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Title: The Haunters of the Silences - A Book of Animal Life
Author: Roberts, Charles George Douglas, Sir, 1860-1943
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Haunters of the Silences - A Book of Animal Life" ***
[Illustration: _The Haunters of the Silences_]
[Illustration: THE LEADER OF THE CARIBOU HERD ... RETURNED THE
STALLION'S INQUIRING STARE WITH A GLANCE OF MILD CURIOSITY.--Page 122.]
The Haunters of
the Silences
A BOOK OF ANIMAL LIFE BY
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
_Author of
"The Kindred of the Wild," "Red Fox,"
"The Heart of the Ancient Wood," "The Forge
in the Forest," "The Heart That Knows," etc._
[Illustration]
_With many
Illustrations and
Decorations by_
CHARLES
LIVINGSTON
BULL
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
[Illustration]
* * * * *
_Copyright, 1905, 1906, by_
THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE COMPANY
_Copyright, 1906, by_
HARPER AND BROTHERS
_Copyright, 1906, by_
PERRY MASON COMPANY
_Copyright, 1906, 1907, by_
THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
_Copyright, 1906, by_
THE CENTURY COMPANY
_Copyright, 1904, by_
THE NEW YORK HERALD COMPANY
_Copyright, 1907, by_
THE S. S. MCCLURE CO.
_Copyright, 1907, by_
THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
_Copyright, 1907, by_
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
* * * * *
ENTERED AT STATIONER'S HALL, LONDON
_All rights reserved_
First impression, May, 1907
[Illustration: To Charles Livingston Bull]
[Illustration]
Prefatory Note
The present collection of stories dealing with creatures of the
wilderness differs from its companion volumes, "The Kindred of the Wild"
and "The Watchers of the Trails," in one important particular. It
contains certain studies and depictions of a sphere of wild life which
presents peculiar difficulties to the observer, viz.: the life of the
dwellers in the deep sea. Our investigation of these remote kindreds is
at best spasmodic, and conducted always at the extreme of disadvantage;
and the knowledge which we may gain from such investigation must always
remain in a measure fragmentary. It is not easy for any observer to be
intimate with a sawfish; and the most ardent naturalist's acquaintance
with an _orca_, or "killer" whale, must be essentially a distant one, if
he would hope to put his observations upon record. Needless to say, my
own knowledge of the orca, the shark, the narwhal, or the colossal
cuttlefish of the ocean depths, is not of the same kind as my knowledge
of the bear, the moose, the eagle, and others of the furtive folk of our
New Brunswick wilderness. When I write of these latter I build my
stories upon a foundation of personal, intimate, sympathetic
observation, the result of a boyhood passed in the backwoods, and of
almost yearly visits, ever since my boyhood, to the wild forest regions
of my native province. But when I write of the kindreds of the deep sea,
I am relying upon the collated results of the observations of others. I
have spared no pains to make these stories accord, as far as the facts
of natural history are concerned, with the latest scientific
information. But I have made no vain attempt at interpretation of the
lives of creatures so remote from my personal knowledge; and for such
tales as "A Duel in the Deep," "The Terror of the Sea Caves," or "The
Prowlers," my utmost hope is that they may prove entertaining, without
being open to any charge of misrepresenting facts. On the other hand, in
certain of the stories dealing with the results of my own observation
and experience, I have dared to hope that I might be contributing
something of value to the final disputed question of animal psychology.
For such stories, which offer in the form of fiction what my
observations have compelled me to regard as fact, I have presented my
case already, in the prefaces to "The Watchers of the Trails" and "Red
Fox." To those prefaces I would add nothing here; and from the
conclusions therein stated I have nothing to retract. I would merely
take this occasion to reaffirm with confidence the belief, which I find
shared by practically all observers whose lives are passed in the
closest relationship with animals,--by such vitally interested
observers, for instance, as keepers, trainers, hunters, and
trappers,--that the actions of animals are governed not only by
instinct, but also, in varying degree, by processes essentially akin to
those of human reason.
C. G. D. R.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Contents of the Book
[Illustration]
PAGE
The Summons of the North 3
The Last Barrier 31
Answerers to the Call 70
The Prisoners of the Pitcher-plant 84
The Prowlers 92
A Stranger to the Wild 108
When the Logs Come Down 132
A Duel in the Deep 140
The Little Tyrant of the Burrows 153
The Ringwaak Buck 168
The Heron in the Reeds 194
In the Deep of the Silences 202
On the Night Trail 218
When the Tide Came over the Marshes 235
Under the Ice-roof 243
The Terror of the Air 261
In the Unknown Dark 268
The Terror of the Sea Caves 282
[Illustration]
A List of the Full-Page Drawings in the Book
[Illustration]
PAGE
"THE LEADER OF THE CARIBOU HERD ... RETURNED
THE STALLION'S INQUIRING STARE WITH
A GLANCE OF MILD CURIOSITY" (_See page 122_) _Frontispiece_
"SOME INEXPERIENCED SEAL HAD BEEN FOOLISH
ENOUGH TO LIE BASKING CLOSE BESIDE AN ICE-CAKE" 7
"SHE LED HIM FARTHER AND FARTHER ACROSS THE ICE" 13
"WOULD RUN GLEEFULLY TO SNAP THEM UP AND EAT THEM" 14
"SOME ONE ON DECK DISCERNED THE CROUCHING BEAR" 24
"HE SAW A BIG SUCKER SETTLE LAZILY WHERE THE
THRONGING FRY WERE THICKEST" 34
"HELD FIRMLY BETWEEN THE EDGES OF HIS GREAT BEAK" 42
"LEAPING HIGH OUT OF THE POOLS" 45
"VANQUISHED IN THEIR OWN ELEMENT BY THE MINK" 59
"AGAIN HE SHOT INTO THE SPRAY-THICK AIR ON THE FACE
OF THE FALL" 68
"SCUTTLED OFF INTO THE WOODS LIKE A FRIGHTENED WOODCHUCK" 74
"THE MOOSE CAME IN SIGHT UP THE BROOK CHANNEL" 79
"AT THIS MOMENT A PASSING SHRIKE SWOOPED DOWN" 85
"LAY MOTIONLESS BUT FOR THE EASY WAVING OF ITS FINS" 97
"ONLY THAT SHARP BLACK FIN, THAT PROWLED AND
PROWLED, KEPT ALWAYS IN SIGHT" 101
"DIRECTLY BENEATH THE SHARK THE STRANGER CAME" 105
"HE STRUCK OUT DESPERATELY, AND SOON CLEARED
THE TURMOIL OF THE BREAKERS" 111
"THE SOUTHWARD JOURNEYING DUCKS, WHICH WOULD DROP WITH
LOUD QUACKING AND SPLASHING INTO THE SHALLOWS" 121
"IT WAS THE COW MOOSE CALLING FOR HER MATE" 125
"THE PLUCKY LITTLE ANIMAL JUMPED AS FAR AS HE COULD" 136
"THEN, WITH THE LARGEST PRIZE IN HIS JAWS, HE SWAM SLOWLY
TO THE ROCK" 151
"LAY DOWN IN SULLEN TRIUMPH TO LICK HIS WOUNDS" 152
"THE BAFFLED SHREW JUMPED STRAIGHT INTO THE AIR" 158
"WITH A FRANTIC LEAP HE SHOT THROUGH THE AIR" 160
"TURN HIS NARROW, SNARLING FACE TO SEE WHAT THREATENED" 173
"WHEN HE STOPPED TO DRINK AT THE GLASSY POOL" 180
"NOISELESSLY FADED BACK THROUGH THE COVERT" 185
"THEN HE LEAPED THE FENCE AGAIN" 186
"HE WAS IN THE IRON CLUTCH OF A MUSKRAT TRAP" 198
"HIS COURSE TOOK HIM FAR OUT OVER THE SOUNDLESS SPACES" 203
"FOR ALL HIS SEEMING AWKWARDNESS HE MOVED AS DELICATELY
AS A CAT" 208
"THE WATER SPLASHED HIGH AND WHITE ABOUT HIM" 213
"THE SHREW-MOUSE ... DARTED OUT INTO THE LIGHT" 218
"HIS ROUND, SINISTER EYES GLARED PALELY INTO EVERY
COVERT" 220
"HE SAW THE GRAY FORMS OF THE PACK" 228
"A SNIPE WHICH FLEW TOO LOW OVER THE DITCH" 238
"MADLY JOYOUS, HE KILLED, AND KILLED, AND KILLED, FOR THE JOY
OF KILLING" 241
"WOULD WHISK SHARPLY INTO THE MOUTH OF THE BLACK TUNNEL" 247
"CONFRONTING THE TWO GREAT CATS WITH UPLIFTED PAW AND MOUTH
WIDE OPEN" 258
"ONCE MORE THE WATCHFUL SENTINEL APPEARED" 260
"THE NOISELESS WINGS WERE NOW JUST BEHIND HIM" 266
"HIS APPREHENSIVE EARS CAUGHT A CURIOUS SOUND" 274
"THE BIG OWL HAD BEEN DISTURBED AT ITS BANQUET" 277
"WHICH SEEMED TO SCRUTINIZE HIM STEADILY" 278
"THOSE SWIFT AND IMPLACABLE LITTLE WHALES WHO FEAR NO LIVING
THING" 296
"FAR OFFSHORE, ONE OF THESE MONSTERS CAME UP AND SPRAWLED UPON
THE SURFACE" 300
"UP DARTED A LIVID TENTACLE, AND FIXED UPON IT" 302
"A SINGULAR FIGURE, DESCENDING SLOWLY THROUGH THE GLIMMERING
GREEN" 304
[Illustration]
The Haunters of the Silences
The Summons of the North
I
In the mystic gloom and the incalculable cold of the long Arctic night,
when Death seemed the only inhabitant of the limitless vasts of ice and
snow, the white bear cub was born. Over the desolate expanses swept the
awful polar wind, now thick with fine, crystalline snow which volleyed
and whirled and bit like points of steel, now glassy clear, so that the
great, unwavering Arctic stars could preside unobscured over its
destructive fury. When the wind was still, not less awful than the wind
had been was the stillness, in which the unspeakable cold wrought
secretly its will upon the abandoned world. Sometimes the implacable
starlight would pale suddenly, and the lovely, sinister, spectral
flames of the aurora, electric blue, and violet, and thin, elusive red,
would go dancing in terrible silence across the arch of sky.
But the white cub--contrary to the custom of her kind his mother had
borne but the one, instead of two--felt nothing of the cold and the
unutterable desolation, saw nothing of the unchanging night, the
implacable stars, the heatless and mirthless dancing flames. In a lair
between two rocks, under seven or eight feet of snow, he lay snuggled
against the warm, furry body of his mother, safe hidden from the world
of night and cold. The mother, whose hot breathing kept open a little
arched hollow in the sheltering snow, spent practically all her time in
sleep, the ample layers of fat which the previous summer had stored upon
her ribs supplying food and fuel to her giant frame. The cub, too, slept
away most of the long unvarying hours, waking to nurse from time to
time, and growing with marvellous rapidity on the inexhaustible
nourishment which his mother's milk supplied.
Month followed month, as the night dragged slowly on toward spring and
dawn; and still the mother slept, growing thinner day by day; and still
the cub slept, and grew, and slept, day by day waxing fatter, and
larger, and stronger for the great and terrible battle of life which
awaited him beyond the threshold of the snow.
Except for the vast alternations of storm and calm, of starlight and
auroral radiance, there was nothing to happen in that empty and frozen
world. Such life as dared the cold and dark in those regions kept along
the edges of the sea, where the great waters kept air-holes open through
the incumbent ice. Thither frequented the walrus and the seals, and
there hunted stealthily the savage old he-bears, who were too restless
to yield themselves to the long winter sleep. But the wise mother had
wandered far into the inland solitudes before retiring for her winter of
sleep and motherhood. Over the place of that safe sleep and secret
motherhood no live thing passed, all winter long,--save once or twice a
small white fox, who sniffed cautiously at a faint, menacing scent which
stole up through the hard snow, and once or twice the wide, soundless
wings of a great white Arctic owl, winnowing southward to find the
vanished ptarmigan.
Late and lagging came the beginnings of the dawn,--and then, much later,
when dawn had grown into the long day, the beginnings of the Arctic
spring. Something called to the heart of the old she-bear, and she heard
in the deep of her lair. Bursting through the softening and decaying
snow, she led her sturdy cub forth into the white outer solitudes, and
turned her steps eastward toward the seashore. She was gaunt,
loose-pelted, and unspeakably hungry; but she went slowly, while the cub
learned the new and interesting business of using his legs.
Along the shore the massive ice was still unbroken for miles out; but
where the currents and tides and storms had begun to vanquish it, and
the steel blue waves were eating into it hour by hour beneath the
growing sunlight, there the life of the north was gathering. Sea-birds
clamoured, and mated, and dived, and flew in circles, or settled in
flickering gray and white masses on every jutting promontory of black
rock. Along the blue-white ice-edge seals basked and barked, their soft
eyes keeping incessant watch against the perils that always lurked about
them. Huge bulks of walrus wallowed heavily in the waves, or lifted
their tusked heads menacingly to stare over the ice.
[Illustration: "SOME INEXPERIENCED SEAL HAD BEEN FOOLISH ENOUGH TO LIE
BASKING CLOSE BESIDE AN ICE-CAKE"]
Amid this teeming life, which the returning sun had brought back to
the ice-fields, the old she-bear, with her cub close at her heels, moved
craftily. She lurked behind piled-up ice-cakes, crept from shelter to
shelter, and moved as noiselessly as a wraith of snow on the hair-tufted
pads of her great feet. Sometimes her tireless hunting was promptly
rewarded, particularly when some inexperienced seal had been foolish
enough to lie basking close beside an ice-cake large enough to give
cover to the cunning hunter. Sometimes her sudden rush would take
unawares a full-fed gannet half-dozing on a rocky ledge. Sometimes a
lightning plunge and sweep of her armed paw would land a gleaming fish
upon the ice, a pleasant variation to the diet of red-blooded seal-meat.
And presently, as the long sunlight gathered warmth, and the brief,
swift heat of the Arctic summer approached, rushing down upon the ice as
if it knew how short must be its reign, the melting of the snow on
sheltered slopes and southward-facing hollows uncovered a wealth of
mosses, and lichens, and sprouting roots, most grateful to the bears'
flesh-wearied palates.
But not always was foraging a matter so simple. The mother bear had two
great appetites to supply, her own, and that of the vigorous youngster
beside her, who kept draining unremittingly at her sources of vitality
and strength. Sometimes the seals were unusually alert and shy, the
birds vituperative and restless, and the fish obstinate in their
preference for the waters far offshore. At such times, if there were no
greening hollows near by, where she might make a bloodless banquet, the
old bear would call to her aid those great powers of swimming which made
her almost as much at home in the water as the seal itself. Marking some
seals at rest by the edge of some far-jutting, naked ice-field, where
there was no possibility of her creeping upon them unobserved, she would
slip into the water in the seclusion of some little cove, and swim
straight seaward, swimming so low that only the tip of her muzzle was to
be seen. This moving speck upon the waters was not conspicuous even to
the keenest and most suspicious eyes. It might pass for a fragment of
ice with seaweed frozen into it, or for a bit of floating moss, save for
the fact that it moved steadily through the dancing of the waves, paying
no heed to tide or wind. As the seals were not expecting danger from the
direction of the sea, they were not inclined to scrutinize a thing so
insignificant as that steadily moving speck among the waves. Arriving
within well calculated distance of the unsuspecting baskers on the
ice-field, the old bear would fill her lungs, sink beneath the surface,
and swim forward with all speed. At the very edge of the ice she would
rise up, lunge forward, and strike down with her savage paw the nearest
seal, before any of them had time to realize the direction from which
death had burst upon them.
The old bear's triumph, however, was not always so complete. On one day
in particular she was confronted by an experience which almost left her
cub without a mother. The cub, watching solicitously from behind a
jagged hummock of ice, received a lesson which never faded from his
mind. He learned that in the wilds one must never let himself become so
absorbed in any occupation as to forget to keep a watchful eye for what
may be coming up behind one's back.
It was on one of the lean days, when all game was wide awake and the
lichen-beds far away. On the jagged ice off the mouth of an inlet lay
two walrus calves sunning their round, glistening sides while their
mothers wallowed and snorted in the water beside them. The old bear eyed
the calves hungrily for a minute or two. Then, ostentatiously turning
her back upon the scene, she slouched off inland among the hummocks and
rocks, the cub lurching along contentedly beside her.
Once hidden from the view of the walruses, she quickened her pace till
the cub had to struggle to keep with her, swung around the head of the
inlet, and crept stealthily down the other side toward the spot where
the calves were lying. The wind blew softly from them, her padded feet
made no sound, and she kept herself completely out of sight. Peering
warily from behind a tilted ice-cake, she saw that one of the cows had
crawled out of the water and lain down beside its calf for a noonday
doze. Then she drew her head back, and continued her careful stalking by
nose and ear alone.
At last she found herself within rushing distance. Not thirty yards away
she could hear the loud breathing of the drowsy cow on the ice, the
splashing of the one in the water. Turning upon the cub, she made him
understand that he was to stay where he was till she was ready for him.
Then gathering all the force of her muscles till she was like a great
bow bent, she shot forth from her place of hiding and rushed upon the
sleepers.
As the white shape of doom came down upon them without warning, the cow
and one calf awoke in intuitive panic and with astonishing and
instantaneous agility rolled off into the water. But the other calf was
not in time. One sprawling struggle it made toward safety, and gave
utterance to one hoarse bleat of despair, as if it knew that fate had
overtaken it. Then a heavy stroke broke its neck; and as its clumsy legs
spread out limp and unstrung upon the ice the bear clutched it and
started to drag it back from the water's edge.
At this moment she was aware of a huge lumbering bulk crawling up upon
the ice behind her. She took it for granted it was the dead calf's
mother, and paid no heed. Walrus cows she despised as antagonists,
though as game she held them in high consideration. She would attend to
this one in a moment; and then her larder would be amply stocked for
days.
An instant later, however, if she had deigned to look back, she would
have seen a gigantic gray and brown, warty-skinned bulk, surmounted by a
hideous face and grim, perpendicular tusks, rearing itself on huge
flippers just behind her. The cub, peering from his hiding-place, saw
the peril but did not comprehend it. The next moment the bulk fell
forward, crushing the bear's hind-quarters to the ice, while those long
tusks, which, fortunately for her, had failed to strike directly, tore a
great red gash across her right shoulder.
With a grunting squeal of rage and pain the bear writhed herself free of
the dripping mass of her assailant, and turned upon him madly. Blow
after blow she struck with that terrible fore paw of hers, armed with
claws like steel chisels. But the hide of the giant walrus was like many
thicknesses of seasoned leather for toughness; and though she drew blood
in streams at every tearing stroke, she inflicted no disabling wound.
His little, deep eyes red with fury, the bull rearing himself on his
flippers and lunging forward with awkward but irresistible force, like a
toppling mountain, seeking to crush his enemy and at the same time catch
her under the terrific downward thrust of his tusks. As he fought he
bellowed hoarsely, and panted with great windy, wheezy breaths, while
the walrus cows swam slowly up and down by the edge of the ice, watching
the struggle with their small, impassive eyes.
[Illustration: "SHE LED HIM FARTHER AND FARTHER ACROSS THE ICE."]
The old bear was lame and aching from that first crushing assault, and
her hind-quarters felt almost useless. Nevertheless she was much too
active for her clumsy adversary to succeed in catching her again at a
disadvantage. As she yielded ground before his blundering charges she
led him farther and farther across the ice, farther and farther from the
element wherein he was at home and invincible. Had she been herself
unhurt she would eventually have vanquished his ill-directed valour,
wearing him out and at last reaching his throat. But now she found
herself wearing out, with loss of blood and the anguish of her bruised
hind-quarters. As soon as she realized that her strength was failing,
and that presently she might fail to avoid one of her enemy's great
sprawling rushes, she was seized with fear. What would become of the cub
if she were killed? She wheeled swiftly, ran to where the cub stood
waiting and whimpering, nosed him solicitously, and led him away through
the blue and sparkling hummocks.
After this misadventure the mother bear did no more hunting for a week
or two, but kept inland among the sunny valleys, and nursed her wounds,
and fed on the young roots and tender herbage which sprouted hurriedly
wherever the snow left bare a patch of earth. On such clean and
blood-cooling diet her hurts speedily healed. Then with renewed vigour
and a whetted craving for red flesh-food, she went back to her keen
hunting of the seals. But the walruses she haughtily ignored.
The Arctic summer, meanwhile, with its perpetual sun, poured down upon
the world in swift, delicious heat; and the desolate world began to
laugh, with vivid greenery about the bubbling sources of the springs,
and sudden fringes of bloom, yellow and pink, along the edges of the
perpetual ice, and the painted fluttering of butterflies in every
southward-sloping hollow where there was earth enough to hold the roots
of flowers. The little winged adventurers would sometimes flit abroad
over the snow, questing perilously beyond the narrow confines of their
home. These rash wanderers, as a rule, would fall chilled, and die on
the snow before they could get back; and the cub, attracted by the
flecks of gay colour on the expanse of gray-white barrenness, would run
gleefully to snap them up and eat them.
[Illustration: "WOULD RUN GLEEFULLY TO SNAP THEM UP AND EAT THEM."]
Throughout the summer the cub and his mother kept very much to
themselves, seldom consorting with the other bears which roamed the
rocks and floes or came to the sunny valleys to feed on the ephemeral
herbage. The cub, meanwhile, having all the nourishment and care that
was usually divided between two, was growing swiftly in stature and in
the lore of the north. With his mother's example before him he learned
to hunt seals, to creep up on the dozing sea-birds, to scoop the unwary
fish from the sea, to waylay the stupid hare or the wary fox. But he was
peculiarly averse to swimming, and never entered the water except under
the compulsion of his mother's firm paw. The wise old bear, knowing how
much his success in the battle of life must depend on his mastery of the
water, would push him in from time to time, and keep him there in spite
of every whimpering protest. In this way he learned his needed lessons.
But his preference was all for land hunting, and it was obvious that
only the extreme of hunger would ever lead him to follow the seals in
their own element. As a matter of fact, since that memorable day when
his mother had been beaten by the great walrus, the cub had grown to
regard the sea as the peculiar domain of the walruses, and he felt a
certain diffidence about trespassing.
When the summer was beginning to fade away as hurriedly as it had come,
the cub was suddenly left alone in his grim world. It happened in this
way. On a certain hungry day, when his mother's hunting had been
unsuccessful, the wind brought over a ridge of rock a pungent and
ravishing smell of fresh blood. As cautiously as a cat the old bear
crept around the ridge, the cub creeping at her heels. The sight that
met them was one they had never seen before. Close at the water's edge
three men were busy skinning and cutting up a couple of seals. The cub
stopped short. A natural, inborn caution warned him that man was a
dangerous animal. But the old bear, to whom man was as unknown as to her
cub, had her intuitions obscured at that moment by her too eager
appetite. Moreover, she was in a bad temper, and felt that the strangers
were intruders upon her own hunting-ground. They were
insignificant-looking intruders, too, any one of whom she felt that she
could settle at a single stroke of her paw. A green gleam came into her
eyes, as with narrow, snaky head thrust forward and jaws half-parted
savagely, she stalked down upon the group, expecting to see it scatter
at her approach and leave her in undisputed possession of the prey.
As she drew near the men stopped work, stood up, and stared at her. For
a moment they did nothing. Then, seeing that she meant business, two of
them stepped aside and picked up what looked to her like two long
sticks, which glinted in the sun. One man took a stride forward and
pointed the stick at her in a way which seemed like a challenge. With a
grunt of anger she charged straight at him.
From the point of the stick burst a flash and a roar, with a little puff
of blue smoke that drifted off like a ghost over the waves. It might
have been the ghost of the old bear herself, fading reluctantly back
into the grim and desolate earth from which she had sprung; for at the
instant of its appearing she plunged forward upon her nose and lay
motionless, with a bullet through her brain.
It was a perfect shot; but the man who had made it took it as a matter
of course. In a few moments the limp and warm body was being treated
like that of the seal, for the pelt was a fine one and fresh bear-meat
was a delicacy not to be despised by Arctic travellers. But the cub was
not a witness of this red work of the shambles. When he saw his mother
fall he shrank back in overwhelming terror behind the rocks, then turned
and ran with all his might till he could run no longer. Finding himself
in a little sheltered valley where he and his mother had often fed
together on the sweet herbage, he crouched down under a rock and lay
shivering for hours, afraid even to whimper.
At first the white cub suffered torments of loneliness and vague fear;
but presently the more insistent torments of hunger gave him
forgetfulness of his loss, and in hunting for his meals he gradually got
himself adjusted to the new conditions. Naturally keen-witted and
adaptable, he prospered, and when the approach of the long Arctic night
began to throw its shadows over the ice and rocks his ribs were well
covered with fat. When the herbage in the little valleys was all frozen
to stone and sealed away under the first hard-driven snow, he yielded to
a drowsiness which had been creeping into his nerves. With this
drowsiness came a stirring of vague memory, and he turned his steps
farther inland, far beyond the roar of waves and grinding floes, till he
reached a place of tumbled rock, and cleft ravine, and imperishable
ice. This was the place where he had been born; and here, in the very
same sheltered crevice, he curled himself up for his winter's sleep. He
was no more than fairly asleep, when the snow fell thick with the first
of the unbroken night, and covered him away securely.
II
Through the months of dark, and storm, and ghostly, dancing lights, and
immeasurable cold, the cub slept unstirring, and grew in his sleep. But
when he woke, at the very first hint of awaking spring, he was wide
awake all at once, and fiercely hungry. Fiercely he burst out from the
sheltering snow, and shook himself, and hurried through the mystic
glimmer of dawn to the seashore, where he hoped to find the seals.
He was trusting partly to memory, partly to instinct; but he did not
know that this year he was a little ahead of the season. The ice inshore
was still unbroken, and the journey to open water was leagues longer
than he had anticipated. His cunning sharpened by his appetite, he
stalked and killed an unwary seal beside its blow-hole, and lay there
among the tumbled hummocks for some days, alternately eating and
sleeping. Then, his strength and craft and self-reliance increasing
hourly, he pressed forward league upon league, under the ethereal,
bubble-tinted, lonely Arctic morning, seeking the open sea.
When, at last, he heard the waves breaking along the blue ice brink, and
the clamour of the sea-fowl, and the barking of the seals, he felt that
he had come home again. He forgot the solid land, here upon what seemed
as solid as any land. He forgot the little inland valleys, where
presently the snow would be melting and the tender grasses beginning to
sprout. Here was good hunting, and easy; and here he stayed, making his
lair among the up-tilted ice-floes, till the yellow and blue glory of
full day was pouring over the waste.
It happened that year that no storms came to shatter and eat away the
ice-fields along their outer edges. Only the tides and the slow assault
of the sun did their work; and presently a vast area of unbroken ice
parted from the land and went drifting southward in the grip of the
polar current.
For days the young bear was quite unaware of this accident. The
ice-field was too vast and too solid for its motion to convey any
warning. The sea-birds, of course, knew all about it; and in a few days
they disappeared, requiring solid ground for their nesting business. As
for the seals, if they knew they didn't care, holding the ice safer for
their domestic arrangements than the perilous and hostile shore. The
young bear found good hunting. No storms came to vex him. And the warmth
of summer fairly rushed to meet him. For several weeks he was altogether
content.
Meanwhile the sun and the sea were making inroads upon the strength of
the ice-field. One day when the bear was prowling along its edges, a
mass of perhaps a quarter-acre in area broke off, lurching on the long
swell. Astonished and a little alarmed, the bear hurried across, swam
the narrow but rapidly widening strait, and clambered out upon the main
field. The incident in some way stirred up a latent instinct, and he
became uneasy. Setting his pace northward and landward, he stalked
straight ahead for hours,--and where he expected a familiar ridge of
rocks he came upon open sea. Much disturbed, he kept on his vain search
for land, forgetting to eat, and soon had circumnavigated his voyaging
domain. There was no land anywhere to swim to. There was nothing to be
done but accept the situation with such composure as he could command.
The seals were still with him, and he was not compelled to go hungry.
Then came a storm, with blinding flurries of snow out of the north, and
huge waves piling upon the weakened ice; and the field began to break
up. The seals fled away from the turmoil. Frantic with terror, the bear
was again and again overwhelmed among the warring floes, and only by
sheer miracle of good luck escaped being crushed. Clever swimmer that he
was, again and again he succeeded in crawling out upon a larger floe,
ploughing its way more steadily through the tumult. But every such
refuge went to pieces after a time, crumbling into chaos under the
shocks of pounding wave and battering ice. At last, and not too soon,
when his young courage was almost worn out and his young strength all
but gone, he was so fortunate as to gain a particularly tough and
massive floe which withstood all the storm's assaults. It was almost a
young berg in its dimensions and solidity; and in its centre, crouched
in a crevice, the bear felt, for the first time since the uproar began,
something like a sense of security.
The drift of the current had by this time carried the ice so far south
that the unchanging light of the Arctic day was left behind. Each night,
for a little while, the sun dipped from sight below the naked horizon.
For three days the great floe voyaged on through unrelenting storm,
riding down the lesser ice-cakes, and taking the waves with ponderous
lurch and slide. Little by little the lesser ice disappeared, till the
great floe rode alone. Then the wind died down; and last of all the
waves subsided. And the bear found himself sailing a steel-blue,
sparkling, empty sea, under a cloudless sky and a sun that burned with a
warmth he had never known.
It was now came the terrific trial of hunger to the young bear. For days
together he had no taste of food, no comfort to his throat but the
licking of the ice and lapping of the fresh water in the pools. Once
only did he taste meat,--a blundering gannet which alighted within a
foot of his motionless head and never knew the lightning doom that smote
it. This made one meal; but no more birds came, and no seals appeared,
and no fish came near enough for the bear to have any hope of striking
them. Day by day he grew thinner and weaker, till it was an effort to
climb the slopes of icy domain; and day by day the floe diminished, till
it grew to be a race between the ice and the animal, as to which should
first fade back into the elements.
But here fate intervened to stop this unnatural rivalry. By this time
the ice had drifted down into the track of occasional ships; and one
day, as a tramp steamer was passing near the floe, some one on deck
discerned the crouching bear. The sea was calm, and the captain in a
mood of leisure; so a boat was lowered and the crew set out for a bear
hunt.
Having heard much of the ferocity of the polar bear, the men went well
armed and full of excitement. But the reception which they met disarmed
them. Too hopeless for fear, or hate, or wonder, the despairing animal
turned upon them a look of faint appeal which they could not
misunderstand. With a not unnatural distrust of such amenability they
lightly bound and muzzled him, and took him aboard ship. There the cook
admitted him to his special favour, gave him a little warm broth, and
gradually, by careful dieting, coaxed him back to health.
[Illustration: "SOME ONE ON DECK DISCERNED THE CROUCHING BEAR."]
The young bear, as soon as he recovered himself, became the admiration
of the whole ship's company. His coat was rich and fine, its whiteness
tinged with a faint golden dye. His teeth and claws were perfect, and in
the small, inscrutable eyes with which he followed the business of the
ship gleamed an unusual intelligence. Nevertheless, though he showed no
ill-temper, no one, not even his kind attendant the cook, could
penetrate his impregnable reserve. To each individual who approached him
he showed complete indifference, while, on the contrary, his interest in
whatever was going on seemed unfailing. Chained to an iron stanchion
near the galley, he would stand swaying from side to side and swinging
his narrow, snake-like head for hours. But nothing that took place, alow
or aloft, escaped his keen observation. His indifference was plainly not
stupidity, so every one on the ship, from the captain down, regarded him
with vast respect. When at length, after a quiet voyage, the ship
reached port, this respect was enhanced by the price which he commanded
from the directors of the zoological gardens.
Now began for the young bear a life which, after the first annoying
novelty of it had worn off, almost broke his spirit by its cramped
monotony. His iron cage was spacious,--for a cage,--and built under the
shadow of a leaning rock; and a spring-fed pool at the base of the rock
kept the heat of the southern summer from growing utterly intolerable.
But the staring, grinning crowds which passed endlessly before the bars
of his cage filled him with weary rage; and day by day a fiercer
homesickness clutched at his heart. The food which his keeper gave him
he ate greedily enough, but through some inexplicable caprice he scorned
the peanuts which the crowd kept throwing to him through the bars. He
saw the other bears, in neighbouring cages, devour these small, dry
things and beg for more; but he would have none of them. He was
ceaselessly irritated, too, by the noisy sparrows which would flit
impudently within a foot of his nose; and once in a while the stroke of
his inescapable paw would descend upon one of them, easing for the
moment his sense of injury. Such small trophies he would eat with a
relish which the choicest of his jailers' gifts could not excite. The
only moments when his homesick heart could even pretend to forget its
longing for the desolate spaces, the lifeless rock ridges, the little,
snow-rimmed flower valleys, and the call of the eternal ice, were when,
in the solitary lilac-gray of dawn, he wallowed unobserved in his
sweetly chilly pool, and dreamed that the barking of the seals from
their tank across the garden was the authentic voice of his lost home.
But the coming of the first drowsy attendants would shatter this
illusion, and send him back under his rock to stand sullenly swaying and
swinging his head all day.
In this way the summer dragged along, and then the fine, dry fall; and
instead of becoming reconciled the young bear grew more moody. His
appetite began to fail and his fine coat lose its live, elastic quality.
The keepers were disappointed in him. At first they had expected to win
him over easily, because of his apparent amenableness and that look of
intelligence in his eyes. But now they gave him up as an irreconcilable,
and set themselves to keep him from pining away.
When winter came with raw rains, and sleet, and some sharp frosts, the
exile sniffed the air hopefully for a few days, then relapsed into a
deeper gloom. Then came a flurry of snow. As the great flakes fell about
him he grew wild with excitement, running with uplift head about his
cage, plunging in and out of the pool, and rearing himself against the
bars in a sort of play. While the flurry lasted he saw no one, and
forgot to eat. But in a day this tender snow had vanished, and he found
no sufficient consolation in the thin ice which came afterward to
encrust the edges of his pool. He seemed to feel himself cheated in his
dearest hopes, and grew more obstinately dejected than ever; till
finally came days when nothing would persuade him from the deepest
corner of his den. Some of the attendants thought this meant no more
than the drowsiness which, in his own home, might precede the desire for
hibernation. But one, more understanding of the wild kindreds than the
rest, declared that it was the very disease of homesickness, and that
the exile was eating his own heart out for desire of his frozen north.
The city of the young bear's exile was not so far south but that
sometimes, once in a long while, it found itself in the track of a
wandering northern blizzard. One day, with terrific suddenness, on the
heels of a gusty thaw, such a blizzard came. In half an hour the pool
was frozen and a fine snow was drifting in fierce whirls about the cage.
The unhappy bear lifted his head and looked forth from his den. But he
was not going to let himself again be cheated. He had no faith in this
alien storm; and turning his back upon it, he once more buried his nose
between his paws.
Meanwhile the cold deepened swiftly; the wind grew savage and shrieked
over the cages and the roofs; and the snow, dry and hard like the driven
needles of the Arctic night, thickened so that one could not see ten
paces before his nose. Through the throbbing drift the attendants went
hurrying about the open cages, fixing shelter for the animals that
needed it. The cold, the savage noises of the wind, the sharp buffets of
snow that struck into his den, at last brought the bear to his feet. He
turned slowly, and came out into the storm.
He found himself, now, actually alone, and in what seemed almost his own
world. This storm was convincing. He could not refuse to believe in the
icy driven crystals which cut so deliciously upon his tongue and against
his open jaws. This was really snow, that whirled and heaped about him.
This was really ice, which crashed about him as he plunged in and out of
his pool. Around and around his cage he romped, biting the snow in
ecstasy, rolling in it, breathing it, whimpering to it. When his keeper
came and looked in at him with wonder, and spoke to him with
sympathetic comprehension, he neither saw nor heard. To his eyes the
storm was volleying over the illimitable fields of the ice. In his ears
the raving of the wind held the crash of grinding floes. To his heart it
was the summons of the north,--and suddenly his heart answered. He stood
still, with a strange bewilderment in his eyes, as if transfixed by some
kind of tremendous shock. Then he swayed on his legs; and sank in a
lifeless heap by the drifted brink of his pool.
The Last Barrier
I
In a circular hollow in the clean, bright gravel of the river-bar the
tiny egg of the great Quahdavic salmon stirred to life. For months it
had lain there among its thousands of fellows, with the clear, cold,
unsullied current streaming over it ceaselessly. Through the autumn the
wilderness sunshine and the bracing wilderness air, playing on the
unshaded shallows of the wide stream, had kept the water highly
vitalized,--though this was hardly necessary in that pure and spring-fed
current. When the savage northern winter closed down upon the high
valley of the Quahdavic it found difficulty in freezing the swift
current that ran rippling over the bar; and when, at last, the frost
conquered, gripping and clutching through the long, windless nights, it
was to form only a thin armour of transparent, steel-strong ice,
through which, as through the mantle of snow which made haste to cover
it, the light still filtered softly but radiantly at noon, with an
ethereal cobalt tinge.
The bar on which the parent salmon had hollowed their round gravel nest
was far up the Great South Branch of the Quahdavic, not many miles from
the little cold spring lake that was its source. The Great South Branch
was a stream much loved by the salmon, for its deep pools, its fine
gravel spawning-beds, the purity and steady coldness of its current, and
the remoteness which protected it from the visits of greedy poachers. In
all its course there was but one serious obstruction, namely, the Big
Falls, where the stream fell about twelve feet in one pitch, then roared
down for half a mile over a succession of low ledges with deep pools
between. The Falls were such that vigorous fish had no real trouble in
surmounting them. But they inexorably weeded out the weaklings. No
feeble salmon ever got to the top of that straight and thunderous pitch.
Therefore, as the spawning-bars were all above the Falls, it was a fine,
long-finned, clean swimming breed of salmon that was bred in the Great
South Branch.
When the tiny egg in the gravel stirred to life,--as the thousands of
other tiny eggs about it were doing at the same time,--there was no ice
sheet imprisoning the current, which ran singing pleasantly under a soft
spring sun. The deep hollow in the gravel sheltered the moving atoms, so
that they were not swept away by the current streaming over them. But
minute as they were, they speedily gathered a strength altogether
miraculous for their size, as they absorbed the clinging sacs of
egg-substance and assumed the forms of fish, almost microscopic, but
perfect. This advance achieved, they began to venture from behind and
beneath the sheltering pebbles, to dare the urgent stream, and to work
their way shoreward toward shallower waters where the perils which beset
young salmon would be fewer and less insistent.
The egg from which he came having been one of the first to hatch, the
tiny salmon mentioned in the opening paragraph was one of the first of
the host to find his strength and to start the migration shoreward from
the nest on the noisy bar. Perhaps a score started with him, trying the
current, darting back to shelter, then more boldly venturing again. A
passing trout, hungry and fierce-eyed, darted above them, heading up
against the current; but being so few and scattered, they escaped his
fatal attentions. Terrified, however, by the sudden shadow, they hid in
the gravel and for some time made no further trial of the dangerous
world.
When again the salmon atom adventured forth, he found himself in a
greater company. Hundreds more of the tiny creatures had left the nest
and were moving shoreward with him. As the defenceless throng advanced,
he saw a couple of what seemed to him gigantic creatures dashing hither
and thither among them, snapping them up greedily by twos and threes;
and he himself barely escaped those greedy jaws by shooting forward in
the nick of time. These seeming monsters were but young redfins, a
couple of inches in length, whom he would soon come to despise and chase
from his feeding-grounds.
[Illustration: "HE SAW A BIG SUCKER SETTLE LAZILY WHERE THE THRONGING
FRY WERE THICKEST."]
His superior development and speed having so well served him, he was now
a foot or more in advance of the throng, and so escaped another and even
more wide-ranging peril. A huge shadow, as vast as that of the trout,
swept down upon them, and as he shrank beneath a sharpedged stone he saw
a big sucker settle lazily where the thronging fry were thickest. With
round, horribly dilating and contracting mouth turned down like an
inverted snout, the big fish sucked up the little wrigglers greedily,
even drawing them out by his power of suction from their hidings in the
gravel. Of the hundreds that had started on the first migration from the
nest not more than three score were left to follow their frightened and
panting mite of a leader into the shallows where the big sucker could
not come.
Among the little stones close to shore, where the water was hardly more
than an inch deep, even the greedy young redfins would not venture.
Nevertheless there were plenty of enemies waiting eagerly for the coming
of the fry, and the little fellow whose one hour of seniority had made
him the pioneer of the shoal found all his ability taxed to guard the
speck of life which he had so lately achieved. Keeping far enough from
shore to avoid being stranded by some whimsical ripple, he nevertheless
avoided the depths that were sufficient for the free hunting of the
predatory minnows and redfins. Such of his kinsfolk as stayed farther
out soon served, the greater number of them, as food for the larger
river dwellers, while those who went too close inshore got cast up on
the sand to die, or were pounced upon, as they lay close to the
surface, by ravenous and unerring mosquitoes, which managed to pierce
them even through a film of water a sixteenth of an inch or more in
thickness. So it came about in a very brief time that of the countless
throng emerging from the nest on the bar there remained but a hundred or
so of the tiny fry to sustain the fortunes of that particular salmon
family.
Even at the safest and most cunningly chosen depth, however, the little
pioneer had plenty of perils to guard against. Secure from the suckers
and redfins on the one hand, and from the mosquitoes on the other, he
had yet for enemies certain predatory larvæ and water-beetles, as well
as a few inch-long youngsters of the trout family, who were very active
and rapacious. There was a water-beetle with hooked, pincer-like jaws
and lightning rapidity of movement, which kept him almost ceaselessly on
the alert, and filled him with wholesome terror as he saw it capture and
devour numbers of his less nimble or less wary kin. And one day, when he
had chanced, in the company of his diminished school of fry, to drift
into a shallow cove where there was no current at all to disturb the
water, he was chased by the terrible larva of a dragon-fly. The
strange-looking creature, with what seemed a blank, featureless mask
where its face and jaws ought to be, darted at him under the propulsion
of jets of water sucked into its middle and spurted out behind. Having
taken alarm in time, he made good his escape between the stalks of a
fine water-weed where the big larva could not penetrate. From this
retreat he saw his pursuer turn and pounce upon a small basking minnow.
The mask that covered the larva's face shot out as if on a hinge,
developed into two powerful, grappling claws, and clutched the victim in
the belly. After a brief struggle, which terrified all the tiny
creatures within a radius of three feet, the minnow was dragged down to
a clump of weed and the victor proceeded to make his feast. The little
salmon stole in terror from his hiding-place and darted out into the
more strenuous but for him far safer waters where a live current stirred
among the gravel. To be sure the beetles were there, and the hungry
young trout; but he had learned the ways of both these species of foe
and knew pretty well how to elude them. Meanwhile, as he was himself
continually busy catching and devouring the tiny forms of life which
abounded in those fruitful waters,--minute shell-fish, and the spawn of
the water-snails that clung under the stones, gnats, and other small
insects that fell on the water, and even other fry just from the
egg,--he was growing at such a rate that presently the fierce
water-beetles and the baby trout ceased to have any terrors for him. And
at last, turning savagely as one of his old tormentors passed by, he
caught a small beetle between his jaws and proceeded to make a meal of
him. A few days later one of the baby trout was too slow in getting out
of his way. He made a rush, caught his former tyrant, and, though the
latter was more than an inch long, found no difficulty in swallowing him
head first.
By this time the little salmon was between two and three inches long. He
was what those learned in matters pertaining to the salmon would have
called a "parr". His colouring was very beautiful, in a higher key than
the colouring of a trout, and more brilliant, if less showy. There was
none of the pink of the trout, but a clear silvery tone on sides and
belly, with a shining blue-black along the back. The sides were marked
with a row of black dots, set far apart and accentuated by a yellow
flush around them, and with another row of spots of most vivid scarlet.
Along the sides also ran a series of broad, vertical, bluish gray bars,
the badge of the young of all the salmon tribe. He was a slender,
strong-finned, finely moulded little fish, built to have his dwelling in
swift currents and to conquer turbulent rapids. His jaws were strong and
large, and he had no reason to fear anything of his size that swam the
river.
There were now not more than two score of his brothers and sisters left
alive, and these scattered far and wide over the shoaling stream. It was
high summer in the Quahdavic country, and the Great South Branch was
beginning to show its ledges and sandy bars above water. Deep green the
full-leaved boughs of elm and ash, poplar and cedar leaned above the
current; and along the little wild-meadows which here and there bordered
the stream, where the lumbermen had had camps or "landings", the misty
pink-purple blossoms of the milkweed poured a wild sweetness upon the
air. In a shallow run near the shore, where the sunlight, falling
through an overhanging cedar "sweeper", dappled the clear ripples, and
the current was about eight inches deep, and there was no pool near to
tempt the larger fish, the active and wary little parr took up his
home. The same run was chosen by three of his fellows also, and by a
couple of small trout of about the same size. But there was room enough,
and food enough, in that run for all of them, so the association was
harmonious.
Lying with his head up-stream, his long fins and broad tail slowly
waving to hold him in his position against the current, the little parr
waited and watched while his food was brought down to him by the
untiring flow. Sometimes it was a luckless leaf-grub, or a caddis-worm
torn from his moorings, that came tumbling and bumping down along the
smooth pebbles of the bottom, to be gathered into the young salmon's
eager maw. Sometimes it was a fly or moth or bee or beetle that came
bobbing with drenched, helpless wings along the tops of the ripples. And
once in awhile a pink-shelled baby crawfish in its wanderings would come
sidling across the run, and be promptly gobbled up in spite of the
futile threatenings of its tiny claws. The river was liberal in its
providing for its most favoured children, these aristocratic and
beautiful parr, so the youngster grew apace in his bright run.
Happy though his life was now, in every kind of weather, he was still
beset with perils. He had, of course, no longer anything to fear from
the journeying suckers, with their small, toothless mouths, but now and
then a big-mouthed, red-bellied, savage trout would pass up the run, and
in passing make a dash at one of the little occupants. In this way two
of the parr, and one of the little trout, disappeared,--the trout folk
having no prejudice whatever against cannibalism. But our pioneer,
ceaselessly on the watch and matchlessly nimble, always succeeded in
keeping well out of the way. Once he had a horrible scare, when a
seven-pound salmon, astray from the main channel, made his way
cautiously up the middle of the run and scraped over the bar. In this
case, however, the alarm was groundless. The stranger was not seeking
food, but only a way out of the embarrassing shallows.
Another peril that kept the young parr on the alert--an ever imminent
and particularly appalling peril--was the foraging of the kingfishers. A
pair of these noisy and diligent birds had their nest of six little ones
in a hole in the red bluff just above the run, and they took ceaseless
tribute from the finny tribes of the river. Like an azure arrow one of
them would dart down into the river with a loud splash, and flap up
again, usually, with a gleaming trout or parr held firmly between the
edges of his great beak. If he missed his shot and came up with empty
beak, he would fly off up the river with a harsh, clattering,
startlingly loud cry of indignation and protest. Several times one or
other of these troublesome foragers dropped into the run. The dappling
of the shadow and sun, however, from the cedar, was a protection to the
dwellers in this run; and only twice was the fishing there successful.
The second little trout, and one more of the parr, were carried off.
Then the birds forsook that particular bit of ripple and hunted easier
waters.
In leaping at the flies which came down the surface of the run the
little salmon one day got a severe but invaluable lesson. A large and
gaudy fly, unlike anything that he had ever encountered before, appeared
on the ripples over his head. Still more unlike those which he had
encountered before, it did not hurry downward with the water, but
maintained its position in a most mysterious fashion. While the parr
eyed it curiously, wondering whether to try it or not, it suddenly moved
straight up against the current, and was followed at a short distance by
another queer-looking big fly, green and brown like a grasshopper.
Excited by the strange behaviour of these two strangers, the parr rose
sharply and hit the green fly with his tail, intending to drown it and
investigate it at his leisure. To his astonishment both flies instantly
disappeared. Chagrined and puzzled, he dropped back to the tail of the
run, sulking.
[Illustration: "HELD FIRMLY BETWEEN THE EDGES OF HIS GREAT BEAK."]
A moment later, however, the two flies reappeared, slipping very slowly
down the current, mounting up again directly in the teeth of it,
sometimes dancing on the surface, sometimes sinking a little below it,
but always remaining the same distance apart, and always behaving in a
manner mysteriously independent of the power of the stream. For a few
seconds the parr eyed them with distrust. Then growing excited by their
strange actions, he dashed forward fiercely and caught the gaudy red fly
in his jaws. There was a prick, a twitch, a frightful jerk,--and he
found himself dragged forth into the strangling upper air, where he fell
flopping on the dry gravel of the shore.
As he lay gasping and struggling on the hot pebbles, which scorched off
the delicate bloom from his tender skin, a tall shape stooped over him,
and a great hand, its fingers as long as his whole body, picked him up.
He heard a vague reverberation, which was the voice of the tall shape
saying, "A poor little beggar of a salmon,--but not badly hooked! He'll
be none the worse, and perhaps none the wiser!" Then, with what seemed
to him terrible and deadly violence, but what was really the most
careful delicacy that the big hand was capable of, the hook was removed
from his jaw, and he was tossed back into the water. Dizzy and
half-stunned, he turned over on his back, head downward, and for a
moment or two was at the mercy of the current. Then, recovering from the
shock, he righted himself, and swam frantically to the shelter of an
overhanging stone which he knew, where he lay with heaving sides, sore,
aching, and trembling, till little by little his self-possession
returned to him. But ever afterward, since he was by nature somewhat
more wary and alert than his fellows, he viewed floating flies with
suspicion and inspected them cautiously before seizing them in his jaws.
[Illustration: "LEAPING HIGH OUT OF THE POOLS."]
All through the summer and autumn the little parr was kept very busy,
feeding, and dodging his enemies, and playing in the cheerful, shallow
"run" beneath the cedar. When the early autumn rains swelled the
volume of the Great South Branch, he first realized how numerous were
the big salmon in the stream,--fish which had kept carefully clear of
the shallow places wherein he had spent the summer. Though he held
himself well aloof from these big fish,--which never paid him any
attention,--he noticed them playing tempestuously, leaping high out of
the pools, and very busy night and morning on the gravel bars, where
they seemed to be digging with their powerful snouts.
Still later, when, instead of flies and beetles, there fell upon the
darkening surface of the river little pale specks which vanished as he
snatched at them, he grew fiercely and inexplicably discontented. What
he longed for he did not know; but he knew it was nowhere in the waters
about him, neither along the edges of the shore, where now the ice was
forming in crisp fringes. All about him he saw the big salmon,--their
sides lean and flat, their brilliant colours darkened and
faded,--swimming down languidly with the strenuous current. Hitherto
their movements had been all up-stream,--upward, upward incessantly and
gladly. Now the old energy and joy of life seemed all gone out of them.
Nevertheless, they seemed very anxious to go somewhere, and the way to
that somewhere appeared to be down-stream. Hardly knowing what he did,
and not at all knowing why he did it, the parr found himself slipping
down-stream with them. He had grown vastly in size and strength, while
his vivid and varied hues had begun to soften appreciably. In fact, he
was now no longer a parr, but a "smelt"; and after the ordained custom
of his kind, he was on his way to the sea.
II
Long-finned and full of vigour, the smelt was not dismayed when he came
to heavier water, exchanging the region of the gravelly bars for a space
of broken ledges, where the great current roared hither and thither and
lashed itself into foam. Through these loud chutes and miniature falls
he shot safely, though not at first without some trepidation. The lean,
slab-sided salmon, or "slinks", who were his travelling companions,
served as his involuntary guides. Except to make use of them in this way
once or twice, he paid them little attention; though now and again a big
lantern-jawed fellow would rush at him with a sort of half-hearted
fury, compelling him to make a hurried retreat.
The Great South Branch, soon after the region of the wild ledges was
past, fell into quiet ways, and crept for a few miles with deep,
untroubled current through a land of alders. Here the winter, which had
by this time settled down upon the high Quahdavic country, had its will,
and the river was frozen and snow-covered from shore to shore. The
smelt, as he journeyed beneath the ice, was puzzled and disturbed by the
unusual dimness of the light that filtered down to him.
This was a condition, however, which he soon left behind. Swollen by the
influx of several lesser streams, the Great South now burst its fetters
and thundered along through a series of tumultuous rapids. Then above
the thunder of these rapids came a louder, heavier roar, a trampling
whose vibration carried a warning to the traveller. He paused for a
moment; but seeing that the salmon swam on without hesitation or
apparent misgiving, he dashed forward-confidently into the tumult. A
moment more and he was hurled onward bewilderingly, dashed downward
through a smother of broken water which held so much air in it that it
almost choked him, and shot into a great, deep, swirling pool where
many "slinks" and a few slim smelts like himself were swimming lazily
hither and thither. He had successfully made the descent of the South
Branch Falls, though, in his ignorance of the best channel, he had
missed the solid water, and come down through the smother.
After a very brief rest in the basin below the Falls, to recover his
self-possession, the smelt, with many other migrants, resumed his
seaward journey. The Great South presently, with a long rush, united its
waters with those of the main Quahdavic. Down this full-flowing stream
he swam steadily for three uneventful days, to find himself at length in
a mighty river whose amber-brown current was a surprise to him after the
clear, greenish floods in which he had been born. It took him several
days, journeying leisurely, and feeding moderately as he went, to get
accustomed to the change in the water. And barely had he become
accustomed to it when another and more startling change confronted him.
The current, flowing strongly in one direction, would change for a time
and flow directly against him. This was confusing. But it was not by any
means the worst. A strange, bitter taste was in the water. The great
salt tides were rushing up to welcome him. He was nearing the sea.
At first the brackishness in the water repelled him; but almost at once
he found himself accepting it with avidity. At the same time he could
not but observe a sudden awakening of interest in life among the languid
"slinks". They began to show a better appetite, to move about more
alertly, to make themselves more dangerous to the smaller fish that
crossed their paths. The water grew more and more salt,--with an ever
increasing zest to it which made the smelt amazingly keen for his food.
Then the shield of ice above him, beneath which he had so long
travelled, suddenly vanished, and through long, free shoreless waves he
felt the sunlight streaming down to him unimpeded. The water was now no
longer tawny brown, but green. He had reached the sea.
For some reason which he could never have explained,--for he certainly
felt no affection for them,--the smelt, with others like himself, kept
travelling more or less in the company of the reviving "slinks". Like
all the rest of the strong-*finned, silver-sided host, he was now
feeding with a ravenousness of appetite unknown to him in the old days
of rapid and pool. His food was chiefly the very tiny creatures of the
sea, shell-fish from the deep-covered rocks and floating masses of weed,
young fry swimming in schools, jellyfish of various sorts, and the
myriad minute sea things which made certain belts and patches of the
sea, at times, almost like a kind of soup ready to his eager palate.
Ever north and north swam the silver host, seeking those cold currents
from the pole which are as thick with life as the lands they wash are
lifeless. Very deep they swam, so deep that, countless as their armies
were, they left no trace to betray them to the nets or hooks of the
fishing fleets. In those faintly glimmering depths the slow tide stirred
softly, unmoved by whatever Arctic storm might rave and shrink over its
surface. In the gloom the tiny creatures of the sea shone by their own
pale phosphorescence, and in such unimaginable millions did they swarm
that the journeying salmon had but to open their mouths to be fed. At
this depth, too, they had but little persecution from the more swift and
powerful hunters of the sea, the big-mouthed whales, the sharks, and the
porpoises. Their most dangerous enemies generally lived and fought and
ravaged nearer the surface, leaving to them the lordship of the
twilight deeps. Once in awhile, indeed, a sounding whale might drop its
mighty bulk among them, and engulf a few scores in his huge maw before
the pressure and the need of air forced him again to the surface. And
once in awhile a shark or swordfish would rush down, as a hawk swoops
from the upper sky, to harry their array. But for the most part now, as
at no other period in their career, they went unmolested on their secret
and mysterious northern drift.
When the young salmon had been about three months in the sea, growing
diligently all the time, a strange but potent influence impelled him,
along with most of his companioning hordes, to turn and journey backward
toward the coast whence he had come. He was now about five pounds in
weight, and if he had fallen into the hands of a fisherman he would have
been labelled a "grilse". His companions were nearly all grilse like
himself, varying in weight from two and a half to four or five pounds,
with here and there a big, adult salmon journeying majestically among
them. The majority of the full-grown salmon had preceded them shoreward
by anything from one month to four, under the urge of the homing and
parental instinct.
As the big grilse journeyed he went on growing daily, till by the time
he found himself back in the waters of the Gulf he was a good six pounds
in weight. As he mounted nearer the surface and drew inshore he passed
the mouths of various rivers and encountered swirling currents of
brackish water. At each of these river-mouths numbers of the host would
separate and turn up the freshening tide. But our grilse kept right on,
making unerringly for his mighty native stream. And those that continued
with him were more in number than those that turned aside.
It was during this journey down offshore that perils once more began to
assail the young salmon, perils which it took all his good luck and keen
activities to evade. For one thing, there were dogfish. These miniature
sharks, with their savage mouths set far under their snouts, were no
match for the grilse, or any of his kind, in speed; but the latter,
being unsuspicious, came very near being caught unawares. A swift surge
of his long fins and powerful tail saved him, just in time. He shot away
like a silver streak as the fierce jaws snapped sharply at his flank.
After that he kept his eyes alert on the approach of any fish in the
least degree larger than himself. And in the course of this
watchfulness he saw many of his kinsmen caught and torn to pieces by the
ravening dogfish, who are the very wolves of the sea.
Another and equally deadly peril was one that took several forms. Once
as he swam swiftly but easily onward, he saw a number of his companions,
who chanced to be a little ahead of him, stop abruptly and engage in
what seemed to him a meaningless struggle. Ever suspicious, he checked
himself and tried to make out what was the matter. The struggle was
desperate, but the adversary at first invisible. In a moment, however,
he detected a mesh of fine, brown lines, which seemed to surround and
grapple with the unfortunate fish. Not waiting to investigate further,
he retreated with a nervous flurry of speed. Then, since nothing could
divert his homeward impulse, he dived almost to the bottom and continued
his journey, not returning toward the dangerous surface till he was
nearly a mile beyond the throttling peril of the drift-net. But there
were yet other nets, and as he entered the great outrush of his native
river he encountered them on every side, stretched on rows of stakes
running far out into the channels. These "set nets", as they were
termed, he was fortunate enough, or wary enough, to detect when he first
entered the river, and he avoided them by keeping to the deepest parts
of the channel; but he saw what cruel toll they took of the eager and
heedless schools that swam with him. Net after net they threatened him;
but ever upward he urged his way against the tawny current, his long
fins and powerful tail never pausing in their graceful, tireless effort.
Neither he nor his companions now lost time in foraging, for their
appetite had mysteriously vanished since leaving the salt water. They
had become engrossed in one idea, the quest of the clean-rushing rapids
and the beds of bright gravel where they were born.
Leagues up the great river, after mounting several noisy but not
difficult rapids, the grilse came to a halt for the first time in a deep
and spacious pool which swarmed with his fellows. Here he rested, and
here he made light, casual meals, jumping at the little flies which fell
upon the swirling surface of the pool. Once the bright yellow body of a
struggling wasp allured him,--but just as he was rising to gulp it in, a
memory, vague but terrifying, swung dimly up into his brain from the
far-off days when he had been a tiny, gay-coloured parr in the ripples
of the Great South Branch. He remembered the sharp point piercing his
jaw, his choking and gasping on the hot, dry bank; and refusing the
bright titbit, he left it to be gobbled up by one of his less wary
companions. After that revival of memory the crafty grilse inspected
every fly before he rose to it, to see if any slender, almost invisible
line were attached to it. His precautions were unnecessary, in that
instance, the pool being a lonely and unnoted one in a broad, shallow
reach of the river; but his awakened watchfulness was to stand him in
good stead later on.
A day's journey beyond the pool, a great outrush of colder water,
green-white against the amber tide of the main river, greeted the
returning grilse, and he found himself in the mouth of his native
Quahdavic. It was a scanter and shallower stream, however, than when he
left it, for now the long heats of the summer had shrunken all the
watercourses. As he mounted the clear current he now encountered fierce
rapids, and ledges boiling with foam, which put his swimming prowess to
the test. After a day of these rapids and ledges and shallow rips, he
felt quite ready to halt once more in a great green pool where two
lively brooks, tumbling in from either shore, kept the surface flecked
with whirling foam. Here the invigorating coolness of the water speedily
refreshed him, and he fell to feeding on the various insects brought
down by the meeting currents. The pool was thronged with grilse and
full-grown salmon, with here and there a school of graceful whitefish or
a group of sluggish suckers, whom he ignored. When the moon rose white
over the black, serried masses of the fir woods, silvering the pool, the
big grilse, obeying a sudden caprice, shot upwards with a mighty surge
of fins and tail, and hurled himself high into the still air. Falling
back with a resounding splash, he repeated the feat again and again. He
had discovered the fascination of diving upward into the unknown and
alien element of the air. Others of his kindred, large and small, had
made the same discovery, and the wilderness silence was broken with
splash after splash, as the tense, silver shapes shot up, gleamed for an
instant, and fell back. As the noise of the mysterious play echoed on
the night air, a black bear crept down to the water's edge on one side
of the stream, and a lynx stole out to the end of a log on the other
side, each hoping that some unwary player might come within reach of
his paw. But all the salmon kept out in the safe deeps; and the
keen-eyed watchers watched in vain as the round moon climbed the clean
heights of sky.
After a few days in this pool, he was surprised one early morning by the
sight of a long, dark shape gliding over the surface. From its side,
near the hinder end, a strange-looking, narrow fin thrust downward from
time to time, and with heavy swirls propelled the dark shape. The
strange apparition disturbed him, and he grew restless and watchful. A
few minutes after it had passed there came a faint splash on the surface
above him, and a big, curious-looking fly appeared. It sank an inch or
two, moved against the current, and was then withdrawn. He eyed it with
scorn, remembering his former experience with such. But when, a moment
later, the strange fly appeared again, he was amazed to see one of the
biggest salmon in the pool rise lazily and suck it down. The next
instant there was a terrific commotion. He saw the great fish rush
hither and thither up and down and around the pool, now scattering the
whitefish on the bottom, now splashing upon the surface and leaping
half his length into the air. Very clearly the cunning grilse
understood what it all meant. For many long minutes he watched the
struggle, which showed no sign of ending. Then disgusted and
apprehensive, he forsook the pool, darting beneath the canoe as he did
so, and continued his journey up-stream.
Late in the day the returning traveller came to the mouth of the Big
South Branch. Without hesitation he turned up that turbulent but
shrunken stream, knowing it for his own; and he made no stop till he
reached the deep, green, foamy pool at the foot of the Falls. Being
still comparatively fresh, and very restless, he swam all round the
pool, and took a crafty survey of the terrific obstacle before him. But
among the sojourners in the pool were many fish with bleeding sides, who
had essayed the leap in vain and were waiting to recuperate their
energies for another effort. So he, too, paused a little, gathering his
young strength.
[Illustration: "VANQUISHED IN THEIR OWN ELEMENT BY THE MINK."]
The Falls of the Big South were about twelve feet in total height. There
were two leaps, the upper one, of about three feet, rolling down into a
hollow shelf of sandstone some six or eight feet in width, and the
lower, dropping nine feet sheer into the pool. Most of the face of
fall, at this stage of the water, was lashed into foam by fissures and
projecting angles of rock, but on the right the main volume of the
stream fell in a clear, green column. Up the front of this column the
grilse presently flung himself, striking the water about a foot from the
top. As he struck, the impetus of his leap not yet exhausted, his
powerful fins and tail took firm hold of the solid water and urged him
upward. Over the lip he shot, into the boiling turmoil of the shelf,
then onward over the great surge of the upper dip. He had triumphed
easily, and the way was clear before him to the shining gravel bars
whereon he had been spawned. There were still some tough
rapids--shallow, and tortuous, and grid-ironed with slaty rocks--to be
climbed; but there were quiet pools to sojourn in, and no perils that
his craft could not evade. One by one his fellow voyagershad dropped
away, betrayed by the fisherman's luring fly, clutched by the skilful
paw of wildcat or bear, or vanquished in their own element by the mink
or the otter. But when he reached the wide spawning-beds he was still
comraded by a fair remnant of the host which had entered the river with
him; and the shallow run that swept the bars were noisy with their
splashings through the twilight of evening and dawn.
Every day there were new arrivals at the spawning-beds, and among them
the strong and wary grilse soon found a mate. She was considerably
larger than he, a trim young salmon of the second year and perhaps nine
pounds in weight. But his radiant colouring, his strength and his
activity, as he swam around her and displayed his charms, appeared to
content her. With his bony nose he dug her a circular nest in the
gravel, where the current ran clear but not too strong; and in this nest
she laid her countless eggs, while he rubbed his side caressingly
against her shining flanks. When her eggs were all laid and fertilized
he drifted away from her, dropped down to the nearest pool, and lay
there sluggish and uninterested for awhile, until, seized once more by
the longing for the great salt tide, he joined a returning company of
"slinks" and hurried back down-river to the sea.
III
When he reached the deep sea once more, and regained his appetite among
the sweeping tides, he once more began to grow. His fins became smaller
in proportion to his bulk, and he was no longer a grilse, but a salmon.
His life, however, underwent no great change; his adventures, perils,
interests, appetites, were all much the same as during his first season
in the sea. Only he now swam with a certain majesty, ignoring the grilse
and smaller salmon who swam and fed beside him; for he was of splendid,
constantly growing stature, of the lords of his kind.
This time he let nearly the whole round of the year go by, feeding at
leisure and lazily dodging the seals, among the icy but populous tides
that swung beyond the mouth of Hudson Straits. Then, late the following
winter, long before the dark earth had any word of spring, spring
stirred secretly in his veins, and he remembered the sunny gravel bars
of the Great South Branch. The sudden urge of his desire turned him
about, and he began to swim tirelessly southward, companioned by an
ardent, silvery host into whose veins at the same time the same
compelling summons had been flashed.
It was late May when the returning salmon, having successfully eluded
the snares of the nets and the assaults of harbour seal and dogfish,
came again to the mouth of his native river and fanned his gills once
more in its sweet, amber current. He was now a good forty pounds in
weight, and his clean blue-and-silver body was adorned with fine
markings of extraordinary brilliancy. His vigorous, wholesome, seasoned
muscles propelled him irresistibly against the current of the river,
which was now fierce with freshet; and being urged by a stronger and
more insistent desire than that which had swayed him on his former
visit, as a grilse, he now made more haste in his journeying, with
briefer halts in the pools. The pools, at this season, were some of them
indistinguishable in the flood, and others turbulent and difficult of
access, so the fly-fishermen were not yet out in force. Only once, in
the great pool below the Quahdavic mouth, did he see the bright fly
whose treacherous lure he knew so well go dancing over his head. He rose
lazily and slapped it with his tail in angry contempt, then returned to
the bottom of the pool and watched it lazily, while for nearly an hour
it went through its futile antics. Then it vanished suddenly.
Perhaps ten minutes after the gaudy fly had disappeared, the big salmon
saw a brown furry shape, more like a very young squirrel than anything
else, go floating down the current. Other salmon, who, like himself,
had ignored the fly, observed this furry shape with interest, and half
started to investigate. But when the big salmon rose to it they turned
away with resignation. As for him, though he had not been once really
hungry since entering the fresh water, he felt that that strange object
was the very thing he wanted. Gliding up to the surface on a long slant,
very slowly, he opened his great jaws just below the object, sucked it
in, and with a heavy splash turned back toward the bottom. The next
instant there was a jerk, a prick, a fierce tug at his jaw which swerved
him from his course; and he realized that he had been fooled. The furry
shape was but the old treason of the fly in another form.
His first impulse was to rush madly across the pool in an effort to
escape the small tormentor. But memory and experience, added to that
native cunning which had brought him safely through so many perils, now
came to his rescue. Instead of rushing to the surface and performing
wild feats which would have soon worn him out while delighting the soul
of his enemy, he turned resolutely back to his course and bored his way
to the bottom against the exasperating pressure of rod and reel. Here
he set himself to nosing vigorously among the stones, in the hope of
rubbing off this troublesome thing on his jaw. The thing tugged, and
tugged, and pricked, and worried, as the fisherman at the other end of
the line strove to rouse him into a lively and spectacular struggle. But
for some minutes he refused to be diverted from his nosing among the
stones, till the fisherman began to fear that the hook had got fast to a
log.
Presently, however, the great salmon decided to change his tactics.
Though he did not know it, he had already loosened the hook appreciably,
tearing the cartilage of his jaw. Now, having craftily eyed for some
seconds the fine, taut, almost invisible line of gut as it slanted off
through the water, he made a long, swift rush straight in the direction
in which the line was striving to pull him. Instantly the pull ceased,
the line fell slack. But he felt the hook, with its furry attachment,
still clinging at the side of his mouth. He passed straight under the
dark shape of the canoe, and heard a sharp, vibrant sound above him,
something like the song of a locust, which was the noise of the big
salmon reel as the fisherman made wild haste to take in the slack of the
line. As he swam he shook his head savagely; but the hook still held.
Then, near the farther edge of the pool, he darted between the limbs of
a sunken windfall, and back again on the other side, effectually fouling
the line a few feet from his nose. The next moment there was a violent
jerk at his jaw. The hook tore out, and he swam free.
In tremendous indignation and trepidation the great salmon now darted
from the pool and up against the wild current of the Quahdavic. In the
next pool he delayed for but a few minutes, not resting, but swimming
about restlessly and stirring up the other salmon with his excitement.
Then, accompanied by three or four of those whom his nervous activity
had aroused, he pressed onward. Through rapid and chute and pool, and
white-churned trough where rocks scored the bed of the river, he darted
tirelessly, and up the clear torrent of the Great South Branch; and he
never halted till he found himself in the boiling basin of green and
foam at the foot of the Falls.
The basin was a very different place now from that which he had visited
as a grilse. Into its vexed deeps the flood fell with the heavy
trampling of thunder, which was echoed back and forth between the high
broken rocks enclosing the basin. But what was of most importance to
the great salmon was a fact which, if he realized it at all, he realized
but vaguely. The Falls themselves had changed since his last visit.
At the very first of spring there had been a landslide. The great,
partly overhanging rock, seamed and split by the wedges of countless
frosts, had all at once crumbled down beneath the tireless pressure of
the cataract. The lower fall, thus retreating, had become one with the
upper. The straight descent was now nearly five feet higher than
before,--a barrier which no voyager those waters ever knew could hope to
overcome.
The great salmon did not understand what had happened. He knew that he
had passed the barrier before, and had come to those bright, gravelled
reaches of which he was desirous. He knew that a summons which he could
not disobey was urging him on up-stream. He had no thought but to obey.
After a short rest in the deepest part of the pool,--he was alone there,
being the first of the returning migrants,--he suddenly aroused himself,
darted like a flash of silver through the green flood, and shot straight
up the face of the fall. Within three feet of the crest he came, hung
curved like a bow for a fraction of a second, glittering and splendid,
then fell back into the white smother. Again, and yet again, he essayed
the leap, gaining perhaps a foot on the second trial, but falling far
short on the third. Then, exhausted and beaten by the great impact of
the waters as he fell back defenceless, he retired to the quietest depth
of the pool to recover his strength. He felt bewildered by his failure,
and half stunned by the buffeting of the air-charged flood, which
affected him somewhat as a tornado might affect a man who was fighting
to make head against it. Moreover, there was a long crimson gash
slanting down his flank, where he had been driven against a jagged rock
as he fell.
Of all these things, however, he thought little, as he lay there in the
green deep which seethed from the turmoil passing above it. Through the
turmoil he saw the wide, clean-glittering, shallow-rippled gravel-bars
of the upper stream, golden under the sun and blue-white under the moon.
These he saw as he remembered them, and he saw the loud barrier to be
passed before he could reach them. As he brooded, his courage summoned
back his strength. Again he flashed up, with a power and swiftness that
seemed irresistible, and again he shot into the spray-thick air on the
face of the fall. Again he hung there for a half a heart-beat, spent, to
fall back baffled and confused. Again and again, however, he flashed
back to the trial, undaunted in spirit though at each effort his
strength grew less: again and again the rock teeth hidden in the foam
caught and tore him as he fell. At last, all but stunned and altogether
bewildered, he swam feebly into an eddy close to shore and half turned
upon his side, his gills opening and closing violently.
[Illustration: "AGAIN HE SHOT INTO THE SPRAY-THICK AIR ON THE FACE OF
THE FALL."]
Just about this time a visitor from the hills had come shambling down to
the river-edge,--one of the great black bears of the Quahdavic valley.
Sitting contemplatively on her haunches, her little, cunning eyes had
watched the vain leaps of the salmon. She knew a good deal about salmon
and her watching was not mere curiosity. As the efforts of the brave
fish grew feebler and feebler she drew down closer and closer to the
edge of the water, till it frothed about her feet. When, at last, the
salmon came blindly into the eddy and turned upon his side, the bear was
but a few feet distant. She crept forward like a cat, crouched,--and a
great black paw shot around with a clutching sweep. Gasping and
quivering, the salmon was thrown up upon the rocks. Then white teeth,
savage but merciful, bit through the back of his neck; and unstruggling
he was carried to a thicket above the Falls.
Answerers to the Call
The little lake, long and narrow, and set in a cleft of the deep forest,
led off like a pathway of light to the full October moon. The surface of
the lake was as still as glass, and the woods, rising from each shore in
dense waves, billowy where the hardwoods crowded thick, or serrated and
pinnacled where the fir and spruce and hemlock drew their ordered ranks,
were as motionless as if an enchantment had been laid upon them. The air
was magically clear, almost pungent with suggestion of frost, and tonic
with autumn scents.
In sharp contrast to the radiance of the open, the deep of the forest
was filled with an extraordinarily liquid and transparent darkness,
pierced with hard white lines and spots of light where the moon broke
through. Down along the shores of the lake, under the ragged fringe of
mixed growths where forest and open met, ran a tangle of grotesque,
exaggerated shadows, so solid of outline as to seem almost palpable.
All these shadows were as motionless as if frozen--except one, a long,
angular shadow, which projected itself spasmodically but noiselessly
through the bushes, occasionally darting out upon the naked beach, but
withdrawing again instantly, as if in dread of the exposure. The source
of this erratic shadow was a lean backwoodsman, who, rifle in hand,
was stealing on moccasined feet down the lake shore under cover of the
fringing branches.
Suddenly across the water came a sound as if some one were thrashing the
underbrush with a stick. The hunter stopped short, and listened intently
from his place of concealment. Very well he knew that sound. It was a
bull moose eager for fight, thrashing the bushes with his great antlers
as a challenge to any rival who might be within hearing.
The woodsman's grizzled lips parted in a smile of satisfaction, and
after a glance at his rifle to see that the cartridge was in place, he
crept onward down the lake, well under cover and as soundless as his own
shadow. He expected to come upon the challenger somewhere near the foot
of the lake. He might, of course, have adopted a surer and lazier
method of hunting by staying where he was and imitating the call of the
big moose's mate; but this seemed to him gross treachery, and little
short of murder. He would almost as willingly have condescended to snare
the noble beast whom he gloried in overcoming in fair chase.
The hunter had not gone far, however, when another strange sound
disturbed the enchanted silence. It was harsh, wild, yet appealing, and
seemed in some way the very voice of the untamed wilderness. It was the
call of the shy cow moose.
The woodsman crept down to the shore and peered cautiously through the
screening boughs, to see whether the call was an authentic one or the
cheat of some other hunter less scrupulous than himself.
About a quarter of a mile down the shore a bare sand spit jutted out
into the sheen of the lake; and near its point, an ungainly black
silhouette against the bright water, stood the cow, calling, listening,
and calling again.
The hunter stood for a few moments, watching her with that deliberation
which marks the man of the woods. As he watched, suddenly the cow
wheeled half-round, as if startled, then dashed into the water, swam in
haste to the next point, and vanished among the trees.
The woodsman, much surprised, waited motionless where he was for a
couple of minutes, to see if the cause of her alarm would reveal itself.
Then, as no sign of life appeared on the brilliantly lighted sand spit,
he pressed on stealthily down the shore to investigate for himself.
In a few minutes--forest and lake meanwhile as still as if no living
thing breathed within the borders--the hunter found himself at the head
of the sand spit. Keeping within the deep shadow, he examined the ground
carefully, but could detect no trail, except that of the cow which had
been calling. Puzzled, and nettled to find his woodcraft at fault, he
continued his furtive progress toward the foot of the lake.
He had gone not more than two or three hundred yards when, just as he
was about to step out upon a little lighted glade, that subtle and
unnamed sixth sense which the men of the woods sometimes develop warned
him that something alive and hostile was hidden in the thicket just
ahead. He stiffened in his tracks and waited, eyes and nostrils intently
alert.
He was so close to the edge of the thicket that his own concealment was
very imperfect. In the thicket, just across the lighted space, nothing
stirred; but he was sure that something was there. For fully five
minutes he waited. Then, just to see what would happen, he gave, very
softly and alluringly, the call of the cow moose.
What happened was something no previous experience had taught him to
expect. No moose responded to the supposed voice of its mate; but a huge
black bear fairly bounced into the open, and came at him in terrific
leaps, evidently purposing to catch the cow before she could get started
running. Annoyed, because he was not hunting bear and did not want to
scare the game he was seeking, the woodsman stepped out into the full
light as he raised his rifle.
But he did not have to shoot. If he was not hunting bear, neither was
the bear hunting man. At this unlooked-for apparition of a man with a
voice like a cow moose, the bear almost stopped in mid-jump, as if
struck by an explosive bullet. Fairly falling over in his desperate
haste to stop himself, he clawed the turf wildly, wheeled about, and
scuttled off into the woods like a frightened woodchuck. The hunter
smiled grimly, and went on. He knew now what had startled the cow
moose.
[Illustration: "SCUTTLED OFF INTO THE WOODS LIKE A FRIGHTENED
WOODCHUCK."]
For nearly half an hour the great white moon seemed to possess the world
alone. At the foot of the lake the hunter had to appear in the shining
open for a second or two, while crossing the shallow but wide brook
which formed the outlet. But he drifted across from stone to stone like
a shadow, marked, as he knew well enough, by vigilant eyes, but not, he
trusted, by the moose.
On this point he was presently quite assured, for he had little more
than reached cover again when he saw the cow reappear on the open beach
a short distance up the lake. She walked out till her fore hoofs were at
the very edge of the water, then called again and again. She knew that
somewhere in these illimitable shades, bold but crafty, her mate was
watching and listening.
In answer to her call he was likely to come rushing up noisily, defying
all peril, and flinging his challenge abroad for all whom it might
interest. But to-night there was a vague suspicion in the air. It was
probable that he would come silently, and give no hint of his coming
until he stood beside her on the beach.
The point of beach whereon the cow was standing was carefully chosen
with reference to the scare which she had received a half-hour earlier.
It was where a little stream flowed in through a space of wild meadow,
so that there was ample open all about her, and no enemy could get
nearer than forty or fifty yards without revealing himself.
From the foot of the lake the woodsman approached with a stealth that
none of the wild kindred themselves could surpass. Skirting the back of
the meadow, he drew near from the upper side, expecting that any
response the call might bring would come from that direction. Then he
hid himself in a dense thicket of willows near the water.
Meanwhile there were others besides the woodsman for whom the calling of
the lonely cow had interest. The great black bear, having recovered from
his panic and put what he thought a safe distance between himself and
the dangerous stranger, had slipped his huge bulk through the underbrush
without a sound, and glared out savagely over the meadow to the solitary
figure on the beach.
He knew that he was no match in speed for a frightened cow moose, and he
saw that the distance across the open was too great for him to carry the
matter by a rush. That cow was not for him, apparently. His mouth
watered, but he held himself firmly under cover, waiting in the hope
that some whimsical fortune of the woods might throw opportunity in his
way.
Suddenly his ears caught a tiny but suggestive sound. Somewhere far up
the course of the little brook a twig snapped sharply. He turned his
attention away from the cow, and listened. That chance sound, so
conspicuous on the expectant silence, might signify the coming of the
antlered bull.
The bear would much rather have spared himself exertion by hunting the
cow; but a bull, although apt to prove a dangerous adversary to an
inexperienced bear, was well enough for one who knew how to manage such
matters. He slipped over to the edge of the brook, and crouched behind a
huge stump which was veiled by a growth of vines.
Immediately before him was the narrow, grassy clearway occupied by the
brook at high water, and now threaded by a winding, loitering rivulet.
So narrow was the space that in one lunge of his long body and mighty
forearm he could reach almost all the way across it. This white-lit path
was fretted with black traceries of branch and leaf, but the shadow
behind the rock was so thick that even the furry bulk of the bear was
completely engulfed in it.
The lonely figure out by the lake-side kept repeating its harsh calls
from time to time, but neither the bear behind his brook-side rock nor
the woodsman in his willow thicket up the shore any longer heeded her.
Both were waiting for a third to answer her summons.
The third, indeed, was coming to answer; but with unwonted
circumspection. He was a small but sturdy young bull, his antlers not
yet perfect. It was he whom the hunter had heard thrashing the bushes in
challenge; and when his mate first sent her call across the lake, he had
stood silent behind the sheltering trees and watched her. But just as he
was about to start on the long détour round the foot of the lake to join
her, he had seen her sudden alarm and been puzzled by it.
Like the woodsman, he had rested for some time, motionless and watchful,
looking for what else might happen. The absence of happening had left
him vaguely apprehensive. When, therefore, he saw her reappear long
afterward on his own side of the lake and begin her calls again, he was
cautious about replying. Instead of hurrying straight down the shore
to meet her, he sank softly back, deeper and deeper, into the woods,
till her voice could scarcely reach his ears.
[Illustration: "THE MOOSE CAME IN SIGHT UP THE BROOK CHANNEL."]
Then he made a wide swing round, and came stealthily down the channel of
the little brook. In spite of his bulk, his spread of antlers, his broad
and loose-hung hoofs, no mink or weasel could have come more silently
than he.
As the moose came in sight up the brook channel, a moving shadow, the
muscles of the watching bear behind the rock grew tense, and a luminous
green film seemed to come over his small eyes. One powerful hind leg
lifted itself till its claws took firm grip on a projection near the top
of the rock. He was like a catapult, bent and ready.
When the moose came just opposite, the giant spring was loosed. The
ponderous shape of the bear launched out over the top of the rock and
seemed to shoot through the air.
Magnificent as the leap was, however, it just fell short of its mark;
for the moose, taking instinctive alarm before any cause was actually
perceptible, had swerved a yard aside from the place of ambush. Instead
of falling directly upon him, therefore, and bearing him to the ground
with a broken back, the bear landed at his side, just close enough to
strike him a savage blow on the neck.
Powerful as the neck of a bull moose is, had that blow struck true it
would have ended the fight. But it fell rakingly, rending hide and
muscle but breaking no bones. Brave as he was cautious, the moose
wheeled to strike back.
Jumping aside with the agility of a red buck, he gained room to lower
his antlers, and lunged forward upon the foe with all the force of his
seven hundred pounds behind these formidable weapons. The bear, skilful
as a boxer at parrying, with his big fore paw turned aside the direct
thrust; but owing to the spread of the antlers, one long, keen spike
caught him right under the shoulder and drove home.
Then began a terrific uproar of crashing and growling and coughing and
grunting, while the underbrush was beaten flat beneath the ponderous
combatants. The bear clung to the antlers, wrenching and twisting, now
trying to pull his antagonist to the ground, now striving to reach past
his pronged defences and rend his throat.
For a time the moose succeeded in keeping his feet, struggling to force
his assailant backward and pierce his flank. Then he was lucky enough
to tear himself free. Instantly he reared like a mad horse, and brought
down his sharp hoofs on the enemy's shoulder.
It was a terrific blow, battering like a sledge-hammer and cutting like
an axe, and the bear roared under it. But it was not a finishing blow,
and it let the foe reach close quarters. The bear got the bull's neck
into the grip of his mighty forearms, and pulled him down. The moose
struggled valiantly, thrashing backward with jagged antlers, and tearing
up the ground in desperate efforts to regain his feet. But victory was
now, beyond peradventure, within the clutch of the bear.
At the first sound of the battle the cow had come trotting inland to see
what was going on, under the impression that her mate had fallen foul of
a rival. At the inner extremity of the meadow, however, she caught sight
of the woodsman running in the same direction, whereupon her discretion
overcame all other emotions, and she made haste to escape from a
neighbourhood so full of the unexpected.
The woodsman never gave her a glance, but ran on at a swift lope, a
spark of excitement in his quiet gray eyes. When he reached the scene
of combat the bear had just got his brave antagonist down.
The hunter paused for a few seconds, to take in the situation
thoroughly. Then he raised his rifle. His sympathies were altogether
with the moose. He waited till he got the chance he wanted, then he sent
a heavy 45-70 expanding bullet through the bear's heart.
The great black form collapsed in a limp heap upon his adversary; and
the latter, struggling to his feet, threw the burden disdainfully aside.
At first he paid no attention to the woodsman, who, taking it for
granted that his injuries were hopeless, stood waiting compassionately
to end his sufferings. But this young bull was made of astonishingly
tough stuff. In his rage he had apparently not heard the sound of the
rifle. As soon as he had fairly regained his feet, he reared to his full
height, came down upon the bear's unresisting form, and trampled madly
for several seconds.
The woodsman stood watching with a grin of sympathetic approval, and
muttered, "Chuck full of ginger yet!"
At last the panting beast turned his head, and saw the man. The sight
sobered him. For a moment he stood staring and shaking his head, drunk
with his imagined triumph. Then discretion whispered in his ear. He
turned away sullenly, with one last, regretful look at his foe's
battered body, and trotted off into the mystic confusion of shine and
shadow.
The Prisoners of the Pitcher-plant
At the edge of a rough piece of open, where the scrubby bushes which
clothed the plain gave space a little to the weeds and harsh grasses,
stood the clustering pitchers of a fine young sarracenia. These
pitchers, which were its leaves, were of a light, cool green, vividly
veined with crimson and shading into a bronzy red about the lip and
throat. They were of all sizes, being at all stages of growth; and the
largest, which had now, on the edge of summer, but barely attained
maturity, were about six inches in length and an inch and a quarter in
extreme diameter. Down in the very heart of the cluster, hardly to be
discerned, was a tiny red-tipped bud, destined to shoot up, later in the
season, into a sturdy flower-stalk.
[Illustration: "AT THIS MOMENT A PASSING SHRIKE SWOOPED DOWN."]
Against the fresh, warm green of the sunlit world surrounding it, the
sarracenia's peculiar colouring stood out conspicuously, its streaks
and splashes of red having the effect of blossoms. This effect, at a
season when bright-hued blooms were scarce, made the plant very
attractive to any insects that chanced within view of it. There was
nearly always some flutterer or hummer poising above it, or touching it
eagerly to dart away again in disappointment. But every once in awhile
some little wasp, or fly, or shining-winged beetle, or gauzy ichneumon,
would alight on the alluring lip, pause, and peer down into the pitcher.
As a rule the small investigator would venture farther and farther, till
it disappeared. Then it never came out again.
On a leaf of a huckleberry bush, overhanging the pitcher-plant, a little
black ant was running about with the nimble curiosity of her kind. An
orange and black butterfly, fluttering lazily in the sun, came close
beside the leaf. At this moment a passing shrike swooped down and caught
the butterfly in his beak. One of his long wings, chancing to strike the
leaf, sent it whirling from its stem; and the ant fell directly upon one
of the pitchers below.
It was far down upon the red, shining lip of the pitcher that she fell;
and there she clung resolutely, her feet sinking into a sort of fur of
smooth, whitish hairs. When she had quite recovered her equanimity she
started to explore her new surroundings; and, because that was the
easiest way to go, she went in the direction toward which the hairs all
pointed. In a moment, therefore, she found herself just on the edge of
the precipitous slope from the lip to the throat of the pitcher. Here,
finding the slope strangely slippery, she thought it best to stop and
retrace her steps. But when she attempted this she found it impossible.
The little, innocent-looking hairs all pressed against her, thrusting
her downward. The more she struggled, the more energetically and
elastically they pushed back at her; till all at once she was forced
over the round, smooth edge, and fell.
To her terrified amazement, it was water she fell into. The pitcher was
about half full of the chilly fluid. In her kickings and twistings she
brought herself to the walls of her green prison, and tried to clamber
out,--but here, again, were those cruel hairs on guard to foil her. She
tried to evade them, to break them down, to bite them off with her
strong, sharp mandibles. At last, by a supreme effort, she managed to
drag herself almost clear,--but only to be at once hurled back, and far
out into the water, by the sharp recoil of her tormentors.
Though pretty well exhausted by now, she would not give up the struggle;
and presently her convulsive efforts brought her alongside of a refuge.
It was only the floating body of a dead moth, but to the ant it was a
safe and ample raft. Eagerly she crept out upon it, and lay very still
for awhile, recovering her strength. More fortunate than most
shipwrecked voyagers, she had an edible raft and was therefore in no
imminent peril of starvation.
The light that came through the veined, translucent walls of this watery
prison was of an exquisite cool beryl, very different from the warm
daylight overhead. The ant had never been in any such surroundings
before, and was bewildered by the strangeness of them. After a brief
rest she investigated minutely every corner of her queer retreat, and
then, finding that there was nothing she could do to better the
situation, she resumed her attitude of repose, with only the slight
waving of her antennæ to show that she was awake.
For a long time nothing happened. No winds were astir that day, and no
sounds came down into the pitcher save the shrill, happy chirping of
birds in the surrounding bushes. But suddenly the pitcher began to tip
and rock slightly, and the water to wash within its coloured walls.
Something had alighted on the pitcher's lip.
It was something comparatively heavy, that was evident. A moment or two
later it came sliding down those treacherous hairs, and fell into the
water with a great splash which nearly swept the ant from her refuge.
The new arrival was a bee. And now began a tremendous turmoil within the
narrow prison. The bee struggled, whirled around on the surface with
thrashing wings, and sent the water swashing in every direction, till
the ant was nearly drowned. She hung to her raft, however, and waited
philosophically for the hubbub to subside. At length the bee too, after
half a dozen vain and exhausting struggles to climb out against the
opposing array of hairs, encountered the body of the dead moth.
Instantly she tried to raise herself upon it, so as to escape the chill
of the water and dry her wings for flight. But she was too heavy. The
moth sank, and rolled over, at the same time being thrust against the
wall of the pitcher. The ant, in high indignation clutched a bundle of
the hostile hairs in her mandibles, and held herself at anchor against
the wall.
Thoroughly used up, and stupid with panic and chill, the bee kept on
futilely grappling with the moth's body, which, in its turn, kept on
sinking and rolling beneath her. A very few minutes of such disastrous
folly sufficed to end the struggle, and soon the bee was floating,
drowned and motionless, beside the moth. Then the ant, with
satisfaction, returned to her refuge.
When things get started happening, they are quite apt to keep it up for
awhile, as if events invited events. A large hunting spider, creeping
among the grass and weeds, discovered the handsome cluster of the
sarracenia. She was one of the few creatures who had learned the secret
of the pitcher-plant and knew how to turn it to account. More than once
had she found easy prey in some trapped insect struggling near the top
of a well-filled pitcher.
Selecting the largest pitcher as the one most likely to yield results,
the spider climbed its stem. Then she mounted the bright swell of the
pitcher itself, whose smooth outer surface offered no obstacle to such
visitors. The pitcher swayed and bowed. The water within washed heavily.
And the ant, with new alarm, marked the big, black shadow of the spider
creeping up the outside of her prison.
Having reached the lip of the leaf and cautiously crawled over upon it,
the spider took no risks with those traitor hairs. She threw two or
three stout cables of web across the lip; and then, with this secure
anchorage by which to pull herself back, she ventured fearlessly down
the steep of that perilous throat. One hooked claw, outstretched behind
her, held aloft the cable which exuded from her spinnerets as she moved.
On the extreme of the slope she stopped, and her red, jewelled cluster
of eyes glared fiercely down upon the little black ant. The latter
shrank and crouched, and tried to hide herself under the side of the
dead moth to escape the light of those baleful eyes. This new peril was
one which appalled her far more than all the others she had encountered.
At this most critical of all crises in the destiny of the little black
ant, the fickle Fortune of the Wild was seized with another whim. An
overwhelming cataclysm descended suddenly upon the tiny world of the
pitcher-plant. The soft, furry feet of some bounding monster--rabbit,
fox, or wildcat--came down amongst the clustered pitchers, crushing
several to bits and scattering wide the contents of all the rest. Among
these latter was that which contained the little black ant. Drenched,
astonished, but unhurt, she found herself lying in a tuft of splashed
grass, once more free. Above her, on a grass-top, clung the bewildered
spider. As it hung there, conspicuous to all the foraging world, a great
black-and-yellow wasp pounced upon it, stung it into helplessness, and
carried it off on heavily humming wing.
The Prowlers
Heeling under a stiff breeze, the sloop rose joyously to the long
Caribbean rollers. Soon after midnight Mahoney awoke. He went to the
tiller at once, and let the stalwart Jamaican nigger, who constituted
his crew, take a turn of sleep. The wind was steady, the sea was clear,
there was no island, reef, or shoal between himself and Cuba, and
Mahoney had little to do but hold the tiller and dream. Presently clouds
gathered, obscuring the moon, and thickened till the light which
filtered through them was rather a deceit than an illumination. Far-off
waves seemed close at hand, and waves so near they were about to break
over the bow appeared remote. Strange shapes made and unmade themselves
among the shifting surfaces, dark, solid forms which melted into
flowing, hissing water. Mahoney's eyes amused themselves with these
fantastic wave-shadows and phantoms of the fluent deep. Then, suddenly,
one of the dark, submerged shapes broke the rules of the game. It
refused to melt and flow. With a gasp Mahoney jammed his helm hard
round, and let go his sheet on the run. There was a shuddering shock.
The boat reared, like a frightened horse struggling to climb a bank.
Then, with a kind of sickening deliberation, she turned clean over.
There was a choking yell from the rudely awakened darky; and Mahoney
found himself plunged into the smother of the broken waves.
When he came to the surface and shook the water out of his eyes, Mahoney
clutched the stern and pulled himself up to see what had happened. He
had run upon a huge fragment of a broken-up wreck. From the heavy,
steady motion, he concluded that the boat was caught on a sunken portion
of the wreck. Some fifteen feet away a space of deck, with a few feet of
bulwarks, rose just clear of the waves. This seemed to offer a less
precarious refuge than the keel to which he was clinging. He slipped
back into the waves, struck out hurriedly, and dragged himself up to the
highest point of the wet deck. Here, holding to the broken bulwarks, he
peered about for his assistant. Taking for granted that the negro, whom
he knew to be a magnificent swimmer, was clinging to the other side of
the boat, he shouted to him, with angry solicitude, but got no answer.
It was incomprehensible. Starting to his feet he was about to plunge
again into the smother and swim around the boat. Then he checked
himself. Such a step was obviously futile. If the negro had been there,
he would have lost no time in clambering out upon the bottom of the
boat. There was a mystery in that sudden and complete disappearance.
With a shiver Mahoney crouched down again and clutched the lurching
bulwarks.
He had plenty of time now to think. He cursed himself bitterly for the
rash impatience which had driven him to attempt the journey from
Kingston to Santiago in a little sloop, instead of waiting for the
regular steamer, just because he feared the rebellion might fizzle out
before he could get there to make a story of it. His folly had cost the
nigger's life, at least; and the account was not yet closed! Well, the
nigger was gone, poor beggar. His black hide had enclosed a man, all
right; but there was no use worrying over him. The question was, how
soon would a ship come along? This was a frequented sea, more or less.
But the wreck was almost level with the water, and lamentably
inconspicuous. Mahoney knew that unless he were picked up right soon the
tropic sun would drive him mad with thirst. He knew, too, that if any
sort of a wind should blow up, he would promptly have forced upon him
that knowledge of the other world which he was not yet ready to acquire.
It was clear that he must find some means of flying a signal. He decided
that when daylight came he would dive under the upturned boat, cut away
either the gaff or the boom, lash it to the bulwarks, and hoist his
shirt upon it as a flag of distress.
Just before dawn the breeze died away. By the time the east had begun to
flame, and thin washes of red-orange to mottle the sky fantastically,
the long swells were as smooth as glass. Mahoney was impatient to get up
his flagstaff, but he wanted plenty of light. He waited until the sky
was blue, the sun clear of the horizon. Then he stood up, set the hilt
of his knife between his teeth, and prepared to plunge in. Before doing
so, however, he instinctively scanned the water all about him. Then he
removed the knife from his mouth and stared.
"That accounts for it!" he muttered, his teeth baring themselves with a
snarl of loathing as he thrust the knife back into his belt and sat down
again. Just behind him, and not a dozen feet away, a gigantic,
triangular black fin was slowly cleaving the swells.
There being nothing else to do, Mahoney occupied himself in watching
that great dorsal, as it prowled slowly this way and that. Such a fin,
he calculated, must mean a bigger shark than any that had hitherto come
within his range of observation. He had a righteous hatred of all
sharks, but this one in particular sickened him with vindictive
loathing. He knew how lately, and how horridly, it had fed; yet here it
was as ravenous as ever. Presently it sank out of sight, and was gone
for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. Then, on a sudden, there was the
devilish black fin again, vigilant and deliberate.
[Illustration: "LAY MOTIONLESS BUT FOR THE EASY WAVING OF ITS FINS."]
As the sun rose, and the light fell more steeply, the dazzling
reflections disappeared and Mahoney could look down into the transparent
blue-green depths. He saw that the wreck on which he had taken refuge
was an old one, long adrift in the teeming tropic seas. Its under edges
carried a dense, waving fringe of barnacles and coloured weed,
swarming with sea-creatures. In its shadow life crowded riotously, and
death held easy revel. Among the looser fringes of the barnacle growth
swam fish of the smaller species, many of them flashing with the
radiance of sapphire and topaz, or shooting like pink flames. Hither and
thither darted a small school of blue and gold bonito, insatiable and
swift, snatching down their prey from among the tips of the barnacles.
About six feet below the barnacles a cavernous-jawed barracouta, perhaps
five feet long, lay motionless but for the easy waving of its fins. It
must have been gorged, for Mahoney, in all his seafaring, had never
before seen one of these ravenous and ferocious fish thus at rest. It
must even have, for once, lapsed into something like sleep,--a perilous
lapse in the strenuous life of the sea, for anything less formidable
than a sperm whale or an orca, and not without its dangers even for
them. Its wide-set, staring eyes seemed to command a view in every
direction. Yet they did not see a huge, spectral form rise smoothly from
below, turning belly upward with a sudden green-white gleam. Then, the
barracouta's powerful tail twisted with a violence that sent the water
swirling as from a screw. But it was too late. The shark's triangular
jaws snapped upon their prey, biting the big fish in halves. The two
pieces were bolted instantly, as a hungry man bolts a "bluepoint." And
the shark--the biggest "man-eater" that Mahoney had ever seen--sank
slowly out of sight, to reappear at the surface again in five minutes as
ravenous as ever.
By this time it was beginning to get hot, there on the shelterless
wreck. A small steamer passed in the distance. Mahoney tore off his
shirt and waved it wildly, on the chance that some one on the steamer
might at that moment have a telescope pointed in his direction. The
steamer went its way. Mahoney put on his shirt again, and wished he had
not lost his hat. He had a handkerchief, however, and this he wound upon
the top of his head like a turban. By wetting it frequently he kept his
head and neck cool. As the morning wore on, no fewer than five sails
appeared on the horizon, but none came near enough even to excite a
thrill of hope. Since there was nothing better to do, Mahoney was wise
enough to keep as still as possible, watching the strange life that went
on beneath his refuge, and splashing water over himself from time to
time that his skin might absorb some of the liquid, and so the dreaded
torment of thirst be a little postponed.
The blazing sun dragged slowly past the zenith, indifferent to Mahoney's
maledictions. Along in the afternoon a three-masted schooner hove in
sight. There was not enough wind, now, to ruffle the tops of the swells;
but there was some breeze up aloft, apparently, and the schooner, with
all her canvas spread, was catching it, for she moved along at a brisk
pace. Her course brought her so near that Mahoney tore off his shirt in
trembling anxiety and waved it at arm's length, jumping as high as he
could in the struggle to make himself conspicuous. Finding this
fruitless, he then tied the shirt to the sleeves of his white duck coat,
making a long streamer, which he thought the lookout could not fail to
see. Notwithstanding all this frantic effort the schooner sailed on
unheeding. From its decks the waving white streamer, if seen at all,
would have looked like nothing more than an agitated streak of foam. But
to Mahoney it seemed that he was being wantonly and brutally ignored.
With a pang he realized that his excitement and his effort had
accomplished but one thing. They had brought on the thirst! His throat
was parching. He had an impulse to break out into a volley of
hysterical curses against the retreating ship. But his self-respect
withheld him. Leaning over the bulwarks, he murmured to the great green
prowling shape of his submarine jailer:
"You're no worse than lots of men, you ain't, damn you!"
As if in answer to this equivocal compliment the shark sailed in to
within a little more than arm's length of the bulwark, and looked up at
Mahoney with cold, malignant eyes. Mahoney kicked at him hysterically,
then turned away and drenched himself where the little waves ran up
shallow over the slope of the deck. The cool of the water on his skin,
particularly on his throat and wrists, did actually, though slightly,
ease his thirst.
[Illustration: "ONLY THAT SHARP BLACK FIN, THAT PROWLED AND PROWLED,
KEPT ALWAYS IN SIGHT"]
The night fell windless and clear; and for a time, so black were the
shifting reflections on the swells, so confusing the phosphorescent
gleams that shot up through the waters, that Mahoney could no longer see
the stealthy prowling of the great black fin. Lashing himself to the
bulwark by the sleeves of his shirt, he snatched an hour or two of
troubled sleep. Once he woke with a shock of disappointment from a dream
that the bottom had fallen out of a jug of water which he was just
raising to his lips. Again he started up shouting, and struggling
fiercely with the bonds that held him safely to the bulwark. He had
dreamed that a glittering white steam-yacht was speeding close past his
refuge,--so close that he had to look up at her rail,--yet the people on
her deck most unaccountably failing to see him. From this waking he fell
back weak and hopeless, and it was some minutes before he could get his
nerves under their wonted cool control. He had no longer any desire for
sleep, so he devoted himself again to soaking his wrists in the water
and letting the lambent phosphorescence stream through his fingers.
At last the moon rose over the waste of sea. Across the shimmering
silver pathway of its light sailed a far-off ship, small and black.
Mahoney gazed at it with longing. An hour or two later another ship
crossed the radiant pathway. But none came near the wreck. Only that
sharp black fin, that prowled and prowled, kept always in sight, always
near, till Mahoney began to wonder if it were really possible that the
tireless monster would get him in the end. He registered a vow that if
he should find himself growing delirious with thirst he would lash
himself so securely to the bulwark that, come what might, the shark
should never get his body. Comforted by this resolve, and the torment of
his thirst mitigated a trifle by a drenching in the brine, Mahoney fell
asleep again, and did not wake till the sun was streaming savagely on
his face.
Untying himself from the bulwark, Mahoney stared about him wildly. A
tall-masted brig, with royal and topgallant sails drawing full, was
retreating in the distance. Apparently, it had passed not far from the
wreck. Mahoney cursed himself wildly for having allowed himself to fall
asleep. This had been perhaps, his one chance. No other sail was in
sight. There was nothing but a wisp of smoke on the horizon, betraying
the passage of an unseen steamer. Mahoney found that he was babbling to
himself about it, and the realization shocked him. He shook himself,
pulled his courage and his nerve together sharply, then took off his
clothes and splashed himself with water from head to foot. It was
certain that his thirsty skin must absorb a good share of the liquid so
generously applied to it; and thus assuring himself, his thirst became,
or seemed to become less intolerable. When he had dressed
again,--leaving off his shirt, which he kept tied to the bulwark ready
for instant use,--he leaned over and peered down into the smooth water
to look for the shark.
Grim and spectral, the great shape was just in sight, rising with
strange indolence toward the surface. Evidently, some good-sized victim
had just been devoured. The shark came to rest within a few inches of
the surface, where the sun could warm its rough back through the thin
barrier of the water. There it lay, apparently basking, with the content
of one that has well dined. The complacent malignity of its eyes, which
seemed to meet the man's eyes with a peculiarly confident menace, filled
Mahoney with rage. He tore savagely at the bulwarks, in a foolish
attempt to provide himself with a missile.
In the midst of this futile effort, Mahoney chanced to drop his glance
into the depths. There he caught sight of something that arrested him,
making him forget for the moment even the tortures of his thirst. In the
deepest green, at the very confines of his vision, a gigantic shape came
faintly into view. It stirred, and grew more distinct. Motionless he
peered down upon it, striving to make out what it was. His sea lore,
more abundant than exact, did not inform him as to whether or not the
shark had any enemies to fear; but his imagination, always finding free
play in the mysteries of the deep sea, was hospitably ready for any
marvel. With fantastic expectancy he watched the sinister form of the
strange creature, as it slowly, and stealthily floated upward.
Presently he recognized it, having caught glimpse of its like once
before in a deep lagoon of the Ladrones. It was not altogether
dissimilar to the great shark basking above it, but slenderer in build,
and with a pair of curious lateral fins outspread like broad, blunt
wings. The most conspicuous difference was in its head, which was broad
and blunt like the fins, and armed with a kind of two-edged saw, perhaps
eight inches in width, projecting from its snout to a length of about
four feet. The tip of the saw looked as if it had been chopped off
square. Down both edges ran a series of keen, raking teeth. It was the
mysterious and dreadful sawfish, perpetrator of fabulous horrors.
[Illustration: "DIRECTLY BENEATH THE SHARK THE STRANGER CAME."]
Mahoney was afraid to move a muscle, lest he should arouse the shark and
put it on its guard. The eyes of the stranger stared up with a dead
coldness at the bulk of the sleeping monster on the surface. More
rapidly now, but still almost without movement of fin or tail, the
ominous form rose through the transparent flood, till Mahoney could
fairly count the teeth on its awkward-looking but hideous weapon.
Directly beneath the shark the stranger came, till at last there was no
more than the space of a few feet between the two giant shapes. And
still the shark slumbered. Mahoney held his breath. Then the sawfish
rolled over on its side, turning one edge of the saw toward the surface.
For an instant it hung so, poised and still. Then the fins and flukes
heaved together, the long bulk shot forward and upward, and the living
saw cut straight across the belly of the shark, deeply and cleanly,
under the urge of that tremendous thrust.
Mahoney cried out, shuddering at the horrible and unexpected sight. The
shark was completely disembowelled. With a gigantic convulsion it sprang
almost clear of the water, which was instantly dyed with blood. Mahoney
now looked for a battle of Titans to follow. But in truth the battle was
already over. The victim made no attempt at retaliation. It did not even
seem to see its foe, or to know what had stricken it. For a few seconds
it lashed the surface convulsively. Then it dived, plunging straight
downward to die unseen in some rayless cavern of the deeps.
With a leisurely zest which turned Mahoney sick, the monster guzzled its
meal, then swam up and nosed inquiringly along the fringe of barnacles.
Nothing there seeming to interest him, he turned with a disdainful sweep
of his huge flukes and bored his way slowly downwards toward the unknown
deep whence he had so mysteriously come. Unstirring, held fast as if in
a hideous dream, Mahoney watched the dull gray-black form grow green,
and spectral, and faint till at last it vanished. For a brief space he
continued to stare after it, picturing it in his fevered imagination
when it had sunk far beyond any reach of sight. At last, as if tearing
himself free from a horrid spell, he drew a long breath and lifted his
eyes to the horizon.
There, in full view, but too far away to notice such a speck among the
waves as Mahoney on his bit of wreck, was a small freight-boat, steaming
past at a leisurely pace. Mahoney was himself in an instant. He realized
that the sawfish had freed him from his dreadful jailer. With his knife
between his teeth he dived beneath the upturned sloop and fell to
cutting ropes and lashings with a cool but savage haste. In half a
minute he reappeared, gasping, but not discouraged. After two or three
deep breaths he dived again, and this time when he came up, he brought
the long slender pole of the gaff with him. With frantic eagerness he
hoisted the white pennon of his shirt and coat, thanking Heaven that the
gaff was so long. He was about to lash the pole to the bulwarks with his
belt, when he remembered that there was not wind enough to run out the
signal. Lifting it in both hands as high as he could, he waved the flag
wildly over his head in great arcs and sudden violent dips. Would the
lookout on the steamer see? Or seeing, would he understand? Mahoney felt
his strength suddenly failing, as a wave of despair sucked up at his
heart. It was all he could do to keep the signal moving. Then, at last,
he saw that the long line of the steamer's broadside was shortening.
Yes,--she was coming, she was coming. Tremblingly, with fingers that
fumbled, he lashed the staff to the bulwark, and sank panting upon the
deck.
A Stranger to the Wild
As the vessel, a big three-masted schooner, struck again and lurched
forward, grinding heavily, she cleared the reef by somewhat more than
half her length. Then her back broke. The massive swells, pounding upon
her from the rear, overwhelmed her stern and crushed it down inescapably
upon the rock; and her forward half, hanging in ten fathoms, began to
settle sickeningly into the loud hiss and chaos. Around the reef, around
the doomed schooner, the lead-coloured fog hung thick, impenetrable at
half a ship's length. Her crew, cool, swift, ready,--they were Gaspé and
New Brunswick fishermen, for the most part,--kept grim silence, and took
the sharp orders that came to them like gunshots through the din. The
boats were cleared away forward, where the settling of the bow gave some
poor shelter.
At this moment the fog lifted, vanishing swiftly like a breath from the
face of a mirror. Straight ahead, not two miles away, loomed a high,
black, menacing shore--black, scarred rock, with black woods along its
crest and a sharp, white line of surf shuddering along its base. Between
that shore and the shattered schooner lay many other reefs, whereon the
swells boiled white and broke in dull thunder; but off to the southward
was clear water, and safety for the boats. At a glance the captain
recognized the land as a cape on the south coast of the Gaspé peninsula,
so far from her course had the doomed schooner been driven. Five minutes
more, and the loaded boats, hurled up from the seething caldron behind
the reef, swung out triumphantly on a long, oil-dark swell, and gained
the comparative safety of the open. Hardly had they done so when the
broken bow of the schooner, with a final rending of timbers, settled in
what seemed like a sudden hurry, pitched nose downward into the smother,
and sank with a huge, startling sigh. The rear half of the hull was left
lodged upon the reef, a kind of gaping cavern, with the surf plunging
over it in cataracts, and a mad mob of boxes, bales, and wine-casks
tumbling out from its black depths.
Presently the torrent ceased. Then, in the yawning gloom, appeared the
head and fore-quarters of a white horse, mane streaming, eyes starting
with frantic terror at the terrific scene that met them. The vision sank
back instantly into the darkness. A moment later a vast surge, mightier
than any which had gone before, engulfed the reef. Its gigantic front
lifted the remnant of the wreck half-way across the barrier, tipping it
forward, and letting it down with a final shattering crash; and the
white horse, hurled violently forth, sank deep into the tumult behind
the reef.
The schooner which had fallen on such sudden doom among the St. Lawrence
reefs had sailed from Oporto with a cargo, chiefly wine, for Quebec.
Driven far south of her course by a terrific northeaster roaring down
from Labrador, she had run into a fog as the wind fell, and been swept
to her fate in the grip of an unknown tide-drift. On board, as it
chanced, travelling as an honoured passenger, was a finely bred, white
Spanish stallion of Barb descent, who had been shipped to Canada by one
of the heads of the great house of Robin, those fishing-princes of
Gaspé. When the vessel struck, and it was seen that her fate was
imminent and inevitable, the captain had loosed the beautiful stallion
from his stall, that at the last he might at least have a chance to
fight his own fight for life. And so it came about that, partly through
his own agile alertness, partly by the singular favour of fortune, he
had avoided getting his slim legs broken in the hideous upheaval and
confusion of the wreck.
[Illustration: "HE STRUCK OUT DESPERATELY, AND SOON CLEARED THE TURMOIL
OF THE BREAKERS."]
When the white stallion came to the surface, snorting with terror and
blowing the salt from his wide nostrils, he struck out desperately, and
soon cleared the turmoil of the breakers. Over the vast, smooth swells
he swam easily, his graceful, high head out of water. But at first, in
his bewilderment and panic, he swam straight seaward. In a few moments,
however, as he saw that he seemed to be overcoming disaster very well,
his wits returned, and the nerve of his breeding came to his aid.
Keeping on the crest of a roller, he surveyed the situation keenly,
observed the land, and noted the maze of reefs that tore the leaden
surges into tumult. Instead of heading directly shoreward,
therefore,--for every boiling whiteness smote him with horror,--he
shaped his course in on a long slant, where the way seemed clear.
Once well south of the loud herd of reefs, he swam straight inshore,
until the raving and white convulsion of the surf along the base of the
cliff again struck terror into his heart; and again he bore away
southward, at a distance of about three hundred yards outside the
breakers. Strong, tough-sinewed, and endowed with the unfailing wind of
his far-off desert ancestors, he was not aware of any fatigue from his
long swim. Presently, rounding a point of rock which thrust a low spur
out into the surges, he came into a sheltered cove where there was no
surf. The long waves rolled on past the point, while in the cove there
was only a measured, moderate rise and fall of the gray water, like a
quiet breathing, and only a gentle back-wash fringed the black-stoned,
weedy beach with foam. At the head of the cove a shallow stream, running
down through a narrow valley, emptied itself between two little red
sand-spits.
Close beside the stream the white stallion came ashore. As soon as his
feet were quite clear of the uppermost fringe of foam, as soon as he
stood on ground that was not only firm, but dry, he shook himself
violently, tossed his fine head with a whinny of exultation, and turned
a long look of hate and defiance upon the element from which he had
just made his escape. Then at a determined trot he set off up the
valley, eager to leave all sight and sound of the sea as far as possible
behind him.
Reared as he had been on the windy and arid plateau of Northern Spain,
the wanderer was filled with great loneliness in these dark woods of fir
and spruce. An occasional maple in its blaze of autumn scarlet, or a
clump of white birch in shimmering, aërial gold, seen unexpectedly upon
the heavy-shadowed green, startled him like a sudden noise.
Nevertheless, strange though they were, they were trees, and so not
altogether alien to his memory. And the brook, with its eddying pools
and brawling, shallow cascades, that seemed to him a familiar, kindly
thing. It was only the sea that he really feared and hated. So long as
he was sure he was putting the huge surges and loud reefs farther and
farther behind him, he felt a certain measure of content as he pushed
onward deeper and deeper into the serried gloom and silence of the
spruce woods. At last, coming to a little patch of brook-side meadow
where the grass kept short and sweet and green even at this late season,
he stopped his flight, and fell to pasturing.
Late in the afternoon, the even gray mass of cloud which for days had
veiled the sky thinned away and scattered, showing the clear blue of the
north. The sun, near setting, sent long rays of cheerful light down the
narrow valley, bringing out warm, golden bronzes in the massive, dull
green of the fir and spruce and hemlock, and striking sharp flame on the
surfaces of the smooth pools. Elated by the sudden brightness, the white
stallion resumed his journey at a gallop, straight toward the sunset,
his long mane and tail, now dry, streaming out on the light afternoon
breeze that drew down between the hills. He kept on up the valley till
the sun went down, and then, in the swiftly deepening twilight, came to
a little grassy point backed by a steep rock. Here where the rippling of
the water enclosed him on three sides, and the rock, with a thick mass
of hemlocks, surmounting it, shut him in on the fourth, he felt more
secure, less desolate, than when surrounded by the endless corridors of
the forest; and close to the foot of the rock he lay down, facing the
mysterious gloom of the trees across the stream.
Just as he was settling himself, a strange voice, hollow yet muffled,
cried across the open space "_Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, woo-hoo-hoo!_" and he
bounded to his feet, every nerve on the alert. He had never in his life
before heard the voice of the great horned owl, and his apprehensive
wonder was excusable. Again and yet again came the hollow call out of
the deep dark of the banked woods opposite. As he stood listening
tensely, eyes and nostrils wide, a bat flitted past his ears, and he
jumped half around, with a startled snort. The ominous sound, however,
was not repeated, and in a couple of minutes he lay down again, still
keeping watchful eyes upon the dark mass across the stream. Then, at
last, a broad-winged bird, taking shape softly above the open, as
noiseless as a gigantic moth, floated over him, and looked down upon him
under his rock with round, palely luminous eyes. By some quick intuition
he knew that this visitor was the source of the mysterious call. It was
only a bird, after all, and no great thing in comparison with the eagles
of his own Pyrenean heights. His apprehensions vanished, and he settled
himself to sleep.
Worn out with days and nights of strain and terror, the exile slept
soundly. Soon, under the crisp autumn starlight, a red fox crept down
circumspectly to hunt mice in the tangled dry grasses of the point. At
sight of the strange white form sleeping carelessly at the foot of the
rock he bounded back into cover, startled quite out of his philosophic
composure. He had never before seen any such being as that; and the
smell, too, was mysterious and hostile to his wrinkling fastidious
nostrils. Having eyed the newcomer for some time from his hiding-place
under the branches, he crept around the rock and surveyed him stealthily
from the other side. Finding no enlightenment, or immediate prospect of
it, he again drew back, and made a careful investigation of the
stranger's tracks, which were quite unlike the tracks of any creature he
knew. Finally he made up his mind that he must confine his hunting to
the immediate neighbourhood, keeping the stranger under surveillance
till he could find out more about him.
Soon after the fox's going a tuft-eared lynx came out on the top of the
rock, and with round, bright, cruel eyes glared down upon the grassy
point, half-hoping to see some rabbits playing there. Instead, she saw
the dim white bulk of the sleeping stallion. In her astonishment at this
unheard-of apparition, her eyes grew wider and whiter than before, her
hair stood up along her back, her absurd little stub of a tail fluffed
out to a fussy pompon, and she uttered a hasty, spitting growl as she
drew back into the shelter of the hemlocks. In the dreaming ears of the
sleeper this angry sound was only a growl of the seas which had for days
been clamouring about the gloom of his stall on the ship. It disturbed
him not at all.
At about two o'clock in the morning, at that mystic hour when Nature
seems to send a message to all her animate children, preparing them for
the advent of dawn, the white stallion got up, shook himself, stepped
softly down to the brook's edge for a drink, and then fell to cropping
the grass wherever it remained green. The forest, though to a careless
ear it might have seemed as silent as before, had in reality stirred to
a sudden, ephemeral life. Far off, from some high rock, a she-fox barked
sharply. Faint, muffled chirps from the thick bushes told of junkos and
chickadees waking up to see if all was well with the world. The mice set
up a scurrying in the grass. And presently a high-antlered buck stepped
out of the shadows and started across the open toward the brook.
The dark buck, himself a moving shadow, saw the stallion first, and
stopped with a loud snort of astonishment and defiance. The stallion
wheeled about, eyed the intruder for a moment doubtfully, then trotted
up with a whinny of pleased interrogation. He had no dread of the
antlered visitor, but rather a hope of companionship in the vast and
overpowering loneliness of the alien night.
The buck, however, was in anything but a friendly mood. His veins aflame
with the arrogant pugnacity of the rutting season, he saw in the white
stranger only a possible rival, and grew hot with rage at his approach.
With an impatient stamping of his slim fore hoofs, he gave challenge.
But to the stallion this was an unknown language. Innocently he came up,
his nose stretched out in question, till he was within a few feet of the
motionless buck. Then, to his astonishment, the latter bounced suddenly
aside like a ball, stood straight up on his hind legs, and struck at him
like lightning with those keen-edged, slim fore hoofs. It was a savage
assault, and two long, red furrows--one longer and deeper than the
other--appeared on the stallion's silky, white flank.
In that instant the wanderer's friendliness vanished, and an avenging
fury took its place. His confidence had been cruelly betrayed. With a
harsh squeal, his mouth wide open and lips drawn back from his
formidable teeth, he sprang at his assailant. But the buck had no vain
idea of standing up against this whirlwind of wrath which he had
evoked. He bounded aside, lightly but hurriedly, and watched for an
opportunity to repeat his attack.
The stallion, however, was not to be caught again; and the dashing
ferocity of his rushes kept his adversary ceaselessly on the move,
bounding into the air and leaping aside to avoid those disastrous teeth.
The buck was awaiting what he felt sure would come, the chance to strike
again; and his confidence in his own supreme agility kept him from any
apprehension as to the outcome of the fight.
But the buck's great weakness lay in his ignorance, his insufficient
knowledge of the game he was playing. He had no idea that his rushing
white antagonist had any other tactics at command. When he gave way,
therefore, he went just far enough to escape the stallion's teeth and
battering fore feet. The stallion, on the other hand, soon realized the
futility of his present method of attack against so nimble an adversary.
On his next rush, therefore, just as the buck bounced aside, he wheeled
in a short half-circle, and lashed out high and far with his steel-shod
heels. The buck was just within the most deadly range of the blow. He
caught the terrific impact on the base of the neck and the forward point
of the shoulder, and went down as if an explosive bullet had struck him.
Before he could even stir to rise, the stallion was upon him, trampling,
battering, squealing, biting madly; and the fight was done. When the
wanderer had spent his vengeance, and paused, snorting and wild-eyed, to
take breath, he looked down upon a mangled shape that no longer
struggled or stirred or even breathed. Then the last of his righteous
fury faded out. The sight and smell of the blood sickened him, and in a
kind of terror he turned away. For a few hesitating moments he stared
about his little retreat and then, finding it had grown hateful to him,
he forsook it, and pushed onward up the edge of the stream, between the
black, impending walls of the forest.
[Illustration: "THE SOUTHWARD JOURNEYING DUCKS, WHICH WOULD DROP WITH
LOUD QUACKING AND SPLASHING INTO THE SHALLOWS"]
About daybreak he came out on the flat, marshy shores of a shrunken
lake, the unstirred waters of which gleamed violet and pale-gold beneath
the twisting coils and drifting plumes of white vapour. All around the
lake stood the grim, serried lines of the firs, under a sky of
palpitating opal. The marshes, in their autumn colouring of burnt gold
and pinky olive, with here and there a little patch of enduring
emerald, caught the wanderer's fancy with a faint reminder of home. Here
was pasture, here was sweet water, here was room to get away from the
oppressive mystery of the woods. He halted to rest and recover himself;
and in the clear, tonic air, so cold that every morning the edges of the
lake were crisped with ice, the aching red gashes on his flank speedily
healed.
He had been at the lake about ten days, and was beginning to grow
restlessly impatient of the unchanging solitude, before anything new
took place. A vividly conspicuous object in his gleaming whiteness as he
roamed the marshes, pasturing or galloping up and down the shore with
streaming mane and tail, he had been seen and watched and wondered at by
all the wild kindreds who had their habitations in the woods about the
lake. But they had all kept carefully out of his sight, regarding him
with no less terror than wonder; and he imagined himself utterly alone,
except for the fish-hawks, and the southward journeying ducks, which
would drop with loud quacking and splashing into the shallows after
sunset, and the owls, the sombre hooting of which disturbed him every
night. Several times, too, from the extreme head of the lake he heard a
discordant call, a great braying bellow, which puzzled him, and brought
him instantly to his feet by a note of challenge in it; but the issuer
of this hoarse defiance never revealed himself. Sometimes he heard a
similar call, with a difference--a longer, less harshly blatant cry, the
under note of which was one of appeal rather than of challenge. Over
both he puzzled in vain; for the moose, bulls and cows alike, had no
wish to try the qualities of the great white stranger who seemed to have
usurped the lordship of the lake.
At last, one violet evening in the close of the sunset, as he stood
fetlock-deep in the chill water, drinking, a light sound of many feet
caught his alert ear. Lifting his head quickly, he saw a herd of
strange-looking, heavy-antlered, whitish-brown deer emerging in long
line from the woods and crossing the open toward the foot of the lake.
The leader of the caribou herd, a massive bull, nearly white, with
antlers almost equal to those of a moose, returned the stallion's
inquiring stare with a glance of mild curiosity, but did not halt an
instant. It was plain that he considered his business urgent; for the
caribou, as a rule, are nothing if not curious when confronted by any
strange sight. But at present the whole herd, which journeyed, in the
main, in single file, seemed to be in a kind of orderly haste. They
turned questioning eyes upon the white stallion as they passed, then
looked away indifferently, intent only upon following their leader on
his quest. The stallion stood watching, his head high and his nostrils
wide, till the very last of the herd had disappeared into the woods
across the lake. Then the loneliness of his spacious pasture all at once
quite overwhelmed him. He did not want the company of the caribou, by
any means, or he might have followed them as they turned their backs
toward the sunset; but it was the dwellings of men he wanted, the human
hand on his mane, the provendered stall, the voice of kindly command,
and the fellowship of his kindred of the uncleft hoof. In some way he
had got it into his head that men might be found most readily by
travelling toward the southwest. Toward the head of the lake, therefore,
and just a little south of the sunset's deepest glow, he now took his
way. He was done with the lake and the empty marshes.
From the head of the lake he followed up a narrow still-water for
perhaps half a mile, crashing his way through a difficult tangle of
fallen, rotting trunks and dense underbrush, till he came out upon
another and much smaller lake, very different from the one he had just
left. Here were no meadowy margins; but the shores were steep and
thick-wooded to the water's edge. Diagonally thrust out across the
outlet, and about a hundred yards above it, ran a low, bare spit of
white sand, evidently covered at high water. Over the black line of the
woods hung a yellow crescent moon, only a few nights old and near
setting.
Coming suddenly from the difficult gloom of the woods, where the noise
of his own movements kept his senses occupied to the exclusion of all
else, the wanderer stopped and stood quite still for a long time under
the shadow of a thick hemlock, investigating this new world with ear and
eye and nostril. Presently, a few hundred yards around the lake shore,
to his left, almost opposite the jutting sand-spit, arose a noisy
crashing and thrashing of the bushes. As he listened in wonder, his ears
erect and eagerly interrogative, the noise stopped, and again the
intense silence settled down upon the forest. A minute or two later a
big, high-shouldered, shambling, hornless creature came out upon the
sand-spit, stood blackly silhouetted against the moonlight, stretched
its ungainly neck, and sent across the water that harsh, bleating cry
of appeal which he had been hearing night after night. It was the cow
moose calling for her mate. And in almost instant answer arose again
that great crashing among the underbrush on the opposite shore.
[Illustration: "IT WAS THE COW MOOSE CALLING FOR HER MATE."]
With a certain nervousness added to his curiosity, the white stallion
listened as the crashing noise drew near. At the same time something in
his blood began to tingle with the lust of combat. There was menace in
the approaching sounds, and his courage arose to meet it. All at once,
within about fifty yards of him, and just across the outlet, the noise
ceased absolutely. For perhaps ten minutes there was not a sound,--not
the snap of a twig or the splash of a ripple,--except that twice again
came the call of the solitary cow standing out against the moon. Then,
so suddenly that he gave an involuntary snort of amazement at the
apparition, the wanderer grew aware of a tall, black bulk with enormous
antlers which took shape among the undergrowth not ten paces distant.
The wanderer's mane rose along his arched neck, his lips drew back
savagely over his great white teeth, fire flamed into his eyes, and for
a score of seconds he stared into the wicked, little, gleaming eyes of
the bull moose. He was eager for the fight, but waiting for the enemy to
begin. Then, as noiselessly and miraculously as he had come, the great
moose disappeared, simply fading into the darkness, and leaving the
stallion all a-tremble with apprehension. For some minutes he peered
anxiously into every black thicket within reach of his eyes, expecting a
rushing assault from some unexpected quarter. Then, glancing out again
across the lake, he saw that the cow had vanished from the moonlit
point. Bewildered, and in the grasp of an inexplicable trepidation, he
waded out into the lake belly-deep, skirted around the south shore,
climbed the steep slope, and plunged straight into the dark of the
woods. His impulse was to get away at once from the mysteries of that
little, lonely lake.
The deep woods, of course, for him were just as lonely as the lake, for
his heedless trampling and conspicuous colouring made a solitude all
about him as he went. At last, however, he stumbled upon a trail. This
he adopted gladly as his path, for it led away from the lake and in a
direction which his whim had elected to follow.
Moving now on the deep turf, with little sound save the occasional swish
of branches that brushed his flanks, he began to realize that the woods
were not as empty as he had thought. On each side, in the soft dark, he
heard little squeaks and rustlings and scurryings. Rabbits went bounding
across the trail, just under his nose. Once a fox trotted ahead of him,
looking back coolly at the great, white stranger. Once a small,
stripe-backed animal passed leisurely before him, and a whiff of pungent
smell annoyed his sensitive nose. Wide wings winnowed over him now and
then, making him jump nervously; and once a pouncing sound, followed by
a snarl, a squeal, and a scuffle, moved him to so keen an excitement
that he swerved a few steps from the trail in his anxiety to see what it
was all about. He failed to see anything, however, and after much
stumbling was relieved to get back to the easy trail again. With all
these unusual interests the miles and the hours seemed short to him; and
when the gray of dawn came filtering down among the trees, he saw before
him a clearing with two low-roofed cabins in the middle of it. Wild with
delight at this evidence of man's presence, he neighed shrilly, and
tore, up to the door of the nearest cabin at full gallop, his hoofs
clattering on the old chips which strewed the open.
To his bitter disappointment, he found the cabin, which was simply an
old lumber-camp, deserted. The door being ajar, he nosed it open and
entered. The damp, cheerless interior, with no furnishing but a rusty
stove, a long bench hewn from a log, and a tier of bunks along one side,
disheartened him. The smell of human occupation still lingered about the
bunks, but all else savoured of desertion and decay. With drooping head
he emerged, and crossed over to the log stable. That horses had occupied
it once, though not recently, was plain to him through various
unmistakable signs; but it was more in the hope of sniffing the scent of
his own kind than from any expectation of finding the stable occupied
that he poked his nose in through the open doorway.
It was no scent of horses, however, which now greeted his startled
nostrils. It was a scent quite unfamiliar to him, but one which,
nevertheless, filled him with instinctive apprehension. At the first
whiff of it he started back. Then, impelled by his curiosity, he again
looked in, peering into the gloom. The next instant he was aware of a
huge black shape leaping straight at him. Springing back with a loud
snort, he wheeled like lightning, and lashed out madly with his heels.
The bear caught the blow full in the ribs, and staggered against the
door-post with a loud, grunting cough, while the stallion trotted off
some twenty yards across the chips and paused, wondering. The blow, in
all probability, had broken several of the bear's ribs, but without
greatly impairing his capacity for a fight; and now, in a blind rage, he
rushed again upon the intruder who had dealt him so rude a buffet. The
stallion, however, was in no fighting mood. Depressed as he was by the
desolation of the cabin, and daunted by the mysterious character of this
attack from the dark of the stable, he was now like a child frightened
of ghosts. Not the bear alone, but the whole place, terrified him. Away
he went at full gallop across the clearing, by good fortune struck the
continuation of the loggers' road, and plunged onward into the shadowy
forest.
For a couple of miles he ran, then he slowed down to a trot, and at last
dropped into a leisurely walk. This trail was much broader and clearer
than the one which had led him to the camp, and a short, sweet grass
grew along it, so that he pastured comfortably without much loss of
time. The spirit of his quest, however, was now so strong upon him that
he would not rest after feeding. Mile after mile he pressed on, till the
sun was high in the clear, blue heavens, and the shadows of the ancient
firs were short and luminous. Then suddenly the woods broke away before
him.
Far below he saw the blue sea sparkling. But it was not the beauty of
the sea that held his eyes. From his very feet the road dropped down
through open, half-cleared burnt lands, a stretch of rough
pasture-fields, and a belt of sloping meadow, to a little white village
clustering about an inlet. The clutter of roofs was homelike to his
eyes, hungry with long loneliness; the little white church, with shining
spire and cross, was very homelike. But nearer, in the very first
pasture-field, just across the burnt land, was a sight that came yet
nearer to his heart. There, in a corner of the crooked snake-fence,
stood two bay mares and a foal, their heads over the fence as they gazed
up the hill in his direction. Up went mane and tail, and loud and long
he neighed to them his greeting. Their answer was a whinny of welcome,
and down across the fields he dashed at a wild gallop that took no heed
of fences. When, a little later in the day, a swarthy French-Canadian
farmer came up from the village to lead his mares down to water, he was
bewildered with delight to find himself the apparent master of a
splendid white stallion, which insisted on claiming him, nosing him
joyously, and following at his heels like a dog.
When the Logs Come Down
It was April, and the time of freshet, when
"Again the last thin ice had gone
To join the swinging sea."
After the ice was all away the river had risen rapidly, flooding the
intervale meadows, till in some places the banks, deep under water, were
marked only by the tops of the alder and willow bushes, and by a line of
elms growing, apparently, in the middle of a lake. Behind these elms the
water was as still as a lake; but in front of them it rushed in heavy
swirls, swaying the alders and willows, and boiling with swish and
gurgle around the resolutely opposing trunks.
Above the swollen flood of water,--the hurried retreat of the last snow
from a thousand forest valleys converging around the river's far-off
source,--washed softly the benign and illimitable flood of the April
air. This air seemed to carry with reluctance a certain fluctuating
chill, caught from the icy water. But in the main its burden was the
breath of willows catkin and sprouting grass and the first shy bloom on
the open edges of the uplands. It was the characteristic smell of the
northern spring, tender and elusive, yet keenly penetrating. If gems had
perfumes, just so might the opal smell.
Besides the fragrance and the faint chill, the air carried an April
music, a confusion of delicate sounds that seemed striving to weave a
tissue of light melody over the steady, muffled murmur of the freshet.
In this melody the ear could differentiate certain notes,--the hum of
bees and flies in the willow bloom, the staccato _chirr_, _chirr_ of the
blackbirds in the elm-tops, the vibrant yet liquid _kong-kla-lee_ of the
redwings in the alders, the intermittent ecstasy of a stray
song-sparrow, the occasional long flute-call of a yellowhammer across
the flood, and, once in awhile, a sudden clamour of crows, a jangle of
irrelevant, broken chords. From time to time, as if at points in a great
rhythm too wide for the ear to grasp, all these sounds would cease for a
second or two, leaving the murmur of the flood strangely conspicuous.
The colours of the world of freshet were as delicately thrilling as its
scents and sounds. The veiled blue pallor of the sky and the milky,
blue-gray pallor of the water served as neutral background to
innumerable thin washes and stains of tint. Over the alders a bloom of
lavender and faint russet, over the willows a lacing of pale yellow,
over the maples a veiling of rose-pink, over the open patches on the
uplands a mist that hinted of green, and over the further hills of the
forest, broad, smoky smudges of indigo. Here and there, just above the
reach of the freshet, a pine or spruce interrupted the picture
emphatically with an intrusion of firm green-black.
Into this opalescent scene, some days before the freshet reached its
height, the logs began to come down. In the upper country every
tributary stream was pouring them out in shoals,--heavy, blind, butting,
and blundering shoals,--to be carried by the great river down to the
booms and saws above its mouth. Some, caught in eddies, were thrust
aside up the bank to lie and slowly rot among the living trees. But
most, darting and wallowing through mad rapids, or shooting falls, or
whirling and circling dully down the more tranquil reaches of the tide,
made shift to accomplish their voyage. They would blacken the broad
river for acres at a time; and then again straggle along singly, or by
twos and threes. It was a good run of logs and the scattered dwellers
along the river forgave the unusual excesses of the freshet, because to
them it was chiefly important that all the logs of the winter's chopping
should be got out.
On a single log, at a most daunting distance from either shore, came
voyaging a lonely and bedraggled little traveller. This particular red
squirrel had been chattering gaily in the top of an old tree on the
river-bank, when misfortune took him unawares. The tree was on a bluff
just where a small but very turbulent and overswollen stream flowed in.
The flood had stealthily undermined the bluff. Suddenly the squirrel had
felt the tree sway ominously beneath him. He had leaped for safety, but
too late! The whole bank had melted into the current. By great luck, the
squirrel had managed to swim to a passing log. Breathless and all but
drowned, he had clambered upon it. Before he could recover his wits
enough to make a venture for shore, the vehement lesser stream had swept
his log clean out into mid-channel. Though a bold enough swimmer, he had
seen that he could not face that boiling tide with any hope of success;
so he had clung to his unstable refuge and waited upon fate.
For perhaps an hour the squirrel journeyed thus without incident or
further adventure. Then, in a wide, comparatively sluggish reach of the
river, some whimsical cross-current had borne his log over to the
neighbourhood of a whole, voyaging fleet of brown timbers. Unable to see
how far this group extended, the squirrel inferred that it might
possibly afford him passage to the shore. With a tremendous leap he
gained the nearest of the timber. Thence he went skipping joyously, now
up river and now down, skirting wide spaces of clear water, and twice
swimming open lanes too broad to jump, till he was not more than a
hundred yards from the line of trees that marked the flooded bank. Some
thirty feet beyond, and that much nearer safety, one more log floated
alone. The plucky little animal jumped as far as he could, landed with a
splash, and swam vigorously for this last log. He gained it, and was
just dragging himself out upon it, when there was a rush and heavy break
in the water, and a pair of big jaws snapped close behind him. An
agonized spring saved him, and he clung flat, quivering, on the top of
the log. But the hungry pickerel had captured nearly half his tail.
[Illustration: "THE PLUCKY LITTLE ANIMAL JUMPED AS FAR AS HE COULD."]
A minute or two later he had recovered from this shock; and thereupon
he sat up and chattered shrill indignation, twitching defiantly the sore
and bleeding stump. This outburst perhaps relieved his feelings a
little; for apparently the red squirrel needs to give his emotions vent
more than any other member of the wild kindreds. But he had learned a
lesson. He would not again try swimming in a water which pickerel
inhabited. Then, a little later, he learned another. A fish-hawk passed
overhead. The fish-hawk would not have harmed him under any
circumstances. But the squirrel thought of other hawks, less
gentle-mannered; and he realized that the loud volubility which in the
security of his native trees he might indulge would never do out here on
his shelterless log. He stopped his complaints, crouched flat, and
scanned the sky anxiously for sign of other hawks. He had suddenly
realized that he was now naked to the eyes of all his enemies.
Presently a new terror came to sap his courage. A little way ahead the
banks were high and the channel narrow; and the river, no longer able to
relieve the freshet strain by spreading itself over wide meadows, became
a roaring rapid. The squirrel heard that terrifying roar. He noted how
swiftly it was approaching. In a half-panic he stared about, almost
ready to dare the pickerel and make a try for shore, rather than be
carried through those rapids.
In this extremity of terror he saw what, at other times, would have
frightened him almost as much as hawk or pickerel. A rowboat slowly drew
near, picking its way through the logs. The one rower, a grizzled old
river-man, was surging vigorously, to avoid being swept down into the
thunderous narrows. But as he approached, he noticed the trembling
squirrel on the log. In a flash he took in the situation. With a
sheepish grin, as if ashamed of himself for troubling about a "blame
squirrel," he thrust out the tip of an oar toward the log, with a sort
of shy invitation.
The squirrel, fortunately for himself, was one of those animals which
are sometimes open to a new idea. He did not trust the man, to be sure.
But he trusted him more than he did the rapids ahead, and feared him
less than he feared the pickerel. Promptly he skipped aboard the boat,
and perched himself on the bow, as far away as possible from his
rescuer. The man wasted no time on sentimentalizing, but pulled as hard
as he could for shore. When near the bank, however, and out of the
stress of the current, he permitted himself what he considered a piece
of foolishness. He turned the boat about, and backed in till the stern
touched land. He wanted to see what the squirrel, up there in the bow,
was going to do about it.
The little animal made up his mind quickly. Scared but resolute, he
darted along the gunwale. The rower, with both arms outspread, was
directly in his way. He hesitated, gave a nervous chirrup, then launched
himself high into the air. His little feet struck smartly on the top of
the man's head. Then he was off up the bank as if hawk and pickerel and
rapids were all after him together. A moment later from the thick top of
a fir-tree came his shrill chatter of triumph and defiance.
"Sassy little varmint!" muttered the old river-man, looking up at him
with indulgent eyes.
A Duel in the Deep
Though there was no wind, the wide surface of the estuary was curiously
disturbed. In from the open sea came swiftly as it were a wedge of
roughness, its edges lightly dancing, sparkling with blue-and-silver
flashes. The strange disturbance kept on straight up the channel,
leaving the placid shoals along-shore to shine unruffled in the low,
level-glancing Arctic sun.
Down along the flat, interminable shore, picking his way watchfully
among the ragged ice-cakes of the tempestuous spring, came a huge white
bear. His small, snaky, cruel head was bent downwards, while his fierce
little eyes peered among the tumbled ice blocks for possible dead fish.
His long, loose-jointed body twisted sinuously as he moved--the only
living creature to be seen up and down the level desolation of those
bleak shores.
The white bear was an old male, restless, and of savage temper. Like
many of his fellows among the older males, he had not been so fortunate
as to slumber away the long, terrific, Arctic winter in the shelter of a
snow-buried rock. All through the months of dark and tempest, of ghostly
auroras and cold unspeakable, he had roamed the dead world and fought
his fight with hunger. His craft, his strength, his fierce desperation
in attack, had pulled him through. Lean and savage, he sniffed the
oncoming of spring, and watched the ice go grinding out.
Presently his keen ears noted a faint sound, which seemed to blow in
from the sea. As there was no wind, this was worthy of note. Lifting his
black nose high above the ice-cakes, he sniffed and peered intently at
the inrushing wedge of tumbled water. His uncertainty was not for long.
The salmon were returning. This was the vanguard of the spring run.
For a few seconds the great white shape stood as if turned to stone,
watching the radiant confusion. Here and there he saw a slender body
flash forth for an instant, half its length above the sparkling water,
as if striving to escape some unseen enemy. The school was making for
the main channel, which ran between two low, naked islets of rock,
perhaps half a mile apart. The nearest of these was about three hundred
yards from the shore. As soon as the bear made sure that the salmon were
taking this course, he galloped at top speed--a long, loose, shambling,
but rapid pace--down along the shore till just abreast of the islet.
Then he plunged in and swam for it, his sharp black muzzle and narrow
white head cleaving the smooth flood with almost incredible swiftness,
and throwing off an oily, trailing ripple on either side. When he
reached the islet the front of the salmon school was still some forty or
fifty paces distant. He crossed the rocks, slipped smoothly down into
the water again, and waited for the shining turmoil to break upon him.
For some reason known only to the hosts of the salmon themselves,
however, the shining turmoil swerved as it approached the islet,
crowding over toward the other side of the channel. The bear's hungry
little eyes blazed savagely at this. He imagined the hordes had taken
alarm at his dread presence,--a natural imagining on his part, since he
knew of nothing but the old bull walrus that dared ever await his
approach. But as a matter of fact the eager myriads of the salmon,
thrilling with life and vigour and the mating fire of spring, were no
more conscious of the savage animal than if he had been a rock or an
ice-floe. The joy of the incoming rush was in their splendid sinews, and
the lure of the shallow, singing rapids in their veins. To that exultant
host an enemy, however formidable, was but an incident. The exhaustless
fertility of their race derided fate.
With a grunt the bear launched himself through the whitish flood. On the
flanks of the flashing host he dived, swimming sinuously and with
extraordinary swiftness like a seal. Rising gradually toward the
surface, he struck this way and that, with wide jaws and armed fore
paws, among the crowded ranks of the salmon. His object was to kill,
kill, kill, before the opportunity passed by, in order that there should
be many dead fish to drift ashore and be picked up at his leisure.
After a minute or two of this savage work, which turned the thronged
tide crimson all about him, he came to the surface for breath. The upper
ranks of the salmon were still flashing on every side, and half-leaping
out of water within the very sweep of his deadly paw, heedless of his
presence. His hunger being fierce upon him, he now seized a good-sized
fish, bit its backbone through to put an end to its troublesome
struggling, and devoured it as he swam along slowly with the host.
Suddenly, not a dozen feet ahead of his nose, a huge salmon seemed to be
lifted horizontally almost clear of the water. It writhed and thrashed
for a second in a sort of convulsion, then sank with a heavy swirl. The
bear stared curiously. He had never seen anything like that before. The
salmon had not jumped of its own accord, that was evident. It had
apparently been held up from below, firmly and steadily sustained as it
struggled, for that brief space of moments. To the wild creatures
anything new, anything unknown, is always either interesting or
terrifying. The white bear was unacquainted with terror, but he was
interested instantly. He swam toward the spot where the salmon had sunk.
The next moment something still more strange arrested him. A little to
one side of the spot where the salmon had behaved so curiously, a great
sharp-pointed spike of yellow horn, massive and twisted, was thrust up
about three feet above the water and instantly withdrawn. Blood clung
thinly in the convolutions of the horn. It was a mysterious and menacing
weapon. Filled with a curiosity that was now warming into wrath, the
bear made for the spot. There was something like defiance in that sudden
upthrust. Moreover, it seemed that some stranger was poaching on his
fishing-grounds. The bear's wrath flamed into fury in a few seconds.
Unable to see down into the disturbed and discoloured tide, he dived
deep, to get below the salmon and the blood, and see what manner of
rival it was with which he had to deal. Whatever it was, he was going to
drive it off or kill it. He would share his salmon with no one.
Meanwhile, just beneath the lowermost ranks of the horde, a big,
pallid-skinned, fish-like creature was swimming slowly this way and
that. Shaped something like a porpoise, with a big bluff head and
tremendously powerful flukes, it belonged evidently to the great kinship
of the whales. Its massive body was about fourteen feet in length. But
the strange thing about it, setting it wide apart from all its cetacean
kin, was a long, heavy, twisted horn or tusk, of yellow ivory, jutting
straight out from its upper jaw to a length of about four feet. It was
that most peculiar of all the whales, a narwhal.
From time to time this ominous shape would launch itself upward among
the salmon, transfixing some of the largest fish with lightning thrusts
of its tusk, and killing others by terrible, thrashing side-blows of the
weapon. Sometimes it would open its great mouth and engulf the most
convenient victim; but it did not seem ravenous. Its hunger was already
all but glutted, and its purpose seemed to be, mainly, to kill, in order
that food might still be abundant after the salmon had passed on up the
river beyond his reach.
When the white bear, swimming under water outstretched like an otter,
saw this threatening form, his veins ran fire. Darting downward, easily
as a mink might have done, he struck the unsuspecting narwhal in the
middle of the back just between the flippers. His mighty fore paws,
armed with claws like knife-blades, tore two gaping wounds in the
narwhal's hide, and the dark blood jetted forth. But the wounds went
little below the blanket of blubber which enclosed the narwhal
underneath his hide. Beyond the pain of those two tearing buffets, the
great sea-beast was little the worse of them. With a surge of his tail
he lunged forward, and turned furiously upon his assailant.
The bear, though rash in his arrogance and rage, was no mere headlong
blunderer. Though he mistook the narwhal for some kind of gigantic
seal, and therefore scorned him, he had not missed the possibilities of
that long, menacing horn. He was upon his foe again in an instant, not
giving him time to charge, and successfully planted another rending
stroke which disabled the narwhal's right flipper. Then, however,
finding that he could hold his breath no longer after such terrific
exertion, he darted to the surface, and hurriedly refilled his lungs.
To regain his breath took him but a moment, and instantly aware of his
peril while at the surface, he dived again to renew his attack. As he
dived, either his own craft or some subtle forewarning led him to twist
sharply to one side. But for this, his fighting would have ended then
and there, his heart split by the thrust of that giant tusk. As it was,
the mad upward rush of the narwhal missed its aim. The bear felt a
couple of salmon hurled in his face. Then the horn shot past his neck;
and a black mass smote him full in the chest, with a force that knocked
the wind out of him, and bore him, clawing and biting passionately, back
to the surface. His blows, of course, were delivered blindly, but one
struck home just above the narwhal's sinister little eye, wiping it out
of existence.
As the bear got his head above water, he choked and gasped, swimming
high for a few seconds in the struggle to recover his breath. Realizing
now to the full how dangerous an adversary he had challenged, he knew
that every second he remained at the surface was a deadly peril. But, at
first, the breath would not return to his buffeted lungs. With his nose
high in air he gave a longing look away across the tumult of the
journeying host, across the tranquil white water beyond, to the low,
desolate shore with its dirty ice-cakes. For the moment, he wished
himself back there. Then, as he regained his breath, and his great,
bellows-like lungs resumed their function, his courage and his fighting
fury also returned. The red light of battle blazed up again in his eyes,
and wheeling half-about with a violence that sent the water swirling and
foaming from his mighty shoulders and hurled a score of salmon upon each
other's backs, he dropped his head to dive once more into the fight.
The narwhal, for his part, had fared badly in that last encounter. With
one eye blinded, his head badly clawed, and the tough cartilage about
his blow-holes torn deeply by his adversary's teeth, he was bewildered
for the moment. But he was not daunted. His sluggish blood only boiled
to a blacker fury. Never before had he met anything like serious
opposition. The colossal sperm-whale, undisputed lord of the ocean,
never came into these cold northern waters; and the huge, blundering
whalebone whales he despised. He had transfixed and slaughtered the
helpless calves of this species under the very fins of their gigantic
but timorous mothers. He had pierced seals, and even, once, a walrus.
Terribly armed as he was, and swift, and powerful, he had never yielded
way to any other inhabitant of his cold and glimmering world.
For a few moments of agitated confusion, flurried by the pain of his
wounds, he swam straight ahead, just below the salmon. Then, recovering
his wits, he turned in a rage and looked about, with his one remaining
eye, for the bear. At first, unable immediately to readjust his vision,
he could not locate him; but presently, staring up vindictively through
the straight-swimming, blue and silver ranks of the journeying fish, he
saw the big white form swimming at the surface some little distance
away. Up through the thronged and swirling tide he darted on a long
slant, straight and swift as a hungry trout rising to a May-fly.
As the bear, with lowered head and great haunches uplifted began his
dive, he felt a terrible, grinding thrust in his left flank, and it
seemed as if a rock from the floor of the channel rose up and smote him,
half-lifting him from the water. The narwhal, his aim confused by the
blinding of one eye, had again failed to strike true. The point of his
tusk had caught the bear's flank on such a slant that it did not
penetrate to any vital organ, but ran up, perhaps an inch below the
hide, between the outermost curve of two of the upper ribs, and
reappeared a little behind the shoulder. The tremendous force of that
upward rush carried the great twisted horn right through to its very
base.
Having delivered what he felt must be a fatal and final blow, the
narwhal at once backed downward with powerful surges of his tail, trying
to withdraw his horn. But now he found himself in a deadly trap. The
bear, mad with pain, and held firmly, proceeded to enwrap his
adversary's whole head in a frightful embrace. Slashing, tearing,
ripping, with all four desperate paws at once, he was speedily shredding
the narwhal's head to fragments. With mad thrashings the narwhal
struggled to break loose, but in vain. Down he sank, till he lay upon
the bottom, that destroying bulk still fixed upon his head. When he
felt the solid ground beneath him he bent his mighty body like a bow,
and sprung it, with a force that nothing could resist. His horn tore
itself free, the bear was flung loose, and he lurched to one side with a
violence that threw the swimming salmon overhead into confusion and sent
great surges boiling to the surface. Then, blind, shattered, and jetting
blood in torrents from his gaping throat, he settled upon the bottom,
writhed feebly for a few minutes, and lay still.
[Illustration: "THEN, WITH THE LARGEST PRIZE IN HIS JAWS, HE SWAM SLOWLY
TO THE ROCK."]
The bear, plunging upward through the close ranks of the salmon, began
to cough hoarsely as soon as he got his head above water. It was some
moments before he could do more than keep himself afloat while he
regained his breath. Then he began slowly swimming round and round in a
circle, still full of battle rage, but not yet able to control his
lungs. At last, he felt equal to seeking a renewal of the fight. Once
more he dived, expecting at any instant to feel again that grinding
thrust, that resistless upward blow. Below the salmon throng he peered
about through the glimmer. Far down, he made out the shape of his
opponent, lying motionless on the bottom. Obviously, there was nothing
more to be feared from that still bulk, which seemed to sway gently in
the current. The victor returned to the surface.
Lifting his head high above the water, he scanned the whole empty,
pallid world. No enemy, no possible rival, was to be seen. Weak as he
was and weary, he killed two or three more of the ceaselessly passing
salmon just to reassure himself. Then, with the largest prize in his
jaws, he swam slowly to the rock, crawled ashore, and lay down in sullen
triumph to lick his wounds.
[Illustration: "LAY DOWN IN SULLEN TRIUMPH TO LICK HIS WOUNDS."]
The Little Tyrant of the Burrows
Along the edge of the woodland he found the young, green turf of the
pasture close and soft. As he paused for a moment with his long,
trunk-like nose thrust into it, his fine sense could detect nothing but
the cool tang of the grass-stems, the light pungency and sweetness of
the damp earth below. With a savage impatience of movement he jerked
himself a foot or more to one side, and again thrust his nose into the
turf. Here he evidently detected something more to his taste than the
sweetness of grass and earth, for he began to dig fiercely, biting the
matted roots apart, and tearing up the soil with his powerful little
fore paws. In a few seconds he dragged forth a fat, cream-coloured grub
about an inch and a half in length, with a copper-coloured head. The
grub twisted and lashed about, but was torn apart and eaten on the spot.
The victor ate furiously, wrinkling his flexible snout away from his
prey in a manner that gave him a peculiarly ferocious, snarling
expression.
Nearly six inches in length, with a round, sturdy body, short tail, very
short, sturdy legs, and fine fur of a clouded leaden gray, this fierce
and implacable little forager might have been mistaken by the careless
observer for an ordinary mole. But such a mistake on the part of any
creature not larger than a ground-sparrow or wood-mouse or lizard would
have resulted in instant doom; for this tiny beast, indomitable as a
terrier and greedy for meat as a mink, was the mole-shrew.
Having devoured the fat grub, and finding his appetite still unappeased,
the shrew at once resumed his vehement digging. His marvellously
developed nostrils had assured him that a little farther on beneath the
turf were more grubs, or well-conditioned earthworms, or the stupid, big
red-brown beetles called "May-bugs." In a few seconds only his hind
quarters were visible among the grass-roots. Then, only a twitch of his
short tail, or a kick of his hind claws. At this moment a broad, swift
shadow appeared overhead; and a hungry marsh-hawk, dropping like a shot,
clutched with eager claws at the mouth of the burrow. That deadly
clutch tore up some grass-roots and some fresh earth, but just failed to
reach the diligent burrower. Tail and hind legs had been nimbly drawn in
just in time, as if forewarned of the swooping peril; and the hawk flew
off heavily, to resume his quartering of the pasture.
Unruffled by his narrow escape, the shrew went on with his burrowing. He
ran his gallery very near the surface,--in fact, close under the roots
of the turf, where the grubs and beetles were most numerous. Sometimes
he would dip an inch or more, to avoid a bit of difficult excavation;
but more often he would press so closely to the surface that the thin
layer of sod above him would heave with every surging motion. The loose
earth, for the most part, was not thrust behind him, but jammed to
either side or overhead, and so vigorously packed in the process as to
make strong walls to the galleries, which zigzagged hither and thither
as the moment's whim or the scent of some quarry might dictate.
In the absolute darkness of his straitened underworld the shrew felt no
consciousness of restriction. His eyes tight closed, the thick earth
pressing upon him at every point, he felt nevertheless as free as if all
the range of upper air were his. The earthy dark was nothing to him,
for the nerves of his marvellous nose served all the purposes of sight
and hearing. It was, indeed, as if he heard, felt, smelled, and saw, all
with his nose. If the walls of the narrow tunnel pressed him too
straitly, he could expand them by a few seconds of digging. In fact, his
underground world, limited as it was, for the moment contented him
utterly. From time to time he would scent, through perhaps a
quarter-inch of earth, a worm or a grub ahead of him. Then he would
drive forward almost with a pounce, clutch the prey, and devour it
delightedly there in the dark.
Suddenly the earth broke away before him, and his investigating nose
poked itself through into another gallery, a shade larger than his own.
The fact that the gallery was larger than his own might well have made
him draw back, but his was not the drawing-back disposition. His nose
told him that the rival digger was a mole, and had but recently gone by.
Without a second's hesitation he clawed through, and darted down the new
tunnel, seeking either a fight or a feast, as fate might please to
award.
In his savage haste, however, the shrew was not discriminating; and all
at once he realized that he had lost the fresh scent. This was still
the mole's gallery, but there was no longer any sign that its owner had
very lately traversed it. As a matter of fact, several yards back the
shrew had blundered past the mouth of a branching tunnel, up which the
mole, ignorant that he was being pursued, had taken leisurely way. The
pursuer stopped, hesitating for a moment, then decided to push ahead and
see what might turn up. In half a minute a breath of the upper air met
him,--then a star of light glimmered before him,--and he came out at one
of the exits which the mole had used for dumping earth.
At this point the shrew seemed to decide that he had had enough of
underground foraging. He stuck his head up through the opening, and
looked over the green turf. The opening was close to a pile of stones in
the fence corner, which promised both shelter and good hunting. Having
hastily dusted the loose earth from his face and whiskers, he emerged,
ran to the stone heap, and whisked into the nearest crevice.
On a warm gray stone near the top of the pile, gently waving its wings
in the sunshine, glowed a gorgeous red-and-black butterfly. The
intensity of its colouring seemed to vibrate in the unclouded radiance.
Suddenly, from just beneath the stone on which it rested, slipped forth
the shrew, and darted at it with a swift, scrambling leap. The beautiful
insect, however, was wide awake, and saw the danger in good time. One
beat of its wide, gorgeous wings uplifted its light body as a breath
softly uplifts a tuft of thistledown. The baffled shrew jumped straight
into the air, but in vain; and the great butterfly went flickering off
aimlessly and idly over the pasture to find some less perilous
basking-place.
Angered by this failure, the shrew descended the stone heap and scurried
over to the fence, poking his nose under every tussock of weeds in
search of the nest of some ground-bird. Along parallel with the fence he
hunted, keeping out about a foot from the lowest rail. He found no nest;
but suddenly the owners of a nest that was hidden somewhere in the
neighbourhood found him. He felt himself buffeted by swift, elusive
wings. Sharp little beaks jabbed him again and again, and the air seemed
full of angry twittering. For a few moments he stood his ground
obstinately, wrinkling back his long snout and jumping at his
bewildering assailants. Then, realizing that he could do nothing against
such nimble foes, he drew back and ran under the fence. He was not
really hurt, and he was not at all terrified; but he was distinctly
beaten, and therefore in a very bad temper.
[Illustration: "THE BAFFLED SHREW JUMPED STRAIGHT INTO THE AIR."]
Since his return to the green upper world ill luck had persistently
followed his ventures, and now his thoughts turned back to the burrows
under the grass-roots. He remembered, also, that mole which had so
inexplicably evaded him. Keeping close to the fence, he hurried back to
the stone heap, on the other side of which lay the entrance to the
burrows. He was just about to make a hurried and final investigation of
the pile, on the chance that it might conceal something to his taste,
when his nose caught a strong scent which made him stop short and seem
to shrink into his skin. At the same instant a slim, long, yellow-brown
animal emerged from the stones, cast a quick, shifting glance this way
and that, then darted at him as smoothly as a snake. With a frantic leap
he shot through the air, alighting just beside the mouth of the burrow.
The next instant he had vanished; and the weasel, arriving just a second
too late, thrust his fierce, triangular face into the hole, but made no
attempt to squeeze himself down a passage so restricted.
The shrew had been terrified, indeed; but his dogged spirit was by no
means cowed or given over to panic. He felt fairly confident that the
weasel was too big to pursue him down the burrow, but presently he
stopped, scraped away the earth on one side, and turned around to face
the menace. Small though he was, the weasel would have found him a
troublesome and daring antagonist in such narrow quarters. When he saw a
glimmer of light reappear at the entrance of the burrow, he understood
that his big enemy was not going to attempt the impossible. Reassured,
but still hot with wrath, he turned again, and went racing through the
black tunnel in search of something whereon to wreak his emotions.
[Illustration: "WITH A FRANTIC LEAP HE SHOT THROUGH THE AIR."]
Now as the fates of the underworld would have it, at this moment the
lazy old mole who owned these burrows was returning from his tour of
investigation. He came to the fork where the shrew had gone by an hour
before. The strong, disagreeable, musky smell of the intruder arrested
him. His keen nose sniffed at it with resentment and alarm, and told him
the whole story, there in the dark, more plainly than if it had passed
in daylight before his purblind eyes. It told him that some time had
gone by since the intruder's passing. But what it could not tell him
was that the intruder was just now on his way back. After some moments
of hesitation the long, cylindrical, limp body of the mole scuffled out
into the main tunnel, and turned toward the exit. Its movement was
rather slow and awkward, owing to the fact that the fore legs were set
on each side of the body, like flippers, which was an excellent
arrangement for digging, but a very bad one for plain walking.
The mole had not advanced more than a yard or so along the main tunnel
when again that strong, musky smell smote his nostrils. This time it was
fresh and warm. Indeed, it was startlingly imminent. Elongating his soft
body till it was not more than half its usual thickness, the mole
doubled in his tracks, intent upon the speediest possible retreat. In
that very instant, while he was in the midst of this awkward effort to
turn, the shrew fell upon him, gripping and tearing his soft,
unprotected flank.
The mole was not altogether deficient in character; and he was larger
and heavier than his assailant. Seeing that escape was impossible, and
stung by the pain of his wounds, he flung himself with energy into the
struggle, biting desperately and striving to bear down his lighter
opponent. It was a blind smother of a fight, there in that pitch-black
narrow tunnel whose walls pressed ceaselessly upon it and hemmed it in.
From the smother came no sound but an occasional squeak of rage or pain,
barely audible to the lurking spiders among the grass-stems just
overhead. The thin turf heaved vaguely, and the grass-blades vibrated to
the unseen struggle; but not even the low-flying marsh-hawk could guess
the cause of these mysterious disturbances.
For several minutes the mole made a good fight. Then the indomitable
savagery of his enemy's attack suddenly cowed him. He shrank and tried
to draw away; and in that moment the enemy had him by the throat. In
that moment the fight was ended; and in the next the invader was
satisfying his ravenous appetite on the warm flesh which he craved.
When this redoubtable little warrior had eaten his fill, he felt a
pleasant sense of drowsiness. First he moved a few feet farther along
the tunnel, till he reached the point where it was joined by the smaller
gallery of his own digging. At this point of vantage, with exits open
both ways, he hastily dug himself a little pocket or side chamber where
he could curl himself up in comfort. Here he licked his wounds for a
minute or two, and carefully washed his face with his clever, hand-like
fore paws. Then with a sense of perfect security he went to sleep, his
watchful nose, most trusty of sentinels, on guard at the threshold of
his bedchamber.
While he slept in this unseen retreat, among the short grasses just
above his sleep went on the busy mingling of comedy and tragedy, of
mirth and birth and death, which makes the sum of life on a summer day
in the pastures. Everywhere the grass, and the air above the grass, were
thronged with insects. Through the grass came gliding soundlessly a
long, smooth, sinuous brown shape with a quick-darting head and a
forked, amber-coloured, flickering tongue. The snake's body was about
the thickness of a man's thumb, and his back was unobtrusively but
exquisitely marked with a reticulation of fine lines. He seemed to be
travelling rather aimlessly, doubtless on the watch for any small quarry
he might catch sight of; but when he chanced upon the fresh-dug hole
where the shrew had begun his burrowing, he stopped abruptly. His fixed,
opaque-looking eyes grew strangely intent. With his head poised
immediately over the hole he remained perfectly rigid for some seconds.
Then he glided slowly into the burrow.
The black snake--for such he was called, in spite of his colour being
brown--had an undiscriminating appetite for moles and shrews alike. It
was of no concern to him that the flesh of the shrew was rank and tough;
for his sense of taste was, to say the least of it, rudimentary, and to
digestion so invincible as his, tough and tender were all one. He had
learned, of course, that shrews were averse to being swallowed, and that
they both could and would put up a stiff fight against such
consummation. But he had never yet captured one in such a position that
he could not get his coils around and crush it. What he expected to find
in the burrow which he entered so confidently was a satisfying meal,
followed by a long, safe sleep to companion digestion.
As he trailed along the winding of the tunnel, his motion made a faint,
dry, whispering sound. This delicate sound, together with his peculiar,
sickly, elusive scent, travelled just before him, and reached the
doorway of the little chamber where the shrew was sleeping. The sleeper
awoke,--wide awake all at once, as it behoves the wild kindreds to be.
Instantly, too, he understood the whole peril, and that it was even now
upon him. There was no time for flight. To do him justice, it was not
flight he thought of, but fight. His little heart swelled with rage at
this invasion of his rest. Experienced fighter that he was, he fully
understood the advantages of his situation. As the head of the invader
stole past his doorway, he sprang, and sank his long, punishing teeth
deep into the back of the snake's neck.
With this hold the advantage was all his, so long as he could maintain
it; and he hung to the grip like a bulldog, biting deeper and deeper
every minute. Fettered completely by the narrowness of the tunnel,
unable to lash or coil or strike, the snake could only writhe impotently
and struggle to drag his adversary farther down the burrow toward some
roomier spot where his own tactics would have a chance. But the shrew
was not to be dislodged from his point of vantage. He clung to his
doorway no less doggedly than he clung to his hold; and all the while
his deadly teeth were biting deeper in. At last, they found the
backbone,--and bit it through. With a quiver the writhing of the big
snake stopped.
Victor though he was, the shrew was slow to accept conviction of his
victory over so mighty an antagonist. Though all resistance had ceased,
he kept on gnawing and worrying, till he had succeeded in completely
severing the head from the trunk. Then, feeling that his triumph was
secured, he turned back into his chamber and curled up again to resume
his rudely interrupted siesta.
Having thus effectually established his lordship of the burrows, this
small champion might have reasonably expected to enjoy an undisturbed
and unanxious slumber. But Fate is pitilessly whimsical in its dealings
with the wild kindreds. It chanced at this time that a red fox came
trotting down along the pasture fence. He seemed to have a very vague
idea of where he was going or what he wanted to do. Presently he took it
into his head that he wanted to cross the pasture, so he forsook the
fence and started off over the grass; and as luck would have it, his
keen, investigating nose sniffed the sod just at the point whereunder
the sleeping shrew lay hidden. The turf that formed the little fighter's
ceiling was not more than half an inch in thickness.
The smell that came up through the grass-roots was strong, and not
particularly savoury. But the red fox was not overparticular just then.
He would have chosen rabbit or partridge had Mother Nature consulted
his wishes more minutely. But as it was he saw no reason to turn up his
sharp nose at shrew. After a few hasty but discreet sniffings, which
enabled him to locate the careless slumberer, he pounced upon the exact
spot and fell to clawing the sod ferociously. His long nails and
powerful fore paws tore off the thin covering of turf in less time than
it takes to tell of it, and the next instant the shrew was hurled out
into the sunlight, dazzled and half stunned. Almost before he touched
the grass a pair of narrow jaws snapped him up. Without a moment's delay
the fox turned and trotted off up the pasture with his prey, toward his
den on the other side of the hill; and as the discriminating sunlight
peered down into the uncovered tunnel, in a few minutes flies came to
investigate, and many industrious beetles. The body of the dead snake
was soon a centre of teeming, hungry, busy life, toiling to remove all
traces of what had happened. For Nature, though she works out almost all
her ends by tragedy, is ceaselessly attentive to conceal the red marks
of her violence.
The Ringwaak Buck
Down through the leafy tangle the sunlight fell in little irregular
splotches, flecking the ruddy-brown floor of a thicket on the southward
slope of Ringwaak. In the very heart of the thicket, curled close and
with its soft, fine muzzle resting flat on its upgathered hind legs, lay
a young fawn.
The ground, covered with a deep, elastic carpet of dead spruce and
hemlock needles, was much the same colour as the little animal's coat.
The latter, however, was diversified with spots of a lighter hue, which
matched marvellously with the scattered splotches of sunlight--so
marvellously, indeed, that only an eye that was initiated, as well as
discriminating, could tell the patches of shine from the patches of
colour or distinguish the outlines of the fawn's figure against the
blending background. There was neither sound nor movement in the
thicket. A tiny greenish-yellow worm, which had let itself down from a
branch on a yard or more of delicate filament, hung motionless and
crinkled, seeming to have forgotten the purpose of its descent. Not a
breath of wind disturbed the clear, balsamy fragrance of the shadowed
air, and the fawn appeared to sleep, though its great liquid eyes were
wide open.
During the brief absence of its mild-eyed mother the little animal was
accustomed to maintaining this voiceless and unwavering stillness,
which, combined with its colouring, made its most effective concealment.
Enemies, hungry and savage, were all about it, searching coverts and
pursuing trails. But the eyes of the hunting beasts seem to be less keen
than we are wont to imagine them--certainly less keen than the eyes of
skilled woodsmen--and an unwinking stillness may deceive the craftiest
of them. Whether because its mother had taught it to be thus motionless,
or because it was coerced by instincts inherited from ten thousand
cautious ancestors, the fawn obeyed so absolutely that even its long,
sensitive ears were not permitted to twitch. Its great eyes kept staring
out in vague apprehension at the wide, shadowy, unknown world.
Suddenly into the limpid deeps of the little watcher's eyes came a flash
of fear, like a sharp contraction in the back of the pupils. A
stealthy-footed, moon-faced, fierce-eyed beast came soundlessly to the
edge of the thicket and glared in searchingly. The fawn knew in some dim
way that this was a deadly danger that confronted him. But he never
winked or moved an anxious ear. He hardly dared to breathe. It was
almost as if a hand of ice had clutched him and held him still beyond
even the possibility of a tremor. For perhaps a full minute the huge
lynx stood there half crouching, with one big, padded fore paw upheld,
piercing the gloom with his implacable stare. He could discern nothing,
however, except spaces of reddish-brown shadow, scored with the slim,
perpendicular trunks of saplings, and spattered thicket with spots of
infiltering sunlight. But the fawn, though in full view, was perfectly
concealed--for he had that gift of fern-seed which, as the old romancers
feign, makes its possessor invisible. No wandering puff of wind came by
to tell the lynx's nose that his eyes were playing him false. At last
the uplifted fore paw came softly to the ground and he crept off like a
terrible gray shadow. For two or three seconds the fawn's sides moved
violently. Then he was once more as still as a stone.
It chanced that on this particular occasion the mother doe was long
away. The fawn got very hungry, as well as lonely, which strained his
patience to the utmost. Nevertheless, he remained obedient to the law
which shielded him, while the forest, which seems so empty, but is in
reality so populous, sent its furtive kindreds past his hiding-place.
From time to time a dainty, bead-eyed wood-mouse scurried by; or a
brooding partridge, unwilling to be long absent from her eggs, ran
hither and thither to peck her hasty meal; or a red squirrel, with
fluffy tail afloat, would dart swiftly and silently over the ground,
dash up a tree, and from the top chatter shrill defiance to the perils
which had lain wait for him below. All these things the fawn's wide eyes
observed, unconsciously laying the foundations for that wisdom of the
woods upon which his success in the merciless game of life would depend.
Once a large red fox, wary, but self-confident, trotted quietly across
one end of the thicket, within ten feet of the fawn's nose; and once
more that inward spasm which meant fear contracted the depths of the
little watcher's eyes. But the fox was sniffing with his narrow,
inquisitive snout at the places where the partridge hen had scratched,
and he never saw the fawn.
With all its advantages, however, this invisibility had certain defects
of its own. About five minutes after the fox had gone there came a
swishing of branches, a pounding of soft feet, a mysterious sound of
haste and terror, at the back of the thicket where the fawn could not
see. He did not dare to lift his head and look, but waited, quivering
with apprehension. The next moment a furry bulk landed plump upon his
flank, to bounce off again with a squeal of terror. In an uncontrollable
panic the fawn bounded to his feet, and stood trembling, while a large
hare, elongated to a straight line in the desperation of his flight,
shot crashing through the screen of branches and disappeared. As the
fawn shrank away from this incomprehensible apparition--which, as far as
he knew, might return at any instant and thump him again--a thin,
snarling, peculiarly malignant cry made him turn his head, and as he did
so a small, dark-furred beast, the hare's pursuer, sprang upon him
furiously and bore him down. For the first time he experienced the pang
of physical anguish, as fierce teeth, small, but sharp, tore at the
tender hide of his neck, feeling the way to his throat. He lay
helplessly kicking under this onslaught, and bleated piteously for his
mother.
[Illustration: "TURN HIS NARROW, SNARLING FACE TO SEE WHAT THREATENED."]
At that same moment, and just in time, the mother arrived. Her eyes,
usually so gentle, were aflame with rage. Before the fisher--for such
the daring little assailant was--could do more than turn his narrow,
snarling face to see what threatened, and while yet the first sweet
trickle of blood was in his throat, a knife-edged hoof came down upon
his back, smashing the spine. He squirmed aside and made one futile
effort to drag himself away. A second later he was pounded and trampled
into a shapeless mass.
The fisher being small and his fangs not very long, the fawn's wounds
were not serious. He picked himself up and crowded close against his
mother's flank. Tenderly the doe licked him over as he nursed, and then,
when his slim legs had stopped trembling she led him away to another
hiding-place.
This experience so jarred the little animal's nerves that for a week or
more his mother could not leave him alone, but had to snatch such
pasturage as she could get near his hiding-place. His confidence in the
tactics of invisibility had been so shaken that whenever his mother
tried to leave him he would jump up and run after her. The patient old
doe got thin under these conditions; but by the time her little one had
recovered his nerves he was strong enough to follow her to her favoured
feeding-grounds, and thereafter her problems grew daily less difficult.
The summer passed with comparatively little event, and by autumn, when
his mother began to develop other instincts, and occasionally, in the
companionship of a tall, wide-antlered buck, seemed to forget him
altogether, he was a very sturdy, self-reliant youngster, in many ways
equipped to take care of himself. Ignored by the tall buck, whom he eyed
with vague disfavour, he still hung about his mother, pasturing with her
usually, and always sleeping near her in the thickets. But his first
summer had supplied him with the most important elements of that
knowledge which a red deer's life in the wilderness of the north
demands.
The courses of the varied knowledge which the wild creatures must carry
in their brains in order to survive in the struggle would seem to be
threefold. The first, and most important, source is doubtless inherited
instinct, which supplies the constant quantity, so to speak, or the
knowledge common to all the individuals of a species. The second appears
to be experience, which teaches varying lore, according to variation in
circumstance and surrounding. In the amount of such knowledge which they
possess the individuals of a species will be found to differ widely.
But, after instinct and experience have accounted for everything that
can reasonably be credited to them, there remains a considerable and
well authenticated residuum of instances where wild creatures have
displayed a knowledge which neither instinct nor experience could well
furnish them with. In such cases observation and inference seem to agree
in ascribing the knowledge to parental teaching.
Among the lessons learned that summer by the little red buck one of the
most vital was how to keep out of the way of the bears. All the forests
about Ringwaak Hill abounded in bears; for the slopes of Ringwaak were
rich in blueberries, and bears and blueberries go together when the
wishes of the bears are at all considered. But the season of blueberries
is short, and before the blueberries are ready there are few things more
delicious to a bear's taste than a fawn or a moose calf. The bear,
however, is not a very pertinacious trailer, nor does he excel in
running long distances at top speed. When it is young moose or deer he
is wanting, his way is to lie hidden behind some brush-screened stump or
boulder till the victim comes by, then dart out a huge paw and settle
the matter at one stroke. Such might well have been the fate of the
little red buck that summer but that he learned to look with wary eye on
every ambush that might hide a bear. To all these perilous places he
gave wide berth, sometimes avoiding them altogether and sometimes
circling about at safe distances till he could get the wind of them and
find out whether they held a menace or not.
Another important truth borne in upon him that first summer was that
man, the most to be dreaded of all creatures, was, notwithstanding,
capable of being most useful to the deer people. To the west of Ringwaak
lay a line of scattered settlements and lonely upland farms. Along the
edge of the forest were open fields, where the men had roots and grains
which the deer found very good to eat. Often the little red buck and his
mother would break into one of these fields and feast riotously on the
succulent crops. But at the first glimpse, smell, or sound of man, or
of the noisy dogs who served man and dwelt with him, they would be off
like swift shadows to their remotest retreats. The wise old doe knew a
lot about man; and so, however it came about, the little red buck had a
lot of useful information upon the same subject. At the same time,
through some inexplicable caprice of his mother's, he acquired a
dangerous habit that was in no way consistent with his prudent attitude
toward man. The old doe had a whimsical liking for cows, and would
sometimes lead her fawn into one of the remoter back-lot cow-pastures to
feed among the cattle. She neither permitted nor offered any
familiarities whatever to these heavy, alien beasts, but for some reason
she liked to be among them. The little red buck, therefore, although he
knew the cattle were associated with man and cared for by him, got into
the way of visiting the cow-pastures occasionally and feeding on the
sweet, close-cropped grasses. Fortunately, he learned from the first
that milking-time was a time when the pastures were to be avoided.
Yet another lesson the little buck learned that fall one day when he and
his mother were crossing the road near the settlement. Two of the
village dogs--mongrels neither very keen of nose nor very resolute of
temper--caught sight of them, and gave chase with noisy cry. Away
through the woods went doe and fawn together, bounding lightly, at a
pace that soon left their pursuers far behind. For these pursuers the
old doe had no very great respect--at a pinch, indeed, she would have
faced them and fought them with her nimble fore hoofs, and she did not
want to tire the fawn unnecessarily. When the yelping of the dogs grew
faint in the distance she wheeled around a half-circle of perhaps fifty
feet in diameter, ran back a little way, and lay down with the fawn
beside her to watch the trail. By the time they were both thoroughly
rested the dogs came panting by, noses to the ground. As soon as they
were well past the two fugitives jumped up and made off again at full
speed in another direction. After one repetition of this familiar
manoeuvre the dogs gave up the game in disgust. The little red buck had
learned a handy trick, but he had learned, at the same time, to take
dogs too lightly.
That winter the doe and fawn, with another doe, were in a manner taken
in charge by the tall, wide-antlered buck, who, when the snow began to
get deep, selected a sunny slope where groves of thick spruce were
interspersed with clumps of young poplar and birch. Hither he led his
little herd, and here he established his winter quarters, treading out
paths from grove to grove and from thicket to thicket, so that even when
the snow lay from four to five feet deep the herd could move about
freely from one feeding-place to another. The memory of all this fixed
itself securely in the recesses of the little buck's brain, to serve him
in good stead in later winters.
When at last the snow vanished and the hillside brooks ran full and
loud, and spring, with her cool colours and fresh scents, was in full
possession of Ringwaak, the little herd scattered. The old doe stole off
by herself one day when he was not noticing, and the yearling found
himself left solitary. For a few days he was lonely and spent much of
his time looking for his mother. Then, being of self-reliant disposition
and very large and vigorous for his age, and well endowed with the joy
of life, he forgot his loss and became pleasantly absorbed in the
wilderness world of Ringwaak, with its elations, and satisfactions, and
breathless adventures, and thrilling escapes. That autumn he grew
pugnacious, and get more than one thrashing from full-grown bucks whom
he was so foolhardy as to offend. But his defeats were the best kind of
instruction, and he was growing both in strength and stature beyond the
ordinary custom of his kind. By the time another winter and another
summer had gone over him he was ready to wipe out all past humiliations.
When he stopped to drink at the glassy pool which lies in a granite
pocket half-way up the western slope of Ringwaak he saw a reflection of
the most redoubtable buck on all that range, and when the other bucks
responded to his challenge they one after another met defeat. That
winter, when he established his yard and trod out his range of paths
among the birch and poplar thickets, he had three does and two fawns
under his leadership.
During the next two years he became famous throughout the settlements.
Every one had heard of the big buck who was so bold about showing
himself when no one was ready for him, but so crafty in eluding the
hunters. He was seen from time to time in the pastures with the cattle,
but never when there was a gun within reach. On many a field of earing
grain he stamped the broad defiance of his ravages, till for miles about
every backwoods sportsman began to dream of winning those noble
antlers.
[Illustration: "WHEN HE STOPPED TO DRINK AT THE GLASSY POOL."]
The last farm of the settlement toward the northwest, where the road
leads off over wooded dips and rises to the valley of the turbulent
Ottanoonsis, belonged to an old bachelor farmer named Ramsay. This farm
the red buck seemed to have selected for his special and distinguished
attention. He loved Ramsay's bean-fields and his corn-patch. He loved
his long, sea-green turnip rows. He loved even the little garden before
the kitchen window, where he easily learned to like cabbages and
cucumbers and tried vainly to acquire a taste for onions and
peppergrass. The visits to the garden were invariably paid when Ramsay
was away at the crossroads store or during the dark hours of those
particular nights when Ramsay slept soundest. The gaunt old farmer vowed
vengeance, and kept his long-barrelled duck gun loaded with buckshot,
and wasted many days lying in wait for the marauder or following his
trail through the tumbled, sweet-smelling autumn woods of Ringwaak. At
last, however, though his desire for vengeance had by no means
slackened, the grim old farmer woodsman began to take a certain pride in
his adversary's prowess, along with a certain jealous apprehension lest
those daring antlers should fall a trophy to some other gun than his.
When the buck would perpetrate some particularly audacious depredation
on the corn or cabbages, Ramsay's first burst of wrath would be
succeeded by something akin to respectful appreciation. He would pull
his scraggy and grizzled chin with his gnarled fingers contemplatively,
and a twinkle of understanding humour would supplant the anger in his
shrewd, blue, woods-wise eyes as he stood surveying the damage. Such an
antagonist was worth while, and Ramsay registered a vow that that fine
hide should keep him warm in winter, those illustrious antlers adorn no
other walls but his.
But there were many others who had similar views as to the destiny of
the great Ringwaak buck, whose fame by the opening of his fourth season
had spread far beyond the limits of the Ringwaak settlements. Late in
the fourth autumn a couple of new settlers on the lower river decided to
make a trip up to Ringwaak and try their luck. They had heard of the big
buck's craft in foiling the trailers, of his almost inspired sagacity in
avoiding ambuscade. But they were prepared to play an entirely new card
against him. They brought with them two splendid dogs of mixed Scotch
deerhound and collie blood who were not only fierce but intelligent,
not only tireless but swift.
When these two long-legged, long-jawed, iron gray dogs were loosed upon
his trail the big buck chanced to be watching them from the heart of a
thicket on a knoll less than one hundred yards away. At least, as the
crow flies, it was about that distance, but by the windings of the trail
it was fully a mile. It was with equanimity, therefore, that the buck
gazed down upon these two strange arrivals, till he perceived by their
actions that it was his own trail they were following. Then a spark of
anger came into his great liquid eyes, and he stamped his sharp hoofs,
as if he would like to wait and give battle. But these were antagonists
too formidable for even so hardy a fighter as he; so he decided to get
away in good time. He was only half in earnest about it, however, for
after all, big as they were, these were only dogs, and dogs were easy to
elude. He amused himself with three or four mighty leaps, first in one
direction, then in another, to give his pursuers something to puzzle
over. Then he went bounding lightly away along the skirts of the
mountains, northwestward, toward the more familiar and favoured section
of his range. When he came to a brook he would run a little way up or
down the channel before resuming his flight. And at last, when his
velvet sides were beginning to heave from so much exercise, he made his
accustomed loop in the trail and lay down, well satisfied to wait for
the pursuers to go by.
There was only one thing that made him a little nervous as he waited in
the covert overlooking his back tracks. These dogs were so silent,
compared with the curs he was used to. An occasional sharp yelp, just
enough to let their masters know where they were, was all the noise they
made. They attended strictly to business. The buck did not expect to
hear anything of them for some time, but he had hardly been lying in his
covert more than five minutes when those staccato yelps came faintly to
his ears. He was startled. How had the creatures so quickly solved the
complexities of his trail? He had no apprehension of the sure cunning
with which those dogs could cut across curves and pick up the trail
anew. Still less did he realize their appalling speed. When next their
voices struck upon his ear they were so close that for an instant his
heart stood still. But his craft did not fail him. Without waiting to
see the lean, long shapes flash by, he arose and noiselessly faded
back through the covert, moving as softly as a shadow till he felt
himself out of ear-shot. Then he dashed away at top speed, determined to
put a safe distance between himself and these disconcerting adversaries.
[Illustration: "NOISELESSLY FADED BACK THROUGH THE COVERT."]
He kept on now till his heart was near bursting, and when at last he
made his strategic loop and lay down to rest and watch he felt that he
must have secured ample time to recover. But not so. Before he had half
got his wind, and while his flanks were yet heaving painfully, those
meagre but terrible cries again drew near. This time, perforce, he let
the pursuers run by, and saw that they seemed as fresh as ever. Then he
sprang up and resumed the flight, shaken by the first chill of real
terror that he had known since that forgotten day in the thicket when
the hare and the fisher jumped upon him.
His flight now led him past the back lots of Ramsay's farm, where the
cattle were pasturing. Either because his sudden fear made him seek
companionship or with an idea of confusing his scent with that of the
cattle, he leaped into the pasture and ran here and there among the
mildly wondering cows. Then he leaped the fence again at the farthest
corner, plumped into the thick underbrush, and headed toward the fields
with which he had been wont to make so free. He had just vanished in the
leafage when his pursuers appeared at the other side of the pasture.
They ran in at once among the cows, paying no heed whatever to angry
snorts and levelled horns, unravelled the trail with perfect ease,
dashed over the fence again, and darted into the underbrush with a new
note of triumph in their yelpings.
When the buck heard their voices so close behind him his knees almost
gave way. He knew he could not run much farther, and he knew his shifts
were all vain against such implacable foes as these. He half-paused,
with a brave impulse to stand at bay. But some other impulse, undefined,
but potent, urged him on toward Ramsay's farm. It was familiar ground,
and he had never suffered any hurt there. He knew that the old farmer
was most dangerous, but he was not an instant, horrible, inevitable
menace like this which was close upon his heels. Moreover, he had seen
the cattle go up to the barn-yard and take refuge there, and come away
in safety.
[Illustration: "THEN HE LEAPED THE FENCE AGAIN."]
With the last of his ebbing strength he burst forth into the open, ran
across the corn-field, passed the corner of the garden, brushed
against the end of the well-sweep, and paused before the open door of
the stable. The heavy door was carelessly propped open with a stick. In
contrast with the glare of the sunshine outside, the interior looked
black and safe. But all about, though mixed with the smell of the
cattle, was the dreaded smell of man. He wheeled aside, dimly intending
to go around the stable and resume his hopeless flight, but as he did so
the yelp of his pursuers broke louder upon his ears. He saw them break
from the woods and dart into the corn-field. This decided him. He
wheeled again, half-staggering, struck blunderingly against the stick
which propped the door open, stumbled across the threshold, ran to the
innermost depths of the stable, and fell gasping into a box stall which
Ramsay had once built for a colt. At the same moment the heavy door, no
longer propped back, swung to with a slam, the big wooden latch rising
smoothly and dropping securely into place.
When the dogs arrived and found the door shut against them they broke
into angry clamour. Once around the building they ran to see if there
was any other entrance. Then they clawed savagely at the door, barking
and growling in their balked fury. Their noise brought Ramsay on the
run from the potato-field, over the rise, where he was working. He was
surprised to see two strange dogs making such a fuss at his stable door.
Being a canny backwoodsman, however, instead of going straight to the
door, he went around behind the stable and looked in the window.
When Ramsay saw the shivering, tawny form and great antlers on the floor
of the stall his heart swelled with exultation. The coveted trophies
were his. He ran into the kitchen for his gun. Then he changed his mind
and picked up, instead, his long hunting-knife. When he approached the
stable door the dogs turned upon him threateningly. But the crisp voice
of authority with which he ordered them aside was something they were
quite too clever to defy. Sullenly, with red eyes of wrath, they obeyed,
waiting for their masters to arrive and support them.
Ramsay closed the door carefully behind him and strode to the box stall,
knife in hand. On its threshold he paused and scrutinized the captive
with triumphant admiration. Sure, besides the trophies of hide and
horns, there was meat enough there to do him all winter--tough, perhaps,
but sweet, seeing that it had been fatted on his choicest crops. He
looked at the animal's heaving sides and realized what a magnificent run
he must have made. Then as he stepped forward with his knife he wondered
what could have induced the beast to flee to such a refuge. The buck was
gazing up at him with wide eyes, reassured by the man's quiet. There was
no terror in that gaze, but only a sort of anxious question; and he
never flinched, though the laboured breath came quicker through his
nostrils as the man approached his head.
As Ramsay met that anxious, questioning look, the eager triumph in his
own eyes died away, and his grim mouth softened to a half-abashed,
half-quizzical smile. The bright blade in his hand slipped furtively
into his belt, as if he didn't want the buck to notice it. Then,
muttering approvingly, "Ye've fooled 'em, ain't ye!" he picked up a
little shallow tub that stood in a corner of the stall and started out
to the well to get the beast a drink.
As he closed the stable door behind him two perspiring men with guns
entered the yard from the corn-field, and were eagerly greeted by the
dogs. "Good day," said one, politely. "We're after a big buck which our
dogs here have run down for us. He must have hidden in your barn."
Ramsay eyed the visitors with ill disguised antagonism and fingered his
scraggy chin before he answered.
"Ya-as," he drawled. "I've got a mighty fine buck in there--the old
Ringwaak buck himself, as everybody's heard tell of. But, beggin' your
pardon, friends, I reckon he's goin' to stay in there for the present."
The strangers studied the old man's strong face for a moment or two in
silence, noted the latent fire in the depths of his eyes, and realized
that there was nothing to be done. Whistling the dogs to heel, they
strode off, angry and disgusted. But before they had gone far the one
who had spoken turned around.
"I'll give you fifty dollars for those horns," he said abruptly.
"Ef they're wuth fifty dollars they're good enough for me to keep,"
drawled Ramsay, never moving from where he stood. And with resentful
eyes he watched them out of sight before he went to the well.
During the next four days half the men and boys in the settlement, with
not a few of the women, visited Ramsay's barn to view the famous
captive. The buck, well fed and watered, had recovered himself in a few
hours, and seemed none the worse for his adventure. All his former
arrogance, too, had returned, and visitors were careful to keep at a
safe distance. But Ramsay he recognized, apparently, as either protector
or master, and Ramsay could enter the stall at any time. The buck would
sidle off and eye him anxiously, but show no sign of the furious anger
which the visitors excited.
To all inquiries as to what he would do with his captive Ramsay would
answer, "Sell him to circus, maybe." But it was not till several weeks
had passed and the settlement had got over its interest in the matter
that he was able to quite make up his mind. Then, one crisp autumn
morning, when the woods were all yellow and red, he went over to the
next farm and asked his neighbour, a handy young farmer, to come and
help him get the captive aboard a hay-wagon.
"Got a chance to sell him up to the Falls," he vouchsafed in brief
explanation, and the explanation was one to content the whole
settlement.
There was a strenuous hour or two before the indignant animal was roped
and trussed into helplessness. Then the bruised and panting men hoisted
the prisoner into the hay-wagon and tied him so he could not be bounced
off; and Ramsay started on the rough twenty-five mile drive to the
Falls.
About seventeen miles from Ringwaak the road crossed the Ottanoonsis,
whose wild current filled the valley with noise and formed an impassable
northern frontier to the Ringwaak region. It was generally believed that
the wild creatures of the Ringwaak region held little intercourse with
those north of the Ottanoonsis, by reason of that stream's turbulence.
As soon as Ramsay found himself across the bridge he stopped and once
more drew his hunting-knife. At the flash of the blade the captive
looked up wonderingly from his bonds. Leaning over him, the old man's
face broke into a sheepish grin. But he did not hesitate. Three or four
properly distributed strokes of the knife, and the ropes fell apart. The
captive lifted his splendid head, kicked, and struggled to his feet,
bewildered.
"Now," said Ramsay, "Git!"
As he spoke he snapped his long whip sharply. With a magnificent leap
the buck went out and over the wheels and vanished with great sailing
bounds into the wild Ottanoonsis forest. Then Ramsay turned slowly back
toward home, thinking a thrilling story for the settlement about the
cunning escape of the Ringwaak buck.
The Heron in the Reeds
Though haying was almost done on the uplands, over the wide, level,
treeless meadow-island the heavy grass stood still uncut, its rank
growth taking long to ripen. The warm wind that drew across it from time
to time in a vague, elusive rhythm was burdened with rich summer scents,
the mid-noon distillations from the vetch and clover and lily and
yellow-daisy blooms which thronged among the grass-heads, and from the
flaunting umbels of the wild parsnip which towered above them. Over this
radiant and pregnant luxuriance the air quivered softly, and hummed with
the murmur of foraging bees and flies, glad in the heat.
The island lay on the tranquil river like a splendid green enamel on
blue porcelain. Its level, at this season, lay several feet above that
of the water, and its shores, fantastically looped with little,
sweeping coves and jutting points, were fringed with deep rushes of
intense, glaucous green. Whenever the wind puffed lightly over them, the
tops of the rushes bowed gravely together in long ranks, and turned
silvery gray. Here and there above them fluttered a snipe, signalling
its hidden young, then winging off across the water to the next point,
with a clear, two-noted whistle.
On one of the little jutting points, where a log lay half-submerged in
trailing water-weeds, stood a tall blue heron balanced motionless on one
long, stilt-like leg. Its head, drawn flat back between the high
shoulders, came about ten inches above the tops of the sedge. Its long,
keen, javelin-like beak lay along its protruding breast, in readiness to
dart in any direction. Its round, gem-like eyes, hard as glass in their
glitter, took in not only the wide, blue-and-green empty landscape, but
equally every movement of the sedge-fringe and the weedy shallows
along-shore.
For some minutes the great bird was as still as a carven figure. Then,
for no apparent reason, the long neck uncoiled violently like a loosed
crossbow, and the javelin beak shot downward with a movement almost too
swift for the eye to follow. Deep into the weeds and water it
darted,--to return with a small, silvery chub securely transfixed. One
smart, sidelong blow of the wriggling fish upon the log ended its
struggles. Then the skilful fisher threw his prize up in the air, caught
it as it fell, swallowed it head foremost, and relapsed into his
watchful immobility.
This time he had not quite so long to wait. Again the coiled spring of
his neck was loosed, again that lightning lance darted downward into the
water, and returned with a kicking trophy. Now it was a large
brown-and-green frog, which the victor had more difficulty in killing.
For half a minute he whacked it savagely against the side of the log,
before he could satisfy himself that the limp, bedragged form was past
all effort to escape. Then, picking it up between the tips of his beak,
he stepped from his log, strode with awkward dignity some paces up the
shore, and hid the prize safely in the heart of a tussock of
sedge-grass. Not only for himself was the big blue heron fishing, but
also, and first of all, for certain extraordinarily hungry nestlings in
a cedar swamp behind the neighbouring hills.
Having hidden the frog, the heron raised his head and steadily surveyed
the shores. Then he spread his long wings and flapped up to a height of
seven or eight feet, where he commanded a comprehensive view of the
meadows. Assured that no peril was lurking near, he winnowed slowly
along the shore, his legs trailing ludicrously, and dropped again to
earth at the next point. The moment he touched ground and steadied
himself he became once more the moveless image of a bird, as if just
projected into solidity from the face of a Japanese screen.
At this point, however, fortune failed to smile upon his fishing. For
full five minutes he waited, and neither fish nor frog came within
reach. Suddenly he unlimbered, and went stalking gravely up along the
sloppy mud between the reeds and the shrunken water. As he went, his
long neck craned alternately to one side and the other, and his eyes
pierced every retreat among the rushes or the water-weeds. Sometimes he
snapped up a tiny shiner, or a big black water-beetle, which he promptly
swallowed; but he got no more prizes worth carrying back to the nest
behind the hills. He went forward somewhat briskly, therefore, being in
haste to reach a bit of good frogging-ground a little farther on. At
length, coming to the mouth of a sluggish rivulet, he started to wade
across it, not carefully observing how he set down his feet in the
tangle of weeds and eel-grass. From under the tangle came a muffled
"click." With a startled squawk he lifted his wings, as something
grabbed him by the toes, and held him fast. He was in the iron clutch of
a muskrat trap.
That one squawk was the only sound he uttered; but his powerful wings
threshed the air desperately as he strained to wrench himself free.
There was no such thing, of course, as relaxing the strong jaws of the
trap, or wrenching his foot free; but he did succeed in pulling the trap
up from its bed under the water-grass and dragging it out upon the shore
to the full limit of the light chain which held it. Having accomplished
this much, he was quiet for some minutes, while his fierce eyes
scrutinized with fear and wonder the incomprehensible creature which had
fastened upon him. After three or four frantic efforts to stab it with
his redoubtable beak, he was quick to realize that this was an
invulnerable foe. He seemed to realize, also, that it was an inanimate
foe; for after due consideration he set himself to pulling it and
feeling it with the tip of his beak, seeking some way of getting rid of
it. At last, finding all this temperate effort useless, he blazed out
into a frantic rage. He would jump, and tug, and flop, and spring into
the air, and almost wrench the captive toes from their sockets. But all
he accomplished was to make his leg ache intolerably, clear up to the
thigh. At length he desisted and stood trembling, so exhausted that he
could hardly keep his feet.
[Illustration: "HE WAS IN THE IRON CLUTCH OF A MUSKRAT TRAP."]
Meanwhile, it chanced that two boys in a birch-bark canoe were paddling
up the river. The extraordinary antics of the blue heron caught their
eyes. They had never heard that this most stately of birds was subject
to fits; and they were filled with wonder. Paddling ashore with all
speed, they momently expected the great bird to recover himself at their
approach and flop heavily away, as herons are wont to do when one seeks
to observe them too closely. When near enough, however, to see what the
trouble was, they were much elated, as they had long wanted to capture a
blue heron and observe his habits in captivity.
As the boys ran their canoe ashore the bird was just yielding to
exhaustion. His dauntless spirit, however, was by no means broken by his
misfortune. At sight of the intruders his fierce eyes hardened, and his
head drew back warily between his shoulders. "Look out! Don't go near
that beak!" shouted the elder boy, as the younger sprang forward to
secure the coveted prize.
The warning came barely in time. That long neck had flashed forward to
its full length,--and just fallen short of the enemy's stockinged leg.
"Gee whizz!" exclaimed the lad, with a nervous laugh. "If that had
struck, I guess it would have gone clean through! How are we going to
disarm him?"
"Watch me!" said the elder, as he snatched up his coat from the canoe.
This effective weapon he threw over the bird's head; and in a few
moments the captive was so securely trussed up that he could do nothing
but eye his captors with implacable and indomitable hate. The cruel trap
was removed from his toes, and their bruises carefully washed. Then very
respectfully he was deposited in the bottom of the canoe, and in high
elation the boys paddled off.
They had not gone far, however, when a thought struck them both at the
same time, and both stopped paddling. They looked at each other with
misgivings.
"Well, what is it?" asked the younger, reluctantly.
"I'm afraid," answered the elder, "it's a blame mean trick we're playing
on the old bird, at this season! Eh? What do you think?"
"Perhaps so!" assented the other with a sigh, looking wistfully down at
their prize. "I never thought about the young ones."
Without a word more they proceeded to loose the bonds of their prisoner.
The moment he was free he struck at them savagely; but they had been on
guard against such ingratitude, and got out of the way in time. Then he
sprang into the air and flapped away indignantly; while the boys stared
after him wistfully, half-repenting of their gentleness.
In the Deep of the Silences
I
In the ancient wild there were three great silences that held their
habitations unassailed. They were the silence of the deep of the lake,
the silence of the dark heart of the cedar swamp, and the silence of the
upper air, high above the splintered peak of the mountain.
To this immeasurable quiet of upper air but one of all the earth sounds
could come. That one sound was of such quality that it seemed rather to
intensify the silence than disturb it. It was so absolutely alone, so
naked of all that murmurous background which sustains yet obscures the
individual sounds of earth's surface, that it served merely as an accent
to the silence. It was the fine, vibrant hiss of the smitten air against
the tense feathers of the soaring eagle.
[Illustration: "HIS COURSE TOOK HIM FAR OUT OVER THE SOUNDLESS SPACES."]
Through the immense, unclouded solitude the eagle swung majestically in
a great circle. At one point in the vast, deliberate swing he was
directly above the bald, deep-riven peak of granite upthrust from its
mantling forest of firs,--directly above it, at a height of not more
than a few hundred feet. The rest of his course took him far out over
the soundless spaces of the landscape, which formed an enormous bowl
rimmed by the turquoise horizon. The bowl was all a many-shaded green,
stains of the light green of birch and poplar blending with the austere
green-black of fir, cedar, and hemlock. Here and there through the dense
colour gleamed sharply the loops and coils of three watercourses and at
the centre of the bowl, glowing in the transparent brilliancy of the
northern day, shone the clear mirror of the lake. At that point of his
aërial path when the eagle swung farthest from the peak, he hung
straight over the middle of the lake and looked down into its depths.
Though no lightest breath was astir far down on the lake surface and not
a tree-top swayed in the forest, up here where the eagle was soaring
streamed a viewless and soundless wind. So it came about that at some
portions of his swing the eagle's wide, apparently moveless wings would
tilt a little, careening ever so slightly, and their tense-webbed
feathers would set themselves at a delicately different angle to the
air-current. When this took place, there would be a different note in
that strange whisper. The vibrant hiss would change to a faint, ghostly
humming, which again would fade away as the rigid feathers readjusted
themselves to another point of the gigantic curve.
Over the soaring black wings the intense sapphire of the zenith thrilled
and melted; but the eyes of the eagle were not directed upward, since
there was nothing above him but sky, and air, and the infinitude of
silence. As he swung, his gleaming, snow-white head and neck were
stretched downward toward the earth. His fierce yellow eyes, unwavering,
brilliant, and clear like crystal, deep set beneath straight,
overhanging brows, searched the far panorama with an incredibly piercing
gaze. At such a distance that the most penetrating human eye--the eye of
a sailor, a plains' ranger, a backwoods' huntsman, or an enumerator of
the stars--could not discern him in his soundless altitude, he could
mark the fall of a leaf or the scurry of a mouse in the sedge-grass.
Though the range of his marvellous vision was so vast, the eagle could
not see beneath the surfaces of the lake except when he soared straight
over it. At one point in his course the baffling reflections of the
surface vanished, and his gaze pierced to the bottom. But from all other
points the lake presented to him either a mirror of stainless blue, or a
dazzling shield of bright steel.
For an hour or more, on wide, untiring wings, the great bird sailed and
watched. The furtive life of the wilderness, all unaware of that high
impending doom, revealed itself to him, yet he saw nothing to draw him
down out of his realm of silence.
Except for that mysterious whisper of the smitten air in his own wings,
it was to the eagle as if all the action and movement of earth had been
struck dumb. Once he saw a black cow moose, tormented with flies, lurch
out madly from the thickets and plunge wallowing into the lake. High
splashed and flashed the water about her floundering bulk; but not a
whisper of it came up to him. Once he saw a pair of swimming loons
stretching their necks alternately as high as they could above the
water, and opening wide their straight, sharp beaks. He well knew the
strident, wild cries with which they were answering each other, setting
loose a rout of crazy echoes all up and down the shores. But not a
ghost of an echo reached him. It was all dumb show. And once, on the
lower slope of the mountain, an ancient fir-tree, its foothold on the
rocks worn away by frost and flood of countless seasons, fell into the
ravine. He saw the mighty downward sweep and plunge, the convulsion of
branches below; but of the sullen roar that startled the mountainside no
faintest sound arose to him.
At last, as he was wheeling over the centre of the lake, his inescapable
eye saw something which interested him. His great wings flapped heavily,
checking his course. He tipped suddenly, half-shut his wings, and shot
straight downward perhaps a thousand feet. Here he stopped his descent
with a sharp upward turn which made the wind whistle harshly in his
wings. And here he hung, hovering, watching, waiting for the opportunity
that now seemed close at hand.
II
In the heart of the cedar swamp the silence was thick, brooding, and
imperishable. One felt that if ever any wandering sound, any lost
bird-cry or call of wayfaring beast, should drop into it, the intruding
voice would be straightway engulfed, smothered, and forgotten.
The ground beneath the stiff branches and between the gray, ragged,
twisted trunks was grotesquely humped with moss-grown roots and pitted
with pools of black water. Here and there amid the heavy moss fat
fungoid growths thrust up their heads, dead white, or cold red, or pink,
or spotted orange. The few scattered herbs that flourished among the
humped and dangerous pools were solitary in habit, broad of leaf, tall
and succulent of stalk. Not one of them bore any gay or perfumed
blossom, to lure into the swamp the brightness of a butterfly or the
homely humming of wild bees.
The only bird that habitually endured the stillness and the gloom of the
cedar swamp was a shadowy, silent, elusive little nuthatch, which spent
its time slipping up and down the ragged trunks, uttering at wide
intervals its faint, brief note. So furtive a being, and so shy and rare
a voice, only made the silence more impressive, the solitude more
profound.
A great black bulk, moving noiselessly as a shadow hither and thither
among the shadows, seemed the spirit of the swamp made palpable. The
old bear, having learned that certain of the big toadstools growing in
the swamp were very good to eat, had taken to haunting the silence of
the glooms in the season when the fungoids flourished. The solitude and
the stillness suited his morose temper; and for all his seeming
awkwardness he moved as delicately as a cat. His great sharp-clawed feet
seemed shod with velvet, and never a twig snapped under his stealthy
tread. It was not through fear that he went thus softly, for he feared
no creature of the wilderness. But the heavy silence was attuned to his
mood; and besides, he never knew when he might surprise some mouse,
water-rat, or mink that would furnish variety to his toadstool diet.
Such a fortunate surprise, however, could befall him but seldom in the
empty solitude of the swamp. So it happened that, one day when he tired
of the fat, insipid fungoids, his thought turned to the lake, on whose
shores he had sometimes found dead fish. He remembered, with watering
chops, that he had even once or twice been able to catch live fish,
close in shore, by lying in wait for them with exhaustless patience and
scooping them up at last with a lightning sweep of the paw.
[Illustration: "FOR ALL HIS SEEMING AWKWARDNESS HE MOVED AS DELICATELY
AS A CAT."]
Ignoring the toadstools, he turned straight south, and made his way
toward the lake. He travelled swiftly, winding this way and that between
the green, humped roots, the gray trunks, and the black water-pits. But
swiftly as he went, his movement left no trail of sound behind it. A
shadow could not have moved more noiselessly. It was as if the age-old
silence simply seized and folded away for ever the impact of his great
footfalls on the moss. When at length he caught the flash of the bright
water ahead of him through the trees, he moved even more cautiously, so
extreme was his circumspection. Reaching the edge of the cedar growth,
he slipped unseen into a thicket of red willows which afforded a
convenient ambush, and peered out warily to assure himself as to what
might be going on around the shores. For a long while he crouched there
as moveless as a stone, that if by mischance his coming had given alarm
to any of the wilderness folk, suspicion might have time to die away.
III
In the mid-deep of the lake the silence was absolute. There was no hiss
of tense feathers to accentuate it, as in the upper vast of air. There
was no fading and elusive bird-note to measure it by, as in the gloom of
the cedar swamp. Down in the gold-brown glimmer the fine silt lay
unstirred on the stones. There was no movement, except the delicate,
almost imperceptible waving of the great trout's coloured fins.
In the shallower water along the edges of the lake there was always a
faint confusion of small sounds. The slow breathing of the lake, as it
were, kept up a rhythmic, almost invisible motion among the smaller
pebbles, making a crisp whisper which the water carried far beneath the
surface while it could not be heard at all in the air above. But none of
this stir reached the silent deeps where the big trout, morose and
enamoured of his solitude, lay lazily opening and shutting his crimson
gills.
Because the water of the lake was dark,--amber-tinted from the swamps
about its shores,--the colours of the trout were dark, strong, and
vivid. His strangely patterned back was almost black, yet brilliant,
like some kinds of damascened steel. His belly was bright pink. His
sides had a purplish hue, on which the rows of intense vermilion spots
stood out almost incongruously. His fins were as gaudy as the petals of
some red-and-white flower.
The trout was staring upward with his blank, lidless eyes. He was
hungry, and he felt that it was from that direction that food was like
to come to him most easily. Smaller fish had learned, from the fate of
so many of their fellows, to shun the haunted stillness of this mid-lake
depth; and the big trout was growing tired of caddis bait and such small
game.
The surface of the lake, as he looked up at it, presented to him a sort
of semitransparent mirror, thronged with reflections, yet allowing the
sky overhead, and the shadows of many dreaming insects, to show through.
If a swallow, for instance, or a low-winged snipe, flew over, the trout
could see not only the bird itself, and the shadow of the bird on the
bottom, but also a dim, swift-moving reflection of the shadow, on the
silvery mirror above. If a swallow's wing-tip flicked the surface,
sending down a bright little jet of bubbles, these bubbles also would
double themselves in reflections as they darted up again and vanished in
the mirroring ripples.
All this, however, was of little interest to the hungry trout, till he
caught sight of a large butterfly zigzagging languidly close above the
water. Its flight was so feeble that the big fish's expectations were
aroused. Slowly he started upwards, to be on hand for whatever favour
fortune might have in store for him.
As he swam up out of the gloom, the butterfly flickered above him, and
its big shadow danced along the bottom beside his own. A small beetle,
its wings all outspread, struck the surface violently close by,
shattering the mirror for a second, then starting a series of tiny
ripples. The big trout paid no heed to the convulsive gyrations of the
beetle. He was wholly intent upon the butterfly, whose faltering flight
drooped ever nearer and nearer to the shining flood. At last, the
splendid painted wings failed to flutter; and lightly, softly, like a
leaf, the gorgeous insect sank upon the water, hardly marring the
surface. Without a struggle, without even a quiver. They rested,--for
perhaps a second. Then, there was a heavy boil in the water immediately
beneath. A pair of black jaws opened. The dead butterfly was sucked
down. With a wanton flick of his broad, powerful tail, just above the
surface, the big trout turned to sink back into the watery silence with
his spoils.
[Illustration: "THE WATER SPLASHED HIGH AND WHITE ABOUT HIM."]
IV
There was a harsh, strong hissing in the air, and a dark body fell out
of the sky. Fell? Rather it seemed to have been shot downward from a
catapult. No mere falling could be so swift as that sheer yet governed
descent. Just at the surface of the water the wedge of the eagle's body
turned, his snow-white head and neck bent upwards, his broad wings
spread, and beat heavily. In spite of the terrific force of his descent,
his body did not go wholly under water, but the water splashed high and
white about him. The next instant he rose clear, flapping ponderously.
In the iron clutch of his talons writhed the great trout, gripped behind
the head and by the middle of the back, its tail thrashing
spasmodically.
Never before had this fierce and majestic visitant from the upper
silence fallen upon so difficult a prey. Its weight, alone, was all that
his mighty wings could lift; and its vehement writhings were so full of
energy that it was all he could do to hold it. With his most strenuous
flapping, he could hardly lift the victim clear of the water. To bear it
off to his lonely rock-ledge on the peak was manifestly impossible.
After a few moments of laborious indecision he beat his way heavily
toward shore. Nowhere, up and down the beach, in the thickets, or in the
dark corridors of the forest, could his piercing eyes detect any foe.
The nearest point of land was an arrow ribbon of clean white rock with a
screen of Indian willow close behind it. This point he made for. A few
feet above the water's edge he alighted. For a moment he stood
haughtily, his hard, implacable yellow eyes challenging the wilderness.
Then, his snake-like white head stooped quickly forward, and his
powerful beak bit clear through to the victim's backbone, a little
behind the spot where it joined the neck. The trout's body stiffened
straight out, with a strong shudder, then lay limp and still. Very
deliberately, as if scorning to display his hunger, the royal bird began
to make his meal.
But one palpitating morsel had gone down his outstretched, snowy throat,
when it seemed to him that a leaf whispered in the willow thicket behind
him. There was no air stirring, so why should a leaf whisper? His claws
relaxed their grip upon the prey; his wings shot out and gave one
powerful flap; he bounced lightly upward and aside. At the same moment a
black bulk burst out from the willow thicket, and a great black paw
smote at him savagely.
The eagle had sprung aside just in time. Had that terrific buffet fairly
reached him, never again would he have mounted to his aërial haunts of
silence. But as it was, the sweep of the black paw just touched the
bird's tail. Two or three dark, regal feathers fluttered to the ground.
His spacious pinions caught the air and winnowed out a few feet over the
water. The bear, content at having captured the prize, paid no more
attention to him, but greedily fell upon the prey.
Ordinarily, an eagle would no more think of interfering with a bear than
of assailing a granite boulder. But in this case the aggravation was
unprecedented. Never before had the "King of the Air" known what it was
to have his lawful prey and hard-won spoils snatched from him. With a
sudden sharp yelp of rage he whirled, shot upward, and swooped, with a
twang of stiff-set feathers, straight at his adversary's head. Totally
unprepared for such a daring assault, the bear could not ward it off.
Several sudden red gashes on his head showed where those knife-like
talons had struck. "_Wah!_" he bawled, half-rising on his haunches and
throwing up a great forearm in defence. The eagle, swooping upward out
of reach, swung round and hovered as if about to repeat the attack.
As the bear crouched, half-sitting, one paw on the mangled prey, the
other uplifted in readiness for stroke or parry, the furious bird
hesitated. He knew the full menace of that massive upraised paw, which,
clumsy though it looked, could strike as swiftly as the darting head of
a snake. For all his rage, he had no mind to risk a maimed wing. In a
second or two he swooped again, this time as if to catch the foe in the
back; but he took care not to come too close. The bear whirled on his
haunches, and struck viciously; but his claws met nothing but empty air,
while a stiff wing-tip brushed smartingly across his eyes.
Again, and yet again, the eagle swooped, never coming quite within
reach. Again and yet again the bear, boiling with embarrassed fury,
whirled and struck, but in vain. He struck nothing more tangible than
air. The sharp indignant yelps of the great bird flapping close above
him were a defiance which he could not answer. He had the prize, but he
could not enjoy it. For a few moments he hesitated. Then doggedly he
crouched down, with his head partly shielded between his fore paws, and
fell to eating hurriedly. Before he could fairly swallow one mouthful,
the air again hissed ominously in his ears, and those clutching talons
tore at his neck. With a roar of pain, and wrath, and discomfiture, he
snatched the prey up in his jaws, and plunged into the thicket with his
head well down between his legs. As he vanished the implacable talons
struck once more, ripping red furrows in the black fur of his rump.
Smarting, and grumbling heavily, the bear lay down in the heart of the
willow thicket, and finished devouring the great trout. Still yelping,
the eagle circled above the thicket. Through the leafy branches he could
see the black form of his adversary; but into the thicket he dared not
swoop lest he should be caught at a disadvantage there. For a long time
he circled, hoping that his enemy would come out and give him another
opportunity of vengeance. Then, seeing that the bear lay motionless,
apparently asleep, his rage wore itself out. Higher he whirled, and yet
higher, while the wary beast in the thicket watched patiently for his
going. Then suddenly he changed his course. With long, splendid sweep of
wing he made off in direct flight, slanting swiftly upward toward the
blue silence above the peak.
On the Night Trail
The radiant, blue-white, midwinter moonlight, flooding the little open
space of white in the blackness of the spruce forest, revealed the
frozen fragments of a big lake trout scattered over the snow. They stood
out sharply, so that no midnight forager of the wilds, prowling in the
fringes of the shadow and peering forth in the watch for prey or foe,
could by any possibility fail to sight them.
The stillness of the solitude was intense, breathless, as if sealed to
perpetual silence by the bitter cold. At last, at one corner of the
open, a spruce branch that leaned upon the snow stirred ever so
slightly; and from its shelter a little gray-brown nose, surmounted by a
pair of tiny eyes like black beads, anxiously surveyed the perilous
space of illumination. For perhaps half a minute there was not another
movement. Then the shrew-mouse, well aware that death might be watching
him from under every tree, plucked up a desperate valour and darted
out into the light. The goad of his winter hunger driving him, he seized
the nearest bit of fish that was small enough for him to handle, and
scurried back with it to his safe hole under a fir-root. It was brave
adventure, and deserved its success.
[Illustration: "THE SHREW-MOUSE ... DARTED OUT INTO THE LIGHT."]
For ten minutes more nothing happened to break the stillness. Then again
the little shrew-mouse peered from the covert of his hanging branch.
This time, however, he drew back instantly. He had caught sight of a
pointed black head and snake-like neck stealthily reconnoitring from the
opposite side of the open. A hungry mink was making ready to appropriate
some of the fish; but since he knew that a forest glade, far from the
water, was not a customary resort of fish, alive or frozen, he was
inclined to be suspicious of some kind of trap or ambuscade. Instead of
looking at the delicious morsels, there in plain, alluring view, he
scanned piercingly the shadows and drooping branches which encircled the
glade. Suddenly he seemed to detect something to his distaste. A red
gleam of anger and ferocity flared into his eyes, and he sank back
noiselessly into covert.
A moment later came a huge lynx, padding softly but fearlessly straight
out into the revealing light, as if he knew that at this season, when
the bears were asleep and the bull moose, bereft of their antlers, had
lost their interest in combat, there was none of all the forest kindreds
to challenge his supremacy. He was stealthy, of course, in every
movement, and his round, sinister eyes glared palely into every covert,
but that was merely because he dreaded to frighten off a possible
quarry, not because he feared a lurking foe. The frozen fish, however,
showed no signs of flight at his approach; so he fell upon the nearest
fragment and bolted it ravenously.
Having thus eagerly disposed of several substantial lumps, the great
lynx became more critical, and went sniffing fastidiously from morsel to
morsel as if he revelled in such unexpected abundance. Suddenly there
was a vicious _click_; and with a spit and a yowl the lynx started as if
to jump into the air. Instead of rising, however, some six or seven
feet, under the propulsion of his mighty, spring-like muscles, he merely
bowed his back and strained tremendously. In response, a small thing of
dark steel emerged from the snow, followed closely by a log of heavy
wood. The lynx was caught in a trap by his right fore foot.
[Illustration: "HIS ROUND, SINISTER EYES GLARED PALELY INTO EVERY
COVERT."]
For a minute or two the panic-stricken beast went through a number of
more or less aimless contortions, spitting and screeching, biting at the
trap, and clawing frantically at the log. Presently, however, finding
that his contortions only made the thing that had him grip the harder
and hurt him the more savagely, he halted to consider his predicament.
Consideration not appearing to ease that urgent anguish in his paw, he
began to strain steadily backward, hoping, if he could not free himself,
at least to drag his captor into the woods and perhaps lose it among the
trees. The log, however, was very heavy, and his best efforts could move
it but a few inches at a time. When, at the end of an hour of fierce
struggle, he lay down utterly exhausted, he was still in the full glare
of the moon, still several feet from the shelter of the branches. But no
sooner had he lain down, than the crunching of a footstep on the crisp
snow brought him to his feet again; and with every hair on end along his
back, his eyes ablaze with rage and fear, he turned to face the tall
figure of a backwoodsman, who stood gazing at him with a smile of
satisfaction from the other side of the glade.
Just about three hours earlier, on his way into the Cross Roads
Settlement, Pete Logan had set that trap with particular care, and with
the definite purpose of capturing that particular lynx. With all his
cunning, little did the great tuft-eared cat suspect that for weeks the
backwoodsman had been watching him, noting his haunts and trails,
observing his peculiarities, and laying plans for his capture. That very
evening, at the Cross Roads, Logan had boasted that single-handed he
would bring the big lynx into the Settlement, alive and undamaged. He
wanted the splendid animal to sell to an American who was collecting
wild beasts for menageries; and to avoid injuring the captive's fine
gray fur he had partly muffled the cruel teeth of the trap, that they
might take hold without tearing.
Having no dread of anything that inhabited the wilds, Logan had left his
rifle at home, and carried no weapon but the knife in his belt and his
light, straight-hafted axe. In the pack on his back, however, he brought
what he intended should serve him better than any weapon,--a thick
blanket, and a heavy canvas sack. Now, as he stood eying the frightened
and furious captive, he undid the pack and shook the big blanket loose.
The lynx glared with new terror at the ample folds. He had seen men
before, but he had never seen one shaking out a blanket, which looked to
him like a kind of gigantic and awful wings.
Logan had made his plans with careful foresight; and now it was with the
deliberation of absolute confidence that he went about the execution of
them. His axe gripped in readiness for any unforeseen piece of strategy
on the part of the foe, he advanced with the blanket outspread before
him like a shield. Back and back, to the limit of his bonds, cowered the
lynx, glaring defiance and inextinguishable hate. Slowly the man drew
near, till, just barely within reach of the beast's spring, he stopped.
For perhaps half a minute more neither man nor beast stirred a
muscle,--till the tension of the captive's nerves must have neared the
breaking-point. Then, as if his own nerves knew by sympathy the exactly
proper moment for the next move in the game, Logan made a swooping
forward plunge with the blanket. With a screech of fury the lynx sprang
to the grapple,--to find himself, in half a second, rolled over and
tangled up and swathed helpless in the smothering woollen folds. In vain
he bit, and spat, and yowled, and tore. His keen white fangs caught
nothing but choking wool; his rending claws had no chance to do their
work; and the crushing weight of the woodsman's sturdy body was bearing
him down into the snow. In a few moments, daunted by the thick darkness
over his eyes and exhausted by the impotence of his efforts, he lay
still, quivering with rage. Then, with the most delicate caution,
working through a couple of folds of the blanket, Logan released the
jaws of the trap and slipped it warily from the imprisoned paw. To
remove it from within the perilous paral was, of course, not to be
thought of; but he feared to damage the joint by leaving it in that
inexorable clutch a moment longer than was necessary. This done, he
deftly whipped a lashing of cod-line about the bundle, binding the legs
securely, but leaving a measure of freedom about the head and neck. Then
he thrust the bundle into the canvas bag, slung it over his back, and
started on the five-mile tramp back to his camp.
Logan travelled without snow-shoes, because there was just now little
snow on the trails, or even in the deep woods. What snow there was,
moreover, was frozen almost as hard as rock, except for an inch or two
of fluffy stuff which had fallen leisurely within a couple of days. An
extraordinarily heavy and prolonged January thaw, followed by fierce and
sudden frost, had brought about this unusual condition, making something
like a famine among the hunting kindreds of the forest, whose
light-footed quarry, the eaters of bark and twig and bud, now found
flight easy over the frozen surfaces.
The complacent trapper, ruminating pleasantly over his triumph and the
handsome price his captive was to bring him, had covered perhaps a mile
of his homeward journey when from far behind him came to his ears a
novel sound, faintly pulsing down the still night air. Without seeming
to pay it any attention whatever, he nevertheless was instantly and
keenly concerned; and he perceived that the uneasy bundle on his back
was interested too, for it stopped its indignant wrigglings to listen.
Up to this moment Logan had believed that there was no voice in all the
wilderness unfamiliar to his ears, no speech of all the wild kindreds
which he could not in rough fashion interpret. But this cry he did not
understand. Presently it was repeated, a little nearer, and a little
more convincingly strange to him. He knotted his rugged brows. A few
moments more and again it floated down the moonlight, high, quavering,
musical, yet carrying in its mysterious cadences an unmistakable menace.
Logan knew now to a certainty that it was a sound he had never heard
before; and he knew what it was, though he refused to acknowledge it to
himself, because it was a refutation of many of his most dogmatic
pronouncements.
"It _ain't_ wolves!" He muttered to himself obstinately. "Ther' ain't
never been a wolf in New Brunswick!"
But even as he spoke, the sinister cry arose again, nearer and yet
nearer; and he was obliged to confess to himself that, whatever it was,
it was on his trail, and he was likely to know more about it within a
few minutes. He was not alarmed, but he was annoyed, both at the
upsetting of his theories and at the absence of his gun. Undoubtedly,
these Charlotte County romancers had been right. There _were_ wolves in
New Brunswick. He was ready to apologize for having so sarcastically
questioned it.
In spite of the fact that his dignity as a woodsman would not permit him
to be alarmed, he could not but recognize that the cry upon his trail
was made up of a number of voices, and that a number of wolves might be
capable of making things very unpleasant for him. He remembered,
uncomfortably, that in this weather, with the snow so hard that the deer
could run their fastest upon it, the wolves must be extremely hungry.
The more he thought of this fact the more clearly he realized that the
wolves must be very hungry indeed, to dare to trail a man. He had been
walking as fast as he could; but now he broke into a long, swinging
lope, his moccasined feet padding with a soft whisper upon the snow. For
a moment he thought of ridding himself of the burden upon his back; but
this idea he rejected resentfully and with scorn. He was not going to be
robbed of his triumph by a bunch of rascally, interloping vermin like
wolves.
Meanwhile, the quavering high-pitched chorus was sweeping swiftly nearer
through the moonlight, and Logan put on a burst of speed in order to get
to a stretch of open burnt lands before his pursuers should come up with
him. If he was to have a fight forced upon him, he wanted plenty of room
and the chance to keep all his adversaries in plain view. He gained the
open, with its scattered black stumps and gaunt, ghostly "rampikes"
dotting the radiant silver of the snow, and was some eighty or a
hundred paces beyond the edge of the woods before the wolves appeared.
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the gray forms of the pack halt, come
close together, then separate again, hesitating at the venture of the
open. The hesitation was only for a moment, however. Then, in formation
so close that one might have covered the whole pack with a bedquilt,
they came on again. His trained eye had counted six wolves in the pack;
and he was relieved to find that there were not more. From their cries
he had imagined there must have been thirty or forty.
Logan was too wise to run, now that he was in view of his foes. He
stalked on with haughty indifference, till the pack was within
twenty-five or thirty yards of his heels. Then he turned, and spoke,
with an air of sharp, confident authority. Even through their hunger and
their savage madness of pursuit the beasts felt the mastery of his
voice. They paused, irresolutely, then opened out and sat down on their
haunches to see what he would do.
[Illustration: "HE SAW THE GRAY FORMS OF THE PACK."]
After surveying them superciliously for a few seconds, the woodsman
turned again and stalked on, keeping, however, a keen watch over his
shoulder and his axe poised ready for instant use. As soon as he moved
on, the wolves followed, but no longer in their pack formation. Not yet
audacious enough to come within ten or twelve feet of this arrogantly
confident being, whose voice had power to daunt them in the very heat of
their onslaught, they spread out on either side of the trail,
half-surrounding him, and keeping pace with him at a skulking trot.
Their jaws were half-open, their long white fangs were bared in a
snarling grin, and their eyes, all fixed upon him unwinkingly, glinted a
green light of ferocity and hunger.
Little by little they drew closer in, while Logan pretended to ignore
them contemptuously. All at once he felt, almost more than saw, one of
the largest of the pack dart in to spring upon his back. Out went the
bright axe-blade like a flash of blue flame, as he whirled on his heel;
and the wolf dropped with a choked-off yelp, shorn through the neck.
Thrice around him he wheeled the circle of the deadly blade; and the
wolves deferentially slunk beyond reach of it, not yet ready to tempt
the fate of their comrade.
Five minutes more, however, and the wary beasts again drew closer and
Logan found that the strain of guarding himself on all sides at once
was overwhelming. At any moment, as he knew, those hungry eyes might all
close in on him together. A few hundred yards ahead, as he bethought
himself, the trail led under the foot of a high, almost perpendicular
rock; and he made up his mind that he must reach that rock as speedily
as possible. With his back against the steep face of it he could face
the charge of the pack to better advantage. Breaking into a long,
unhurried trot, he pressed on, swinging the axe from side to side in
swift, menacing sweeps, and uttering angry expletives which the wolves
seemed to respect as much as they did the gleaming weapon. Before he
gained the foot of the rock, however, the beasts had grown more
confident and more impatient, making little sudden leaps at him, from
one side or the other, so incessantly that his arm had not a moment's
rest; and he realized that the crisis of the adventure could not be much
longer delayed.
When he reached the foot of the rock and turned at bay, the wolves drew
back once more and formed a half-circle before him, a moving,
interweaving half-circle that drew closer and grew smaller stealthily.
Suddenly the wolf which seemed the leader sprang straight in. But the
woodsman seemed to divine the move even before it began, so sharply did
he meet it with a step forward and a savage axe-stroke; and the wolf
sprang back just in time to save its skull.
And now, in the clutch of the final trial, Logan had an inspiration.
With all the doggedness of the backwoods will he had vowed that he would
not give up the rich booty on his back. But the question had at last, as
he saw, become one of giving up his own life. In this crisis, his
backwoods understanding and sympathy suddenly went out toward the plucky
but helpless captive in the sack on his back. It would be quite too bad
that the splendid lynx, with all his fighting equipment of fangs and
claws, should be torn to pieces in his bonds without a chance to make a
fight for life. Moreover, as he realized with the next thought, here was
perhaps a chance to create an effective diversion in his own favour.
With a shout and a mad whirling of the axe, he once more drew back the
narrowing crescent of the wolves. The next instant he swung the bag from
his back, ripped open the mouth of it, and emptied out the writhing roll
of blanket upon the snow at his feet,--while the wolves, eyeing this
new procedure with suspicion, held back a few moments before again
closing in. As the bundle fell, Logan seized one corner of the blanket,
and with a dexterous twist and throw unrolled it, landing the prisoner
almost under the noses of the wolves.
Bewildered for an instant, the lynx had no time to bound back and scurry
up the steep face of the rock to safety. He had no sooner gained his
feet than the whole pack was upon him. With a screech of fury he
proclaimed his understanding of the crisis, and turned every tooth and
claw into the fray. His fangs, of course, were no match for those of any
one of his assailants; but his claws were weapons of such quality that
no single wolf could have withstood him. As it was, the wolves in their
eagerness got in one another's way; and as the mass of them smothered
the lynx down, more than one got eviscerating slashes that sent them
yelping out of battle.
For a few breathless seconds Logan watched the fight, glowing with
excited approval over his late captive's prowess. Then he realized the
time had come when he must take a hand, or find himself again at a
disadvantage. Silently he darted upon the screeching, growling heap
with his light axe. So skilled was he in all the woodsman's sleights,
that even in so brief time as takes to tell it, three more of the pack
were down, kicking and dying silently on the snow. The leader of the
pack, the side of his neck redly furrowed and the lust of battle hot in
his veins, wheeled, and jumped madly at Logan's throat. But the woodsman
met him with a terrific short-handled upward stroke, which fairly split
his ribs and hurled him over backwards. On the instant the remaining
wolves, who had each suffered something in the mêlée, concluded that the
game was up. Leaping away from the reach of those deadly-ripping claws,
they turned and ran off like whipped dogs.
Bleeding from a dozen gashes, bedraggled and battered, but still full of
fight to every outspread claw, the lynx crouched and glared at the man,
with ears flattened back and eyes shooting pallid flame. For some
seconds the two faced each other, the man grinning with approval. Then
it occurred to him that the maddened beast, in despair of escape, might
spring at him and compel him to strike, which, in his present
sympathetic and grateful mood, he was most unwilling to do. Cautiously,
keeping his eyes on the sinister flaring orbs that faced him, he took a
step backwards. Still the lynx crouched, ready to spring. Then Logan
spoke, in quiet expostulation.
"Don't ye go for to fight _me_, now! I never done ye no hurt!" he argued
mendaciously. "It's them durn wolves, that was after the both of us; an'
it was me got ye out of that scrape. Don't ye come lookin' fer trouble,
for I don't want to hurt ye!"
At the sound of the quiet voice, soothing yet commanding, the tension of
the beast's madness seemed to relax. The fixity of his glare wavered.
Then his eyes shifted; and the next moment, turning with a movement so
quick that the woodsman's eyes could hardly follow it, he was away like
a gray shadow among the stumps and trunks, not leaping, but running
belly to ground like a cat. Logan watched him out of sight, then
nonchalantly put two wounded wolves out of their misery, whetted his
knife on his larrigans, and settled down to the task of stripping the
pelts.
When the Tide Came Over the Marshes
A perfect dome of palest blue, vapourous but luminous. To northward and
southeastward a horizon line of low uplands, misty purple. Along the
farthest west a glimmer and sparkle of the sea. Everywhere else, wide,
wind-washed levels of marsh, pallid green or ochre yellow, cut here and
there with winding tide-channels and mud-flats of glistening copper red.
Twisting this way and that in erratic curves, the unbroken, sodded lines
of the dyke, fencing off the red flats and tide-channels, and dividing
the green expanses of protected dyke-marsh from the ochre yellow
stretches of the salt marsh, as yet but half-reclaimed from the sea.
At this autumn season the hay had all been cut and cured and most of it
hauled away to safe storage in far-off, upland barns. But on the remoter
and wetter marshes some of it had been piled in huge yellow-gray,
cone-peaked stacks, to await the easier hauling of winter. The solitary,
snug-built stacks, towering above the dyke-tops and whistled over
ceaselessly by the long marsh winds, were a favoured resort of the
meadow-mice. These adaptable little animals were able to endure with
equanimity the inevitable annual destruction of their homes in the deep
grass, seeing that the haymakers were so thoughtful as to afford them
much dryer and more secure abodes in the heart of the stacks, where
neither the keen-nosed fox nor the keen-eyed marsh-owl could get at
them.
Past the foot of a certain lonely stack by the outer dyke, within sound
of the rushing tide, ran an old drainage ditch, at this time of year
almost dry. Its bottom, where tiny puddles were threaded on a trickle of
running water, was now a thronged resort of water-loving insects, and
small frogs, and imprisoned shiners. To a wandering mink, driven down by
drought from the uplands, it was a wonderful and delightful place, which
he adopted at once as his own particular range. The main ditch, with its
system of lateral feeders, furnished several miles of runway, and the
whole of this rich domain the newcomer preempted, patrolling it
methodically, devoting his whole attention to it, and ready to defend
it against any rival claimant who might appear.
The mink was a male, about twenty inches long, with his rich dark coat
in perfect condition. His pointed, sinister, quietly savage face and
head were set on a long but heavy-muscled neck, almost as thick as the
thickest part of his body. The body itself was altogether snake-like in
its lithe sinuousness, and supported on legs so ridiculously short that
when he was not leaping he seemed to writhe and dart along on his belly
after the fashion of a snake. In spite of this shortness of the legs,
however, his movements, when he had any reason for haste, were of an
almost miraculous swiftness, his whole form seeming to be made up of
subtle and tireless steel springs. When he did not care to writhe and
dart along like a snake, he would arch his long back like a
measuring-worm and go leaping over the ground in jumps of sometimes four
or five feet in length. This method of progression he probably adopted
for the fun of it, in the main; for his hunting tactics were usually
those of stealthy advance and lightning-like attack. Once in a long
while, indeed, by lucky chance he would succeed in catching in one of
these wild leaps, a snipe which flew too low over the ditch or paused
on hovering wing before alighting to forage on the populous ooze. Such
an achievement would afford a pleasant variation to his customary diet
of fish, frogs, beetles, and occasional muskrat.
The mink had been nearly three weeks on his new range, and enjoying
himself hugely in his devastating way, before he observed the big yellow
stack beside the ditch. It was on a day of driving rain-squalls and
premature cold that he first took note of its possibilities. Gliding
furtively around its base, his bright, fierce eyes detected a tiny hole,
the imperfectly hidden entrance to a mouse-tunnel. He thrust in his head
at once to investigate. It was a close squeeze; but where his head and
neck could go his slender body could follow, and he dearly loved the
exploring of just such narrow passages.
A little way in, the tunnel branched; but the mink made no mistake. The
gallery which he selected to follow ended in a mouse-nest, with the mice
at home. There in the dry, warm, sweet-scented dark there was a brief
tragedy, with shrill squeaks and a rustling struggle. Two mice escaped
the slaughter, but the other three were caught. The invader sucked the
blood of all three while they were warm, ate one, and then curled
himself up for sleep in his new and delightful quarters. This stack was
all that the new range needed to make it the very choicest that a mink
could possess.
[Illustration: "A SNIPE WHICH FLEW TOO LOW OVER THE DITCH."]
After this the mink occupied the stack in bad weather, but ranged the
ditches, as usual, when it was pleasant. The stack was full of
mouse-galleries, and when he wanted a change he hunted mice. But it was
the outdoor, wide-ranging life that best contented him, so the mice were
by no means all driven out. Being a happy-go-lucky tribe, the survivors
continued to occupy their nests in spite of their terrible new
neighbour, trusting that doom would overlook them.
But neither men nor mice nor minks can be prepared against all the
caprices of Nature. That fall, Nature suddenly took it into her head to
try the dykes, of which the men had for a generation or more been so
boastful. She rolled in from the sea a succession of tremendous tides,
backing them up with a mighty and unrelenting wind out of the southwest,
and piled the tide-channels to the brim with buffeting floods. For a
time the dykes withstood the assault valiantly. But again and again,
ever fiercer and fiercer, came the besieging tides; and finally they
made a breach. In rushed a red and foaming torrent, devouring the clay
walls on either side with a roar, and drowning the long-protected
dyke-marsh under a seething chaos of muddy waves and débris.
The first breach occurred at daybreak; and the stack stood right in the
way. The huge flood poured in in angry glory, almost blood-red in the
first gush of a blazing crimson sunrise. In that unnatural and
terrifying light, which swiftly softened to a mocking delicacy of pink
and lilac, the stack was torn from its foundations and borne revolving
up the tide.
The nest of the mink, being low in the stack, was promptly flooded,
driving the angry tenant out. He ran up to the dry top of the stack, and
surveyed the wild scene with surprise. Water, of course, had no terrors
for him; but this tumultuous flood seemed a good thing to keep out of.
He would stay by his refuge for the present, at least. Meanwhile, there
were mice!
[Illustration: "MADLY JOYOUS, HE KILLED, AND KILLED, AND KILLED, FOR THE
JOY OF KILLING."]
The mice, indeed, panic-stricken and forced from their lower nests, were
fairly swarming in the top of the stack. The mink first satiated his
thirst with blood. Next he glutted his hunger with the brains of his
victims. Then, seeing their numbers apparently undiminished, he got
wild with excitement and blood-lust. Darting hither and thither, madly
joyous, he killed, and killed, and killed, for the joy of killing; while
the stack, with its freight of terror and death, went whirling
majestically along the now broader and quieter flood.
How long the slaughter of the helpless mice would have continued, before
the slaughterer tired of the game and crept into a nest to sleep, cannot
be known. By another of Nature's whims, concerned equally with great
matters and with little, it was not left to the joyous mink to decide.
His conspicuous dark body, darting over the light surface of the stack,
caught the eye of a great hawk soaring high above the marshes. Lower and
lower sank the bird, considering,--for the mink was larger game than he
usually chose to hunt. Then, while still too high in the blue to attract
attention from the busy slayer, he narrowed his wings, hardened his
plumage, and shot downward. At a strange sound in the air the mink
looked up,--but not in time to meet that appalling attack. One great set
of talons, steel-strong and edged like knives, clutched him about the
throat, strangling him to helplessness, while another set crushed his
ribs and cut into his vitals. The wise hawk had struck with a thorough
comprehension of the enemy's fighting powers; and had taken care that
there should be no fight. Flying heavily, he carried the long, limp body
off to his high nest in the hills; and the stack drifted on with the
tiny terrified remnant of the mouse-people, till the ebbing tide left it
stranded on a meadow near the foot of the uplands.
Under the Ice-roof
I
Filtering thinly down through the roof of snow and clean blue ice, the
sharp winter sunshine made almost a summer's glow upon the brown bottom
of the pond. Beneath the ice the water was almost as warm now as in
summer, the pond being fed by springs from so deep a source that their
temperature hardly varied with the seasons. Here and there a bit of
water-weed stood up from the bottom, green as in June. But in the upper
world, meanwhile, the wind that drove over the ice and snow was so
intensely cold that the hardy northern trees snapped under it, and few
of the hardy northern creatures of the wilderness, though fierce with
hunger, had the fortitude to face it. They crouched shivering in their
lairs, under fallen trunks or in the heart of dense fir thickets, and
waited anxiously for the rigour of cold and the savagery of wind to
abate. Only down in the pond, in the generous spaces of amber water
beneath the ice-roof, life went on busily and securely. The wind might
rage unbridled, the cold might lay its hand of death heavily on forest
and hill; but the beavers in their unseen retreat knew nothing of it.
All it could do was to add an inch or two of thickness to the icy
shelter above them, making their peaceful security more secure.
The pond was a large one, several acres in extent, with a depth of fully
five feet in the deeper central portions, which were spacious enough to
give the beavers room for play and exercise. Around the shallow edges
the ice, which was fully fifteen inches thick beneath its blanket of
snow, lay solid on the bottom.
The beavers of this pond occupied a lodge on the edge of the deep water,
not far above the dam. This lodge was a broad-based, low-domed house of
mud, turf, and sticks cunningly interwoven, and rising about four feet
above the surface of the ice-roof. The dome, though covered deep with
snow, was conspicuous to every prowler of the woods, who would come at
times to sniff greedily at the warm smell of beaver steaming up from
the minute air-vents in the apex. But however greedy, however ravenous,
the prowling vagrants might be, the little dome-builders and
dam-builders within neither knew nor cared about their greed. The dome
was fully two feet thick, built solidly, and frozen almost to the
hardness of granite. There were no claws among all the ravening forest
kindred strong enough to tear their way through such defences. In the
heart of the lodge, in a dry grass-lined chamber just above high-water
level, the beavers dwelt warm and safe.
But it was not from the scourge of the northern cold alone, and the
ferocity of their enemies, that the beavers were protected by their
ice-roof and their frozen dome. The winter's famine, too, they had well
guarded themselves against. Before the coming of the frost, they had
gnawed down great quantities of birch, poplar, and willow, cut them into
convenient, manageable lengths, and dragged them to a spot a little
above the centre of the dam, where the water was deepest. Here the store
of logs, poles, and brush made a tangled mass from the bottom up to the
ice. When it was feeding-time in the hidden chamber of the lodge, a
beaver would swim to the brush pile, pull out a suitable stick, and drag
it into the chamber. Here the family would feast at their ease, in the
dry, pungent gloom, eating the bark and the delicate outer layer of
young wood. When the stick was stripped clean, another beaver would drag
it out and tow it down to the dam, there to await its final use as
material for repairs. Every member of the colony was blest with a good
appetite, and there was nearly always at least one beaver to be seen
swimming through the amber gloom, either with a green stick from the
brush pile, or a white stripped one to deposit on the base of the dam.
For these most diligent of all the four-foot kindreds this was holiday
time. Under the ice-roof they had no dam-building, no tree-cutting, no
house-repairing. There was nothing to do but eat, sleep, and play. There
was not much variety to their play, to be sure; but the monotony of it
did not trouble them. Sometimes two would indulge in a sort of mad game
of tag, swimming at marvellous speed close beneath the ice, their
powerful hind legs propelling them, their tiny little fore paws held up
demurely under their chins, and their broad, flat, hairless tails
stretched straight out behind to act as rudders. As they swam this way
and that, they loosed a trail of silvery bubbles behind them, from the
air carried under their close fur. At last one of the players, unable
to hold his breath any longer, would whisk sharply into the mouth of the
black tunnel leading into the lodge, scurry up into the chamber, and lie
there panting, to be joined a moment later by his equally breathless
pursuer. One by one the other members of the colony would dip in, till
the low chamber was full of furry, snuggling warmth and well-fed
content. Little cared the beavers whether it was night or day in the
wide, frozen, perilous world above the ice-roof, whether the sun shone
from the bitter blue, or the wolf-haunted moonlight lay upon the snow,
or the madness of the blizzard made the woods cower before its fury.
[Illustration: "WOULD WHISK SHARPLY INTO THE MOUTH OF THE BLACK
TUNNEL."]
As long as the cold endured and the snow lay deep upon the wilderness,
the beavers lived their happy, uneventful life beneath the ice-roof. But
in this particular winter the untempered cold of December and January,
which slew many of the wood folk and drove the others wild with hunger,
broke suddenly in an unprecedented thaw. Not the oldest bear of the Bald
Mountain caves could remember any such thaw. First there were days on
days, and nights on nights, of bland, melting rain, softer than April's.
The snow vanished swiftly from the laden branches of fir and spruce and
hemlock, and the silent woods stood up black and terrible against the
weeping sky. On the ground and on the ice of pond and stream the snow
shrank, settled, and assumed a grayish complexion. Water, presently,
gathered in great spreading, leaden-coloured pools on the ice; and on
the naked knolls the bare moss and petty shrubs began to emerge. Every
narrow watercourse soon carried two streams,--the temperate, fettered,
summer-mindful stream below the ice, and the swollen, turbulent flood
above. Then the rain stopped. The sun came out warm and urgent as in
latter May. And snow and ice together dwindled under the unnatural
caress.
The beavers, in their safe seclusion, had knowledge in two ways of this
strange visitation upon the world. Not all the soft flood of the melting
snow ran over the surface of their ice, but a portion got beneath it, by
way of the upper brooks. This extra flow disturbed both the colour and
the temperature of the clear amber water of the pond. It lifted heavily
against the ice, pressed up the tunnels to the very edge of the dry
chamber of the lodge, and thrust ponderously at the outlets of the dam.
Understanding the peril, the wise little dam-builders sallied forth in a
flurry, and with skilful tooth and claw lost no time in enlarging the
outlets. They were much too intelligent to let the flood escape by a
single outlet, lest the concentrated flow should become too heavy for
them to control it. They knew the spirit of that ancient maxim of
tyrants, "_divide et impera_." By dividing the overflow into many feeble
streams they knew how to rule it. This done, they rested in no great
anxiety, expecting the thaw to end with a stringent frost.
Then, however, came the second, and more significant, manifestation of
peril. The snow on the ice-roof had vanished; and looking up through the
ice they saw the flood eddying riotously over the naked expanse. It was
a portent which the wiser elders understood. The whole colony fell to
work strengthening the dam where the weight of the current bore down
upon it, and increasing the outlet along the farther edges.
A thaw so persistent, however, and at the same time so violent,
overpassed their cunning calculations. One night, when all had done
their best and, weary, but reassured, had withdrawn into the warm
chamber of the lodge, something happened that they had never looked for.
In their snug retreat they were falling to sleep, the rush of the
overflow and the high clamour of the side vents coming dimly to their
ears, when suddenly they were startled by the water being forced up over
the dry floor of the chamber. The pressure of water beneath the ice had
suddenly increased. They were more than startled. They were badly
frightened. If the water should rise much higher they would be drowned
helplessly, for the ice lay close all over the pond. The younger ones
scurried this way and that with plaintive squeaks, and several dashed
forth into the pond in a panic, forgetting that there was no escape in
that direction. A moment later a low crashing penetrated to the dark
chamber; and the invading water retreated down the tunnel. The ice-roof,
worn thin, honey-combed, and upheaved by the pressure from below, had
gone to pieces.
It was the older and wiser beavers who had remained in the chamber,
terrified, but not panic-stricken. When the water retreated to its
normal level,--about two inches below the chamber floor,--they were
satisfied. Then, however, a louder and heavier note in the rush of the
overflow came to their ears, and their anxiety returned with fresh
force. Thrusting their whiskered noses inquiringly down the tunnel, they
observed that the water was sinking far below its proper level. Well
they knew what that meant. The dam was broken. The water, which was
their one protection from the terrors of the forest, was escaping.
This was the kind of an emergency which a beaver will always rise to.
Shy as they are, under ordinary circumstances, when the dam is attacked
their courage is unfailing. In a moment every beaver in the colony was
out among the swirling ice, under the broad, white moonlight which they
had not seen for so long.
It was at its very centre, where the channel was deepest and the thrust
of the water most violent, that the dam had given way. The break was
about ten feet wide, and not, as yet, of any great depth. It was the
comparatively narrow and unsubstantial crust of the embankment which had
yielded, disintegrated by the thaw and ripped by the broken edges of the
ice.
The vehemence of the torrent was rapidly cutting down into the firmer
body of the dam, when the beavers flung themselves valiantly into the
breach. In the face of the common danger they forgot all caution, and
gave no heed to any hungry eyes that might be glaring at them from the
woods on either shore. Without any apparent leadership in the work,
they all seemed to help each other in whatever way would be most
effective. Some dragged up the longest and heaviest poles from the pile
of stripped stuff, floated them carefully into the break, butt end
up-stream and parallel with the flow, and held them there doggedly with
their teeth and fore paws till others could come with more timbers to
hold the first lot down. Meanwhile, from the soft bottom along the base
of the dam, big lumps of mingled clay and grass-roots, together with
small stones to add weight, were grabbed up and heaped solidly upon the
layers of sticks for anchorage. This loose stuff, though deposited along
the upper ends of the sticks where the flow was least violent, and
swiftly packed down into the interstices, was mostly washed away in the
process. It was seemingly an even struggle, for a time, and the beavers
could do no more than hold the breach from deepening and widening. But
they were quite undaunted; and they seemed to know no such thing as
fatigue. Little by little they gained upon the torrent, making good the
hold of a mass of turf here, a few stones there, and everywhere the long
straight sticks upon which the water could get but slight grip. The
flood grew shallower and less destructive. More sticks were brought,
more stones, and clay, and grass-roots; and then a layer of heavy, clean
poles, over which the water slid thinly and smoothly without danger to
the structure beneath.
The dam was now strongest at this point, its crest being broader and
formed of heavier timbers than elsewhere. But no sooner had the hard-won
victory been secured, and the plucky little architects paused for
breath, than there came an ominous crackling from far over to the
extreme left of the dam, where a subsidiary channel had offered a new
vantage to the baffled torrent. The crackling was mingled with a loud
rushing noise. Another section of the crest of the dam had been swept
away. A white curtain of foam sprang into the moonlight, against the
darkness of the trees.
II
While the brave little dam-builders had been battling with the flood,
out there in the wide-washing moonlight, hungry eyes had been watching
them from the heart of a dense spruce thicket, a little below the left
end of the dam. The watching had been hopeless enough, as the owner of
those fierce, narrow eyes knew it was no use trying to surprise a
beaver in the open, when the whole pond was right there for him to dive
into. But now when the new break brought the whole colony swimming madly
to the left-hand shore, and close to the darkness of the woods, those
watching eyes glowed with a savage expectancy, and began slowly,
noiselessly, steadily, floating nearer through the undisturbed
underbrush.
The tremendous thaw, loosing the springs and streams on the high flanks
of Bald Mountain, had washed out the snow from the mouth of a shallow
cave and rudely aroused a young bear from his winter sleep. As soon as
he had shaken off his heaviness the bear found himself hungry. But his
hunting thus far had not been successful. His training had not been in
the winter woods. He hardly knew what to look for, and the soft slumping
snow hampered him. One panic-stricken white rabbit, and a few ants from
a rotten stump, were all that he had found to eat in three days. His
white fangs in his red jaws had slavered with craving as he watched the
plump beavers at their work, far out on the brightly moonlit dam. When,
at last, they came hurrying toward him, and fell to work on the new
break within thirty or forty yards of his hiding-place, he could hardly
contain himself. He did contain himself, however; for he had hunted
beaver before, and not with a success to make him overconfident. Right
by the termination of the dam, where the beavers were working, the woods
came down thick and dark to within eight or ten feet of the water.
Toward this point he made his way patiently, and with such control of
every muscle that, for all his apparent clumsiness, not a twig snapped,
not a branch rustled, any more than if a shadow were gliding through
them. He saw one old beaver sitting stiffly erect on the crest of the
dam, a wary sentinel, sniffing the still air and scanning the perilous
woods; but he planned to make his final rush so swift that the sentinel
would have no time to give warning.
But the fierce little eyes of the bear, dark and glinting red, were not
the only ones that watched the beavers at their valorous toil. In the
juniper scrub, a short distance up the bank of the pond, crouched two
big gray lynxes, glaring down upon the scene with wide, round, pale
greenish eyes, unspeakably sinister. The lynxes were gaunt with famine.
Fired with the savage hope that some chance might bring a beaver within
reach of their mighty spring, they had crept down, on their great,
furred, stealthy pads, to the patch of juniper scrub. Here they had
halted, biding their time with that long, painful patience which is the
price of feeding--the price of life--among the winter-scourged kindreds.
Now, when the beavers had so considerately come over to the edge of the
woods, and appeared to be engrossed in some incomprehensible pulling and
splashing and mud-piling, the two lynxes felt that their opportunity had
arrived. Their bellies close to the snow, their broad, soft-padded feet
stepping lightly as the fall of feathers, their light gray fur all but
invisible among the confused moon-shadows, their round, bright eyes
unwinking, they seemed almost to drift down through the thickets toward
their expected prey.
Neither the bear creeping up from below the dam, nor the two lynxes
stealing down from above it, had eyes or thought for anything in the
world but the desperately toiling beavers. Their hunger was gnawing at
their lean stomachs, the fever of the hunt was in their veins, and the
kill was all but within reach. A few moments more, and the rush would
come, up from the fir thickets--the long, terrible spring and pounce,
down from the juniper scrub.
The work of repairing the breach was making good progress. Already the
roaring overflow was coming into subjection, its loud voice dwindling to
a shallow clamour. Then, something happened. Perhaps the wary sentinel
on the crest of the dam detected a darker shade stirring among the firs,
or a lighter grayness moving inexplicably between the bushes up the
bank. Perhaps his quick nostrils caught a scent that meant danger.
Perhaps the warning came to him mysteriously, flashed upon that inner
sense, sometimes alert and sometimes densely slumbering, which the
forest furtiveness seems to develop in its creatures. However, it came,
it came. Dropping forward as if shot, the sentinel beaver brought his
flat tail down upon the surface of the water with a smack that rang all
up and around the borders of the pond, startling the quiet of the night.
In a fraction of a second every beaver had vanished beneath the shining
surface.
At the same moment, or an eye-wink later, a strange thing happened--one
of those violent surprises with which the vast repression of the forest
sometimes betrays itself. Maddened to see his prey escaping, the bear
made his rush, launching himself, a black and uncouth mass, right down
to the water's edge. Simultaneously the two lynxes shot into the air
from higher up the bank, frantic with disappointed hunger. With a
screech of fury, and a harsh spitting and snarling, they landed a few
feet distant from the bear, and crouched flat, their stub tails
twitching, their eyes staring, their tufted ears laid back upon their
skulls.
Like a flash the bear wheeled, confronting the two great cats with
uplifted paw and mouth wide open. Half-sitting back upon his haunches,
he was ready for attack or defence. His little eyes glowed red with
rage. To him it was clearly the lynxes who had frightened off the
beavers and spoiled his hunting; and interference of this kind is what
the wild kindreds will not tolerate. To the lynxes, on the other hand,
it was obvious that the bear had caused the whole trouble. He was the
clumsy interloper who had come between them and their quarry. They were
on the verge of that blindness of fury which might hurl them, at any
instant, tooth and claw, upon their formidable foe. For the moment,
however, they had not quite lost sight of prudence. The bear was master
of the forest, and they knew that even together they two were hardly a
match for him.
[Illustration: "CONFRONTING THE TWO GREAT CATS WITH UPLIFTED PAW AND
MOUTH WIDE OPEN."]
The bear, on the other hand, was not quite sure that he was willing to
pay the price of vengeance. His blood surging in the swollen veins, he
growled with heavy menace, and rocking forward upon his haunches he
seemed on the point of rushing in. But he knew how those powerful
knife-edged claws of the lynxes could rend. He knew that their light
bodies were strong and swift and elusive, their teeth almost as
punishing as his own. He felt himself the master; nevertheless he
realized that it would cost dear to enforce that mastery. He hesitated.
Had he made the slightest forward move, the lynxes would have thrown
caution to the winds, and sprung upon him. On the other hand, had the
lynxes even tightened up their sinews to spring, he would have hurled
himself with a roar into the battle. But as it was, both sides held
themselves in leash, tense, ready, terrible in restraint. And as the
moments dragged by, out on the bright surface of the pond small heads
appeared, with little bright eyes watching curiously.
For perhaps three or four long, intense minutes there was not a move
made. Then the round eyes of the lynxes shifted ever so little, while
the bear's eyes never faltered. The bear's was the steadier purpose,
the more tenacious and resolute temper. Almost imperceptibly the lynxes
shrank backward, gliding inch by inch. A swift side-glance showed them
that the way of retreat was open. Then, as if both were propelled by the
one vehement impulse, they bounded into the air, one whirling aside and
the other almost doubling back upon his own trail. Quicker than it takes
to tell it, they were fleeing like gray shadows, one over the bank and
through the juniper bushes, the other up along the snowy shore of the
pond, their discomfiture apparently driving them to part company. The
bear, as if surprised, sat up on his haunches to stare after them. Then,
with a hungry look at the beavers, now swimming openly far out in the
moonlight, he turned and shambled off to find some more profitable
hunting.
For a few minutes all was stillness, save for the rushing of the water
over the dam. The solitude of the night had resumed its white and
tranquil dominion as if nothing had ever occurred to jar its peace. Then
once more the watchful sentinel appeared, sitting erect on the dam, and
the diligent builders busied themselves to complete the mending of the
breach.
[Illustration: "ONCE MORE THE WATCHFUL SENTINEL APPEARED."]
The Terror of the Air
From all the lonely salt-flats and tide-washed, reedy shores of the wide
estuary, the flocks of the sea-ducks had flown south. After feeding for
days together amicably, golden-eyed and red-head, broad-bill and dipper,
all hobnobbing and bobbing and guttering in company, without regard to
difference of kin, they had at last assorted themselves into flocks of
the like species and wing power, and gone off in strong-flying wedges to
seek milder tides and softer skies.
Nevertheless, though the marshy levels were now stiffened with frost,
and ice fringes lingered thin and brittle behind each retreating tide,
and white flurries of snow went drifting over the vast, windy spaces of
wave and plain, some bold, persistent waifs of life clung to these bleak
solitudes. Here and there a straggler from the flocks, or a belated
arrival from farther north, fed solitary and seemed sufficient to
himself; while here and there a few hardy coots, revelling in the
loneliness and in the forbidding harshness of the season, swam and dived
among the low, leaden-coloured waves.
Across ten level miles of naked marsh-land another estuary made in from
the sea. On the shore of this estuary, so shallow that for leagues along
its edge it was impossible to distinguish, at high tide, just where the
water ended and the solid land began, a solitary surf-duck dabbled among
the gray, half-frozen grasses. Of a dull black all over, save for a
patch of clear white on his head and another on the back of his neck, he
made a sharp, conspicuous spot against the pallid colouring of the
marshes. For all his loneliness, he seemed to be enjoying himself very
well, active and engrossed, and to all appearances forgetful of the
departed flocks.
Suddenly, however, he stopped feeding, and sat with head erect and
watchful eyes, rising and falling gently with the pulse of the
sedge-choked flood. Either some unusual sight or sound had disturbed
him, or some drift of memory had stirred his restlessness. For several
minutes he floated, forgetful of the savoury shelled and squirming
creatures which his discriminating bill had been gathering from among
the oozy sedge-roots. Then with an abrupt squawk, he flapped noisily
along the surface of the water, rose into the air, and flew straight
inland, mounting as he went to a height far above gunshot.
The flight of the lonely drake was toward the shores of the other
estuary, ten miles southward, where in all likelihood he had some hope
of finding the companionship of his kin, if not a better feeding-ground.
Though his body was very heavy and massive and his wings ridiculously
short for the bulk they had to sustain, he flew with tremendous speed
and as straight as a bullet from a rifle. His wings, however small, were
mightily muscled and as tough as steel springs, and they beat the air
with such lightning strokes that the sturdy body, head and neck and legs
and feet outstretched in a rigid line, was hurled through the air at a
speed of something like a hundred miles an hour. As he flew, the
flurries of snow gathered into a squall of whirling flakes, almost
obscuring the waste of marsh-land that rushed past beneath his flight,
and shutting him off alone in the upper heights of sky.
Alone indeed he imagined himself, while the cold air and the streaming
snowflakes whistled past his flight. But keen as were his eyes, other
eyes keener than his had marked him from a loftier height, where the air
was clear above the storm strata. A great Arctic goshawk, driven by some
unknown whim to follow the edge of winter southward, was sailing on wide
wings through the high, familiar cold. When he saw the black drake far
below him, shooting through the snowflakes like a missile, his fierce
eyes flamed and narrowed, his wings gave one mighty beat and then
half-closed, and he dropped into the cloudy murk of the storm belt.
The drake was now about a hundred yards ahead of the great hawk, and
flying at perhaps ninety miles an hour under the mere impulse of his
desire to reach the other estuary. When he caught sight of the white
terror pursuing him, his sturdy little wings doubled the rapidity of
their stroke, till he shot forward at a rate of, perhaps, two miles a
minute, his wedge-shaped body and hard, oiled plumage offering small
resistance to the air even at that enormous speed. His only chance of
escape, as he well knew, was to reach the water and plunge beneath it.
But he could not turn back, for the terror was behind him. Straight
ahead lay his only hope. There, not more than two or three minutes
distant, lay his secure refuge. He could see the leaden gray expanse,
touched by a gleam of cold and lonely sunlight which had pierced the
obscurity of the squall. Could he reach it? If he could, he would drop
into the slow wave, dive to the bottom, and hold to the roots of the
swaying weeds till the terror had gone by.
A hundred yards behind came the hawk, moving like a dreadful ghost
through the swirl and glimmer of the snow. His plumage was white, but
pencilled with shadowy markings of pale brown. His narrowed eyes, fixed
upon the fugitive, were fiercely bright and hard like glass. His hooked
beak, his flat head, his strong, thick, smoothly modelled neck, were
outstretched in a rigid line like those of the drake.
The long, spectral wings of the great hawk beat the air, but not with
haste and violence like those of the fleeing quarry. Swift as his
wingbeats were, there was a surging movement about them, an irresistible
thrust, which made them seem slow and gave their working an air of
absolute ease. For all this ease, however, he was flying faster than the
fugitive. Slowly, yard by yard, he crept up, the distance from his
victim grew narrower. The drake's wings whistled upon the wind, a
strange shrill note, as of terror and despair. But the wings of the
pursuing destroyer were as noiseless as sleep. He seemed less a bird
than a spirit of doom, the embodiment of the implacable Arctic cold.
The astounding speed at which the two were rushing through the sky on
this race of life and death brought the gleam of the estuary water
hurrying up from the horizon to meet them. The terrible seconds passed.
The water was not half a mile ahead. The line of the drake's flight
began to slope toward earth. A few moments more, and a sudden splash in
the tide would proclaim that the fugitive was safe in a refuge where the
destroyer could not follow. But the noiseless wings were now just behind
him, just behind and above.
[Illustration: "THE NOISELESS WINGS WERE NOW JUST BEHIND HIM"]
At this moment the fugitive opened his beak for one despairing squawk,
his acknowledgment that the game of life was lost. The next instant the
hawk's white body seemed to leap forward even out of the marvellous
velocity with which it was already travelling. It leaped forward, and
changed shape, spreading, and hanging imminent for the least fraction
of a second. The head, with slightly open beak, reached down. A pair of
great black talons, edged like knives, open and clutching, reached down
and forward.
The movement did not seem swift, yet it easily caught the drake in the
midst of his flight. For an instant there was a slight confusion of
winnowing and flapping wings, a dizzy dropping through the sky. Then the
great hawk recovered his balance, steadied himself, turned, and went
winging steadily inland toward a crag which he had noted, where he might
devour his prey at ease. In his claws was gripped the body of the black
drake, its throat torn across, its long neck and webbed feet trailing
limply in the air.
In the Unknown Dark
His long, awkward legs trembling with excitement, his long ears pointing
stiffly forward, his distended nostrils sniffing and snorting, he stared
anxiously this way and that from the swirling, treacherous current to
the silent man poling the scow. The river, at this point nearly half a
mile wide, daunted him now that he saw it at such close quarters, though
all summer he had been viewing it with equanimity from the shore. A few
hundred yards above the comparatively quiet course of the ferry he saw a
long line of white leaping waves, stretching from bank to bank with
menacing roar, and seeming as it were about to rush down upon the slow
ferry and overwhelm it. When he looked toward the other side of the scow
the prospect was equally threatening. The roar from below was worse than
the roar from above, and the whole river, just here so radiant with the
sunset glow, grew black with gloom and white with fury as it plunged
through a rocky chasm strewn with ledges. The only thing that comforted
him at all and kept his fears within bounds was the patient, sturdy
figure of the man, poling the scow steadily toward shore.
This nervous passenger on the primitive backwoods ferry was a colt about
eight months old, whose mother had died the previous day. His owner, a
busy lumberman, was now sending him across the river to a neighbour's
farm to be cared for, because he was of good "Morgan" strain. The
ferryman had taken the precaution to hitch the end of his halter-rope to
a thwart amidships, lest he should get wild and jump overboard; but the
colt, though his dark brown coat was still woolly with the roughness of
babyhood, had too much breadth between the eyes to be guilty of any such
foolishness. He felt frightened, and strange, and very lonely; but he
knew it was his business just to trust the man and keep still.
When the animal trusts the man he generally comes out all right; but
once in a long while Fate interferes capriciously, and the utterly
unexpected happens. Hundreds of times, and with never a mishap, the
ferryman had poled his clumsy scow across the dangerous passage between
the rapids--the only possible crossing-place for miles in either
direction. But this evening, when the scow was just about mid-channel,
for some inexplicable reason the tough and well-tried pole of white
spruce snapped. It broke short off in the middle of a mighty thrust. And
overboard, head first, went the ferryman.
As the man fell his foot caught in the hook of a heavy chain used for
securing hay-carts and such vehicles on the scow; and as the clumsy
craft swung free in the current the man was dragged beneath it. He would
have been drowned in a few seconds, in such water; but at last, in the
twisting, the captive foot fell clear. The man came to the surface on
the upper side of the scow, made one despairing but successful clutch,
got hold of the edge, and with his last strength drew himself aboard,
all but suffocated, and with a broken ankle. Tricked by years of
security, he had left his spare pole on the shore. There was absolutely
nothing to do but let the scow drift, and pray that by some succession
of miracles she might survive nine miles of rapids and gain the placid
reaches below.
As the man, white and sullen, crouched on the bottom of the scow and
held his ankle, the colt eyed him wonderingly. Then he eyed the river,
very anxiously, and presently braced his legs wide apart as the scow
gave a strange, disconcerting lurch. The roar was growing swiftly
louder, and those fierce white waves appeared to be rushing right up the
middle of the river to meet the scow. Daunted at the sight, he crowded
as close as he could to the ferryman, and nosed him as if to call his
attention to the peril.
In a very few minutes the scow was in the rapids. But the current had
carried her well inshore, where there chanced to be, for several miles,
a comparatively free channel, few rocks, and no disastrous ledges. She
swung and wallowed sickeningly, bumping so violently that once the
colt's knees gave way beneath him and twice he was all but hurled
overboard. And she took in great, sloshing crests of waves till she was
half-full of water. But she was not built to sink, and her ribs were
sound. For miles she pounded her terrible way in safety through the
bewildering tumult. At last a long jutting promontory of rock started
the current on a new slant, and she was swept staggering across to the
other shore. Here, for nearly two miles, she slipped with astonishing
good luck down a narrow, sluice-like lane of almost smooth water. As if
to compensate for this fortune, however, she was suddenly caught by a
violent cross-current, snatched out of the clearway, and swept heavily
over a ledge. At the foot of this ledge she was fairly smothered for
some seconds. The man clung obstinately to the gunwales; and the colt,
by sheer good luck, fell in the scow instead of over the side. By the
time he had struggled to his feet again the scow had righted herself,
and darted into a wild chaos of rocks and sluices close by the shore.
Here she caught on a boulder, tipped up till she was nearly on her
gunwale, and pitched the little animal clear overboard.
As the clumsy craft swung loose the very next instant, the colt was
dragged along in her wake, and would have ended his adventures then and
there but for the readiness of the man. Forgetting for an instant his
own terrible plight, he drew his knife and slashed the rope. Thus
released, the colt got his head above water and made a valiant struggle
toward the shore, which was now not five yards away.
All that he could do in the grip of that mad flood was, needless to say,
very little, but it chanced to be enough, for it brought him within the
grasp of a strong eddy. A moment later he was dashed violently into
shoal water. As he fought to a footing he saw the scow wallowing away
down the torrent. Then he found himself, he knew not how, on dry land.
The falls roared behind him. They might, it seemed, rush up at any
instant and clutch him again. Blind and sick with panic, he dashed into
the woods, and went galloping and stumbling straight inland. At last he
sank trembling in the deep grass of a little brookside meadow.
Being of sturdy stock, the brown colt soon recovered his wind. Then,
feeling nervous in the loneliness of the woods and the deepening
shadows, he snatched a few mouthfuls of grass and started to try and
find his way home. Obeying some deep-seated instinct, he set his face
aright, and pushed forward through the thick growths.
His progress, however, was slow. Among the trees the twilight was now
gathering, and the dark places filled his young heart with vague but
dreadful apprehensions, so that at every few steps he would stop and
stare backward over his shoulder. Presently he came out upon another
open glade, and cheered by the light, he followed this glade as long as
it seemed to lead in the right direction. Once a wide-winged, noiseless
shadow sailed over his head, and he shied with a loud snort of terror.
He had never before seen an owl. And once he jumped back wildly, as a
foraging mink rustled through the herbage just before him. But for all
the alarms that kept his baby heart quivering, he pressed resolutely
forward, longing for the comfort of his mother's flank, and the familiar
stall in the barn above the ferry.
As he reached the end of the glade his apprehensive ears caught a
curious sound, a sort of dry rustling, which came from the fringe of the
undergrowth. He halted, staring anxiously at the place the strange sound
came from. Immediately before him was the prostrate and rotting trunk of
an elm-tree, its roots hidden in the brushwood, its upper end projecting
into the grass and weeds of the glade. As the colt stood wondering, a
thickset, short-legged, grayish coloured animal, covered with long,
bristling quills, emerged from the leafage and came crawling down the
trunk toward him. It looked no larger than the black-and-white dog which
the colt was accustomed to seeing about the farmyard, but its fierce
little eyes and its formidable quills made him extremely nervous.
[Illustration: "HIS APPREHENSIVE EARS CAUGHT A CURIOUS SOUND."]
The porcupine came directly at him, with an ill-natured squeaking grunt.
The colt backed away a foot or two, snorting, then held his ground. He
had never yielded ground to the black-and-white dog. Why should he be
afraid of this clumsy little creature? But when, at last, the porcupine
drew so near that he could have touched it with his outstretched nose,
instead of making any such great mistake as that he flung his head high
in air, wheeled about, and lashed out furiously with his hinder hoofs.
One hoof caught the porcupine fairly on the snout and sent it whirling
end over end into the thicket, where it lay stretched out lifeless, as a
feast for the first hungry prowler that might chance by. Not greatly
elated by his victory, the magnitude of which he in no way realized, the
colt plunged again into the woods and continued his journey.
By this time the sun had dropped completely behind the wooded hills, and
here in the deep forest the dark seemed to come on all at once. The
colt's fears now crowded upon him so thickly that he could hardly make
any progress at all. He was kept busy staring this way and that, and
particularly over his shoulders. A mass of shadow, denser than the
rest,--a stump, a moss-grown boulder,--would seem to his frightened eyes
a moving shape, just about to spring upon him. He would jump to one
side, his baby heart pounding between his ribs, only to see another and
huger shadow on the other side, and jump back again. The sudden
scurrying of a wood-mouse over the dry spruce-needles made his knees
tremble beneath him. At last, coming to two tall, straight-trunked
saplings growing close together just before the perpendicular face of a
great rock, he was vaguely reminded of the cow-stanchions near his
mother's stall in the barn. To his quivering heart this was in some way
a refuge, as compared with the terrible spaciousness of the forest. He
could not make himself go any farther, but crowded up as close as
possible against the friendly trees and waited.
He had no idea, of course, what he was waiting for, unless he had some
dim expectation that his dead mother, or his owner, or the man on the
ferryboat would come and lead him home. His instinct taught him that the
dark of the wilderness held unknown perils for him, though his guarded
babyhood had afforded him no chance to learn by experience. Young as he
was, he took up the position which gave his peculiar weapons opportunity
for exercise. Instead of backing up against the trees and the rock, and
facing such foes as the dread dark might send upon him, he stood with
his back toward the danger and his formidable heels in readiness, while
over first one shoulder, then the other, his eyes and ears kept guard.
The situation was one that might well have cowed him completely; but the
blood in his baby veins was that of mettled ancestors, and terrified
though he was, and trembling, his fear did not conquer his spirit.
[Illustration: "THE BIG OWL HAD BEEN DISTURBED AT ITS BANQUET."]
Soon after he had taken his stand in this strange and desolate stabling,
from a little way back in the underbrush there came a pounce, a scuffle,
and a squeal, more scuffle, and then silence. He could not even guess
what was happening, but whatever it was, it was terrible to him. For
some moments there came, from the same spot, little, soft, ugly,
thickish sounds. These stopped abruptly. Immediately afterwards there
was a hurried beating of wings, and something floated over him. The big
owl had been disturbed at its banquet. A few seconds more and the
watcher's ears caught a patter of light footsteps approaching. Next he
saw a faint gleam of eyes, which seemed to scrutinize him steadily,
fearlessly, indifferently, for perhaps the greater part of a minute.
Then they vanished, with more patter of light footsteps; and as they
disappeared a wandering puff of night air brought to the colt's nostrils
a musky scent which he knew. It was the smell of a red fox, such as he
had seen once prowling around his owner's barn-yard. This smell, from
its associations, was comforting rather than otherwise, and he would
have been glad if the fox had stayed near.
For some time now there was stillness all about the big rock, the owl's
kill and the passing of the fox having put all the small wild creatures
on their guard. Little by little the colt was beginning to get used to
the situation. He was even beginning to relax the tense vigilance of his
watching, when suddenly his heart gave a leap and seemed to stand still.
Just about ten paces behind him he saw a pair of pale, green-gleaming
eyes, round, and set wider apart than those of the fox, slowly floating
toward him. At the same time his nostrils caught a scent which was
absolutely unknown to him, and peculiarly terrifying.
[Illustration: "WHICH SEEMED TO SCRUTINIZE HIM STEADILY."]
As these two dreadful eyes drew near, the colt's muscles grew tense.
Then he distinguished a shadowy, crouching form behind the eyes; and he
gathered his haunches under him for a desperate defense. But the big
lynx was wary. This long-legged creature who stood thus with his back
to him and eyed him with watchful, sidelong glances was something he did
not understand. Before he came within range of the colt's heels he
swerved to one side and stole around at a safe distance, investigating.
He was astonished, and at first discomfited, to find that, whichever way
he circled, the unknown animal under the rock persisted in keeping his
back to him. For perhaps half an hour, with occasional intervals of
motionless crouching, he kept up this slow circling, unable to allay his
suspicions. Then, apparently making up his mind that the unknown was not
a dangerous adversary, or perhaps in some subtle way detecting his
youth, he crept closer. He crept so close, indeed, that he felt
emboldened to spring; and he was just about to do so.
Just at this moment, luckily just the right moment, the colt let loose
the catapult of his strong haunches. His hoofs struck the lynx fairly in
the face, and hurled him backwards against a neighbouring tree.
Half-stunned, and his wind knocked out, the big cat picked himself up
with a sharp spitting and snarling, and slunk behind the tree. Then he
turned tail and ran away, thoroughly beaten. The strange animal had a
fashion in fighting which he did not know how to cope with; and he had
no spirit left for further lessons.
After this the night wore on without great event, though with frequent
alarms which kept the colt's nerves ceaselessly on the rack. Now it was
the faint, almost imperceptible sound of a hunting weasel; now it was
the erratic scurrying of the wood-mice; now it was the loud but muffled
thumping of a hare, astonished at this long-limbed intruder upon the
wilderness domains. The colt was accustomed to sleeping well through the
night, and this protracted vigil upon his feet (for he was afraid to lie
down) exhausted him. When the first spectral gray of dawn began to work
its magic through the forest, his legs were trembling so that he could
hardly stand. When the first pink rays crept in beneath the rock, he
sank down and lay for half an hour, not sleeping, but resting. Then he
got up and resumed his homeward journey, very hungry, but too desperate
with chill and homesickness to stop and eat.
He had travelled perhaps a mile, when he caught the sound of heavy,
careless footsteps, and stopped. Staring anxiously through the trees, he
saw a woodsman striding along the trail, with an axe over his shoulder.
At sight of one of those beings that stood to him for protection, and
kindly guidance, and shelter, his terror and loneliness all slipped
away. He gave a shrill, loud whinny of delight, galloped forward with
much crashing of underbrush, and snuggled a coaxing muzzle under the arm
of the astonished woodsman.
The Terror of the Sea Caves
I
It was in Singapore that big Jan Laurvik, the diver, heard about the
lost pearls.
As he was passing the head of a mean-looking alley near the waterside,
late one sweltering afternoon, he was halted by a sudden uproar of cries
and curses. The noise came from a courtyard about twenty paces up the
alley. It was a fight, evidently, and Jan's blood responded with a
sympathetic thrill. But the curses which he caught were all in Malay or
Chinese, and he curbed his natural desire to rush in and help somebody.
Though he knew both languages very well, he knew that he did not know,
and never could know, the people who spoke those languages. Interference
on the part of a stranger might be resented by both parties to the
quarrel. He shrugged his great shoulders, and walked on reluctantly.
Hardly three steps had he taken, however, when above the shrill cries a
great voice shouted.
"Take that, you damned--" it began, in English. And at that it ended,
with a kind of choking.
Jan Laurvik wheeled round in a flash and ran furiously for the door of
the courtyard, which stood half-open. He was a Norwegian, but English
was as a native tongue to him; and amid the jumble of races in the East
he counted all of European speech his brothers. An Englishman was being
killed in there. The quarrel was clearly his.
Six feet two in height, swift, and of huge strength, with yellow hair,
so light as to be almost white, waving thickly over a face that was
sunburnt to a high red, his blue eyes flaming with the delight of
battle, Jan burst in upon the mob of fighters. Several bodies lay on the
floor. One dark-faced, low-browed fellow, a Lascar apparently, with his
back to the wall and a bloody kreese in his hand, was putting up a
savage fight against five or six assailants, who seemed to be Chinamen
and Malays. The body of the Englishman whose voice Jan had heard lay in
an ugly heap against the wall, its head far back and almost severed.
Jan's practised eye took in everything at a glance. The heavy stick he
carried was, for a mêlée like this, a better weapon than knife or gun.
With a great bellowing roar he sprang upon the knot of fighters.
The result was almost instantaneous. The two nearest rascals went down
at his first two strokes. At the sound of that huge roar of his all had
turned their eyes; and the man at bay, seizing his opportunity, had cut
down two more of his foes with lightning slashes of his blade. The
remaining two, scattering and ducking, had leaped for the door like
rabbits. Jan wheeled, and sprang after them. But they were too quick for
him. As he reached the head of the alley they darted into a narrow
doorway across the street which led into a regular warren of low
structures. Knowing it would be madness to follow, Jan turned back to
the courtyard, curious to find out what it had all been about.
The silence was now startling. As he entered, there was no sound but the
painful breathing of the Lascar, whom he found sitting with his back
against the wall, close beside the body of the Englishman. He was
desperately slashed. His eyes were half-closed; and Jan saw that there
was little chance of his recovery. Besides that of the Englishman, there
were six bodies lying on the floor, all apparently quite lifeless. Jan
saw that the place was a kind of drinking den. The proprietor, a
brutal-looking Chinaman, lay dead beside his jugs and bottles. Jan
reached for a jug of familiar appearance, poured out a cup of arrack,
and held it to the lips of the dying Lascar. At the first gulp of the
potent spirit his eyes opened again. He swallowed it all, eagerly, then
straightened himself up, held out his hand in European fashion to Jan,
and thanked him in Malayan.
"Who's that?" inquired Jan in the same tongue, pointing to the dead
white man.
Grief and rage convulsed the fierce face of the wounded Lascar.
"He was my friend," he answered. "The sons of filthy mothers, they
killed him!"
"Too bad!" said Jan sympathetically. "But you gave a pretty good account
of yourselves, you two. I like a man that can fight like you were
fighting when I came in. What can I do for you?"
"I'm dead, pretty soon now!" said the fellow indifferently. And from the
blood that was soaking down his shirt and spreading on the floor about
him, Jan saw that the words were true. Anxious, however, to do something
to show his good will, he pulled out his big red handkerchief, and
knelt to bandage a gaping slash straight across the man's left forearm,
from which the bright arterial blood was jumping hotly. As he bent, the
fellow's eyes lifted and looked over his shoulder.
"Look out!" he screamed. Before the words were fairly out of his mouth
Jan had thrown himself violently to one side and sprung to his feet. He
was just in time. The knife of one of the Chinamen whom he had supposed
to be dead was sticking in the wall beside the Lascar's arm.
Jan stared at the bodies--all, apparently, lifeless.
"That's the one did it," cried the Lascar excitedly, pointing to the one
whom Jan had struck on the head with his stick. "Put your knife into the
son of a dog!"
But that was not the big Norseman's way. He wanted to assure himself. He
went and bent over the limp-looking, sprawling shape, to examine it. As
he did so the slant eyes opened upon his with a flash of such maniacal
hate that he started back. He was just in time to save his eyes, for the
Chinaman had clutched at them like lightning with his long nails.
Startled and furious at this novel attack, Jan reached for his knife.
But before he could get his hand on it the Chinaman had leaped into the
air like a wildcat, wound arms and legs about his body, and was
struggling like a mad beast to set teeth into his throat. The attack was
so miraculously swift, so disconcerting in its beast-like ferocity, that
Jan felt a strange qualm that was almost akin to panic. Then a black
rage swelled his muscles; and tearing the creature from him he dashed
him down upon the floor, on the back of his neck, with a violence which
left no need of pursuing the question further. Not till he had examined
each of the bodies carefully, and tried them with his knife, did he turn
again to the wounded Lascar leaning against the wall.
"Thank you, my friend!" he said simply.
"You're a good fighting man. You're--like him," answered the Lascar
feebly, nodding toward the dead Englishman. "Give me more arrack. I will
tell you something. Hurry, for I go soon."
Jan brought him the liquor, and he gulped it. Then from a pouch within
his knotted silk waistband he hurriedly produced a bit of paper which he
unfolded with trembling fingers, Jan saw that it was a rough map
sketched with India ink and marked with Malayan characters. The Lascar
peered about him with fierce eyes already growing dim.
"Are you sure they are all gone?" he demanded.
"Certain!" answered Jan, highly interested.
"They'll try their best to kill you," went on the dying man. "Don't let
them. If you let them get the pearls, I'll come back and haunt you."
"I won't let them kill me, and I won't let them get the pearls, if
that's what it is that's made all the trouble. Don't worry about that,"
responded Jan confidently, reaching out his great hand for the paper,
which was evidently so precious that men were giving up their lives for
it.
The man handed it over with a groping gesture, though his savage black
eyes were wide open.
"That'll show you where the wreck of the junk lies, in seven or eight
fathom of water, close inshore. The pearls are in the deck-house. _He_
kept them. The steamer was on a reef, going to pieces, and we came up
just as the boats were putting off. We sunk them all, and got the
pearls. And next night, in a storm, the junk was carried on to the rocks
by a current we didn't know about. Only five of us got ashore--for the
sharks were around, and the 'killers,' that night. _Him_ and me, we
were the only ones knew enough to make that map."
Here the dying pirate--for such he had declared himself--sank forward
with his face upon his knees. But with a mighty effort he sat up again
and fixed Jan Laurvik with terrible eyes.
"Don't let the sons of a dog get them, or I will come back and choke you
in your sleep," he gasped, suddenly pointing a lean finger straight at
the Norseman's face. Then his black eyes opened wide, a strange red
light blazed up in them for an instant and faded. With a sigh he toppled
over, dead, his head resting on the dead Englishman's feet.
II
Jan Laurvik looked down upon the slack form with a sort of grim
indulgence. "He was game, and he loved his comrade, though he _was_ but
a bloody-hearted pirate!" he muttered to himself.
With the paper folded small and hidden in his great palm, he glanced
again from the door to see if any of the routed scoundrels were coming
back. Satisfied on this point, he once more investigated the dead bodies
on the floor, to assure himself that all were as dead as they appeared.
Then he set himself to examine the precious paper, which held out to his
imagination all sorts of fascinating possibilities. He knew that the
swift boats carrying the proceeds of the pearl-fisheries were always
eagerly watched by the piratical junks infesting those waters, but
carried an armament which secured them from all interference. In case of
wreck, however, the pirates' opportunity would come. Jan knew that the
story he had just heard was no improbable one.
The map proved to be rough, but very intelligible. It indicated a
stretch of the eastern coast of Java, which Jan recognized; but the spot
where the junk had gone down was one to which passing ships always gave
a wide berth. It was a place of treacherous anchorage, of abrupt,
forbidding, uninhabited shore, and of violent currents that shifted
erratically. So much the better, thought Jan, for his investigations, if
only the pirate junk should prove to have been considerate enough to
sink in water not too deep for a diver to work in. There would be so
much the less danger of interruption.
Jan was on the point of hurrying away from the gruesome scene, which
might at any moment become a scene of excitement and annoying
investigation, when a new idea flashed into his mind. It was over this
precious paper that all the trouble had been. The scoundrels who had
fled would undoubtedly return as soon as they dared, and would search
for it. Finding it gone they would conclude that he had it; and they
would be hot on his trail. He had no fancy for the sleepless vigilance
that this would entail upon him. He had no fancy for the heavy armed
expedition which it would force him to organize for the pearl hunt. He
saw his airy palaces toppling ignominiously to earth. He saw that all he
was likely to get was a slit throat.
As he glanced about him for a way out of his dilemma his eyes fell on a
bottle of India ink containing the fine-tipped brush with which these
Orientals did their writing. His resourcefulness awoke to this chance.
The moments were becoming very pearls themselves for preciousness, but
seizing the brush, he made a workable copy of the map on the back of a
letter which he had in his pocket. Then he made a minute and very
careful correction in the original, in such a manner as to indicate that
the position of the wreck was in a deep fiord some fifty miles east of
where it actually was. This done to his critical satisfaction, he
returned the map to its hiding-place in the dead pirate's belt, and made
all haste away. Not till he was back in the European quarter did he feel
himself secure. Once among his fellow whites, where he was a man of
known standing and reputed to be the best diver in the Archipelago, he
knew that he would run no risk of being connected with a drinking brawl
of Lascars and pirates. As for the dead Englishman, he knew the odds
were that the Singapore police would know all about him.
Jan Laurvik had a little capital. But he needed a trusty partner with
more. To his experienced wits his other needs were clear. There would
have to be a very seaworthy little steamer, powerfully engined for
service on that stormy coast, and armed to defend herself against
prowling pirate junks. This small and fit craft would have to be manned
by a crew equally fit, and at the same time as small as possible, for
the reason that in a venture of this sort every one concerned would of
necessity come in for a share of the winnings. Moreover, the fewer there
were to know, the fewer the chances of the secret leaking out; and Jan
was even more in dread of the Dutch Government getting wind of it than
he was of the pirates picking up his trail.
Up to a certain point, he had no difficulty in verifying the dead
pirate's story. He had heard of the wreck of the Dutch steamer _Viecht_
on a reef off the Celebes, and of the massacre of all the crew and
passengers, except one small boat-load, by pirates. This had happened
about eight months ago. Discreet inquiry developed the fact that the
_Viecht_ had carried about $300,000 worth of pearls. The evidence was
sufficiently convincing and the prize was sufficiently alluring to make
it worth his while to risk the adventure.
It was with a certain amount of Northern deliberation that Jan Laurvik
thought these points all out, and made up his mind what to do. Then he
acted promptly. First he cabled to Calcutta, to one Captain Jerry
Parsons, to join him in Singapore without fail by the very next steamer.
Then he set himself unobtrusively to the task of finding the craft he
wanted and looking up the equipment for her.
Captain Jerry Parsons was a New Englander, from Portland, Me. He had
been whaler, gold-hunter, filibuster, copra-trader, general-in-chief to
a small Central American republic, and sheepfarmer in the Australian
bush. At present he was conducting a more or less regular trade in
precious stones among the lesser Indian potentates. He loved gain much,
but he loved adventure more.
When he received the cable from his good friend Jan Laurvik, he knew
that both were beckoning to him. With light-hearted zest he betook
himself to the steamship offices, found a P. & O. boat sailing on the
morrow, and booked his passage. Throughout the journey he amused himself
with trying to guess what Jan Laurvik was after; and, as it happened,
almost the only thing he failed to think of was pearls.
When Captain Jerry reached Singapore Jan Laurvik told him the story of
the dead pirate's map.
"Let's see the map!" said he, chewing hard on the butt of his unlighted
Manila.
Jan passed his copy over. The New Englander inspected it carefully, in
silence, for several minutes.
"'Tain't much of a map!" said he at length disparagingly. "You think the
varmint was straight?"
"In his way, yes," answered Jan with conviction. "He had it in him to be
straight in his way to a friend, which wouldn't hinder him cuttin' the
throats of a thousand chaps he didn't take an interest in."
"When shall we start?" asked Captain Jerry. Now that his mind was quite
made up he took out his match-box and carefully lighted his cheroot.
The big Norseman's face lighted up with pleasure, and he reached out his
hand. The grip was all, in the way of a bargain, that was needed between
them.
"Why, to-morrow night!" he answered.
"Well," said the New Englander, "I'll draw some cash in the morning."
The boat which Jan had hired was a fast and sturdy seagoing tug,
serviceable, but not designed for comfort. Jan had retained her
engineer, a shrewd and close-mouthed Scotchman. Her sailing-master would
be Captain Jerry. For crew he had chosen a wiry little Welshman and two
lank leather-skinned Yankees. To these four, for whose honesty and
loyalty he trusted to his own insight as a reader of men, he explained,
partially, the nature of the undertaking, and agreed to give them, over
and above their wages, a substantial percentage of whatever treasure he
might succeed in recovering. He had made his selection wisely, and
every man of the four laid hold of the opportunity with ardour.
The tug was swift enough to elude any of the junks infesting those
waters, but the danger was that she might be taken by surprise at her
anchorage while Laurvik was under water. He fitted her, therefore, with
a Maxim gun on the roof of the deck-house, and armed the crew with
repeating Winchesters.
Thus equipped, he felt ready for any perils that might confront him
above the surface of the water. As to what might lurk below he felt
somewhat less confident, as these he should have to face alone, and he
remembered the ominous warning of his pirate friend, about the sharks
and the "killers." For sharks Jan Laurvik had comparatively small
concern; but for the "killers," those swift and implacable little whales
who fear no living thing, he entertained the highest respect.
On the evening of the day after Captain Jerry's arrival, the tug
_Sarawak_ steamed quietly out of the harbour. As this was a customary
thing for her to do, it excited no particular comment among the
frequenters of the waterside. By the pirates' spies, who abounded in the
city, it was not considered an event worth making note of.
[Illustration: "THOSE SWIFT AND IMPLACABLE LITTLE WHALES WHO FEAR NO
LIVING THING."]
The journey, across the Straits, and down the treacherous Javan Sea, was
so prosperous that Jan Laurvik, his blood steeped in Norse superstition,
began to feel uneasy. The sea was like a millpond all the way, and
they were sighted by no one likely to interfere or ask questions. Jan
distrusted Fortune when she seemed to smile too blandly. But Captain
Jerry comforted him with the assurance that there'd be trouble enough
ahead; and strangely enough this singular variety of comfort quite
relieved Jan's depression.
The unusual calm made it easy to hold close inshore, when they reached
that portion of the coast where they must keep watch for the landmarks
indicated on the pirate's map. Every reef and surface-ledge boiled
ceaselessly in the smooth swell, and by that clear green sea they were
saved the trouble of tedious soundings. When they came exactly abreast
of a low headland which they had been watching for some time, it
suddenly opened out into the semblance of a two-humped camel crouching
sidewise to the sea, exactly as it was represented in Jan's map. Just
beyond was a narrow bay, and across the middle of its mouth, with a
dangerous passage on either side, stretched the reef on which the pirate
junk had gone down. At this hour of low water the reef was showing its
teeth and snarling with surf. At high tide it would be hidden, and a
perfect snare of ships. According to the map, the wreck lay in some
eight fathoms of water, midway of the outer crescent of the reef. Behind
the reef, where the latter might serve them as a partial shelter from
the sweep of the seas if a northeaster should blow up, they found
tolerable anchorage for the tug. For the preliminary soundings, and for
the diving operations, of course, Jan planned to use the launch. And, in
order to take utmost advantage of the phenomenal calm, which seemed
determined to smooth away every obstacle for the adventurers, Jan got
instantly to work. Within a half-hour of the _Sarawak's_ anchoring he
had the launch outside the reef with all his diving apparatus aboard,
with Captain Jerry to manage the air-pump, and the Scotch engineer to
run the motor.
III
Along the outer face of the reef, at a depth varying from eight to
twelve fathoms, ran an irregular rocky shelf which dipped gradually
seaward for several hundred yards, then dropped sheer to the ocean
depths. In the warm water along this shelf swarmed a teeming life, of
gay-coloured gigantic weeds, and of strange fish that outdid the
brightest weeds in brilliancy and unexpectedness of hue. Where the
tropic sunlight filtered dimly down through the beryl tide it sank into
a marvellous garden whose flowers, for the most part, were living and
moving forms, some monstrous, many terrifying, and almost all as
grotesque in shape as they were radiant in colour. But in that
insufficient, glimmering light, which was rather, to a human eye, a
vaguely translucent, greenish darkness, these colours were almost
blotted out. It took eyes adapted to the depth and gloom to
differentiate them clearly.
In the great deeps, also, beyond the edge of the shelf, thronged life in
swimming, crawling, or moveless forms, of every imagined and many
unimagined shapes, from creatures so tiny that a whole colony could
dwell at ease in the eye of a cambric needle, to the Titanic squid, or
cuttlefish, with oval bodies fifty feet in length and arms like writhing
constrictors reaching twenty or thirty feet farther. It was a life of
noiseless but terrific activity, of unrelenting and incessant death, in
a darkness streaked fitfully with phosphorescent gleams from the bodies
of the darting, writhing, or pouncing creatures that slew and were slain
in the stupendous silence.
Down to these dwellers in the profound had come some mysterious message
or exciting influence, no man knows what, from the prolonged calm on the
surface. It affected individuals among various species, in such a way
that they moved upward, into a twilight where they were aliens and
intruders. Among those so stung with unrest were several of the
gigantic, pallid cuttles. Far offshore, one of these monsters came up
and sprawled upon the surface in the unfriendly sun, his dreadful arms
curling and uncurling like snakes, till a great sperm-whale, of scarcely
more than his own size, came by and fell upon him ravenously, and
devoured him.
Another of the restless monsters, however, kept his restlessness within
the bounds of discretion. Slowly rising, a vast and spectral horror as
he came up into the green light, he reached the rim of the ledge. The
growing light had already made him uneasy, and he wanted no more of it.
Here on the ledge, where food, though novel in character, was unlimited
in supply, was variety enough to content him. Gorging himself as he went
with everything that swam within reach of his darting tentacles, he
moved over the rocky floor till he came to the wreck of the junk.
[Illustration: "FAR OFFSHORE, ONE OF THESE MONSTERS CAME UP AND SPRAWLED
UPON THE SURFACE."]
To his huge unwinking eyes of crystal black, which caught every tiniest
ray of light in their smooth, appalling deeps, the wreck looked strange
enough to attract his attention at once. It was quite unlike any
rock-form which he had ever seen. Rather cautiously he advanced a giant
tentacle to investigate it. But at the touch of the unfamiliar and alien
substance the tentacle recoiled in aversion. The pale monster backed
away. But the wreck made no attempt to pounce upon him. It seemed to
have no fight in it. Possibly, on closer investigation, it might prove
to be good to eat; and he was hungry. In fact, he was always hungry, for
the irresistible corrosives in his great stomach--and he was nearly all
stomach--were so swift in their action that whatever he swallowed was
digested almost in the swallowing. Since coming upon the ledge he had
clutched and devoured two small basking sharks, from six to eight feet
long, and a sawfish fully ten feet long, who had not been on their guard
against the approach of such a peril. Besides these substantial victims,
countless small fry, of every kind, had been drawn deftly to the
insatiable vortex of his maw. Nevertheless, his appetite was again
crying out. He tried the wreck again, first carefully, then boldly, till
the writhing tentacles, with their sensitive tips and suckers, had
enveloped it from stem to stern and searched it inside and out. A few
lurking fish and mollusks were snatched from the dark interior by those
insinuating and inexorable feelers; and a toothsome harvest of anchored
crustaceans was gathered from the hidden surfaces along beside the keel.
But of the bodies of the pirates that had gone down in the sudden
foundering there was nothing left but bones, which the myriad scavengers
of the sea had polished to the barren smoothness of ivory.
While the pallid monster was occupied in the investigation of the wreck
those two great bulging black mirrors of his eyes were sleeplessly alert
to everything that passed above or about them. Once a swordfish, about
seven feet long, sailed carelessly though swiftly some ten feet
overhead. Up darted a livid tentacle, and fixed upon it with the deadly
sucking disks. In vain the splendid and ferocious fish lashed out in the
effort to wrench itself free. In vain it strove to plunge downward and
pierce the puffy monster with its sword. In a second two more
tentacles were wrapped about it. Then, all force crushed out of it, it
was dragged down and crammed into the conqueror's horrible mouth.
[Illustration: "UP DARTED A LIVID TENTACLE, AND FIXED UPON IT."]
While its mouth was yet working with the satisfaction of this meal, the
monster saw a graceful but massive black shape, nearly half as long as
himself, swimming slowly between his eyes and the shining surface. At
the sight a shudder of fear passed over him. Every waving tentacle
shrank back and lay moveless, as if suddenly paralyzed, and he flattened
himself down as best he could beside the dark hulk of the wreck. Well he
knew that dark shape was a whale--and a whale was the one being he knew
of which he had cause to fear. Against those rending jaws his cable-like
tentacles and tearing beak were of no avail, his unarmoured body utterly
defenceless.
The whale, however,--not a sperm, but one of a much smaller, though more
savage, species--the "killer,"--did not catch sight of the giant
cuttlefish cringing below him. Intent on other game, he passed swiftly
on. His presence, however, had for the moment destroyed the monster's
appetite. Instead of continuing his search for food, he wanted a
hiding-place. He could no longer be at ease for a moment there in the
open.
Just behind the wreck the rock wall rose abruptly to the surface of the
reef. Its base was hollowed into a series of low caves, where masses of
softer rock had been eaten out from beneath a slanting stratum of more
enduring material. The most spacious of these caves was immediately
behind the wreck. It was exactly what the monster craved. He backed into
it with alacrity, completely filling it with his spectral and swollen
body. In the doorway the convex inky lenses of his eyes kept watch,
moveless and all-seeing. And his ten pale-spotted tentacles, each
thicker at the base than a man's thigh, lay outspread and hidden among
the seaweeds, waiting for such victims as might come within reach of
their lightning snap and coil.
[Illustration: "A SINGULAR FIGURE, DESCENDING SLOWLY THROUGH THE
GLIMMERING GREEN."]
The monster had no more than got himself fairly installed in his new
quarters, when into the range of his awful eyes came a singular figure,
descending slowly through the glimmering green directly over the wreck.
It was not so long as the swordfish he had lately swallowed, but it was
thick and massive-looking; and it was blunt at the ends, unlike any
fish he had ever seen. Its eyes were enormous, round and bulging. From
its head and from one of its curious round, thick fins, extended two
slender antennæ straight up toward the surface, and so long that their
extremities were beyond the monster's vision. It was indeed a
strange-looking creature, but he felt sure that it would be very good to
eat. In their concealment among the many-coloured seaweeds his tentacles
thrilled with expectancy, and he waited, like some stupendous nightmare
of a spider, to spring the moment the prey came within reach.
It chanced, however, that just as the strange creature, descending
without any movement of its fins, did come within reach, there also
appeared again, in the distance, the black form of the "killer" whale,
swimming far overhead. The monster changed his plans instantly. His
interest in the newcomer died out. He became intent on nothing but
keeping himself inconspicuous. The newcomer, unconscious of the terror
lying in wait so near him and of the dark form patrolling the upper
green, alighted upon the wreck and groped his way lumberingly into the
cabin, dragging those two slim antennæ behind him.
IV
When Jan Laurvik, in his up-to-date and well-tested diving-suit, went
down through the green twilight of the sea, he was doing what it was his
profession to do, and he had few misgivings. He had confidence in his
equipment, in his skill, and in his mate at the rope and the air-pump,
Captain Jerry. For defence against any obtrusive shark or sawfish he
carried a heavy, long-bladed, two-edged knife, by far the most effective
weapon in deep water. This knife he wore in a sheath at his waist, with
a cord attached to the handle so that it could not get away from him. He
carried also a tiny electric battery supplying a strong lamp on the
front of his head-piece just above his eyes.
From his long experience in sounding and in locating wrecks, Jan Laurvik
had acquired an accuracy that seemed almost like divination. His
soundings, in this instance, had been particularly thorough, because he
did not wish to waste any more time than necessary at the depth in which
he would have to work. He was not surprised, therefore, when he found
himself descending upon the wreck of a junk. Moreover, as it was not an
old wreck, he concluded that it was the junk which he was looking for.
The wreck had settled almost on an even keel; and as he was familiar
with craft of her type, he had no difficulty in finding his way about.
It was in the narrow, closet-like structure which served as the junk's
cabin that the pirate had said the pearls would be found. The door was
open. Turning on his light, which struggled with the water and diffused
a ghostly glow, he found himself confronted by a hideous little joss of
red-and-gilt lacquer. He knew it was lacquer, and of the best, for
nothing else, except gold itself, would have withstood the months of
soaking in sea-water. Jan grinned to himself, there within his rubber
and copper shell, at this evidence of pirate piety. Then it occurred to
him that a man like the pirate captain would probably have turned his
piety to practical use. What better guardian of the treasure than a god?
Dragging the gaudy deity from his altar, he found the altar hollow. In
that secure receptacle lay a series of packages done up with careful
precision in wrappings of oiled silk. He knew the style of wrapping very
well. For all his coolness, his heart fell to thumping painfully at the
sight of this vast wealth beneath his hand. Then he realized that the
pressure of the water, and of the compressed air in his helmet, was
beginning to tell upon him. In fierce but orderly haste he corded the
packages about his middle and turned to leave the cabin. He would make
another trip for the lacquer god, and for such other articles of value
or _vertu_ which the junk might contain.
Jan turned to leave the cabin. But in the doorway he started back with a
shudder of dread and loathing. A slender, twisting thing, whitish in
colour and minutely speckled with livid spots, reached in, and fastened
upon his arm with soft-looking suckers which held like death.
Jan knew instantly what the pale, writhing thing was. Out flashed his
knife. With a swift stroke he slashed off the detaining tip, where it
had a thickness of perhaps two inches. The raw stump shrank back, like a
severed worm, and Jan, leaping clear of the doorway, signalled furiously
to be hauled up. But at the same instant two more of the curling white
things came reaching over the bulwarks and fastened upon him--one upon
his right arm, hampering him so that he was almost helpless, and the
other upon his left leg just above the knee. He felt his signal promptly
answered by a powerful tug on the rope. But he was anchored to the wreck
as if he had grown to it.
Never before had Jan Laurvik felt the clutch of fear at his heart as he
did at this moment. But not for an instant, in the horror, did he lose
his presence of mind. He knew that in a pulling match with the giant
devil-fish of the deeps his comrades in the boat far overhead would be
nowhere. He had made a mistake in leaving the cabin. Frantically he
signalled with his left hand, to "slack away" on the rope; and at the
same time, though hampered by the grip on his right arm, he managed to
slash off the end of the feeler that had fixed upon his leg. On the
instant, whipping the knife over to his left, he cut his right arm
clear, and sprang back into the doorway.
Jan's idea was that by keeping just inside the cabin door he could
defend himself from being surrounded by the assault of the writhing
things. He knew that in the open he would speedily be enfolded and
crushed, and engulfed between the jaws of the monstrous squid. But in
the narrow doorway the swift play of his blade would have some chance.
He gained the doorway. He got fairly inside it, indeed. But as he
entered he was horrified to see the thick stump, whose tip he had shorn
off, dart in with him and fix itself, by its bigger and more
irresistible suckers, upon the middle of his breast. With a shiver he
sliced off the fatal disks, in one long sweep of his blade; then turned
like a flash to sever a pallid tip which had fastened upon his helmet.
Jan was now thankful enough that he had got himself into the narrow
doorway. Seemingly undisturbed by the slashings and slicings which some
of them had received, the whole ten squirming horrors now darted at the
doorway. Jan's knife swooped this way and that; but as fast as he
severed one clutch two more would make good. The cut tentacles grew to
be the more terrifying, because their suckers were so big; and they
themselves were so thick and hard to cut. Presently no fewer than three
of the diabolical things laid their loathsome hold upon his right leg,
below the knee, and began to haul it out through the door. Jan slashed
at them madly, but not altogether effectually; for at this moment
another tentacle had laid grip upon his arm below the elbow. He had just
time to shift the knife again to his left and catch the jamb of the
door, when he felt his helmet almost jerked from his head. This grip he
dared not interfere with, lest he should cut, at the same time, the
air-tube that fed his lungs, and drown like a rat in a hole. All he
could do was hold on to the door-jamb, and carve away savagely at the
tentacles which were within reach. If he could get free of those, he
calculated that he could then reach the one which had fastened to his
head-piece by throwing himself over on his back and so bringing it
within range of his vision and his knife. At this moment, however, just
as the pressure upon his neck was becoming intolerable, he felt his head
suddenly released. One of the great sucking disks had crushed in the
glass of the electric lamp and fastened upon the live wire. The
sensation it experienced was evidently not pleasant, for it let go
promptly, and secured a new hold upon Jan's left arm.
This hold left him almost helpless, because he could no longer wield the
knife freely with either hand. He felt himself slowly being pulled out
of the doorway by his right leg. Throwing himself partly backward, and
partly behind the door, he gained a firmer brace and at the same time
brought his knife again into better play. He would fight to the very
last gasp, but he felt that the odds had now gone overwhelmingly against
him. The fear of death itself was not heavy upon him. He had faced it
too often, and too coolly, for that. But at the manner of this death
that confronted him his very soul sickened with loathing. As he thought
of it, his horror was not lessened by the sight which now greeted his
view. A colossal, swollen, leprous-looking bulk, pallid and spotted, was
mounting over the bulwark. Two great oval lenses of clear blackness, set
close together, were in the front of the bulk, just over the spot where
the tentacles started. These gigantic, appalling, expressionless eyes
were fixed upon him. The monster was coming aboard to see what kind of
creature it was that was giving him so much trouble.
Jan saw that the end of the fight was very near. The thought, however,
did not unnerve him. Rather, it put new fire into his nerves and
muscles. By a tremendous wrench he succeeded in reaching with the knife
the tentacle that bound his right arm. This freedom was like a new lease
of life to him. He made swift play with his blade, so savagely that he
was able to drag himself back almost completely into the cabin before
the writhing horrors again closed upon him. But meanwhile, the monster's
gigantic body had gained the deck. Those two awful eyes were slowly
drawing nearer; and below them he saw the viscid mouth opening and
shutting in anticipation.
At this a kind of madness began to surge up in Jan Laurvik's overtaxed
brain. His veins seemed to surge with fresh power, as if there were
nothing too tremendous for him to accomplish. He was on the very point
of stopping his resistance, plunging straight in among the arms, and
burying his big blade in those unspeakable eyes. It would be a
satisfaction, at least, to force them to change their expression. And
then, well, something might happen!
Before he could put this desperate scheme into execution, however,
something did happen. Jan was aware of a sudden darkness overhead. The
monster was evidently aware of it, too, for every one of the twisting
horrors suddenly shrank away, leaving Jan to lean up against the
doorway, free. The next moment a huge black shape descended
perpendicularly upon the fleshy mountain of the monster's back, and a
rush of water drove Jan backward into the cabin.
As the electric lamp had gone out when the glass was broken, Jan could
see but dimly the awful battle of giants now going on before him. So
excited was he that he forgot his own new peril. The danger was now that
in the struggle one or other of the battling bulks might well crush the
cabin flat, or entangle the air-tube and life-line In either case Jan's
finish would be swift; but in comparison with the loathsome death from
which he had just been so miraculously saved, such an end seemed no very
dreadful thing. He was altogether absorbed in watching the prowess of
his avenging rescuer.
Skilled in deep-sea lore as he was, he knew the dark fury which had
swooped down upon the devilfish. It was a "killer" whale, or grampus,
the most redoubtable and implacable fighter of all the kindreds of the
sea. Jan saw its wide jaws shear off three mighty tentacles at once,
close at the base. The others writhed up hideously and fastened upon
him, but under the surging of his resistless muscles their tissues tore
apart like snapped cables. Huge masses of the monster's ghastly flesh
were bitten off, and thrown aside. Then, gaining a grip that took in the
monster's head and the roots of the tentacles, the killer shook his prey
as a bulldog might shake a fat sheep. The tentacles straightened out
slackly. Jan saw that the fight was over; and that it was high time for
him to remove from that too strenuous neighbourhood. He gave the signal
vehemently, and was drawn up, without attracting his dangerous rescuer's
notice. When Captain Jerry hauled him in over the boatside, he fell in
an unconscious heap.
When Jan came to himself he was in his bunk on the _Sarawak_. It was an
utter physical and nervous exhaustion that had overcome him. His swoon
had passed into a heavy sleep, and when he awoke he sat up with a start.
Captain Jerry was at his side, bursting with suppressed curiosity; and
the Scotch engineer was standing by the bunk.
"Waal, partner, you've delivered the goods all right!" drawled Captain
Jerry. "They're the stuff, not a doubt of it. But kind o' seemed to us
up here you were having high jinks of one kind or another down there.
What was it?"
"It was hell!" responded Jan with a shudder. Then he took hold of
Captain Jerry's hand, and felt it, as if to make sure it was real, or as
if he needed the feel of honest human flesh again to bring him to his
senses.
"Ugh!" he went on, swinging out of the bunk. "Let me get out into the
sunlight again! Let me see the sky again! I'll tell you all about it by
an' by, Jerry. But wait. Were all the packages on me, all right?"
"I reckon!" responded Captain Jerry. "There was six of 'em tied on to
you. I reckon they're worth the three hundred an' fifty thousand all
right!"
"Well, let's get away from this place quick as we can get steam up
again!" said Jan. "There's more swag down there, I guess--lots of it.
But I wouldn't go down again, nor send another man down, for all the
millions we've all of us ever heard tell of. Mr. McWha, how soon can we
be moving?"
"Ten meenutes, more or less!" replied the Scotchman.
"All right! When we're outside of this accursed bay, an' round the
'Camel' yonder, I'll tell you what it's like down there under that shiny
green."
THE END.
* * * * *
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THE GIRL FROM TIM'S PLACE. By Charles Clark Munn. With illustrations by
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THE LION AND THE MOUSE. A story of American Life. By Charles Klein, and
Arthur Hornblow. With illustrations by Stuart Travis, and Scenes from
the Play.
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BARBARA WINSLOW, REBEL. By Elizabeth Ellis. With illustrations by John
Rae, and colored inlay cover.
The following, taken from story, will best describe the heroine: A
TOAST: "To the bravest comrade in misfortune, the sweetest
companion in peace and at all times the most courageous of
women."--_Barbara Winslow._ "A romantic story, buoyant, eventful,
and in matters of love exactly what the heart could desire."--_New
York Sun._
SUSAN. By Ernest Oldmeadow. With a color frontispiece by Frank Haviland.
Medallion in color on front cover.
Lord Ruddington falls helplessly in love with Miss Langley, whom he
sees in one of her walks accompanied by her maid, Susan. Through a
misapprehension of personalities his lordship addresses a love
missive to the maid. Susan accepts in perfect good faith, and an
epistolary love-making goes on till they are disillusioned. It
naturally makes a droll and delightful little comedy; and is a
story that is particularly clever in the telling.
WHEN PATTY WENT TO COLLEGE. By Jean Webster. With illustrations by C. D.
Williams.
"The book is a treasure."--_Chicago Daily News._ "Bright,
whimsical, and thoroughly entertaining."--_Buffalo Express._ "One
of the best stories of life in a girl's college that has ever been
written."--_N. Y. Press._ "To any woman who has enjoyed the
pleasures of a college life this book cannot fail to bring back
many sweet recollections; and to those who have not been to college
the wit, lightness, and charm of Patty are sure to be no less
delightful."--_Public Opinion._
THE MASQUERADER. By Katherine Cecil Thurston. With illustrations by
Clarence F. Underwood.
"You can't drop it till you have turned the last page."--Cleveland
Leader. "Its very audacity of motive, of execution, of solution,
almost takes one's breath away. The boldness of its denouement is
sublime."--_Boston Transcript._ "The literary hit of a generation.
The best of it is the story deserves all its success. A masterly
story."--_St. Louis Dispatch._ "The story is ingeniously told, and
cleverly constructed."--_The Dial._
THE GAMBLER. By Katherine Cecil Thurston. With illustrations by John
Campbell.
"Tells of a high strung young Irish woman who has a passion for
gambling, inherited from a long line of sporting ancestors. She has
a high sense of honor, too, and that causes complications. She is a
very human, lovable character, and love saves her."--_N. Y. Times._
GROSSET & DUNLAP,----NEW YORK
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