the rim of an old shell-hole. He gained the top, braced his legs, and
shook himself vigorously. The loaded panniers thumping heavily upon his
ribs restored him fully to his senses. Snorting through wide red
nostrils, he stared about him wildly. Some ten paces distant he saw a
great new crater in the mud, reeking with black and orange fumes.
But where was Jimmy Wright? The mule swept anxious eyes across the
waste of shell-holes, in every direction. In vain. His master had
vanished. He felt himself deserted. Panic began to clutch at his
heart, and he gathered his muscles for frantic flight. And then he
recovered himself and stood steady. He had caught sight of a
ginger-haired head, bare of its shrapnel helmet, lying on the mud at the
other side of the shell-hole from which he had just struggled out.
His panic passed at once, but it gave place to anxious wonder. There,
indeed, was Jimmy Wright, but what was he doing there? His body was
buried almost to the shoulders in the discoloured slime that half filled
the shell-hole. He was lying on his face. His arms were outstretched,
and his hands were clutching at the slippery walls of the hole as if he
were striving to pull himself up from the water. This effort, however,
seemed anything but successful. The mule saw, indeed, that his
protector was slowly slipping deeper into the slime. This filled him
with fresh alarm. If Jimmy Wright should disappear under that foul
surface, that would be desertion complete and final. It was not to be
endured.
Quickly but cautiously the mule picked his way around the hole, and
then, with sagacious bracing of his hoofs, down to his master's side.
But what was to be done next? Jimmy Wright's face was turned so that he
could not see his would-be rescuer. His hands were still clutching at
the mud, but feebly and without effect.
The mule saw that his master was on the point of vanishing under the
mud, of deserting him in his extremity. This was intolerable. The
emergency quickened his wits. Instinct suggested to him that to keep a
thing one should take hold of it and hold on to it. He reached down
with his big yellow teeth, took hold of the shoulder of Jimmy Wright's
tunic, and held on. Unfamiliar with anatomy, he at the same time took
hold of a substantial portion of Jimmy Wright's own shoulder inside the
tunic, and held on to that. He braced himself, and with a loud,
involuntary snort began to pull.
Jimmy Wright, up to this point, had been no more than half conscious.
The mule's teeth in his shoulder revived him effectually. He came to
himself with a yell. He remembered the shell-burst. He saw and
understood where he was. He was afraid to move for a moment, lest he
should find that his shoulder was blown off. But no, he had two arms,
and he could move them. He had his shoulder all right, for something
was pulling at it with quite sickening energy. He reached up his right
arm--it was the left shoulder that was being tugged at--and encountered
the furry head and ears of his rescuer.
"Sonny!" he shouted. "Well, I'll be d----d!" And he gripped fervently
at the mule's neck.
Reassured at the sound of his master's voice, the big mule took his
teeth out of Wright's shoulder and began nuzzling solicitously at his
sandy head.
"It's all right, old man," said the New Brunswicker, thinking quickly,
while with his left hand he secured a grip on the mule's head-stall.
Then he strove to raise himself from the slime. The effort produced no
result, except to send a wave of blackness across his brain. Wondering
sickly if he carried some terrible injury concealed under the mud, he
made haste to pass the halter rope under his arms and knot it beneath
his chest. Then he shouted for help, twice and again, till his voice
trailed off into a whimper and he relapsed into unconsciousness. The
mule shifted his feet to gain a more secure foothold on the treacherous
slope, and then stood wagging his ears and gazing down on Jimmy in
benevolent content. So long as Jimmy was with him, he felt that things
were bound to come all right. Jimmy would presently get up and lead him
out of the shell-hole, and take him home.
Shell after shell, whining or thundering according to their breed,
soared high over the hole, but the black mule only wagged his ears at
them. His eyes were anchored upon the unconscious sandy head of Jimmy
Wright. Suddenly, however, a sharp voice made him look up. He saw a
couple of stretcher-bearers standing on the edge of the shell-hole,
looking down sympathetically upon him and his charge. In a second or
two they were beside him, skilfully and tenderly extricating Jimmy's
body from the mud.
"He ain't gone west this time," pronounced one, who had thrust an
understanding hand into the breast of the tunic.
Jimmy Wright opened his eyes wide suddenly.
"Not by a d----d sight I ain't, Bill!" he muttered, rather thickly.
Then, his wits and his voice coming clearer, he added: "But if I ain't,
it's thanks to this here old ---- of an Argentine mule, that come down
into this hole and yanked me out o' the mud, and saved me. Eh, Sonny?"
The big mule was crowding up so close to him as to somewhat incommode
the two men in their task on that treacherous incline. But they warded
off his inconvenient attentions very gently.
"He's some mule, all right," grunted one of the bearers, as they got
Jimmy on to the stretcher and laboriously climbed from the shell-hole.
*STAR-NOSE OF THE UNDER WAYS*
He was in a darkness that was dense, absolute, palpable. And his eyes
were shut tight,--though it made no difference, under the circumstances,
whether they were shut or open. But if his sense of sight was for the
moment off duty, its absence was more than compensated for by the
extreme alertness of his other senses. To his supersensitive nostrils
the black, peaty soil surrounding him was full of distinct and varying
scents. His ears could detect and locate the wriggling of a fat grub,
the unctuous withdrawal of a startled earth-worm. Above all, his sense
of touch was so extraordinarily developed that it might have served him
for eyes, ears and nostrils all in one. And so it came about that,
there in the blackness of his close and narrow tunnel, deep in the black
soil of the swamp, he was not imprisoned, but free and at large as the
swift hares gambolling overhead,--far freer, indeed, because secure from
the menace of prowling and swooping foes.
Star-nose was a mole. But he was not an ordinary mole of the dry
uplands and well drained meadows, by any means, or he would not have
been running his deep tunnel here in the cool, almost swampy soil within
a few yards of the meandering channel of the Lost-Water. In shape and
colour he was not unlike the common mole,--with his thick, powerful neck
of about the same size as his body, his great, long-clawed, immensely
strong, hand-like fore-feet, and his mellow, velvety, shadowy,
grey-brown fur. But his tail was much longer, and thicker at the base,
than that of his plebeian cousin of the lawns. And his nose,--that was
something of a distinction which no other beast in the world, great or
small, could boast of. From all around its tip radiated a fringe of
feelers, no less than twenty-two in number, naked, flexible,
miraculously sensitive, each one a little nailless, interrogating
finger. It entitled him, beyond question, to the unique title of
Star-Nose.
This tireless worker in the dark was driving a new tunnel,--partly, no
doubt, for the sake of worms, grubs, and pupae which he might find on
the way, and partly for purposes known only to himself. At the level
where he was digging, a scant foot below the surface, the mould, though
damp, was fairly light and workable, owing to the abundance of fine
roots and decayed leafage mixed through it; and his progress was
astonishingly rapid.
His method of driving his tunnel was practical and effective. With back
arched so as to throw the full force of it into his fore-shoulders, with
his hind feet wide apart and drawn well up beneath him, he dug mightily
into the damp soil straight before his nose with the long, penetrating
claws of his exaggerated and powerful fore-paws. In great swift
handfuls (for his fore-paws were more like hands than feet), the
loosened earth was thrown behind him, passing under his body and out
between his roomily straddling hind legs. And as he dug he worked in a
circle, enlarging the tunnel head to a diameter of about two-and-a-half
inches, at the same time pressing the walls firm and hard with his body,
so that they should not cave in upon him. This compacting process
further enlarged the tunnel to about three inches, which was the space
he felt he needed for quick and free movement. When he had accumulated
behind him as much loose earth as he could comfortably handle, he turned
around, and with his head and chest and forearms pushed the mass before
him along the tunnel to the foot of his last dump-hole,--an abrupt shaft
leading to the upper air. Up this shaft he would thrust his burden, and
heave it forth among the grass and weeds, a conspicuous and contemptuous
challenge to would-be pursuers. He did not care how many of his enemies
might thus be notified of his address, for he knew he could always
change it with baffling celerity, blocking up his tunnels behind him as
he went.
And now, finding that at his present depth the meadow soil, at this
point, was not well-stocked with such game--grubs and worms--as he chose
to hunt, he slanted his tunnel slightly upward to get among the
grass-roots near the surface. Almost immediately he was rewarded. He
cut into the pipe-like canal of a large earth-worm, just in time to
intercept its desperate retreat. It was one of those stout,
dark-purplish lob-worms that feed in rich soil, and to him the most
toothsome of morsels. In spite of the eagerness of his appetite he drew
it forth most delicately and gradually from its canal, lest it should
break in two and the half of it escape him. Dragging it back into his
tunnel he held it with his big, inexorable "hands," and felt it over
gleefully with that restless star of fingers which adorned the tip of
his nose. Then he tore it into short pieces, bolted it hurriedly, and
fell to work again upon his tunnelling. But now, having come among the
grass-roots, he was in a good hunting-ground, and his work was
continually interrupted by feasting. At one moment it would be a huge,
fat, white grub as thick as a man's little finger, with a hard,
light-copper-coloured head; at the next a heavy, liver-coloured
lob-worm. His appetite seemed insatiable; but at last he felt he had
had enough, for the moment. He stopped tunnelling, turned back a few
inches, drove a short shaft to the surface as a new exit, and heaved
forth a mighty load of debris.
In the outer world it was high morning, and the strong sunlight glowed
softly down through the tangled grasses of the water-meadow. The eyes
of Star-Nose were but two tiny black beads almost hidden in fur, but
after he had blinked them for a second or two in the sudden light he
could see quite effectively,--much better, indeed, than his cousin, the
common mole of the uplands. Though by far the greater part of his
strenuous life was spent in the palpable darkness of his tunnels in the
under world, daylight, none the less, was by no means distasteful to
him, and he was not averse to a few minutes of basking in the tempered
sun. As he sat stroking his fine fur with those restless fingers of his
nose, and scratching himself luxuriously with his capable claws, a big
grasshopper, dropping from one of its aimless leaps, fell close beside
him, bearing down with it a long blade of grass which it had clutched at
in its descent. Star-Nose seized the unlucky hopper in a flash, tore
off its hard inedible legs, and started to eat it. At that instant,
however, a faint swish of wings caught his ear and a swift shadow passed
over him. At the touch of that shadow,--as if it had been solid and
released an oiled spring within his mechanism,--he dived back into his
hole; and the swooping marsh-hawk, after a savage but futile clutch at
the vanishing tip of his tail, wheeled off with a yelp of
disappointment.
It was certainly a narrow shave; and for perhaps a whole half-minute
Star-Nose, with his heart thumping, crouched in his refuge. Then,
remembering the toothsome prize which he had been forced to abandon, he
put forth his head warily to reconnoitre. The hawk was gone; but the
dead grasshopper was still there, green and glistening in the sun, and a
burly blue-bottle had just alighted upon it. Star-Nose crept forth
cautiously to retrieve his prey.
Now at this same moment, as luck would have it, gliding along one of the
tiny run-ways of the meadow-mice, came a foraging mole-shrew, a
pugnacious cousin of the Star-Nose tribe. The mole-shrew was distinctly
smaller than Star-Nose, and handicapped with such defective vision that
he had to do all his hunting by scent and sound and touch. He smelt the
dead grasshopper at once, and came straight for it, heedless of whatever
might stand in the way.
Under the circumstances Star-Nose might have carelessly stood aside, not
through lack of courage, but because he had no special love of fighting
for its own sake. And he knew that his cousin, though so much smaller
and lighter than himself, was much to be respected as an opponent by
reason of his blind ferocity and dauntless tenacity. But he was no
weakling, to let himself be robbed of his lawful prey. He whipped out
of his hole, flung himself upon the prize, and lifted his head just in
time to receive the furious spring of his assailant.
Between two such fighters there was no fencing. The mole-shrew secured
a grip upon the side of the immensely thick and muscular neck of his
antagonist, and immediately began to worry and tear like a terrier. But
Star-Nose, flexible as an eel, set his deadly teeth into the side of his
assailant's head, a little behind the ear, and worked in deeper and
deeper, after the manner of a bulldog. For a few seconds, in that
death-grapple, the two rolled over and over, thrashing the grass-stems.
Then the long teeth of Star-Nose bit into the brain; and the
mole-shrew's body, after a convulsive stiffening, went suddenly limp.
But the disturbance in the grass--there being no wind that golden
morning--had not escaped the eyes of the foraging marsh-hawk. She came
winnowing back to learn the cause of it. The sun being behind her,
however, her ominous shadow swept over the grass before her,--and
Star-Nose, unfailingly vigilant even in the moment of victory, caught
sight of it coming. He loosed his hold on his dead adversary and
plunged for the hole. At least he tried to plunge for it. But the
plunge was little more than a crawl; for the teeth of the mole-shrew,
set deep in his neck, had locked themselves fast in death, and all that
Star-Nose could do was to drag the body with him. This, however, he
succeeded in doing, so effectively that he was in time to back down into
the hole, out of reach, just as the hawk swooped and struck.
The clutching talons of the great bird fixed themselves firmly in the
protruding hind-quarters of the mole-shrew, and she attempted to rise
with her capture. But to her amazed indignation the prize resisted.
Star-Nose was holding on to the walls of his tunnel with all the
strength of his powerful claws, while at the same time struggling
desperately to tear himself loose from the grip of those dead teeth in
his neck. The contest, however, was but momentary. The strength of
Star-Nose was a small thing against the furious beating of those great
wings; and in two or three seconds, unable either to hold on or to free
himself from the fatal incubus of his victim, he was dragged forth
ignominiously and swept into the air, squirming and dangling at the tip
of the dead mole-shrew's snout.
Star-Nose was vaguely conscious of a chill rush of air, of a sudden
dazzling glare of gold and blue, as the victorious hawk flapped off
towards the nearest tree-top with her prize. Then, suddenly, the grip
of the dead jaws relaxed and he felt himself falling. Fortunately for
him the hawk had not risen to any great height,--for the marsh-hawk,
hunter of meadow-mice, and such secretive quarry, does not, as a rule,
fly high. He felt himself turn over and over in the air, dizzily, and
then he landed, with a stupefying swish, in a dense bed of wild
parsnips. He crashed right through, of course, but the strong stems
broke his fall and he was little the worse for the stupendous adventure.
For a few moments he lay half stunned. Then, pulling himself together,
he fell to digging with all his might, caring only to escape from a
glaring outer world which seemed so full of tumultuous and altogether
bewildering perils. He made the earth fly in a shower; and in an
unbelievably brief space of time he had buried himself till even the tip
of his tail was out of sight. But even then he was not content. He dug
on frantically, till he was a good foot beneath the surface and perhaps
a couple of feet more from the entrance. Then, leaving the passage
safely blocked behind him, he enlarged the tunnel to a large chamber,
and curled himself up to lick his wounds and recover from his fright.
It was perhaps half an hour before Star-Nose completely regained his
composure and his appetite. His appetite--that was the first
consideration. And second to that, a poor second, was his need of
tunnelling back into his familiar maze of underground passages. Resuming
his digging with full vigour, he first ran a new shaft to the surface,
gathering in several fat grubs in his progress through the grass-roots.
Then, at about six inches below the surface--a depth at which he could
count upon the best foraging--he began to drive his tunnel. His sense
of direction was unerring; which was the more inexplicable as there in
the thick dark he could have no landmarks to guide him. He headed
straight for the point which would, by the shortest distance, join him
up with his own under-ways.
It happened, however, that in that terrible journey of his through the
upper air the swift flight of the hawk had carried him some distance,
and across the course of a sluggish meadow brook, a tributary of the
Lost-Water. Suddenly and unexpectedly his vigorous tunnelling brought
him to this obstacle. The darkness before him gave way to a glimmer of
light. He hesitated, and then burrowed on more cautiously. A screen of
matted grass-roots confronted him, stabbed through with needles of sharp
gold which quivered dazzlingly. Warily he dug through the screen,
thrust forth his nose, and found himself looking down upon a shimmering
glare of quiet water, about a foot below him.
Glancing upwards to see if there were any terrible wings in the air
above, Star-Nose perceived, to his deep satisfaction, that the steep
bank was overhung by a mat of pink-blossomed wild roses, humming
drowsily with bees. The concealment, from directly overhead, was
perfect. Reassured upon this point, he crawled forth, intending to swim
the bright channel and continue his tunnel upon the other side. The
water itself was no obstacle to him, for he could swim and dive like a
musk-rat. He was just about to plunge in, when under his very nose
popped up a black, triangular, furry head with fiercely bright, hard
eyes and lips curled back hungrily from long and keen white fangs. With
amazing dexterity he doubled back upon himself straight up the slope,
and dived into his burrow; and the mink, springing after him, was just
in time to snap vainly at the vanishing tip of his tail.
The mink was both hungry and bad-tempered, having just missed a fish
which he was hunting amid the tangle of water-weeds along the muddy
bottom of the stream. Angrily he jammed his sharp snout into the mouth
of the tunnel, but the passage was much too small for him, and Star-Nose
was well out of reach. He himself could dig a burrow when put to it,
but he knew that in this art he was no match for the expert little
fugitive. Moreover, keen though his appetite was, he was not
over-anxious to allay it with the rank and stringy flesh of the
Underground One. He shook his head with a sniff and a snarl, brushed
the earth from his muzzle, and slipped off swiftly and soundlessly to
seek more succulent prey.
It was ten or fifteen minutes before Star-Nose again ventured forth into
the perilous daylight. His last adventure had not in the least upset
him,--for to his way of thinking a miss was as good as a mile. But he
was hungry, as usual, and he had found good hunting in the warm, light
soil just under the roots of the wild rose bushes along the bank. At
length his desires once more turned towards the home tunnels. He poked
his starry nose out through the hole in the bank, made sure that there
were no enemies in sight, slipped down to the water's edge, and glided
in as noiselessly as if he had been oiled. He had no mind to make a
splash, lest he should advertise his movements to some voracious pike
which might be lurking beneath that green patch of water-lily leaves a
little further up stream.
Deep below the shining surface he swam, straight and strong through a
world of shimmering and pellucid gold, roofed by a close, flat, white
sky of diaphanous silver, upon which every fallen rose-petal or drowning
fly or moth was shown with amazing clearness. As he reached the opposite
shore and clambered nimbly up through that flat silver sky, he glanced
back and saw a long grey shadow, with terrible jaws and staring round
eyes, dart past the spot from which he had just emerged. The great pike
beneath the lilypads had caught sight of him, after all,--but too late!
Star-Nose shook himself, and sat basking for a few moments in the
comfortable warmth, complacently combing his face with his nimble
fore-paws. He had an easy contempt for the pike, because it could not
leave the water to pursue him.
* * * * * *
Some fifty yards away, on the side of the brook from which Star-Nose had
just come, beside a tiny pool in the deeps of the grass stood an immense
bird of a pale bluish-grey colour, motionless as a stone, on the watch
for unwary frogs. The rich grasses were about two feet in height, and
the blue heron towered another clear two feet above them. He was all
length,--long, stilt-like legs, long, snake-like neck, long, dagger-like
bill, and a firm, arrogant crest of long, slim, delicate plumes. All
about him spread the warm and sun-steeped sea of the
meadow-grass,--starred thick with blooms of purple vetch and crimson
clover, and sultry orange lilies,--droning sleepily with bees and
flies,--steaming with summer scents, and liquidly musical with the songs
of the fluttering, black-and-white bobolinks, like tangled peals of tiny
silver bells. But nothing of this intoxicating beauty did the great
heron heed. Rigid and decorative as if he had just stepped down from a
Japanese screen, his fierce, unwinking, jewel-bright eyes were intent
upon the pool at his feet. His whole statuesque being was concentrated
upon the subject of frogs.
But the frogs in that particular pool had taken warning. Not one would
show himself, so long as that inexorable blue shape of death remained in
sight. Nor did a single meadow-mouse stir amid the grass-roots for
yards about the pool, for word of the watching doom had gone abroad.
And presently the great heron, grown tired of such poor hunting, lifted
his broad wings, sprang lazily into the air, and went flapping away
slowly over the grass-tops, trailing his long legs stiffly behind him.
He headed for the other side of the brook, and fresh hunting-grounds.
At the first lift of those great pale wings Star-Nose had detected this
new and appalling peril. By good luck he was sitting on a patch of bare
earth, where the overhanging turf had given way some days before.
Frantically he began to dig himself in. The soft earth flew from under
his desperate paws. The piercing eyes of the heron detected the curious
disturbance, and he winged swiftly to the spot.
But Star-Nose, in his vigilance, had gained a good start. In about as
much time as it takes to tell it, he was already buried to his own
length. And then, to his terror, he came plump upon an impenetrable
obstacle--an old mooring stake driven deep into the soil. In a sweat of
panic he swerved off to the left and tunnelled madly almost at right
angles to the entrance.