All night the big buck rabbit--he was really a hare, but the
backwoodsmen called him a rabbit--had been squatting on his form under
the dense branches of a young fir tree. The branches grew so low that
their tips touched the snow all round him, giving him almost perfect
shelter from the drift of the storm. The storm was one of icy rain,
which everywhere froze instantly as it fell. All night it had been
busy encasing the whole wilderness--every tree and bush and stump, and
the snow in every open meadow or patch of forest glade--in an armour of
ice, thick and hard and glassy clear. And the rabbit, crouching
motionless, save for an occasional forward thrust of his long,
sensitive ears, had slept in unwonted security, knowing that none of
his night-prowling foes would venture forth from their lairs on such a
night.
At dawn the rain stopped. The cold deepened to a still intensity. The
clouds lifted along the eastern horizon, and a thin, icy flood of
saffron and palest rose washed down across the glittering desolation.
The wilderness was ablaze on the instant with elusive tongues and
points of coloured light--jewelled flames, not of fire, but of frost.
The world had become a palace of crystal and opal, a dream-palace that
would vanish at a touch, a breath. And indeed, had a wind arisen then
to breathe upon it roughly, the immeasurable crystal would have
shattered as swiftly as a dream, the too-rigid twigs and branches would
have snapped and clattered down in ruin.
The rabbit came out from under his little ice-clad fir tree, and, for
all his caution, the brittle twigs broke about him as he emerged, and
tinkled round him sharply. The thin, light sound was so loud upon the
stillness that he gave a startled leap into the air, landing many feet
away from his refuge. He slipped and sprawled, recovered his foothold,
and stood quivering, his great, prominent eyes trying to look in every
direction at once, his ears questioning anxiously to and fro, his
nostrils twitching for any hint of danger.
There was no sight, sound, or scent, however, to justify his alarm, and
in a few seconds, growing bolder, he remembered that he was hungry.
Close by he noticed the tips of a little birch sapling sticking up
above the snow. These birch-tips, in winter, were his favourite food.
He hopped toward them, going circumspectly over the slippery surface,
and sat up on his hindquarters to nibble at them. To his intense
surprise and disappointment, each twig and aromatic bud was sealed
away, inaccessible, though clearly visible, under a quarter inch of
ice. Twig after twig he investigated with his inquiring, sensitive
cleft nostrils, which met everywhere the same chill reception. Round
and round the tantalizing branch he hopped, unable to make out the
situation. At last, thoroughly disgusted, he turned his back on the
treacherous birch bush and made for another, some fifty yards down the
glade.
As he reached it he stopped short, suddenly rigid, his head half turned
over his shoulder, every muscle gathered like a spring wound up to
extreme tension. His bulging eyes had caught a movement somewhere
behind him, beyond the clump of twigs which he had just left. Only for
a second did he remain thus rigid. Then the spring was loosed. With a
frantic bound he went over and through the top of the bush. The
shattered and scattered crystals rang sharply on the shining
snow-crust. And he sped away in panic terror among the silent trees.
From behind the glassy twigs emerged another form, snow-white like the
fleeting rabbit, and sped in pursuit--not so swiftly, indeed, as the
rabbit, but with an air of implacable purpose that made the quarry seem
already doomed. The pursuer was much smaller than his intended victim,
very low on the legs, long-bodied, slender, and sinuous, and he moved
as if all compacted of whipcord muscle. The grace of his long,
deliberate bounds was indescribable. His head was triangular in shape,
the ears small and close-set, the black-tipped muzzle sharply pointed,
with the thin, black lips upcurled to show the white fangs; and the
eyes glowed red with blood-lust. Small as it was, there was something
terrible about the tiny beast, and its pursuit seemed as inevitable as
Fate. At each bound its steel-hard claws scratched sharply on the
crystal casing of the snow, and here and there an icicle from a snapped
twig went ringing silverly across the gleaming surface.
For perhaps fifty yards the weasel followed straight upon the rabbit's
track. Then he swerved to the right. He had lost sight of his quarry.
But he knew its habits in flight. He knew it would run in a circle,
and he took a chord of that circle, so as to head the fugitive off. He
knew he might have to repeat this manoeuvre several times, but he had
no doubts as to the result. In a second or two he also had disappeared
among the azure shadows and pink-and-saffron gleams of the ice-clad
forest.
For several minutes the glade was empty, still as death, with the
bitter but delicate glories of the winter dawn flooding ever more
radiantly across it. On a sudden the rabbit appeared again, this time
at the opposite side of the glade. He was running irresolutely now,
with little aimless leaps to this side and to that, and his leaps were
short and lifeless, as if his nerve-power were getting paralysed.
About the middle of the glade he seemed to give up altogether, as if
conquered by sheer panic. He stopped, hesitated, wheeled round, and
crouched flat upon the naked snow, trembling violently, and staring,
with eyes that started from his head, at the point in the woods which
he had just emerged from.
A second later the grim pursuer appeared. He saw his victim awaiting
him, but he did not hurry his pace by a hair's-breadth. With the same
terrible deliberation he approached. Only his jaws opened, his long
fangs glistened bare; a blood-red globule of light glowed redder at the
back of his eyes.
One more of those inexorable bounds, and he would have been at his
victim's throat. The rabbit screamed.
At that instant, with a hissing sound, a dark shadow dropped out of the
air. It struck the rabbit. He was enveloped in a dreadful flapping of
wings. Iron talons, that clutched and bit like the jaws of a trap,
seized him by the back. He felt himself partly lifted from the snow.
He screamed again. But now he struggled convulsively, no longer
submissive to his doom, the hypnotic spell cast upon him by the weasel
being broken by the shock of the great hawk's unexpected attack.
But the weasel was not of the stuff or temper to let his prey be
snatched thus from his jaws. Cruel and wanton assassin though he was,
ever rejoicing to kill for the lust of killing long after his hunger
was satisfied, he had the courage of a wounded buffalo. A mere darting
silver of white, he sprang straight into the blinding confusion of
those great wings.
He secured a hold just under one wing, where the armour of feathers was
thinnest, and began to gnaw inwards with his keen fangs. With a
startled cry, the hawk freed her talons from the rabbit's back and
clutched frantically at her assailant. The rabbit, writhing out from
under the struggle, went leaping off into cover, bleeding copiously,
but carrying no fatal hurt. He had recovered his wits, and had no idle
curiosity as to how the battle between his enemies would turn out.
The hawk, for all her great strength and the crushing superiority of
her weapons, had a serious disadvantage of position. The weasel,
maintaining his deadly grip and working inwards like a bull-dog, had
hunched up his lithe little body so that she could not reach it with
her talons. She tore furiously at his back with her rending beak, but
the amazingly tough, rubbery muscles resisted even that weapon to a
certain degree. At last, securing a grip with her beak upon her
adversary's thigh, she managed to pull the curled-up body out almost
straight, and so secured a grip upon it with one set of talons.
That grip was crushing, irresistible, but it was too far back to be
immediately fatal. The weasel's lithe body lengthened out under the
agonizing stress of it, but it could not pull his jaws from their grip.
They continued inexorably their task of gnawing inwards, ever inwards,
seeking a vital spot.
The struggle went on in silence, as far as the voices of both
combatants were concerned. But the beating of the hawk's wings
resounded on the glassy-hard surface of the snow. As the struggle
shifted ground, those flapping wings came suddenly in contact with a
bush, whose iced twigs were brittle as glass and glittering like the
prisms of a great crystal candelabrum. There was a shrill crash and a
thin, ringing clatter as the twigs shattered off and spun flying across
the crust.
The sound carried far through the still iridescent spaces of the
wilderness. It reached the ears of a foraging fox, who was tiptoeing
with dainty care over the slippery crust. He turned hopefully to
investigate, trusting to get a needed breakfast out of some
fellow-marauder's difficulties. At the edge of the glade he paused,
peering through a bush of crystal fire to size up the situation before
committing himself to the venture.
Desperately preoccupied though she was, the hawk's all-seeing eyes
detected the red outlines of the fox through the bush. With a frantic
beating of her wings she lifted herself from the snow. The fox darted
upon her with a lightning rush and a shattering of icicles. He was
just too late. The great bird was already in the air, carrying her
deadly burden with her. The fox leapt straight upwards, hoping to pull
her down, but his clashing jaws just failed to reach her talons.
Labouring heavily in her flight, she made off, striving to gain a
tree-top, where she might perch and once more give her attention to the
gnawing torment which clung beneath her wing.
The fox, being wise, and seeing that the hawk was in extremest straits,
ran on beneath her as she flew, gazing upwards expectantly.
The weasel, meanwhile, with that deadly concentration of purpose which
characterizes his tribe, paid no heed to the fact that he was
journeying through the air. And he knew nothing of what was going on
below. His flaming eyes were buried in his foe's feathers, his jaws
were steadily working inwards toward her vitals.
Just at the edge of the glade, immediately over the top of a branchy
young paper-birch which shot a million coloured points of light in the
sunrise, the end came. The fangs of the weasel met in the hawk's
wildly throbbing heart. With a choking burst of scarlet blood it
stopped.
Stone dead, the great marauder of the air crashed down through the slim
birch-top, with a great scattering of gleams and crystals. With
wide-sprawled wings she thudded down upon the snow-crust, almost under
the fox's complacent jaws. The weasel's venomous head, covered with
blood, emerged triumphant from the mass of feathers.
As the victor writhed free, the fox, pouncing upon him with a careless
air, seized him by the neck, snapped it neatly, and tossed the long,
limp body, aside upon the snow. He had no use for the rank, stringy
meat of the weasel when better fare was at hand. Then he drew the hawk
close to the trunk of the young birch, and lay down to make a leisurely
breakfast.
V