snappish. She growled if Brownie came near her. Mother Bear also began
to develop a temper. Then came a warm night in late spring, when both
Blackie and Spotty disappeared. Brownie sniffed and searched and
hunted but no trace of either of them could he find. As the days
lengthened into June, the old bear became restless and more and more
irritable. One day in the middle of the month, she wandered back and
forth, feeding but little, and so cross that Brownie followed her only
at a safe distance. He, too, was uneasy and unhappy. Something, he
knew not what, was lacking in his life. As the late twilight faded, a
great honey-colored moon came up and made the woods so bright that the
veeries began to sing again their strange rippling chords, as if the
night-wind were blowing across golden harp-strings.
There before them, in a little glade, suddenly towered the black
figure of a giant bear. With a little whicker Mother Bear moved
forward to meet her mate, and a moment later led the way toward the
dim green fastnesses of the forest. Poor, untactful, unhappy Brownie
started to follow as of old. Both of them growled at him so fiercely
that he stopped in his tracks. As he watched them disappear into the
fragrant dark, he felt that the whole Round Table was dissolved. Never
again would the little family that had been so happy together be
united.
He turned and plunged into a near-by thicket, and hurried away lonely
and unhappy. For long he followed a faint trail, until it widened
into a green circle where some forgotten charcoal-pit had stamped its
seal forever upon the forest. The air was heavy with the drugged
perfume of chestnut tassels and the fragrance of wild grape, sweetest
of all the scents of earth. Then, under the love-moon of June, in the
centre of the tiny circle, there was standing before him a lithe,
black figure with a silver spot showing at the end of her slim tilted
nose--and all at once Brownie knew what his life had lacked. For long
and long the two looked at each other, and he was lonely and unhappy
no more.
Then slowly, slowly, the silver spot moved away, ahead of him, toward
the soft scented blackness of the deep woods. As he followed, he
stopped and rumbled out dreadful warnings to a large number of
imaginary bears, to beware that silver spot. While the veeries, whose
heartstrings are a lute, sang in the thicket, and a little owl crooned
a love-song from overhead, and the last of the hylas piped like pixies
from far away, the two followed the path of their honeymoon, until it
was lost in the depths of that night of love.
III
THE SEVENTH SLEEPER
In a far northwestern corner of Connecticut, the twenty-one named
hills of Cornwall slept deep under the snow. At the north lay the
Barrack, a lonely coffin-shaped hill, where, in the deep woods on the
top, lived old Rashe Howe and his wife, snowbound from December until
March. Never since the day that he journeyed to New York to hear Jenny
Lind sing, a half-century ago, had she spoken to him.
Two miles beyond, Myron Prindle and Mrs. Prindle lived on the bare top
of Prindle Hill, where in summer the hermit thrushes sang, and in
hidden bogs bloomed the pink-and-white lady-slipper, loveliest and
loneliest of all of our orchids. Then there were Lion's Head, and
Rattlesnake Mountain, where that king of the dark places of the forest
had a den. Beyond towered the Cobble, a steep cone-shaped hill, which,
a century ago, Great-great Uncle Samuel Sedgwick used to plough clear
to the top. He relied upon three yoke of oxen and the Sedgwick temper;
and on calm mornings could be heard discoursing to said oxen from the
top of the Cobble in three different towns.
Over beyond the Cobble was Dibble Hill, with its lost settlement of
five deserted houses crumbling in the woods. Coltsfoot, Green
Mountain, and Ballyhack stretched away to the south and the west; and
in the northwest was Gold Mountain, with its abandoned gold-mine, from
which Deacon Wadsworth mined just enough gold to pay for sinking the
shaft. Then came Blakesley Hill, climbed by a winding road three miles
long, and Ford Hill, populated by Silas Ford and twelve little Fords,
and Bunker Hill, traversed by the Crooked S's, which drove motorists
to madness.
Beyond them all was Great Hill, where grew the enormous tree which
could be seen against the sky-line for ten miles around. Six
generations of Cornwall people had planned to walk or drive or motor,
on some day, that never dawned, and look at that tree and find out
what it was. Some claimed that it was an elm, like the vast Boundary
Elm which marked a corner where four farms met. Others believed it to
be a red oak; while still others claimed the honor for a button-ball.
But no one yet has ever known for certain. In the very centre and
heart of all the other hills was Cream Hill, greenest, richest, and
roundest of them all. On its flanks were Cornwall Plains, Cornwall
Centre, and Cornwall Hollow; and at its foot nestled Cream Pond, with
Pond Hill sloping straight skyward from its northern shore.
Ever since November, Cream Hill had been in the clutch of winter.
There had been long nights when the cold stars flared and flamed in a
black-violet sky, and the snow showed cobalt-blue against the dark
tree-trunks. Then came the storm. For three days the north wind swept,
howling like a wolf, down from the far-away Catskills, whirling the
lashing, stinging snow into drifts ten feet deep. Safe and warm in
great white farmhouses, built to stand for centuries, human-folk
stayed stormbound. In the morning, again at noon, and once more in the
gray twilight, the men would plough their way through the drifts to
the barns, and feed and water the patient oxen, the horses stamping in
their stalls, the cows in stanchions, and the chickens, which stayed
on their roosts all through the darkened days. In field and forest the
Seven Sleepers slept safe and warm until spring, but the rest of the
wild folk were not at truce with winter but, hunger-driven, must play
at hide-and-seek with foe and food. Everywhere on the surface of the
snow the writings of their foot-prints appeared and reappeared, as
they were swept away by the wind or blotted out by the falling flakes.
Finally, the storm raged itself out, and by the afternoon of the third
day, the white unwritten page of the snow lay across hill and lake and
valley. The next morning it was scribbled and scrawled all over with
stories of the life which had pulsed and ebbed and passed among the
silent trees and across the snowbound meadows. Wherever the
weed-stalks had spread a banquet of seeds, there were delicate trails
and traceries. Some of them were made up of tiny, trident tracks where
the birds had fed--juncos with their white skirts and light beaks,
tree-sparrows with red topknots and narrow white wing-bars, and flocks
of redpolls down from the Arctic Circle, whose rosy breasts looked
like peach-blossoms scattered upon the white snow. Hundreds of larger
patterns showed where the mice-folk had feasted and frolicked all the
long night through. Down under the snow, their tunnels ran in mazes
and labyrinths, with openings at every weed-stalk up which they could
climb in hurrying groups into the outside world. Some of the trails
were lines of little paw-prints separated by a long groove in the
snow. These were the tracks of the deer-mice, whose backs are the
color of pine-needles, and who wear white silk waistcoats and silk
stockings and have pink paws and big flappy ears and lustrous black
eyes. The groove was the mark of their long slender tails. Near them
were lines of slightly larger paw-prints, with only occasional
tail-marks--the trail of the sturdy, short-tailed, round-headed
meadow-mouse.
Here and there were double rows of tiny exclamation points, separated
by a tail-mark. Wherever this track approached the mazes of the mice
paw-prints, the latter scattered out like the spokes of a wheel. This
strange track was that of the masked shrew, the smallest mammal in the
world, a tiny, blind death, whose doom it is to devour its own weight
in flesh and blood every twenty-four hours. Another track showed like
a tunnel, with its concave surface stamped with zigzag paw-marks. It
was the trail of the blarina shrew, which twisted here and there as if
a snake had writhed its way through the powdered snow. Again, all
other tracks radiated away from it; for the blarina is braver and
bigger and fiercer than its little blood-brother, the masked shrew.
Everywhere, across the fields and through the swamps and in and out of
the woods, was another track, made up of four holes in the snow, two
far-apart and two near-together. Overhead at night in the cold sky,
below those star-jewels, Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnita, which gleam in
the belt of Orion, the same track appears where four stars form the
constellation of Lepus the Hare. Down on Connecticut earth, however,
the mark was that of the cottontail rabbit.
Among the many snow-stories which showed that morning was one tragedy
written red. It began with the trail of one of the cottontails. At
first, the near-together holes were in front of the others. That
marked where Bunny had been hopping leisurely along, his short
close-set forepaws making the near-together holes and his long
far-apart hind paws the others. At times, where the trail led in the
lee of thick bushes, a fifth mark would appear. This was the print of
the powder-puff that the rabbit wears for a tail, and showed where he
had sat down to rest or meditate in the snow. Suddenly, the wide-apart
marks appeared far in front of the other two. For some reason the
rabbit had speeded up his pace, and with every spring his long hind
legs had thrust themselves beyond and outside of the short forepaws. A
little farther along, the tracks of the two forepaws showed close to
each other, in a vertical instead of a horizontal line. This meant to
him who could read the writing that the rabbit was running at a
desperate speed. At the end of every bound he had twisted each
forepaw inward, so as to thrust them out with the greatest possible
leverage.
The trail zigzagged here and there and doubled back upon itself and
crossed and turned and circled. The snow said that the rabbit had been
running for his life, and every twist and turn told of the desperation
and dumb despair of his flight. Yet nowhere was there the print of any
pursuer. At last, in a little opening among the bushes, the trail
ended in a circle of trampled, ridged, and reddened snow. At the very
edge of the blood-stains a great X was stamped deep. Farther on was
the end of that snow-story--the torn, half-eaten body of the rabbit,
which had run a losing race with death. Again, to him who could read
the writing on the snow the record was a plain one. The X is the sign
and seal of the owl-folk, just as a K is the mark of the hawk-people.
On silent, muffled wings, the great horned owl, fiercest of all the
sky-pirates, had hunted down poor Cottontail. All his speed, his
twistings and turnings and crafty doublings, availed him not against
the swift flight and cruel, curved talons of this winged death.
Around the trees were other series of tracks, which went in fours,
something like the rabbit-tracks in miniature, except that they showed
tiny claw-marks. These were where the gray squirrels had ventured out
to dig under the snow, to find nuts which they had buried in the fall,
or where their more thrifty cousins, the red squirrels, had sallied
forth to look up hidden hoards in the lee of rocks and in hollow
trees. Crossing and recrossing fields and forests in long straight
lines were the trails of hunting foxes. The neat, clearly stamped
prints, with never a mark of a dragging paw, and the fact that they
did not spraddle out from a straight line, distinguished them from
dog-tracks. Along the brooks were the four- and five-fingered prints
of the muskrat, showing on either side of a tail-mark; and
occasionally the double foot-prints of that killer, the weasel, and
the rarer trail of his cousin, the mink. Only the signatures of the
Seven Sleepers were absent from the smooth page. The bear and the bat,
the woodchuck and the chipmunk, the raccoon, the jumping-mouse, and
the skunk were all in bed.
As the sun rose higher and higher on the first day after the storm,
the sky showed as blue and soft as in June, and at sunset the whole
western heavens seemed to open in a blaze of fiery amber. There were
strips of sapphire-blue and pools of beryl-green, while above was a
spindrift of flame the color of the terrible crystal. That night the
mercury crept up higher and higher in the thermometer that hung
outside of Silas Dean's store at Cornwall Centre. A little screech-owl
thought that spring had come, and changed his wailing call to the
croon which belongs to the love-month of May, and the air was full of
the tinkle and drip and gurgle of the thaw.
The next morning, in the wet snow a new trail appeared--a long chain
of slender delicate close-set tracks, like a pattern of intricate
stitches. The last of the Sleepers was awake, for the close-set
paw-prints were none other than those of the unhasting skunk. "Don't
hurry, others will," is his motto. It was just at dawn of the second
day of the thaw that he appeared in the sunlight. All night long he
had wandered slowly and sedately in and out of a circle not over two
hundred yards in diameter. In spite, however, of his preoccupied
manner and unhurried ways, there was not much that was edible which he
had overlooked throughout his range; and now, at sunrise, which was
his bedtime, he was on his way home.
The rays of the rising sun blazoned to the world the details of his
impressive personality. His most noticeable and overshadowing feature
was his huge, resplendent tail. It waved like a black and white banner
over his broad back. Throughout its long dark hair, coarse as tow,
were set bunches of white hairs, some of them so long that, when they
floated out to their full extent, the width of that marvelous tail
exceeded its length. At the very tip was a white tuft which could be
erected. Wise wild folk, when they saw that tuft standing straight up,
removed themselves elsewhere with exceeding rapidity. As for the
unwise--they wished they had. Between the small eyes, which were set
nearer to the pointed nose than to the broad ears, was a fine white
stripe running back to a white ruff at the back of the neck. From this
a wide white stripe extended across the shoulders, and branched down
either flank.
As he ambled homewards in the sunlight, the skunk had such an air of
innocence and helplessness, that a young fox, coming down the
hillside after a night of unsuccessful hunting, decided that the
decorative stranger must be some unusual kind of rabbit, and dashed
forward to catch it with a quick sidelong snap of his narrow jaws.
Unfortunately for him, the skunk snapped first. His ancestors had
learned the secret of the gas-attack a million years before the Boche.
As the fox rushed upon him, the skunk twisted its tail to one side
bringing into action two glands near the base of its tail which
secrete a clear golden fluid filled with tiny floating bubbles of a
devastating gas, against which neither man nor beast can stand.
Moreover, the skunk's accurate breech-loading and repeating weapon has
one other improvement not as yet found in any human-made artillery.
Each gland, beside the hole for long-range purposes, is pierced with a
circle of smaller holes, through which the deadly gas can be sprayed
in a cloud for work at close quarters.
Just as the jaws of the fox were opened to seize him, the skunk
compressed the mat of powerful muscles that encircled the two conical
scent-glands. From the circle of tiny openings a cloud of choking,
blinding, corrosive gas poured full into the fox's astonished face. To
human nostrils the very odor of the gas is appalling. A mixture of
garlic, sewer-gas, sulphur-matches, musk, and a number of other
indescribable smells only faintly defines it. A fox, however, is by no
means squeamish about smells. Many odors which are revolting and
unbearable to human nostrils arouse only pleasurable sensations in a
fox. What sent him rolling backwards over and over, and stiffened and
contracted his throat-muscles in spasms, was the choking acrid gas
itself. It strangled him just as the fumes of chlorine or ammonia gas
will choke a man. Only one thought remained in that fox's mind. Air,
air, fresh untainted air, preferably miles away. He departed to find
it, at an initial velocity of something less than a mile a minute,
while his adversary lowered his plumed tail and regarded him
forgivingly. Then, with mincing, deliberate steps, the skunk started
leisurely back to his home on the hillside, which had once been the
property of a grizzled old woodchuck.
On a day, however, the woodchuck had come back to his burrow, only to
find that he had been dispossessed. The woodchuck is a surly and
dogged fighter, and always fully able and disposed to protect his
rights. Yet it took but a single sniff to make this one abandon his
lands, tenements, and hereditaments, with all easements of ingress,
egress, and regress. From thenceforth, to the skunk belonged the whole
complicated system of tunnels and galleries. To him belonged the two
public entrances and a third concealed from sight in a little thicket.
To him came the cozy nest, with its three exits in the centre of a
maze of passages, the storehouses, the sand-piles, and the sun-warmed
slope where the former owner had been accustomed to take his ease.
From that day forward he occupied them all in undisturbed possession.
After the rout of the fox, the skunk slept until late in the
afternoon, and an hour before sunset was out again. Here and there,
through the bushes and among the trees, he tacked and zigzagged in an
apparently absent-minded way. Yet nothing that he could eat escaped
those small deep-set eyes or that long pointed nose. Near the edge of
the woods he passed under a sugar-maple tree. On a lower limb sat
Chickaree, the irritable, explosive red squirrel, nibbling away at a
long cylindrical object which he held tightly clasped in his forepaws.
As the skunk passed underneath, the squirrel stopped to scold at him
on general principles, and became so emphatic in his remarks that he
lost his hold of what he had been eating, and it fell directly in
front of the plodding skunk. It was only an icicle, but after one
sniff the skunk proceeded to crunch it down eagerly while the red
squirrel raved overhead. The day before, the squirrel had nibbled a
hole in the bark of one of the maple limbs, to taste the sweet sap
which the thaw had started flowing; and during the night the running
sap had frozen into a long sweet icicle, the candy of the wild folk,
which heretofore only the squirrels had enjoyed.
The last bit of frozen sweetness swallowed, the skunk ambled up the
hillside. Suddenly he stopped, and sniffed at a little ridge in the
snow which hardly showed upon the surface. Hardly had he poked his
pointed nose into the hummock, before it burst like a bomb, and out
from the snow started a magnificent cock grouse. During the storm he
had plunged into the drift for shelter, and the warmth of his body
had melted a snug little room for him under the snow. There, safe and
warm, he had feasted on the store of rich, spicy seeds that he found
on the sweet fern under the snow, and for long days and nights had
been safe from cold and hunger. The thaw, however, had thinned his
coverlet so that the fine nose of the skunk had scented him through
the white crystals.
As the partridge broke from the snow, his magnificent, iridescent,
black-green ruff stood out a full three inches around his neck, and
his strong wings began the whirring flight of his kind. The skunk shed
his slowness like a mask and, with the lightning-like pounce of the
weasel family, caught the escaping bird just back of the ruff and
snapped his neck asunder. There was a tremendous fluttering and
beating of brown mottled feathers against the white snow, and a minute
later he was feeding full on the most delicious meat in the world.
Before he had finished, there came an interruption. Down from the top
of the hill trotted another skunk, an oldtimer whose range marched
next to that of the first. As the newcomer caught sight of the dead
partridge, he hurried down to join in the feast. The other skunk
stopped eating at the sight of this unbidden guest, and made a kind of
chirring, complaining noise, with an occasional low growl. According
to skunk-standards that was a tremendous exhibition of rage, but the
second skunk came on unmoved. Under the Skunk Geneva Convention, the
use of aerial bombs or any form of gas-attack against skunk-kind is
barred. In a battle between skunk and skunk the fighters must depend
upon tooth and claw. Accordingly, when the stranger sniffed
approvingly at the half-eaten bird, he was promptly nipped by the
owner of the same, just back of the forepaw. He, in turn, secured a
grip on the first skunk's neck, and in a moment the atmosphere was
full of flying snow and whirling fur. The teeth of each fighter were
so fine and their fur so thick, that neither one could do much damage
to the other; but they fought and rolled and chirred and growled,
until they looked like a great black-and-white pinwheel.
[Illustration: THE THIEF]
The contest caught the eyes of an old red fox, who was loping around a
ten-mile circle in search of any little unconsidered trifle that might
come his way. He was a seasoned old veteran and, unlike the novice of
the day before, was well acquainted with skunk-ways. Not for any prize
that the country round about held would he have attacked either one of
that battling pair. His was a purely sporting interest in the fight,
until he happened to catch a glimpse of the partridge half-covered by
the loose snow. On the instant, he nobly resolved to play the
peacemaker and remove the cause of all the trouble. Step by step, he
stole up closer to the fighters, all set to turn and run for his life
if either one of them saw him. At last he was poised and taut on his
tiptoes not six feet from the prize. As an extra whirl of the
contestants carried them to the farthest circumference of the circle
of which the partridge was the centre, the fox started like a
sprinter from his marks, and reached the grouse in one desperate
bound.
Just at that instant a disengaged eye of the first of the skunks came
to the surface, in time to see his grouse departing toward the
horizon, slung over the shoulder of the fox, nearly as fast as if it
had gone under its own wing-power. Instantly the skunk released his
hold. His opponent did the same, and the two scrambled to their feet
and for a long moment stood sombrely watching the vanishing partridge.
Then, without a sound, they turned their backs on each other and
trotted away in opposite directions.
A week later the thaw was over, and all that hill-country was once
more in the grip of winter. When the temperature went down toward the
zero-mark, the skunk went back to bed. Rolled up in a round ball of
fur, with his warm tail wrapped about him like a fleecy coverlet, he
slept out the cold in the midmost chamber of his den on a bed of soft,
dry grass. At the first sign of spring he was out again, the latest to
bed and the earliest to rise of all the Sleepers.