length had disappeared from sight when Chippy showed a flash of that
instantaneous, unreckoning courage which carries man or beast into the
front ranks of his kind. Perhaps what he did was to save himself from
future danger. Yet who can say that it was not a spark of the same
divine fire which glows in the heart of man that made him risk his
life for another? As he saw the fatal head disappear down the burrow,
with a lightning-like spring he leaped upon the disappearing body,
casting out his cherished nuts from his cheeks in mid-air. Opening his
wide-set jaws, he clamped them shut where the supple, flexible spine
of the snake ridged the smooth skin. The back of a blacksnake is a
mass of tough muscles, and its spine has the strength of a steel
spring. Yet the tremendous jaw-muscles of the chipmunk drove the
needle-pointed teeth deep into the twisted, over-lapping fibres.
The black column stiffened like an iron bar. Bracing his paws against
the sides of the hole, the chipmunk gnawed away desperately. Suddenly
the keen teeth grated, and then locked in the sinuous spine itself. As
they met, the great body surged forward and dragged the chipmunk into
the burrow. Once deep underground, there was danger that the snake
might find space to double back on its length and gain a fatal
head-hold with its sharp slanting teeth. Yet Chippy never loosed his
grip for an instant. Dragging back with all his strength, he forced
his clamped teeth deeper and deeper into the twisting spine. At last
through the cold, bubbling blood, he felt the fibres of the vertebrae
slowly give, until with a final rending tug he bit clear through the
spinal cord.
By this time he was well below ground, and only the snake's tail
thrashed and writhed ineffectually on the surface. Suddenly, as Chippy
still gnawed and tugged, the lashings of the tail lessened, and
through his clenched teeth he could feel something tugging and biting
at it. Little by little the struggles of the snake became fainter, and
Chippy no longer felt himself dragged forward. When at last they had
died down to convulsive twists and shudders, which would last for
hours, the battling chipmunk unlocked his jaws and backed out of the
burrow. Bloody, bruised and exhausted he found himself once more safe
in the sunlight.
Right in front of him was Nippy, worrying the wriggling tail with her
sharp teeth like a little terrier. Aroused far underground by the
sounds of the struggle she had rushed up toward the entrance. While
still a long distance from it, her quick little ears caught the fierce
hiss that the great snake gave at the first pang from the piercing
teeth; and though this was her first year alone in the world, she knew
that the sound meant death. Turning like a flash, she slipped into a
by-passage and escaped to the upper air by an emergency exit concealed
under a huckleberry bush. At her front door she found the tail of the
crippled snake thrashing back and forth, and pouncing upon it, she
helped her unseen ally by biting through the spine in two places at
its narrowest point. When Chippy appeared, she let go, and by degrees
the writhing body disappeared from the sight of the sun. Then, while
Chippy lay and panted, the little owner of the burrow began to seal up
the entrance of the haunted home in token that it was hers no longer.
The front door once shut and locked, she moved slowly toward the top
of the hill and--looked back.
Then was the time for Chippy to follow. Instead, he stiffly and
haltingly betook himself to his own burrow. When, two days later, he
came out, there was no trace of the fair and fleeting Nippy. For weeks
he sought her everywhere, in the woods and pastures, and even to the
shore of the little lake that cupped the farther side of the hill.
Then came a happening which drove all thoughts of anything but life
and death from the minds of all the dwellers on the hillside. The doom
which always hangs over the Little People fell upon them. In the gray
hour just before the dawn, one fatal day, what looked like a brown
squirrel, with a white throat and paws and a short tail, came to the
chipmunk colony. Yet no squirrel ever had such bloodred eyes, such a
serpent-like head, or a body so lithe and sinuous. The deadly visitor
was none other than the lesser, or short-tailed, weasel, far more
dangerous to the Little People than his larger kinsman, since he was
small enough to enter their burrows.
To-day he slipped like a shadow into the first burrow he found. It
happened to be the very one of which the stranger chipmunk had
dispossessed Chippy months before. This morning he had just waked up
in his round sleeping-room when he heard the patter of the weasel down
the long entrance tunnel. Out of one of his many exits the chipmunk
dashed, but as he came above ground, the weasel was hard on his heels,
and he turned to do battle for his life. As he was nearly as large as
the weasel, the fight did not seem an unequal one; yet the chipmunk
never had a chance. For a second the two faced each other, the
chipmunk crouched low, the weasel with its swaying head raised high.
Then the chipmunk lunged forward, desperately hoping to gain a grip
with its two keen gnawing teeth. With a curve of its supple body, the
weasel slipped the other's lead, and with almost the same motion gave
that fatal counter which no animal has yet learned to parry. With a
snap of the triangular muzzle, three of the long fighting teeth of the
killer pierced with diabolical accuracy the chipmunk's skull at the
exact point where it was thinnest, and crashed deep into its brain.
Stopping only to lap a little of the warm blood of its victim, the
weasel flashed into the next burrow, where a mother chipmunk slept
with her five babies, all rolled up in a round warm ball. To them all,
death came mercifully swift. Then into the next burrow and the next
this Death-in-the-dark hastened. None of the Little People he met
escaped. Some fought, others fled, but neither courage nor fleetness
availed. When, at last, the brown killer approached the burrow where
Chippy lived, it had left behind it a trail of nearly a score of dead
and dying victims, and yet was as tireless and terrible as ever. Each
time that it slaked its vampire-thirst with fresh blood, it seemed to
gain new strength and speed.
As the sun showed over Prindle Hill, Chippy started out of his front
door. Even as he thrust his head into the open, he caught the sound of
a faint squeal from a near-by burrow and saw the blood-stained muzzle
of the weasel show in the early sunlight. As he dived back, his
instantaneous brain seized upon the one way of escape remaining. The
weasel could outrun him, and with his unerring nose unravel any tangle
of tunnels. Yet the underground people have one last resource of their
own, which a million years of being hunted to the death have taught
them. To make use of this defense, however, the pursued must have a
substantial start over the hunter, and to-day Chippy had but a few
scant seconds, since the weasel had glimpsed the whisk of his tail as
he plunged headlong down his front entrance, and had instantly started
for his burrow.
With back humped high at every pattering plunge of its short legs, the
weasel looked like a great inch-worm measuring its way toward its
prey. Yet, clumsy as its gait appeared, it was scarcely an instant
before the bloody muzzle and red glaring eyes were thrust into the
hole down which the chipmunk had disappeared. Much can be done,
however, even in seconds, with a hair-trigger brain and nerves and
muscles tensed by the fear of death. Like a flash, Chippy traversed
the main passage of his burrow, dashed into a tunnel that forked off
to the right, and then dived into a smaller branch, which angled off
sharply from the larger tube. Then he suddenly doubled on his tracks,
and popped into another passage, which ran in a long slant up to
within a few inches of the surface of the hillside.
Once beyond the entrance to this last tunnel, the chipmunk dug for his
very life's sake. With flashing strokes of his forepaws, he dislodged
the soft earth at the sides of the passage, sweeping it back with his
hind feet; and, even as the weasel writhed his way along the main
passage, Chippy had sealed the doorway to the last tube which he had
entered, so carefully that the blocked entrance could not be told from
the rest of the surface of the passage-wall. Then he hurried swiftly
and silently toward the surface.
Even as he dug his way up through the tough grass-roots, his fierce
pursuer flashed into the tube from which the walled-up doorway led.
With nose close to the ground, the weasel had followed the chipmunk's
trail at full speed, nor had the branching and intersecting passages
slowed his speed even for a moment. Only when he came to the spot
where the chipmunk had doubled back to the sealed-up doorway, was he
checked. Even his keen nostrils could not follow the trail through
four inches of fresh earth.
As he came to a standstill, his microphonic ears caught the sound of
distant digging far above him. Instantly, without wasting any time in
hunting for the sealed tunnel, he turned and raced back to the
entrance-hole, with such speed that, just as the chipmunk pushed his
way to the surface well up the hillside, the weasel burst out of the
main entrance below and dashed after him.
If the weasel's speed had not been slowed by slaughter, the chase
would have been a short one. As it was, the chipmunk went over the
crest of the hill a few rods ahead; but the gap lessened as his
pursuer struck his gait and shot forward like an uncoiling spring.
This time it seemed as if the chipmunk's last chance for life were
gone. Above ground he was out-paced. To go underground again meant
certain death. A miracle had saved him before from the other
weasel--but nature seldom deals in miracles twice. Yet the little
animal never weakened. A rabbit so close to death would have quit and
cowered down, crying piteously until the weasel's teeth were in its
throat. A rat would have lost its head and, running itself to a
standstill, met its death frothing and squealing in mortal terror.
Chippy, however, concealed under his gentle, sprightly exterior a cool
little brain, nor did ever a braver heart beat than throbbed under his
white waistcoat. Although he seemed to be running at full speed, he
was really holding something in reserve and already his flash-like
mind had seized upon the one chance of life that was left. Earth and
air had betrayed him. Perhaps water would be kinder. Straight toward
the little lake he headed. Little by little the space between him and
the killer behind lessened. By the time he had reached the roots of a
black willow tree which stretched far out over the water, the
snake-head of the weasel was not six feet behind the fluffy tail which
Chippy still flaunted, the unlowered banner of his courage. Out upon
the tree trunk he rushed, until he reached the farthest fork. Then,
gathering himself together, he sprang from all four feet as if driven
by a released spring and struck far out in the still water.
The sound of his splash had hardly died away before his brown pursuer
launched himself into the air with a sort of double jump, starting
with a spring from his short forelegs and ending with a tremendous
drive from his squat hind legs. In spite of this clumsy take-off, the
fierce force that shows in everything a weasel does, drove him a foot
ahead of the chipmunk's mark. Followed a desperate race. Swimming high
with jerky, uneven, rapid strokes, the weasel rushed through the water
and foot by foot cut down the chipmunk's lead, until his teeth gnashed
a scant yard back of the other's shoulder. There however the weasel
hung. Swimming deeper, and with slower and more powerful strokes, the
chipmunk refused to break his stroke by looking back. Only when the
recurring ripples warned him that his pursuer was closing in on him
did he put more power into the deep, regular beat of his strong little
legs.
Slowly, very slowly, the better stroke began to tell. At first the
weasel only stopped gaining. Then, little by little, the gap between
the two widened. When it had stretched out to ten feet, the chipmunk
shot ahead as if the other were anchored. The weasel's strokes became
slower, and at last stopped. Flesh and blood, however fierce, has its
limitations. The weasel had risked everything on his first desperate
sprint. That failing, his reserves were gone, and he turned and slowly
and pantingly swam back to the shore and passed out of Chippy's life
forever.
Strongly and steadily the chipmunk swam on, until the farther shore, a
quarter of a mile away, was reached. Wearily Chippy dragged himself up
the beach to the dry hillside, staggering from exhaustion. There was
no stone wall near, nor had he the strength to dig even the beginning
of a burrow. Unprotected, in the open, he must take his chances until
his strength came back. Then it was that nature relented, and once
more another miracle was wrought for one of her loved Little People.
Out of a hole on the hillside half-hidden by the pink blossoms of a
steeple-bush, popped a small head, and for a golden moment Chippy
gazed long and long into the eyes of Nippy. Then she turned back into
her burrow, with a look that drew him totteringly after her. At the
flood-tide of their lives they had met to become the founders of
another colony, and to pass on undimmed the divine spark of courage
and endurance and love.
VI
THE PATH OF THE AIR
Deacon Jimmy Wadsworth was probably the most upright man in Cornwall.
It was he who drove five miles one bitter winter night and woke up
Silas Smith, who kept the store at Cornwall Bridge, to give him back
three cents over-change. Silas's language, as he went back to bed,
almost brought on a thaw.
The Deacon lived on the tiptop of the Cobble, one of the twenty-seven
named hills of Cornwall, with Aunt Maria his wife, Hen Root his hired
man, Nip Root his yellow dog and--the Ducks. The Deacon had rumpled
white hair and a serene clear-cut face, and even when working, always
wore a clean white shirt with a stiff bosom and no collar.
Aunt Maria was of the salt of the earth. She was spry and short, with
a little face all wrinkled with good-will and good works, and had
twinkling eyes of horizon-blue. If anyone was sick, or had unexpected
company, or a baby, or was getting married or buried, Aunt Maria was
always on hand, helping.
As for Hen, he cared more for his dog than he did for any human. When
a drive for the Liberty Loan was started in Cornwall, he bought a bond
for himself and one for Nip, and had the latter wear a Liberty Loan
button in his collar.
Of course, the farm was cluttered up with horses, cows, chickens, and
similar bric-a-brac, but the Ducks were part of the household. It came
about this way: Rashe Howe, who hunted everything except work, had
given the Deacon a tamed decoy duck, who seemed to have passed her
usefulness as a lure. It was evident, however, that she had been
trifling with Rashe, for before she had been on the farm a month,
somewhere in sky or stream she found a mate. Later, down by the
ice-pond, she stole a nest--a beautiful basin made of leaves and edged
with soft down from her black-and-buff breast. There she laid ten
blunt-ended, brown eggs, which she brooded until she was carried off
one night by a wandering fox. Her mate went back to the wilds, and
Aunt Maria put the eggs under a big clucking Brahma hen, who hatched
out six soft yellow ducklings.
They had no more than come out of the shell when, with faint little
quackings, they paddled out of the barnyard and started in single file
for the pond. Although just hatched, each little duck knew its place
in the line, and from that day on, the order never changed. The old
hen, clucking frantically, tried again and again to turn them back.
Each time they scattered and, waddling past her, fell into line once
more. When at last they reached the bank, their foster-mother scurried
back and forth squawking warnings at the top of her voice; but, one
after another, each disobedient duckling plunged in with a bob of its
turned-up tail, and the procession swam around and around the pond as
if it would never stop.
This was too much for the old hen. She stood for a long minute,
watching the ungrateful brood, and then turned away and evidently
disinherited them upon the spot. From that moment she gave up the
duties of motherhood, stopped setting and clucking, and never again
recognized her foster-children, as they found out to their sorrow
after their swim. All the rest of that day they plopped sadly after
her, only to be received with pecks whenever they came too near. She
would neither feed nor brood them, and when night came, they had to
huddle in their deserted coop in a soft little heap, shivering and
quacking beseechingly until daylight.
The next day Aunt Maria was moved by the sight of the six, weary but
still pursuing the indifferent hen, keeping up the while a chorus of
soft sorrowful little quackings, which ought to have touched her
heart--but didn't. By this time they were so weak that, if Aunt Maria
had not taken them into the kitchen and fed them and covered them up
in a basket of flannel, they would never have lived through the second
night.
Thereafter the old kitchen became a nursery. Six human babies could
hardly have called for more attention, or have made more trouble, or
have been better loved than those six fuzzy, soft, yellow ducklings.
In a few days, the whole home-life on top of the Cobble centred around
them. They needed so much nursing and petting and soothing, that it
almost seemed to Aunt Maria as if a half-century had rolled back, and
she was once more looking after babies long, long lost to her. Even
old Hen became attached to them enough to cuff Nip violently when that
pampered animal growled at the newcomers, and showed signs of
abolishing them. From that moment Nip joined the Brahma hen in
ignoring the ducklings completely. If any attention was shown them in
his presence, he would stalk away majestically, as if overcome with
astonishment that humans would spend their time over six yellow ducks
instead of one yellow dog.
During the ducks' first days in the kitchen, someone had to be with
them constantly. Otherwise all six of them would go "Yip, yip, yip,"
at the top of their voices. As soon as any one came to their cradle,
or even spoke to them, they would snuggle down contentedly under the
flannel, and sing like a lot of little tea-kettles, making the same
kind of a sleepy hum that a flock of wild mallards gives when they are
sleeping far out on the water. They liked the Deacon and Hen, but they
loved Aunt Maria. In a few days they followed her everywhere around
the house, and even out on the farm, paddling along just behind her,
in single file, and quacking vigorously if she walked too fast.
One day she tried to slip out and go down to the sewing-circle at Mrs.
Miner Rogers's at the foot of the hill; but they were on her trail
before she had taken ten steps. They followed her all the way down,
and stood with their beaks pressed against the bay-window, watching
her as she sat in Mrs. Rogers's parlor. When they made up their minds
that she had called long enough, they set up such a chorus of
quackings that Aunt Maria had to come.
"Those pesky ducks will quack their heads off if I don't leave," she
explained shamefacedly.
The road up-hill was a long, long trail for the ducklings. Every now
and then they would stop and cry with their pathetic little yipping
note, and lie down flat on their backs, and hold their soft little
paddles straight up in the air, to show how sore they were. The last
half of the journey they made in Aunt Maria's apron, singing away
contentedly as she plodded up the hill.
As they grew older, they took an interest in everyone who came; and if
they did not approve of the visitor, would quack deafeningly until he
went. Once Aunt Maria happened to step suddenly around the corner of
the house as a load of hay went past. Finding her gone, the ducks
started solemnly down the road, following the hay-wagon, evidently
convinced that she was hidden somewhere beneath the load. They were
almost out of sight when Aunt Maria called to them. At the first sound
of her voice, they turned and hurried back, flapping their wings and
paddling with all their might, quacking joyously as they came.
Aunt Maria and the flock had various little private games of their
own. Whenever she sat down, they would tug at the neatly tied bows of
her shoelaces, until they had loosened them; whereupon she would jump
up and rush at them, pretending great wrath; whereupon they would
scatter on all sides, quacking delightedly. When she turned back, they
would form a circle around her, snuggling their soft necks against her
gown until she scratched each uplifted head softly. If she wore
button-shoes they would pry away at the loose buttons and attempt to
swallow them. When she was working in her flower-garden, they would
bother her by swallowing some of the smallest bulbs, and snatching up
and running away with larger ones. At other times they would hide in
dark corners and rush out at her with loud and terrifying quacks, at
which Aunt Martha would pretend to be much frightened and scuttle
away, pursued by the six.
All three of the family were forever grumbling about the flock. To
hear them, one would suppose that their whole lives were embittered by
the trouble and expense of caring for a lot of useless, greedy ducks.
Yet when Hen suggested roast duck for Thanksgiving, Deacon Jimmy and
Aunt Maria lectured him so severely for his cruelty, that he was glad
to explain that he was only joking. Once, when the ducks were sick, he
dug angleworms for them all one winter afternoon, in the corner of the
pigpen where the ground still remained unfrozen; and Deacon Jimmy
nearly bankrupted himself buying pickled oysters, which he fed them as
a tonic.
It was not long before they outgrew their baby clothes, and wore the
mottled brown of the mallard duck, with a dark steel-blue bar edged
with white on either wing. The leader evidently had a strain of black
duck in her blood. She was larger, and lacked the trim bearing of the
aristocratic mallard. On the other hand, Blackie had all the wariness
and sagacity of the black duck, than whom there is no wiser bird. As
the winter came on, a coop was fixed up for them not far from the
kitchen, where they slept on warm straw in the coldest weather, with
their heads tucked under their soft, down-lined wings up to their
round, bright eyes. The first November snowstorm covered their coop
out of sight; but when Aunt Maria called, they quacked a cheery answer
back from under the drift.
Then came the drake, a gorgeous mallard with a head of emerald-green
and a snow-white collar, and with black, white, gray, and violet
wings, in all the pride and beauty of his prime. A few days and nights
before he had been a part of the North. Beyond the haunts of men,
beyond the farthest forests, where the sullen green of the pines
gleamed against a silver sky, a great waste-land stretched clear to
the tundras, beyond which is the ice of the Arctic. In this
wilderness, where long leagues of rushes hissed and whispered to the
wind, the drake had dwelt. Here and there were pools of green-gray
water, and beyond the rushes stretched the bleached brown reeds,
deepening in the distance to a dark tan. In the summer a heavy, sweet
scent had hung over the marshland, like the breath of a herd of
sleeping cattle. Here had lived uncounted multitudes of waterfowl.
As the summer passed, a bitter wind howled like a wolf from the North
with the hiss of snow in its wings. Sometimes by day, when little
flurries of snow whirled over the waving rushes; sometimes by night,
when a misty moon struggled through a gray wrack of cloud, long lines
and crowded masses of water-birds sprang into the air, and started on
the far journey southward. There were gaggles of wild geese flying in
long wedges, with the strongest and the wisest gander leading the
converging lines; wisps of snipe, and badlings of duck of many kinds.
The widgeons flew with whistling wings, in long black streamers. The
scaup came down the sky in dark masses, giving a rippling purr as they
flew. Here and there scattered couples of blue-winged teal shot past
groups of the slower ducks. Then down the sky, in a whizzing
parallelogram, came a band of canvasbacks, with long red heads and
necks and gray-white backs. Moving at the rate of a hundred and sixty
feet a second, they passed pintails, black duck, and mergansers as if
they had been anchored, grunting as they flew.