upon the pool at his feet.  His
whole statuesque being was concentrated upon the
subject of frogs.

But the frogs in that particular pool had taken
warning.  Not one would show himself, so long as that
inexorable blue shape of death remained in sight.  Nor
did a single meadow-mouse stir amid the grass-roots
for yards about the pool, for word of the watching
doom had gone abroad.  And presently the great heron,
grown tired of such poor hunting, lifted his broad
wings, sprang lazily into the air, and went flapping
away slowly over the grass-tops, trailing his long legs
stiffly behind him.  He headed for the other side of the
brook, and fresh hunting-grounds.

At the first lift of those great pale wings Star-Nose
had detected this new and appalling peril.  By good
luck he was sitting on a patch of bare earth, where the
overhanging turf had given way some days before.
Frantically he began to dig himself in.  The soft earth
flew from under his desperate paws.  The piercing eyes
of the heron detected the curious disturbance, and he
winged swiftly to the spot.

But Star-Nose, in his vigilance, had gained a good
start.  In about as much time as it takes to tell it, he
was already buried to his own length.  And then, to his
terror, he came plump upon an impenetrable obstacle—an
old mooring stake driven deep into the soil.  In
a sweat of panic he swerved off to the left and tunnelled
madly almost at right angles to the entrance.

And just this it was—a part of his wonderful luck
on this eventful day—that turned to his salvation.
Dropping swiftly to the entrance of the all-too-shallow
tunnel, the great heron, his head bent sideways, peered
into the hole with one implacable eye.  Then drawing
back his neck till it was like a coiled spring, he darted
his murderous bill deep into the hole.

Had it not been for the old mooring stake, which
compelled him to change direction, Star-Nose would
have been neatly impaled, plucked forth, hammered
to death, and devoured.  As it was, the dreadful weapon
merely grazed the top of his rump—scoring, indeed, a
crimson gash—and struck with a terrifying thud upon
the hard wood of the stake.  The impact gave the heron
a nasty jar.  He drew his head back abruptly, and shook
it hard in his indignant surprise.  Then, trying to look
as if nothing unusual had happened, he stepped down
into the water with lofty deliberation and composed
himself to watch for fish.  At this moment the big
pike came swimming past again, hoping for another
chance at the elusive Star-Nose.  He was much too
heavy a fish for the heron to manage, of course; but
the heron, in his wrath, stabbed down upon him
vindictively.  There was a moment's struggle which made
the quiet water boil.  Then the frightened fish tore
himself free and darted off, with a great red wound in
his silver-grey side, to hide and sulk under the lilypads.

In the meantime Star-Nose, though smarting from
that raw but superficial gash upon his hind-quarters,
was burrowing away with concentrated zeal.  He had
once more changed direction, and was heading, as
true as if by compass, for the nearest point of the
home-galleries.  He was not even taking time to drive
dump-shafts at the customary intervals, but was letting the
tunnel fill up behind him, as if sure that he was going
to have no further use for it.  He just wanted to get
home.  Of course he might have travelled much faster
above ground; but the too-exciting events of the past
few hours had convinced him that, for this particular
day at least, the upper world of sun and air was not
exactly a health-resort for a dweller in the under-ways.
Through all his excitement, however, and all his
eagerness for the safe home burrows, his unquenchable
appetite remained with him; and, running his tunnel
as close to the surface as he could without actually
emerging, he picked up plenty of worms and grubs and
fat, helpless pupæ as he went.

It was past noon, and the strong sunshine, beating
straight down through the grass and soaking through
the matted roots, was making a close but sweet and
earthy-scented warmth in the tunnel, when at last
Star-Nose broke through into one of his familiar passages,
well-trodden by the feet of his tribe.  Not by sight,
of course,—for the darkness was black as pitch,—but
by the comfortable smell he knew exactly where he
was.  Without hesitation he turned to the left, and
scurried along, as fast as he could, for the big central
burrow, or lodge, where his tribe had their
headquarters and their nests.  The path forked and
re-forked continually, but he was never for one instant
at a loss.  Here and there he passed little short
side-galleries ending in shallow pockets, which served for
the sanitation of the tribe.  Here and there a ray of
green-and-gold light flashed down upon him, as he ran
past one of the exit-shafts.  And then, his heart beating
with his haste and his joy, he came forth into a roomy,
lightless chamber, thick with warmth and musky
smells, and filled with the pleasant rustlings and small
contented squealings of his own gregarious tribe.





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.. _`KROOF, THE SHE-BEAR`:

.. class:: center large bold

   KROOF, THE SHE-BEAR

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[The next two stories are taken from *The Heart of the Ancient
Wood*, which tells how Kirstie Craig and her little daughter
Miranda left the Settlement to live by themselves in a cabin
on the edge of an old wood.]

.. vspace:: 2

Spring came early to the clearing that year.  Kirstie's
autumn furrows, dark and steaming, began to show
in patches through the diminished snow.  The chips
before the house and the litter about the barn, drawing
the sun strongly, were first of all uncovered; and over
them, as to the conquest of new worlds, the haughty
cock led forth his dames to scratch.  "Saunders,"
Miranda had called him, in remembrance of a strutting
beau at the Settlement; and with the advent of April
cheer, and an increasing abundance of eggs, and an
ever resounding cackle from his complacent partlets,
his conceit became insufferable.  One morning, when
something she did offended his dignity, he had the
presumption to face her with beak advanced and
wide-ruffled neck feathers.  But Saunders did not know
Miranda.  Quick as a flash of light she seized him by
the legs, whirled him around her head, and flung him
headlong, squawking with fear and shame, upon his
own dunghill.  It took him a good hour to recover his
self-esteem, but after that Miranda stood out in his
eyes as the one creature in the world to be respected.

When the clearing was quite bare, except along
the edges of the forest, and Kirstie was again at work
on her fencing, the black-and-white cow gave birth
to a black-and-white calf, which Miranda at once
claimed as her own property.  It was a very wobbly
knock-kneed little heifer; but Miranda admired it
immensely, and with lofty disregard of its sex, christened
it Michael.

About this time the snow shrank away from her
hollow under the pine root, and Kroof came forth to
sun herself.  She had lived all winter on nothing but
the fat stored up in the spaces of her capacious frame.
Nevertheless she was not famished—she had still a
reserve to come and go on, till food should be abundant.
A few days after waking up she bore a cub.  It was the
custom of her kind to bear two cubs at a birth; but
Kroof, besides being by long odds the biggest she-bear
ever known in that region, had a pronounced individuality
of her own, and was just as well satisfied with
herself over one cub as over two.

The hollow under the pine root was warm and softly
lined—a condition quite indispensable to the
new-comer, which was about as unlike a bear as any baby
creature of its size could well manage to be.  It was
blind, helpless, whimpering, more shapeless and
clumsy-looking than the clumsiest conceivable pup,
and almost naked.  Its tender, hairless hide looked a
poor thing to confront the world with; but its appetite
was astounding, and Kroof's milk inexhaustible.  In
a few days a soft dark fur began to appear.  As the
mother sat, hour by hour, watching it and suckling
it, half erect upon her haunches, her fore-legs braced
wide apart, her head stretched as far down as possible,
her narrow red tongue hanging out to one side, her
eyes half closed in rapture, it seemed to grow visibly
beneath her absorbing gaze.  Before four weeks had
passed, the cub was covered with a jet-black coat,
soft and glossy.  This being the case, he thought it
time to open his eyes and look about.

He was now about the size of a small cat, but of a
much heavier build.  His head, at this age, was shorter
for its breadth than his mother's; the ears much
larger, fan-like and conspicuous.  His eyes, very softly
vague at first, soon acquired a humorous, mischievous
expression, which went aptly with the erect, inquisitive
ears.  Altogether he was a fine baby—a fair justification
of Kroof's pride.

The spring being now fairly forward, and pale,
whitish-green shoots upthrusting themselves numerously
through the dead leaves, and the big crimson
leaf-buds of the skunk-cabbage vividly punctuating
the sombreness of the swamp, Kroof led her infant
forth to view their world.  He had no such severe and
continued education to undergo as that which falls
to the lot of other youngsters among the folk of the
ancient wood.  For those others the first lesson, the
hardest and the most tremendous in its necessity,
was how to avoid their enemies.  With this lesson
ill-learned, all other found brief term; for the noiseless
drama, in which all the folk of the forest had their
parts, moved ever, through few scenes or through many,
to a tragic close.  But the bear, being for the most part
dominant, had his immunities.  Even the panther,
swift and fierce and masterful, never deliberately
sought quarrel with the bear, being mindful of his
disastrous clutch and the lightning sweep of his paw.
The bear-cub, therefore, going with its mother till
almost full grown, gave no thought at all to enemies;
and the cub with such a giantess as Kroof for its mother
might safely make a mock even at panthers.  Kroof's
cub had thus but simple things to learn, following
close at his mother's flank.  During the first blind
weeks of his cubhood he had, indeed, to acquire the
prime virtue of silence, which was not easy, for he
loved to whimper and grumble in a comfortable little
fashion of his own.  This was all right while Kroof
was at home; but when she was out foraging, then
silence was the thing.  This he learned, partly from
Kroof's admonitions, partly from a deep-seated
instinct; and whenever he was left alone, he held his
tongue.  There was always the possibility, slight but
unpleasant, of a fox or a brown cat noting Kroof's
absence, and seizing the chance to savour a delicate
morsel of sucking bear.

Wandering the silent woods with Kroof, the cub
would sniff carefully at the moist earth and budding
shoots wheresoever his mother stopped to dig.  He thus
learned where to find the starchy roots which form so
large a part of the bear's food in spring.  He found out
the important difference between the sweet ground-nuts
and the fiery bitter bulb of the arum, or Indian
turnip; and he learned to go over the grassy meadows
by the lake and dig unerringly for the wild bean's
nourishing tubers.  He discovered, also, what old stumps
to tear apart when he wanted a pleasantly acid tonic
dose of the larvæ of the wood-ant.  Among these serious
occupations he would gambol between his mother's
feet, or caper hilariously on his hind legs.  Soon he
would have been taught to detect a bee tree, and to
rob it of its delectable stores without getting his eyes
stung out; but just then the mysterious forest fates
dropped the curtain on his merry little play, as a
reminder that not even for the great black bear could
the rule of doom be relaxed.

Kroof's wanderings with the cub were in the
neighbourhood of the clearing, where both were sometimes
seen by Miranda.  The sight of the cub so overjoyed
her that she departed from her usual reticence as to
the forest-folk, and told her mother about the lovely,
glossy little dog that the nice, great dog took about
with her.  The only result was that Kirstie gave her
a sharp warning.

"Dog!" she exclaimed severely; "didn't I tell you
Miranda, it was a bear?  Bears are mostly harmless,
if you leave them alone; but an old bear with a cub
is mighty ugly.  Mind what I say now, you keep by
me and don't go too nigh the edge of the woods."

And so, for the next few weeks, Miranda was watched
very strictly, lest her childish daring should involve
her with the bears.

Along in the summer Kroof began to lead the cub
wider afield.  The longer journeys vexed the little
animal at first, and tired him; so that sometimes he
would throw himself down on his back, with pinky-white
soles of protest in the air, and refuse to go a step
farther.  But in spite of the appeal of his quizzical
little black snout, big ears, and twinkling eyes, old
Kroof would box him sternly till he was glad enough
to jump up and renew the march.  With the exercise
he got a little leaner, but much harder, and soon came
to delight in the widest wandering.  Nothing could tire
him, and at the end of the journey he would chase
rabbits, or weasels, or other elusive creatures, till
convicted of futility by his mother's sarcastic comments.

These wide wanderings were, indeed, the making of
him, so that he promised to rival Kroof herself in
prowess and stature; but alas! poor cub, they were
also his undoing.  Had he stayed at home—but even
that might have little availed, for among the folk of
the wood it is right at home that fate most surely
strikes.

One day they two were exploring far over in the
next valley—the valley of the Quah-Davic, a tract little
familiar to Kroof herself.  At the noon hour Kroof lay
down in a little hollow of coolness beside a spring that
*drip-drop, drip-drop, drip-dropped* from the face of a
green rock.  The cub, however, went untiringly exploring
the thickets for fifty yards about, out of sight,
indeed, but scrupulously never out of ear-shot.

Near one of these thickets his nostrils caught a new
and enthralling savour.  He had never, in his brief life,
smelled anything at all like it, but an unerring instinct
told him it was the smell of something very good to
eat.  Pushing through the leafage he came upon the
source of the fragrance.  Under a slanting structure
of logs he found a piece of flesh, yellowish-white,
streaked thickly with dark reddish-brown,—and, oh,
so sweet smelling!  It was stuck temptingly on a forked
point of wood.  His ears stood up very wide and high
in his eagerness.  His sensitive nostrils wrinkled as he
sniffed at the tempting find.  He decided that he would
just taste it, and then go fetch his mother.  But it was
a little high up for him.  He rose, set his small white
teeth into it, clutched at it with his soft forepaws, and
flung his whole weight upon it to pull it down.

Kroof, dozing in her hollow of coolness, heard a
small agonised screech, cut short horribly.  On the
instant her great body went tearing in a panic through
the under-brush.  She found the poor cub crushed flat
under the huge timbers of "a dead-fall," his glossy
head and one paw sticking out piteously, his little red
tongue protruding from his distorted mouth.

Kroof needed no second look to know in her heart
he was dead, stone dead; but in the rage of her grief
she would not acknowledge it.  She tore madly at the
great timber,—so huge a thing to set to crush so small
a life,—and so astonishing was the strength of her
claws and her vast forearms that in the course of half
an hour she had the trap fairly demolished.  Softly
she removed the crushed and shapeless body, licking
the mouth, the nostrils, the pitifully staring eyes;
snuggling it lightly as a breath, and moaning over it.
She would lift the head a little with her paw, and
redouble her caresses as it fell limply aside.  Then it grew
cold.  This was testimony she could not pretend to
ignore.  She ceased the caresses which proved so vain
to keep warmth in the little body she loved.  With her
snout held high in air she turned around slowly twice,
as if in an appeal to some power not clearly
apprehended; then, without another glance at her dead,
she rushed off madly through the forest.

All night she wandered aimlessly, hither and thither
through the low Quah-Davic valley, over the lower
slopes of the mountain, through tracts where she had
never been, but of which she took no note; and toward
noon of the following day she found herself once more
in the ancient wood, not far from the clearing.  She
avoided widely the old den under the pine root, and at
last threw herself down, worn out and with unsuckled
teats fiercely aching, behind the trunk of a fallen
hemlock.

She slept heavily for an hour or two.  Then she was
awakened by the crying of a child.  She knew it at once
for Miranda's voice; and being in some way stirred by
it, in spite of the preoccupation of her pain, she got up
and moved noiselessly toward the sound.





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.. _`THE INITIATION OF MIRANDA`:

.. class:: center large bold

   THE INITIATION OF MIRANDA

.. vspace:: 2

That same day, just after noon-meat, when Miranda
had gone out with the scraps in a yellow bowl to feed
the hens, Kirstie had been taken with what the people
at the Settlement would have called "a turn."  All the
morning she had felt unusually oppressed by the heat,
but had thought little of it.  Now, as she was wiping the
dishes, she quite unaccountably dropped one of them
on the floor.  The crash aroused her.  She saw with a
pang that it was Miranda's little plate of many colours.
Then things turned black about her.  She just managed
to reel across to the bunk, and straightway fell upon it
in a kind of faint.  From this state she passed into a
heavy sleep, which lasted for several hours, and probably
saved her from some violent sickness.

When Miranda had fed the hens she did not go
straight back to her mother.  Instead, she wandered off
toward the edge of the dark fir-wood, where it came
down close behind the cabin.  The broad light of the
open fields, now green with buckwheat, threw a living
illumination far in among the cool arcades.

Between the straight grey trunks Miranda's clear
eyes saw something move.

She liked it very much indeed.  It looked to her extremely
like a cat, only larger than any cat she had seen
at the Settlement, taller on its legs, and with a queer
thick stump of a tail.  In fact, it was a cat, the brown
cat, or lesser lynx.  Its coat was a red brown, finely
mottled with a paler shade.  It had straight brushes
of bristles on the tips of its ears, like its big cousin, the
Canada lynx, only much less conspicuous than his;
and the expression on the moonlike round of its face
was both fierce and shy.  But it was a cat, plainly
enough; and Miranda's heart went out to it, as it sat
up there in the shadows, watching her steadily with
wide pale eyes.

"Oh, pretty pussy! pretty pussy!" called Miranda,
stretching out her hands to it coaxingly, and running
into the wood.

The brown cat waited unwinking till she was about
ten paces off, then turned and darted deeper into the
shadows.  When it was all but out of sight it stopped,
turned again, and sat up to watch the eager child.  It
seemed curious as to the bit of scarlet at her neck.
Miranda was now absorbed in the pursuit, and sanguine
of catching the beautiful pussy.  This time she was
suffered to come almost within grasping distance,
before the animal again wheeled with an angry *pfuff*
and darted away.  Disappointed, but not discouraged,
Miranda followed again; and the little play was
repeated, with slight variation, till her great eyes were
full of blinding tears, and she was ready to drop with
weariness.  Then the malicious cat, tired of the game
and no longer curious about the ribbon, vanished
altogether; and Miranda sat down to cry.

But she was not a child to make much fuss over a
small disappointment.  In a very few minutes she
jumped up, dried her eyes with the backs of her tiny
fists, and started, as she thought, for home.  At first
she ran, thinking her mother might be troubled at her
absence.  But not coming to the open as soon as she
expected, she stopped, looked about her very carefully,
and then walked forward with continual circumspection.
She walked on, and on, till she knew she had gone far
enough to reach home five times over.  Her feet faltered,
and then she stood quite still, helplessly.  She knew
that she was lost.  All at once the ancient wood, the
wood she had longed for, the wood whose darkness she
had never feared, became lonely, menacing, terrible.
She broke into loud wailing.

This is what Kroof had heard and was coming to
investigate.  But other ears heard it, too.

A tawny form, many times larger than the perfidious
brown cat, but not altogether unlike it in shape, crept
stealthily toward the sound.  Though his limbs looked
heavy, his paws large in comparison with his lank body
and small, flat, cruel head, his movements nevertheless
were noiseless as light.  At each low-stooping, sinuous
step, his tail twitched nervously.  When he caught
sight of the crying child he stopped, and then crept
up more stealthily than before, crouching so low that
his belly almost touched the ground, his neck stretched
out in line with his tail.

He made absolutely no sound, yet something within
Miranda's sensitive brain heard him, before he was
quite within springing distance.  She stopped her crying,
glanced suddenly around, and fixed a darkly clear
look upon his glaring green eyes.  Poor little frightened
and lonely child though she was, there was yet something
subtly disturbing to the beast in that steady gaze
of hers.  It was the empty gloom, the state of being
lost, which had made Miranda's fear.  Of an animal,
however fierce, she had no instinctive terror; and now,
though she knew that the cruel-eyed beast before her
was the panther, it was a sort of indignant curiosity
that was uppermost in her mind.

The beast shifted his eyes uneasily under her
unwavering look.  He experienced a moment's indecision
as to whether or not it was well, after all, to meddle
with this unterrified, clear-gazing creature.  Then an
anger grew within him.  He fixed his hypnotising stare
more resolutely, and lashed his tail with angry jerks.
He was working himself up to the final and fatal spring,
while Miranda watched him.

Just then a strange thing happened.  Out from
behind a boulder, whence she had been eyeing the
situation, shambled the huge black form of Kroof.  She
was at Miranda's side in an instant; and rising upon
her hind quarters, a towering, indomitable bulk, she
squealed defiance to the panther.  As soon as Miranda
saw her "great big dog,"—-which she knew quite well,
however, to be a bear,—she seemed to realise how
frightened she had been of the panther; and she
recognised that strong defence had come.  With a
convulsive sob she sprang and hid her tear-stained little
face in the bear's shaggy flank, clutching at the soft
fur with both hands.  To this impetuous embrace Kroof
paid no attention, but continued to glower menacingly
at the panther.

As for the panther, he was unaffectedly astonished.
He lost his stealthy, crouching, concentrated attitude,
and rose to his full height; lifted his head, dropped his
tail, and stared at the phenomenon.  If this child was a
protégée of Kroof's, he wanted none of her; for it
would be a day of famine indeed when he would wish
to force conclusions with the giant she-bear.  Moreover,
he recognised some sort of power and prerogative in
Miranda herself, some right of sovereignty, as it were,
which had made it distinctly hard for him to attack
her even while she had no other defence than her
disconcerting gaze.  Now, however, he saw clearly that
there was something very mysterious indeed about
her.  He decided that it would be well to have an
understanding with his mate—who was more savage
though less powerful than himself—that the child
should not be meddled with, no matter what chance
should arise.  With this conclusion he wheeled about,
and walked off indifferently, moving with head erect
and a casual air.  One would hardly have known him
for the stealthy monster of five minutes before.

When he was gone Kroof lay down on her side and
gently coaxed Miranda against her body.  Her bereaved
heart went out to the child.  Her swollen teats, too,
were hotly aching, and she had a kind of hope that
Miranda would ease that hurt.  But this, of course,
never came within scope of the child's remotest idea.
In every other respect, however, she showed herself
most appreciative of Kroof's attentions, stroking her
with light little hands, and murmuring to her much
musical endearment, to which Kroof lent earnest ear.
Then, laying her head on the fine fur of the bear's belly,
she suddenly went fast asleep, being wearied by her
wanderings and her emotions.

Late in the afternoon, toward milking-time, Kirstie
aroused herself.  She sat up with a startled air in her
bunk in the corner of the cabin.  Through the window
came the rays of the westering sun.  She felt troubled
at having been so long asleep.  And where could
Miranda be?  She arose, tottering for a moment, but
soon found herself steady; and then she realised that
she had slept off a sickness.  She went to the door.  The
hens were diligently scratching in the dust, and Saunders
eyed her with tolerance.  At the fence beyond the
barn the black-and-white cow lowed for the milking;
and from her tether at the other side of the buckwheat
field, Michael, the calf, bleated for her supper of milk
and hay tea.  But Miranda was nowhere to be seen.

"Miranda!" she called.  And then louder,—and yet
louder,—and at last with a piercing wail of anguish, as
it burst upon her that Miranda was gone.  The sunlit
clearing, the grey cabin, the dark forest edges, all
seemed to whirl and swim about her for an instant.  It
was only for an instant.  Then she snatched up the axe
from the chopping log, and with a sure instinct darted
into that tongue of fir-woods just behind the house.

Straight ahead she plunged, as if following a plain
trail; though in truth she was little learned in
woodcraft, and by her mere eyes could scarce have tracked
an elephant.  But her heart was clutched by a grip of
ice, and she went as one tranced.  All at once, however,
over the mossy crest of a rock, she saw a sight which
brought her to a standstill.  Her eyes and her mouth
opened wide in sheer amazement.  Then the terrible
tension relaxed.  A strong shudder passed through her,
and she was her steadfast self again.  A smile broke up
the sober lines of her face.

"Sure enough," she muttered; "the child was
right.  She knows a sight more about the beasts
than I do."

And this is what she saw.  Through the hoary arcades
of the fir-wood walked a huge black bear, with none
other than Miranda trotting by its side, and playfully
stroking its rich coat.  The great animal would pause
from time to time, merely to nuzzle at the child with
its snout or lick her hand with its narrow red tongue;
but the course it was making was straight for the cabin.
Kirstie stood motionless for some minutes, watching
the strange scene; then, stepping out from her shelter,
she hastened after them.  So engrossed were they with
each other that she came up undiscovered to within
some twenty paces of them.  Then she called out:

"Miranda, where *have* you been?"

The child stopped, looked around, but still clung to
Kroof's fur.

"Oh, mother!" she cried, eager and breathless, and
trying to tell everything at once, "I was all lost—and
I was just going to be eaten up—and the dear, good,
big bear came and frightened the panther away—and
we were just going home—and do come and speak to
the dear, lovely, big bear!  Oh, don't let it go
away! don't let it!"

But on this point Kroof had her own views.  It was
Miranda she had adopted, not Kirstie; and she felt a
kind of jealousy of Miranda's mother.  Even while
Miranda was speaking, the bear swung aside and
briskly shambled off, leaving the child half in tears.

It was a thrilling story which Miranda had to tell
her mother that evening, while the black-and-white
cow was getting milked, and while Michael, the calf,
was having its supper of milk and hay tea.  It made a
profound impression on Kirstie's quick and tolerant
mind.  She at once realised the value to Miranda of
such an affection as Kroof's.  Most mothers would
have been crazed with foolish fear at the situation,
but Kirstie Craig was of no such weak stuff.  She saw
in it only a strong shield for Miranda against the
gravest perils of the wood.





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.. _`A Royal Marauder`:

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   A ROYAL MARAUDER[1]

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[1] This is the eleventh chapter of "RED FOX:
the Story of His
Adventurous Career in the Ringwaak Wilds
and of His Final
Triumph over the Enemies of His Kind."

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The new lair on the ridge, being little more than a
cleft in the rock, had been accepted as a mere
temporary affair.  Near by, however, was a deep and
well-drained pocket of dry earth, hard to come at, and
surrounded by an expanse of rocky débris where scent
would not lie.  This was the place the foxes needed for
security; and here, as soon as the frost was well out,
and the mother fox ready to resume her full share of
the hunting, the two dug out a new burrow, which ran
far under an overhanging rock.  Hither, with great
satisfaction, they transferred the bright-eyed woolly
whelps.  So secure was the retreat that they were
comparatively careless about hiding the entrance or
removing the evidences of their occupancy.  In a little
while the ground about the hole was littered with the
skins of rabbits, woodchucks, squirrels, with feathers,
and with musk-rat tails; while about the old den in
the bank below no such remnants had been allowed
to collect.

In this difficult retreat Red Fox and his family had
few neighbours to intrude upon their privacy.  Over the
naked ridge-crest the winds blew steadily, sometimes
humming to a gale; but they never disturbed the
quiet of that deep pocket in the rocks, with its little
plot of bright, bare soil where the young foxes played
and sunned themselves.  No matter what the direction
of the wind, no matter from what quarter the driven
rain came slanting, the hollow was perfectly protected.
On the top of the bare rock which partly overhung it
from the north Red Fox would sometimes lie and
watch, with eyes half-closed and mouth half-open, the
world of green and brown and purple and blue
outspread below and around him.  Far down, on both
sides of the ridge, he would note the farmers of both
valleys getting in their crops, and the ceaseless,
monotonous toiling of the patient teams.  And far over to
the eastward he would eye the bold heights of old
Ringwaak, with the crow-hunted fir-groves on its
flanks, and plan to go foraging over there some day,
for sheer restlessness of curiosity.

But though neighbours were few up here, there was
one pair on whom Red Fox and his mate looked with
strong disapproval, not unmixed with anxiety.  On
an inaccessible ledge, in a ravine a little way down the
other side of the ridge, toward Ringwaak, was the
nest of a white-headed eagle.  It was a great, untidy,
shapeless mass, a cart-load of sticks, as it were,
apparently dropped from the skies upon this bare ledge,
but in reality so interwoven with each point of rock,
and so braced in the crevices, that no tempest could
avail to jar its strong foundations.  In a hollow in the
top of this mass, on a few wisps of dry grass mixed
with feathers and fur, huddled two half-naked,
fierce-eyed nestlings, their awkward, sprawling, reddish
bodies beginning to be sprinkled with short black
pin-feathers.  All around the outer edges of this huge
nest, and on the rocks below it, were the bones of
rabbits, and young lambs, and minks, and woodchucks,
with claws, and little hoofs, and bills, and feathers, a
hideous conglomeration that attested both the appetites
of the nestlings and the hunting prowess of the
wide-winged, savage-eyed parents.

Of the eagle pair, the larger, who was the female,
had her aerial range over Ringwaak, and the chain
of lonely lakes the other side of Ringwaak.  But the
male did all his hunting over the region of the
settlements and on toward the Ottanoonsis Valley.  Every
morning, just after sunrise, his great wings went
winnowing mightily just over the crest of the ridge,
just over the lofty hollow where Red Fox had his lair.
And as the dread shadow, with its sinister rustling of
stiff pinions, passed by, the little foxes would shrink
back into their den, well taught by their father and
mother.

When the weather was fine and dry, it was Red
Fox's custom to betake himself, on his return from
the night's hunting, to his safe "lookout" on the
rocky summit above the den, and there, resting with
his nose on his fore-paws, to watch the vast and austere
dawn roll up upon the world.  Sometimes he brought
his prey—when it was something worth while, like a
weasel or woodchuck or duck or rabbit—up to this
lonely place to be devoured at leisure, beyond the
solicitude of his mate and the irrepressible whimperings
of the puppies.  He would lie there in the mystic
spreading of the grey transparencies of dawn till the
first long fingers of gold light touched his face, and
the thin flood of amber and rose washed all over the
bald top of the rock.  He would watch, with ceaseless
interest, the mother eagle swoop down with narrowed
wings into the misty shadows of the valley, then mount
slowly, questing, along the slopes of Ringwaak, and
finally soar high above the peak, a slowly gyrating
speck against the young blue.  He would watch the
male spring into the air resolutely, beat up the near
steep, wing low over his rock, and sail majestically
down over the valley farms.  Later he would see them
return to the nest, from any point of the compass as
it might chance, sometimes with a big lake trout
snatched from the industrious fish-hawks, sometimes
with a luckless mallard from the reed-beds southward,
sometimes with a long-legged, pathetic white lamb
from the rough upland pastures.  With keenest interest,
and no small appreciation, he would watch the great
birds balance themselves, wings half-uplifted, on the
edge of the nest, and with terrible beak and claws rend
the victim to bloody fragments.  He marvelled at the
insatiable appetites of those two ugly nestlings, and
congratulated himself that his four playful whelps
were more comely and less greedy.

One morning when, in the grey of earliest dawn, he
climbed to his retreat with a plump woodchuck in his
jaws, it chanced he was in no hurry for his meal.
Dropping the limp body till he should feel more relish
for it, he lay down to rest and contemplate the waking
earth.  As he lay, the sun rose.  The female eagle sailed
away toward Ringwaak.  The male beat up, and up,
high above the ridge, and Red Fox paid no more
attention to him, being engrossed in the antics of a
porcupine which was swinging in a tree-top far below.

Suddenly he heard a sharp, hissing rush of great
wings in the air just above him, and glanced upward
astonished.  The next instant he felt a buffeting wind,
huge wings almost smote him in the face,—and the
dead woodchuck, not three feet away, was snatched
up in clutching talons, and borne off into the air.  With
a furious snarl he jumped to his feet; but the eagle,
with the prize dangling from his claws, was already
far out of reach, slanting down majestically toward
his nest.

The insolence and daring of this robbery fixed in
Red Fox's heart a fierce desire for vengeance.  He
stole down to the ravine that held the eyrie, and
prowled about for hours, seeking a place where he
could climb to the ledge.  It was quite inaccessible,
however; and the eagles, knowing this, looked down
upon the prowlings with disdainful serenity.  Then he
mounted the near-by cliff and peered down directly
into the nest.  But finding himself still as far off as
ever, and the eagles still undisturbed, he gave up the
hope of an immediate settlement of his grudge, and
lay in wait for the chances of the wilderness.  He was
frank enough, however, in his declaration of war; for
whenever the eagle went winging low over his rocky
lookout, he would rise and snarl up at him defiantly.  The
great bird would bend his flight lower, as if to accept
this challenge; but having a wise respect for those
long jaws and white fangs which the fox displayed so
liberally, he took care not to come within their reach.

A few days later, while Red Fox was away hunting
down in the valley, the fox-puppies were playing just
in the mouth of the den, when they saw their slim
mother among the rocks.  In a puppy-like frolic of
welcome they rushed to meet her, feeling secure in
her nearness.  When they were half-way across the
open in front of the den, there came a sudden shadow
above them.  Like a flash they scattered,—all but one,
who crouched flat and stared irresolutely.  There was
a dreadful whistling sound in the air, a pounce of great
flapping wings and wide-reaching talons, a strangled
yelp of terror.  And before the mother fox's leap could
reach the spot, the red puppy was snatched up and
carried away to the beaks of the eaglets.

When he learned about this, Red Fox felt such fury
as his philosophic spirit had never known before.  He
paid another futile visit to the foot of the eagles' rock;
and afterward, for days, wasted much time from his
hunting in the effort to devise some means of getting
at his foe.  He followed the eagle's flight and foraging
persistently, seeking to be on the spot when the robber
made a kill.  But the great bird had such a wide range
that this effort seemed likely to be a vain one.  In
whatever region Red Fox lay in wait, in some other
would the eagle make his kill.  With its immeasurable
superiority in power of sight, the royal marauder had
no trouble in avoiding his enemy's path, so that Red
Fox was under surveillance when he least suspected it.

It was one day when he was not thinking of eagles
or of vengeance that Red Fox's opportunity came.  It
was toward evening, and for a good half-hour he had
been quite out of sight, watching for a wary old woodchuck
to venture from its hole.  As he lay there, patient
and moveless, he caught sight of a huge black snake
gliding slowly across the open glade.  He hesitated, in
doubt whether to attack the snake or keep on waiting
for the woodchuck.  Just then came that whistling
sound in the air which he knew so well.  The snake
heard it, too, and darted toward the nearest tree, which
chanced to be a bare young birch sapling.  It had
barely reached the foot of the tree when the feathered
thunderbolt out of the sky fell upon it, clutching it
securely with both talons about a foot behind the head.

Easily and effectively had the eagle made his
capture; but, when he tried to rise with his prey, his
broad wings beat the air in vain.  At the instant of
attack the snake had whipped a couple of coils of its
tail around the young birch-tree, and that desperate
grip the eagle could not break.  Savagely he picked at
the coils, and then at the reptile's head, preparing to
take the prize off in sections if necessary.

Red Fox's moment, long looked for and planned for,
had come.  His rush from cover was straight and low,
and swift as a dart; and his jaws caught the eagle a
slashing cut on the upper leg.  Fox-like, he bit and let
go; and the great bird, with a yelp of pain and
amazement, whirled about, striking at him furiously with
beak and wings.  He got one buffet from those wings
which knocked him over; and the eagle, willing to
shirk the conflict, disengaged his talons from the snake
and tried to rise.  But in an instant Red Fox was upon
him again, reaching up for his neck with a lightning-like
ferocity that disconcerted the bird's defence.  At
such close quarters the bird's wings were ineffective,
but his rending beak and steel-like talons found their
mark in Red Fox's beautiful ruddy coat, which was
dyed with crimson in a second.

For most foxes the king of the air would have proved
more than a match; but the strength and cleverness of
Red Fox put the chance of battle heavily in his favour.
In a few seconds he would have had the eagle overborne
and helpless, and would have reached his throat in spite
of beak and claw.  But at this critical moment the bird
found an unexpected and undeserved ally.  The snake
which he had attacked, being desperately wounded, was
thrashing about in the effort to get away to some
hiding.  Red Fox happened to step upon it in the struggle;
and instantly, though blindly, it threw a convulsive coil
about his hind legs.  Angrily he turned, and bit at the
constricting coil.  And while he was tearing at it, seeking
to free himself, the eagle recovered, raised himself with
difficulty, and succeeded in flopping up into the air.
Bedraggled, bloody, and abjectly humiliated, he went
beating over the forest toward home; and Red Fox,
fairly well satisfied in spite of the incompleteness of
his victory, proceeded to refresh himself by a hearty
meal of snake.  He felt reasonably certain that the big
eagle would give both himself and his family a wide
berth in the future.

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   Made at the
   Temple Press
   Letchworth
   in Great Britain

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