now they were wide awake, the skunk hardly noticed their antics, but
kept on his direct path toward the farmyard. Presently, however, his
attention was caught by the rabbits scattering off in every direction.
On the instant he was all alert for the cause. Mounting a hillock, he
caught sight of a biggish shaggy-haired dog some distance down the
pasture. The dog was racing this way and that as crazily, it seemed, as
the rabbits, with faint little yelps of excitement and whines of
disappointment. He was chasing the rabbits with all his energy; and it
was evident that he was a stranger, a new-comer to the wilderness world,
for he seemed to think he might hope to catch the fleet-foot creatures
by merely running after them. As a matter of fact, he had just arrived
the same day at the backwoods farm from the city down the river. His
experience had been confined to streets and gardens and the chasing of
cats, and he was daft with delight over the spacious freedom of the
clearings. The skunk eyed him scornfully, and continued his journey
with the unconcern of an elephant.
A moment later the dog was aware of a little, insignificant
black-and-white creature coming slowly towards him as if unconscious of
his presence. Another rabbit! But as this one did not seem alarmed, he
stopped and eyed it with surprise, his head cocked to one side in
inquiry. The skunk half turned and moved off slowly, deliberately, at
right angles to the path he had been following.
With a yelp of delight the dog dashed at this easy victim, which seemed
so stupid that it made no effort to escape. He was almost upon it.
Another leap and he would have had it in his jaws. But the amazing
little animal turned its back on him, stuck its tail straight in the
air, and jerked up its hindquarters with a derisive gesture. In that
instant something hot and soft struck the inexperienced hunter full in
the face--something soft, indeed, but overwhelming, paralysing. It
stopped him dead in his tracks. Suffocating, intolerably pungent, it
both blinded him and choked him. His lungs refused to work, shutting up
spasmodically. Gasping and gagging, he grovelled on his belly and
strove frantically to paw his mouth and nostrils clear of the dense,
viscous fluid which was clogging them. Failing in this, he fell to
rooting violently in the short grass, biting and tearing at it and
rolling in it, till some measure of breath and eyesight returned to him.
Thereupon, his matted head all stuck with grass and moss and dirt, he
set off racing madly for the farmhouse, where he expected to get relief
from the strange torment which afflicted him. But when he pawed and
whined at the kitchen door for admittance, he was driven off with
contumely and broomsticks. There was nothing for him to do but slink
away with his shame to a secluded corner between the wagon-shed and the
pig-pen, where he could soothe his burning muzzle in the cool winds and
fresh earth. On the following day one of the farm hands, with rude hands
and unsympathetic comment, scrubbed him violently with liquid soap and
then clipped close his splendid shaggy coat. But it was a week before
he was readmitted to the comfortable fellowship of the farmhouse
kitchen.
For a moment or two, with a glance of triumph in his bright eyes, the
skunk had watched the paroxysms of his discomfited foe. Then, dropping
the tip of his tail into its customary disdainful arch, he had turned
back towards his burrow. This was a redoubtable foe whom he had just
put to rout, and he had expended most of his armoury upon him. He had
no wish to risk another encounter until the potent secretion which he
carried in a sac between the powerful muscles of his thighs should have
had time to accumulate again. He dropped, for that night, all notion of
the distinctly adventurous expedition to the farmyard, contenting
himself with snapping up a few beetles and crickets as he went. He was
lucky enough to pounce upon an indiscreet field-mouse just as she
emerged from her burrow, and then a few minutes' digging with his
powerful and expert fore-paws had served to unearth the mouse's nest
with her half-dozen blind sucklings. So he went home well satisfied
with himself. Before re-entering he again made a careful toilet; and as
the opening of the sac from which he had projected the potent fluid into
his enemy's face had immediately closed up tight and fast, he carried no
trace of the virulent odour with him. Indeed, that fluid was a thing
which he never by any chance allowed to get on to his own fur. Always,
at the moment of ejecting it, the fur on his thighs parted and lay back
flat to either side of the naked vent of the sac, and the long tail
cocked itself up rigidly, well out of the way. It was a stuff he kept
strictly for his foes, and never allowed to offend either himself or his
friends.
On entering his burrow he found there his mate and all the youngsters,
curled up together in the sleep of good digestion and easy conscience.
He curled himself up with them, that the supply of his high-explosive
might accumulate during another forty winks.
About an hour before the dawn he awoke again, feeling hungry. The rest
of the family were still sleeping, having gorged themselves, as he might
have done had it not been for that encounter with the misguided dog. He
left them whimpering contentedly in their cosy slumber, and crept forth
into the dewy chill alone, his heart set on mice and such-like
warm-blooded game.
The moon was now high overhead, sailing honey-coloured through a faintly
violet sky. The rough pasture, with its stumps and hillocks, was
touched into a land of dream.
Now, it chanced that an old bear, who was accustomed to foraging in the
valley beyond the cedar swamp, had on this night decided to bring her
cub on an expedition toward the more dangerous neighbourhood of the
clearings. She wanted to begin his education in all the wariness which
is so necessary for the creatures of the wild in approaching the works
and haunts of man. On reaching the leafy fringe of bushes which fringed
the rude rail-fence dividing the forest from the pasture, she cautiously
poked her head through the leafage, and for perhaps a minute, motionless
as a stone, she interrogated the bright open spaces with eyes and ears
and nostrils. The cub, taking the cue from his mother, stiffened to the
like movelessness at her side, his bright little eyes full of interest
and curiosity. There was no sign of danger in the pasture. In fact,
there were the merry rabbits hopping about in the moonlight undisturbed.
This was a sign of security quite good enough for the wise old bear.
With crafty and experienced paws she forced a hole in the fence--leaving
the top rail, above the binder, in its place--and led the eager cub
forth into the moonlight.
The special notion of the bear in coming to the pasture was to teach her
cub the art of finding, unearthing, and catching the toothsome wild
mice. Keeping along near the fence, she sniffed the tussocky, uneven
grass with practised nose. But the first thing she came upon was a
bumble-bees' nest. This was far more to her taste than any mice. She
gave a low call to the cub; but the cub was preoccupied now, sniffing at
the rabbit tracks, and lifting himself on his hindquarters to stare
longingly at the rabbits, who were hopping off to discreeter distance.
The mother did not insist on his coming to watch her tackle the bees'
nest. After all, he was perhaps a bit young to face the stings of the
angry bees, and she might as well have the little hoard of honey and
larvae and bee-bread for herself. The cub wandered off a little way,
with some vague notion of chasing the elusive rabbits.
Just then through the edge of the underbrush appeared the skunk,
stretching himself luxuriously before he started off across the pasture.
He saw the bear, but he knew that sagacious beast would pay him no
attention whatever. He trotted out into the moonlight and pounced upon
a fat black cricket as an appetiser.
The cub caught sight of the pretty little striped creature, and came
darting clumsily and gaily to the attack. He would show his mother that
he could do some hunting on his own account. The striped creature
turned its back on him and moved off slowly. The cub was delighted. He
was just going to reach out a rude little paw and grab the easy prize.
Then the inevitable happened. The pretty striped creature gave its
stern a contemptuous jerk, and the deluded cub fell in a heap,
squealing, gasping, choking, and pawing convulsively at the horrible
sticky stuff which filled his mouth and eyes.
Just before the catastrophe occurred, the old bear had looked up from
her business with the bees, and had uttered a loud _woof_ of warning.
But too late. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was to try
any fooling with a skunk. But now her rage at the suffering and
discomfiture of her little one swept away all prudence. With a grunt of
fury she charged at the offender. One glance at the approaching
vengeance convinced the skunk that this time he had made a mistake. He
turned and raced for the underbrush as fast as his little legs would
carry him. But that was not fast enough. Just as he was about to dart
under the fence, a huge black paw, shod with claws like steel, crashed
down upon him, and his leisurely career came to an end.
The bear, in deep disgust, scraped her reeking paw long and earnestly in
the fresh earth beneath the grass, then turned her attention to the
unhappy cub. She relieved her feelings by giving him a sharp cuff which
sent him sprawling a dozen feet. Then, relenting, she showed him how to
clean himself by rooting in the earth. At length, when he could see and
breathe once more with some degree of comfort, she indignantly led him
away back into the depths of the consoling forest.
*THE BLACK MULE OF AVELUY*
The mule lines at Aveluy were restless and unsteady under the tormented
dark. All day long a six-inch high-velocity gun, firing at irregular
intervals from somewhere on the low ridge beyond the Ancre, had been
feeling for them. Those terrible swift shells, which travel so fast, on
their flat trajectory, that their bedlam shriek of warning and the
rending crash of their explosion seem to come in the same breathless
instant, had tested the nerves of man and beast sufficiently during the
daylight; but now, in the shifting obscurity of a young moon harrowed by
driving cloud-rack, their effect was yet more daunting. So far they had
been doing little damage, having been occupied, for the most part, in
blowing new craters in the old lines, a couple of hundred yards further
east, which had been vacated only two days before on account of their
deep-trodden and intolerable mud. All day our 'planes, patrolling the
sky over Tara Hill and the lines of Regina, had kept the Boches' airmen
at such a distance that they could not observe and register for their
batteries; and this terrible gun was, therefore, firing blind. But
there came a time, during the long night, when it seemed to reach the
conclusion that its target must be pretty well obliterated. Squatting
in its veiled lair behind the heights of Ancre, it lifted its raking
muzzle, ever so slightly, and put another two hundred yards on to its
range.
The next shell screamed down straight upon the lines. The crash tore
earth and air. A massive column of black smoke vomited upwards, pierced
with straight flame and streaked with flying fragments of mules and
ropes and tether-pegs. Deadly splinters of shell hissed forth from it
on all sides. The top of the column spread outwards; the base thinned
and lifted; a raw and ghastly crater, like some Dantesque dream of the
mouth of Hell, came into view; and there followed a faint, hideous sound
of nameless things pattering down upon the mud.
Near the edge of the crater stood a big, raw-boned black mule. His team
mate and the three other mules tethered nearest to him had vanished.
Several others lay about on either side of him, dead or screaming in
their death agonies. But he was untouched. At the appalling shock he
had sprung back upon his haunches, snorting madly; but the
tethering-rope had held, and he had almost thrown himself. Then he had
lashed out with his iron-shod heels. But he was tough of nerve and
stout of heart far beyond the fashion of his kind, and almost at once he
pulled himself together and stood trembling, straining on the halter,
his long ears laid back upon his head. Then his eyes, rolling white,
with a green gleam of horror at the centre, took note of the familiar
form of his driver, standing by his head and feeling himself curiously,
as if puzzled at being still alive.
This sight reassured the black mule amazingly. His expressive ears
wagged forward again, and he thrust his frothing muzzle hard against the
man's shoulder, as if to ask him what it all meant. The man flung an
arm over the beast's quivering neck and leaned against him for a moment
or two, dazed from the tremendous shock which had lifted him from his
feet and slammed him down viciously upon the ground. He coughed once or
twice, and tried to wipe the reek of the explosion from his eyes. Then,
coming fully to himself, he hurriedly untethered his charge, patted him
reassuringly on the nose, loosed the next mule behind him on the lines,
and led the two away in haste toward safer quarters. As he did so,
another shell came in, some fifty yards to the left, and the lines
became a bedlam of kicking and snorting beasts, with their drivers,
cursing and coaxing, according to their several methods, clawing at the
ropes and hurrying to get their charges away to safety.
At any other time the big black mule--an unregenerate product of the
Argentine, with a temper which took delight in giving trouble to all in
authority over him--might have baulked energetically as a protest
against being moved from his place at this irregular hour. But he was
endowed with a perception of his own interests, which came rather from
the humbler than the more aristocratic side of his ancestry. He was no
victim of that childish panic which is so liable, in a moment of
desperation, to pervert the high-strung intelligence of the horse. He
felt that the man knew just what to do in this dreadful and demoralising
situation. So he obeyed and followed like a lamb; and in that moment he
conceived an affection for his driver which made him nothing less than a
changed mule. His amazing docility had its effect upon the second mule,
and the driver got them both away without any difficulty. When all the
rest of the survivors had been successfully shifted to new ground, far
off to the right, the terrible gun continued for another hour to blow
craters up and down the deserted lines. Then it lengthened its range
once more, and spent the rest of the night shattering to powder the
ruins of an already ruined and quite deserted street, under the
impression that it was smashing up some of our crowded billets. A
little before daylight, however, a shell from one of our forward
batteries, up behind Regina Trench, found its way into the lair where
the monster squatted, and rest descended upon Aveluy in the bleak
autumnal dawn.
This was in the rain-scourged autumn of 1916, when the unspeakable
desolation of the Somme battlefield was a sea of mud. The ruins of the
villages--Ovillers, La Boisselle, Pozieres, Courcelette, Martinpuich,
and all the others which had once made fair with flowers and orchards
this rolling plateau of Picardy--had been pounded flat by the inexorable
guns, and were now mere islands of firmer ground in the shell-pitted
wastes of red mire. Men went encased in mud from boots to shrapnel
helmet. And it was a special mud of exasperating tenacity, a cement of
beaten chalk and clay. The few spidery tram-lines ran precariously along
the edges of the shell-holes, out over the naked, fire-swept undulations
beyond Mouquet Farm and Courcelette, where they were continually being
knocked to pieces by the "whizz-bangs," and tirelessly rebuilt by our
dauntless pioneers and railway troops. Scattered all about this
dreadful naked waste behind our front trenches lurked our forward
batteries, their shallow gun-pits cunningly camouflaged behind every
little swell of tumbled mud.
And this foul mud, hiding in the deep slime of its shell-holes every
kind of trap and putrid horror, was the appropriate ally of the Germans.
Stinkingly and tenaciously and treacherously, as befitted, it opposed
the feeding of the guns. Two by two or four by four, according to their
size, the shells for the guns had to be carried up from the forward
dumps in little wicker panniers slung across the backs of horses and
mules. It was a slow process, precarious and costly, but it beat the
mud, and the insatiable guns were fed.
After the night when the mule-lines at Aveluy were shelled, the big
black mule and his driver were put on this job of carrying up shells to
the forward batteries. The driver, a gaunt, green-eyed, ginger-haired
teamster from the lumber camps of Northern New Brunswick, received the
order with a crooked grin.
"Say your prayers now, Sonny," he muttered in the mule's big, waving
ear, which came to "attention" promptly to receive his communication.
"You'll be wishing you was back in them old lines at Aveluy afore we're
through with this job. Fritzy over yonder ain't goin' to like you an'
me one little bit when he gits on to what we're up to. It ain't like
haulin' fodder, I tell you that. But I guess we've got the nerve all
right."
Instead of rolling the whites of his eyes at him, in surly protest
against this familiarity, the black mule responded by nibbling gently at
the sleeve of his muddy tunic.
"Geezely Christmas," murmured the driver, astonished at this evidence of
goodwill, "but it's queer, how a taste o' shell-fire'll sometimes work a
change o' heart, even in an Argentine mule. I only hope it'll last,
Sonny. If it does, we're goin' to git along fine, you an' me." And the
next time he visited the canteen he brought back a biscuit or two and a
slab of sweet chocolate, to confirm the capricious beast in its mended
manners.
Early that same afternoon the black mule found himself in new
surroundings. He was at the big ammunition dump which lay concealed in
an obscure hollow near the ruins of Courcelette. He looked with
suspicion on the wicker panniers which were slung across his sturdy
back. Saddles he knew, and harness he knew, but this was a contraption
which roused misgivings in his conservative soul. When the shells were
slipped into the panniers, and he felt the sudden weight, so out of all
proportion to the size of the burden, he laid back his long ears with a
grunt, and gathered his muscles for a protesting kick. But his driver,
standing at his head, stroked his muzzle soothingly and murmured:
"There, there, steady, Son! Keep your hair on! It ain't goin' to bite
you."
Thus adjured, he composed himself with an effort, and the lashing kick
was not delivered.
"What a persuasive cuss you must be, Jimmy Wright!" said the man who was
handling the shells. "I wouldn't trust you round with my best girl, If
you can get a bucking mule locoed that way with your soft sawder."
"It ain't me," replied the New Brunswicker. "It's shell-shock, I guess,
kind of helped along with chocolate an' biscuits. He got a bit of a
shaking up when they shelled the lines at Aveluy night afore last, an'
he's been a lamb ever since. Seems to think I saved his hide for him.
He was the very devil to handle afore that."
For some way from the dump the journey was uneventful. The path to the
guns led along a sunken road, completely hidden from the enemy's
observation posts. The dull, persistent rain had ceased for a little,
and the broad patches of blue overhead were dotted with our droning
aeroplanes, which every now and then would dive into a low-drifting rack
of grey cloud to shake off the shrapnel of the German "Archies." Of
German 'planes none were to be seen, for they had all sped home to their
hangars when our fighting squadrons rose to the encounter. The earth
rocked to the explosions of our 9.2 howitzers ranged about Pozieres and
Martinpuich, and the air clamoured under the passage of their giant
shells as they went roaring over toward the German lines. Now and again
a vicious whining sound would swell suddenly to a nerve-racking shriek,
and an enemy shell would land with a massive cr-r-ump, and a furious
blast of smoke and mud would belch upwards to one side or other of the
sunken road. But none of these unwelcome visitors came into the road
itself, and neither the black mule nor Jimmy Wright paid them any more
attention than the merest roll of an eye to mark their billet.
"Change o' heart hain't spoiled old Sonny's nerve, anyhow," thought the
driver to himself, with deep approval.
A little further on and the trail up to "X's Group," quitting the
shelter of the sunken road, led out across the red desolation, in the
very eye, as it seemed to the New Brunswicker, of the enemy's positions.
It was a narrow, undulating track, slippery as oil, yet tenacious as
glue, corkscrewing its laborious way between the old slime-filled
shell-pits. From the surface of one of these wells of foul-coloured
ooze the legs of a dead horse stuck up stiffly into the air, like four
posts on which to lay a foot-bridge. A few yards beyond, the track was
cut by a fresh shell-hole, too new to have collected any water. Its raw
sides were streaked red and white and black, and just at its rim lay the
mangled fragments of something that might recently have been a mule.
The long ears of Wright's mule waved backwards and forwards at the
sight, and he snorted apprehensively.
"This don't appear to be a health resort for us, Sonny," commented the
New Brunswicker, "so we won't linger, if it's all the same to you." And
he led the way around the other side of the new shell-hole, the big mule
crowding close behind with quivering muzzle at his shoulder.
However urgent Wright's desire for speed, speed was ridiculously
impossible. The obstinate pro-German mud was not lightly to be
overcome. Even on the firmer ridges it clung far above the fetlocks of
the black mule, and struggled to suck off Wright's hob-nailed boots at
every labouring step. Though a marrow-piercing north-easter swept the
waste, both man and mule were lathered in sweat. Half their energy had
to be expended in recovering themselves from continual slithering slides
which threatened to land them in the engulfing horrors of the
shell-holes. For all that he had so little breath to spare, Jimmy
Wright kept muttering through his teeth strange expletives and
objurgations from the vocabulary of the lumber camps, eloquent but
unprintable, to which the black mule lent ear admiringly. He seemed to
feel that his driver's remarks, though he could not understand them,
were doubtless such as would command his fullest accord. For his own
part he had no means of expressing such sentiments except through his
heels, and these were now all too fully occupied in their battle with
the mud.
By this time the black mule had become absolutely convinced that his
fate was in the hands of his ginger-haired driver. Jimmy Wright, as it
seemed to him, was his sole protection against this violent horror which
kept bursting and crashing on every hand about him. It was clear to him
that Jimmy Wright, though apparently much annoyed, was not afraid.
Therefore, with Jimmy Wright as his protector he was safe. He wagged
his ears, snorted contemptuously at a 5.9 which spurted up a column of
mud and smoke some hundred yards to the left, and plodded on gamely
through the mud. He didn't know where he was going, but Jimmy Wright
was there, and just ahead of his nose, where he could sniff at him; and
he felt sure there would be fodder and a rub down at the end of the
weary road.
In the midst of these consoling reflections something startling and
inexplicable happened. He was enveloped and swept away hi a deafening
roar. Thick blackness, streaked with star-showers, blinded him. Though
half stupefied, he kicked and struggled with all his strength, for it
was not in him to yield himself, like a stricken horse, to any stroke of
Fate.