new to his experience, the mink was in no way daunted. Rather he was so
boiling with rage that his wonted wariness forsook him completely. With
a snarl that was almost a screech he sprang straight at the long,
exposed, inviting throat of his adversary. Had those keen white fangs
of his, still dripping with egg, reached their aim, the fight would have
been over. His leap was swift, true, and deadly. But equally true, and
more swift, was the counter-stroke. He was met, and stopped in mid-air,
by a thrust of the bittern's bill, which, had he not twisted his head
just in time, would have split his skull. As it was, it laid open one
side of his snarling face, destroyed one eye, and brought him heavily to
the ground. Even under this punishment, however, he would not
acknowledge defeat. Springing aside, with a lightning zigzag movement
to confuse the aim of that terrific bill, he darted low and made a leap
at his antagonist's long, vulnerable legs. He missed only by a hair's
breadth, as the bittern, keenly alive to the risk of such a manoeuvre,
leapt nimbly aside and baulked him with a stiff wing-stroke. He seized
the baffling wing and strove to pull his tall adversary down. But two
great pinion feathers came away in his jaws, and the next moment he got
another terrible, driving stab from the dagger beak, well forward on the
flank. It was a slanting thrust, or it would have pierced his lungs; but
it nearly knocked the wind out of him, and ploughed a deep red gash in
his glossy coat.
Screeching furiously, he doubled on himself like a snake to meet this
attack. But at the same moment he cringed under another excruciating
stab, this time in the haunch; and looking up, he saw himself enveloped
in a cloud of blinding wings. The hen bittern had arrived to join in
the defence of her nest.
Now, bloodthirsty and merciless marauder though he was, the mink's
courage was a thing beyond dispute; and terribly though the fight had so
far gone against him, with a single foe to confront he would probably
have held on to the death. But for all his fury he was not quite mad;
and this reinforcement of the enemy was too much for him. Suddenly
straightening himself out long and small like an eel, he slipped from
under the terrifying storm of wings and stabs, and made off through the
grass at the best speed that in all his swift career he had ever
attained. He made for the water, which he felt would be his safest
refuge. The angry bitterns were after him on the instant, flying as low
as possible and stabbing down at him through the grass-stems. But his
cunning and slippery zigzags enabled him to dodge most of their thrusts;
and in their eagerness they got in each other's way--which probably
saved him his bare life. At length, streaming with blood, and leaving
behind him a red trail to proclaim his discomfiture to the mice, he
reached the water, and dived in. Without daring to come to the surface
he swam across the channel--here about two score paces in width--and
cautiously raised his head behind a screen of over-hanging weeds. He saw
his two pursuers standing, motionless and erect, on the opposite bank,
watching with fierce eyes for him to reappear. He decided not to
reappear. Submerging himself again, he swam on down stream till he had
rounded a sharp bend of the channel. When he thought it prudent to show
himself once more, he was sheltered from those avenging eyes by a dense
screen of alder and willows. These bushes were full of nesting
red-wings, who chattered at him angrily. He paid no heed to their
scolding, but hurried through the thicket, and on down the bank till he
found an ancient musk-rat hole. Into this he crept eagerly, and lay
down in the grateful dark to nurse his wounds and his humiliation.
After the disappearance of the mink the hen bittern soon returned to her
nest. But the male stayed where he was. From time to time he would
snap up a butterfly or beetle, or spear a passing frog or chub or
sucker. But always his indignant heart was hoping that the mink would
return. After an hour or two, however, his wrath died down and he began
to forget.
Then he would occasionally vary his still-hunting, by walking with slow,
meditative steps up and down the strip of bare ooze between the grass
and the water, feeling out with his sensitive claws the little
freshwater clams which lay hidden in the mud. The clams were scarce,
however, so along about the middle of the afternoon he flapped lazily
back to his old fishing station on the other side of the meadow.
Later in the day, when the osiers were beginning to throw long shadows
across the water, and the red-and-black butterflies had grown too
indolent to dance, and the blue-and-amethyst dragon-flies had ceased
their hawking of mosquitoes over the lily-pads and arrow-weed, the great
bittern, full fed and at ease with life, flapped languidly up from the
water-side and dropped close beside the nest. His brooding mate lifted
her head, as if in greeting, and laid it back at once between her
shoulders, with her yellow bill pointing skyward as was her vigilant
custom.
Soon the first warm tints of sunset began to stain the edges of the
clouds above the far fringes of the swamp. Motionless and erect beside
his mate, the bittern watched the oncoming of the enchantment as his day
drew to its quiet close. Suddenly the coloured quiet of the air was
disturbed by the beating of hurried wings. He glanced upward, without
moving. A mallard drake, in frantic flight, whirred past, fifteen or
twenty feet above his head, making for the water. Close after the
fugitive, and swiftly overhauling him with long, tremendous thrusts of
his mighty wings, came that most dreaded cut-throat of the air, a great
blue goshawk. Swift and bullet-like was the flight of the desperate
fugitive; but that of the hawk was far swifter. Had the water been two
feet further away the fate of the glossy drake would have been sealed.
He would have been overtaken, his throat torn out in mid-air, his body
carried off to the nearest tree-top to be plucked and devoured. But
this time the inscrutable Fates of the wilderness, too seldom so lenient
to the weak, decided to favour him. With a heavy-sounding splash he
shot down into the blessed water, and disappeared into safety beneath
the lily-pads, just in time.
The destroying talons of the great hawk clutched convulsively at the
dandy curled tips of his tail as he vanished.
With his arrowy speed, his precision of stroke, his audacity and fiery
spirit, the blue goshawk was little accustomed to the experience of
being baulked of his prey. He knew well enough that his quarry would
not show itself again, but would swim away under water and only come up
to breathe in the safe shelter of some dense thicket of rushes. With a
sharp yelp of wrath, he swept up from the water on a long, graceful
curve, wheeled sharply above the osiers, and sailed back low above the
bittern's island, seeking other prey. And his piercing gaze fell upon
the bittern, standing rigid beside the nest.
His swoop was instantaneous, straight and swift as a bolt from a
cross-bow. But that coiled steel spring of the bittern's neck was even
swifter; and as his talons struck downward, the bittern's dagger thrust
caught him in the very centre of the impending claw, splitting the foot
fairly and disabling it. Nevertheless, by the shock of the attack the
bittern was borne downward, and would have been caught in the breast or
throat by the other talon; but at the same instant his watchful mate,
who had half risen on the nest that her eggs might not be crushed in the
melee, delivered her thrust. It went true. And it had not only the
drive of her sinewy neck behind it, but also the full force of her
powerful thighs, as well as the assailant's descending weight to drive
it home. It caught the goshawk full in the base of the neck, pierced
clean through, and severed the spine. And in a wild confusion of
sprawled legs and pounding wings the three great birds fell in a heap in
the grass, just beyond the nest.
The two bitterns nimbly extricated themselves, and with wings pounding,
stabbed savagely, again and again, at the unresisting body of the hawk.
Presently, as if by one impulse, they both stood up, erect and still as
images, their yellow bills dripping with blood. The male had a bleeding
gash along the side of his head, and had lost several of his haughty
crest feathers. But this concerned him little. His heart swelled with
triumph. He was forced to give it utterance. He snapped his bill
sharply, gulped a few mouthfuls of air, and then sent forth his booming
challenge across the swamp:--_Klunk-er-glungk ... Klunk-er-glungk ...
Klunk-er-glungk_.
His mate spread her broad wings, shook herself till her ruffled plumage
fell into place, wiped her conquering bill on the grass, stepped
delicately back into the nest, and softly settled herself down upon her
two eggs, so miraculously preserved.
Silence fell on Lost-Water Swamp. The air became gradually transfused
with amethyst and pale rose. And then, far and faint, tranquil and
poignant, came the entrancing cadence--_Oh, spheral, spheral, oh, holy,
holy, spheral_--the silver vesper ecstasy of the hermit-thrush, in his
tree-top against the pellucid sky.
*QUILLS THE INDIFFERENT*
Quills was born in a capacious hole in the heart of a huge and ancient
red maple, near the banks of the Tobique River, in New Brunswick.
The hole had to be capacious, for Quills's mother was a fine porcupine,
in her prime, fully two and a half feet in length, massive in build, and
a good twenty pounds in weight; and, moreover, her armament of long,
bristling spines made it essential that she should not be unduly crowded
in her nest. But the entrance was only large enough for her to squeeze
through it without discomfort, so the dusky interior was sheltered, warm
and dry. It was also safe; for in all the wilderness there was no
savage marauder reckless enough to invade a porcupine's nest while the
owner was at home.
In proportion to the size of his mother, Quills, like all young
porcupines, was an amazingly big baby--hardly smaller, indeed, than the
new-born cub of the black bear. His length was about eleven inches, his
weight a shade over two pounds--and this when he was not yet twenty-four
hours old. He was richly clothed with long, dark fur, almost black,
under which lay hidden his sprouting armament of spines, already
formidable, though only about half an inch in length. Born with the
insatiable appetite of his tribe, he lay stretched out between his
mother's stumpy fore-legs, nursing greedily, with an incessant
accompaniment of tiny squeaks and squeals of satisfaction. The sounds
were loud enough to attract the notice of two little black-and-white
woodpeckers who had just alighted on the trunk near the hole. With
sleek heads cocked alertly, and bright eyes keen with interrogation,
they listened to the curious noises inside the tree. Then they
clambered on up the trunk to a safer height, wondering, no doubt, that
any youngling should be guilty of such an indiscretion as thus to betray
the secret of its hiding-place. They could not know that the porcupine
baby, almost alone among the babes of the wild, was exempted, through
the reputation of his spines, from the law of silence as the price of
life. Young or old, the porcupine will make a noise whenever it pleases
him to do so, and with a lofty indifference as to who his hearers may
be.
* * * * * *
It was spring, and spring comes late to the high valley of the Tobique
stream. The ancient red maple, still full of vigorous life in the
sap-wood of its outer shell, in spite of the great hollow at its
decaying heart, was mantled over every branch and twig with a glowing
veil of tiny rose-bud blooms, though the green of its leaf-buds was
hardly yet showing through the brown sheaths. The ice had been broken
up and been swept away in tumbling masses, and the current of the swift
river, swollen with the spring freshet, filled the air about the
porcupine's nest with a pleasant, softly thunderous roar. From all the
open glades the snow was gone, though masses of it, shrunken and greyish
and sprinkled with dead leaves and twigs, still lingered in the fir
thickets and the deeper hollows. On the drier hillocks and about the
rotting stumps a carpet of round, flat, yellowish-green and bronzy
leaves shielded the lurking pink-and-white blossoms and haunting
perfumes of the Mayflower, or trailing arbutus, the shy darling of the
Northern spring. The fairy fragrance came and went elusively across the
pervading scent of moist earth and spicy balsam-tips, as the mild breeze
pulsed vaguely through the forest.
It was mid-afternoon of the second day of Quills's life. Pleasantly
fatigued from his double duty of nursing and growing, he fell into a
sound sleep. Then his mother, spurred by the now insistent demands of
her own appetite, gently disentangled herself from the clutch of his
baby claws in her fur, crawled from the hole, and descended the trunk to
seek a hasty meal.
But what was haste for a porcupine would have been regarded at the
extreme of lazy loitering in any other creature of the wild. At the
foot of the old maple she stood for some moments loudly sniffing the air
with her blunt nostrils. Then, as if making up her mind that it was
hemlock she wanted, she ambled off with heavy deliberation to the
nearest hemlock tree, climbed it with a noisy rattling of claws, settled
herself comfortably in the first crotch, and fell to gnawing the rough
bark. When she had taken the edge off her appetite with this
fare--which no stomach but a porcupine's could ever digest--she crawled
out along a branch, as far as it would bear her weight, and, gathering a
lot of the slender twigs between her fore-paws, made a hearty dessert of
the dark-green, glossy frondage. Other hemlocks, standing at a greater
distance from her nest, already bore the conspicuous marks of her
foraging; but this one she had hitherto left untouched against the day
when she would be wanting to take her meals near home.
While his mother was away feeding, Quills had slept, soundly and
silently, for perhaps an hour or more. Then he woke up--hungry, of
course, as befitted a healthy young porcupine. Finding no warm mother
to snuggle him and feed him, he at once set up his small but earnest
complaint of whines and squeals and grumbles, all unconcerned as to who
or what might overhear him.
As it chanced at this moment, a hungry weasel--the most insatiably
bloodthirsty of all the wilderness prowlers--was just approaching the
foot of the old maple, nosing out the somewhat stale trail of a rabbit.
As his keen ear caught these tell-tale sounds from within the tree, he
stopped short, and his malignant little eyes began to blaze. Then he
glided around the great trunk, halted just below the hole, and sniffed
discriminately at the strong fresh scent upon the bark. But at this
point he hesitated--and it is not usual for a hungry weasel to hesitate.
The scent was porcupine, and a grown-up porcupine was a proposition
which not even his audacity was prepared to tackle. The sounds from
within that tempting hole, to be sure, were the voice of a baby
porcupine. But was the baby alone, or was the mother with it? In the
latter case, he would as soon have jumped into the jaws of a lynx as
enter that hole. The fresh scent on the bark offered no solution to the
problem. Was it made in coming out or going in? He sniffed at it
again, growing fiercer and more hungry every moment.
Suddenly he heard behind him a dry rattling of quills and a confused
noise of squeals and chattering grunts. The mother porcupine was
hurrying across the moist turf, gnashing her jaws, and looking twice her
natural size with every quill on end. In her rage and anxiety she was
making remarkable speed for a porcupine. The weasel, his long white
fangs bared and his eyes red with disappointed fury, whipped about and
stood facing her till she was within three or four feet of him. But for
all his rage he was no fool. For her gnashing yellow teeth he had no
respect whatever. But those deadly, poisonous, needle-sharp spines of
hers! He had no wish to interview them too closely. With eleventh-hour
discretion he slipped aside to make way for her, and glided off to pick
up again the trail of the rabbit.
The mother porcupine never even turned her head to see where the enemy
had gone to. Wild with anxiety, she scrabbled up the trunk and into her
nest. Her experienced nose, however, at once assured her that the
weasel had not been inside. Instantly appeased, she stretched herself
on her side, drew the complaining youngster to her breast, licked and
nosed him for a few moments, and settled into a comfortable doze.
Having this hearty mother's attention all to himself--an exceptional
advantage, as a porcupine baby has generally one brother or sister, if
not more, to share the maternal supply--young Quills grew and throve
amazingly. And his armoury of spines throve with him. In a few weeks
he was out of the hole and following his mother up into the hemlock
trees, where he speedily learned to feed on the glossy green tips of the
frondage. From this diet he passed quickly to the stronger fare of the
harsh and bitter bark, the gnawing of which was a delight to his
powerful, chisel-like teeth. By the time the full flush of the Tobique
summer, ardent and swift, had crowded the rich-soiled valley with
greenery and bloom, Quills's mother had grown altogether indifferent to
him. She had long ago refused him her breasts, of which, indeed, he had
no further need. But she still permitted him to follow her about, if he
wanted companionship, so long as he did not trouble her. And in this
way he learned the few things--astonishingly few, it would seem--that a
porcupine needs to know in order to hold his own in the struggle for
existence. He learned, among other things, that nearly all the green
stuff that the forest produced was more or less fit for his food, that
there were other trees besides the hemlock whose bark was tasty and
nourishing and pleasantly resistant to his teeth, and that in a broad,
sunny backwater of the river there grew a profusion of great round flat
leaves, the pads of the water-lily, which were peculiarly thrilling to
his palate. In fact, most of his learning had to do with food, which was
what he appeared to live for. His enemies were few, and seldom
enthusiastic. And he never troubled his head about avoiding them. With
an indifference nothing less than colossal, he left it to them to avoid
him, if they wished; and they did so wish, ninety-nine times out of the
hundred.
Along towards the latter part of August, Quills found that his mother
was no longer indifferent. She had grown actively unfriendly. Whenever
he came near her she grunted and chattered to him in such an irritable
fashion that it was obvious, even to a not over-sensitive spirit like
his, that his companionship was distasteful to her. This attitude
neither grieved nor angered him, however. She was no longer of any
importance to him. He simply quit following her, went his own way, and
forgot her. Striking off on his own, and impelled by instinct to seek a
fresh range for himself, he plunged into the still, warm tide of the
sunny backwater and swam, with much splashing and little speed, to the
opposite bank. Swimming was no task to him, for his coat of hollow
quills made it impossible for him to sink. The backwater was not more
than thirty or forty yards in width, but when he had crossed it, and
crawled forth upon the opposite bank, he felt that he had found a new
world, and owned it. He ambled joyously along the bank to a point where
he had marked a bed of bright-green arrow-weed, and gorged himself to
his great content on the shapely, pointed leaves and stout succulent
stalks. Then he climbed a big poplar and curled up to sleep,
self-sufficient and pleased to be alone.
Quills was by this time more than half grown up, and, moreover, thanks
to his happily selected parentage and his ample nourishment when a baby,
he was as big and strong as many a less favoured porcupine achieves to
be at maturity. In colour he was of a very dark brown, verging on
black, and peppered with a dingy yellowish white, his long fur being
dark with light tips, and his spines cream-coloured with black tips.
The spines on his body ranged from two to four inches in length, and
when he was not angry, they were partly concealed by the fur, which was
considerably longer. The quills on his head and the sides of his face
were about an inch in length. His short, blunt muzzle was free from
spines, but closely furred to the lips, and conspicuously adorned by his
large and prominent front teeth, his gnawing teeth, which were of a
vivid dark yellow colour. His legs and all the under parts of his body
were clothed in dense, soft fur, entirely without spines. His tail,
about five inches in length, was very thick and powerful, and heavily
armed with spines to the tip. The spines on his body were for his
protection, but this armed tail was his one weapon of offence--a weapon
with which at a single stroke he could fill an enemy's mouth or paws
with a hundred barbed and poisonous needles; and the peculiar deadliness
of these needles, large and small alike, lay in their power of swift and
inexorable burrowing. Once their subtle points penetrated the skin,
their innumerable, microscopic, scale-like barbs would begin working
them inwards through the muscles, setting up violent inflammations as
they went, till they would reach some vital part and put their wretched
victim out of his misery.
So far in his career young Quills had had no occasion to test the
efficiency of that formidable tail of his as a weapon, though from time
to time he would stretch himself elaborately, leg after leg and claw
after claw, ruffle up all his spines as if to see that they were in
working order, and lash out alarmingly with the aforesaid tail by way of
keeping it efficient and ready for action. And now, as luck would have
it, the first enemy he was to encounter was the very one against whom
his best defences were of least avail--namely, Man himself. But
fortunately for young Quills, and for this his brief biography, the man
in question was neither needing meat--least of all, such harsh meat as
porcupine--nor of a destructive disposition. He was magnanimous, and
Quills never knew that he held on to his little lease of life by favour.
The man had come up to the Tobique in a canoe, partly for the fishing,
partly to refresh his spirit with the clean airs of the wilderness. He
left his guide frying bacon and trout for the midday meal, and strolled
up the backwater to cast a fly and see if there were any big fish
lurking in the shade of the lily-pads. He forgot about his fishing,
however, when he caught sight of Quills, looking somewhat like a big
dilapidated bird's nest, curled up asleep in the crotch of a young
poplar. Being interested in all the kindred of the wild, the man reeled
in his line, stood his rod carefully in a bush, and went and shook the
tree as hard as he could, to see what Quills would do.
Quills woke up with a startled squeak, dug his claws into the bark to
secure himself, and peered down to see what was the matter. At sight of
this wanton disturber of his dreams he grew very angry. He chattered
and grunted, and clashed his big yellow teeth loudly, and ruffled up his
deadly spines as a clear warning to the intruder to keep off.
The man laughed, as if pleased at this bold defiance. He looked about
for a long pole, thinking to poke Quills from his perch, so as to study
him a little nearer at hand. But poles for poking porcupines do not lie
about the Tobique wilderness, as he presently realised. He decided to
climb the poplar, for a closer--but not too close--investigation. But
the moment he began to climb, Quills, boiling with indignation, started
down to meet the danger half-way. He came down backwards, with his tail
lashing savagely. And he came down so astonishingly fast that the man
had barely time to drop to the ground and jump out of the way, chuckling
at the speedy success of his experiment.
"Half a jiffy, and the beggar would have made my face look like a
pin-cushion," he muttered approvingly.
Reaching the ground, Quills stopped and stood chattering his defiance.
The man, some paces distant, eyed him humorously for a few seconds, then
went and got his fishing-rod out of the bush. With a bit of string from
his jacket pocket he tied his cloth cap over the butt of the rod, and
then, like a fencer with a button on his foil, with this weapon of
courtesy he came and made a gentle thrust at Quills's blunt nose. Quick
as a flash Quills whisked around and lashed at the impertinent weapon
with his tail. The man at once withdrew it and examined his cap. It
was stuck full, at that one slashing blow, with beautiful, polished,
black-tipped white quills.