refused to leave the cold pools and the whispering rushes. Late that
season he had lost his mate, and, lonely without her and hoping still
for her return, he lingered among the last to leave. As the nights
went by, the marshes became more and more deserted. Then there dawned
a cold, turquoise day. The winding streams showed sheets of sapphire
and pools of molten silver. That afternoon the sun, a vast globe of
molten red, sank through an old-rose sky, which slowly changed to a
faint golden green. For a moment it hung on the knife-edge of the
world, and then dipped down and was gone.
Through the violet twilight five gleaming, misty-white birds of an
unearthly beauty, glorious trumpeter swans, flew across the western
sky in strong, swift, majestic flight. As the shadows darkened like
spilt ink, their clanging notes came down to the lonely drake. When
the swans start south, it is no time for lesser folk to linger. The
night was aflame with its million candles as he sprang into the air,
circled once and again, and followed southward the moon path which lay
like a long streamer of gold across the waste-lands. Night and day and
day and night and night and day again he flew, until, as he passed
over the northwestern corner of Connecticut, that strange food sense
which a migrating bird has, brought him down from the upper sky into
the one stretch of marshland that showed for miles around. It chanced
to be close to the base of the Cobble.
All night long he fed full among the pools. Just as the first faint
light showed in the eastern sky, he climbed upon the top of an old
muskrat house that showed above the reeds. At the first step, there
was a sharp click, the fierce grip of steel, and he was fast in one of
Hen's traps. There the old man found him at sunrise, and brought him
home wrapped up in his coat, quacking, flapping, and fighting every
foot of the way. An examination showed his leg to be unbroken, and Hen
held him while Aunt Maria with a pair of long shears clipped his
beautiful wings. Then, all gleaming green and violet, he was set down
among the six ducks, who had been watching him admiringly.
The second he was loosed, he gave his strong wings a flap that should
have lifted him high above the hateful earth, where tame folk set
traps for wild folk. Instead of swooping toward the clouds, the
clipped wings beat the air impotently, and did not even raise his
orange, webbed feet from the ground. Again and again the drake tried
to fly, only to realize at last that he was clipped and shamed and
earthbound. Then for the first time he seemed to notice the six who
stood by, watching him in silence. To them he quacked, and quacked,
and quacked fiercely, and Aunt Maria had an uneasy feeling that she
and her shears were the subject of his remarks. Suddenly he stopped,
and all seven started toward their winter quarters; and lo and behold!
at the head of the procession marched the gleaming drake, with the
deposed Blackie trailing meekly in second place.
From that day forth he was their leader; nor did he forget his wrongs.
The sight of Aunt Maria was always a signal for a burst of impassioned
quackings. Soon it became evident that the ducks were reluctantly
convinced that the gentle little woman had been guilty of a great
crime, and more and more they began to shun her. There were no more
games and walks and caressings. Instead the six followed the drake's
lead in avoiding as far as possible humans who trapped and clipped the
people of the air.
At first the Deacon put the whole flock in a great pen where the young
calves were kept in spring, fearing lest the drake might wander away.
This, of course, was no imprisonment to the ducks, who could fly over
the highest fence. The first morning, after they had been penned, the
ducks sprang over the fence and started for the pond, quacking to the
drake to follow. When he quacked back that he could not, the flock
returned and showed him again and again how easy it was to fly over
the fence. At last he evidently made them understand that for him
flying was impossible. Several times they started for the pond, but
each time at a quack from the drake they came back. It was Blackie who
finally solved the difficulty. Flying back over the fence, she found a
place where a box stood near one of the sides of the pen. Climbing up
on top of this, she fluttered to the top rail. The drake clambered up
on the box, and tried to follow. As he was scrambling up the fence,
with desperate flappings of his disabled wings, Blackie and the
others, who had joined her on the top rail, reached down and pulled
him upward with tremendous tugs from their flat bills, until he
finally scrambled to the top and was safely over. For several days
this went on, and the flock would help him out of and into the pen
every day, as they went to and from the pond. When at last Aunt Maria
saw this experiment in prison-breaking, she threw open the gate wide,
and thereafter the drake had the freedom of the farm with the others.
As the days went by, he seemed to become more reconciled to his fate
and at times would even take food from Aunt Maria's hand; yet certain
reserves and withdrawings on the part of the whole flock were always
apparent, to vex her.
At last and at last, just when it seemed as if winter would never go,
spring came. There were flocks of wild geese beating, beating, beating
up the sky, never soaring, never resting, thrusting their way north in
a great black-and-white wedge, outflying spring, and often finding
lakes and marshes still locked against them. Then came the strange,
wild call from the sky of the killdeer, who wears two black rings
around his white breast; and the air was full of robin notes and
bluebird calls and the shrill high notes of the hylas. On the sides of
the Cobble the bloodroot bloomed, with its snowy petals and heart of
gold and root dripping with burning, bitter blood--frail flowers which
the wind kisses and kills. Then the beech trees turned all
lavender-brown and silver, and the fields of April wheat made patches
of brilliant velvet green.
At last there came a day blurred with glory, when the grass was a
green blaze, and the woods dripped green, and the new leaves of the
apple trees were like tiny jets of green flame among the pink and
white blossoms. The sky was full of waterfowl going north. All that
day the drake had been uneasy. One by one he had moulted his clipped
wing-feathers, and the long curved quills which had been his glory had
come back again. Late in the afternoon, as he was leading his flock
toward the kitchen, a great hubbub of calls and cries floated down
from the afternoon sky. The whole upper air was black with ducks.
There were teal, wood-ducks, baldpates, black duck, pintails, little
bluebills, whistlers, and suddenly a great mass of mallards, the green
heads of the drakes gleaming against the sky. As they flew they
quacked down to the little earthbound group below.
Suddenly the great drake seemed to realize that his power was upon him
once more. With a great sweep of his lustrous wings, he launched
himself forth into the air in a long arrowy curve, and shot up through
the sky toward the disappearing company--and not alone. Even as he
left the ground, before Aunt Maria's astonished eyes, faithful,
clumsy, wary Blackie sprang into the air after him, and with the
strong awkward flight of the black duck, which ploughs its way through
the air by main strength, she overtook her leader, and the two were
lost in the distant sky.
Aunt Maria took what comfort she could out of the five who remained,
but only now that they had gone, did she realize how dear to her was
Greentop, the beautiful, wild, resentful drake, and Blackie, awkward,
wise, resourceful Blackie. The flock too was lost without them, and
took chances and overlooked dangers which they never would have been
allowed to do under the reign of their lost king and queen. At last
fate overtook them one dark night when they were sleeping out. That
vampire of the darkness, a wandering mink, came upon them. With their
passing went something of love and hope, which left the Cobble a very
lonely place for the three old people.
As the nights grew longer, Aunt Maria would often dream that she heard
the happy little flock singing like teakettles in their basket, or
that she heard them quack from their coop, and would call out to
comfort them. Yet always it was only a dream. Then the cold came, and
one night a great storm of snow and sleet broke over the Cobble, and
the wind howled as it did the night before the drake was found.
Suddenly Aunt Maria started out of her warm bed, and listened. When
she was sure she was not dreaming, she awakened the Deacon, and
through the darkness they hurried down to the door, from the other
side of which sounded tumultuous and familiar quackings.
With trembling hands she lighted the lamp, and as they threw open the
door, in marched a procession. It was headed by Greentop, resentful no
more, but quacking joyously at the sight of light and shelter. Back of
him Blackie's soft, dark head rubbed lovingly against Aunt Maria's
trembling knees, with the little caressing, crooning noise which
Blackie always made when she wanted to be petted. Back of her,
quacking embarrassedly, waddled four more ducks who showed their youth
by their size and the newness of their feathering. Greentop and
Blackie had come back, bringing their family with them.
The tumult and the shouting aroused old Hen, who hurried down in his
night clothes. These, by the way, were the same as his day clothes
except for the shoes; for, as Hen said, he could not be bothered with
dressing and undressing except during the bathing season, which was
long past.
"Durned if it ain't them pesky ducks again," he said, grinning
happily.
"That's what it be," responded Deacon Jimmy, "I don't suppose now
we'll have a moment's peace."
"Yes, it's them good-for-nothin'--" began Aunt Maria; but she gulped
and something warm and wet trickled down her wrinkled cheeks, as she
stopped and pulled two dear-loved heads, one green and the other
black, into her arms.
VII
BLACKCAT
Above the afterglow gleamed a patch of beryl-green. Etched against the
color was the faintest, finest, and newest of crescent moons. It
seemed almost as if a puff of wind would blow it, like a cobweb, out
of the sky. As the shifting tints deepened into the unvarying
peacock-blue of a Northern night, the evening star flared like a lamp
hung low in the west while the dark strode across the shadows of the
forest, cobalt-blue against the drifted snow. As the winter stars
flamed into the darkening sky, a tide of night-life flowed and
throbbed under the silent trees. One by one the wild folk came forth,
to live and love and die in this their day, even as we humans in ours.
Long after the twilight had dimmed into the jeweled darkness,
opalescent with the changing colors of the Northern Lights, from the
inner depths of the woods there came a threat to the life of nearly
everyone of the forest folk. Yet it seemed but the mournful wail of a
little child. Only to the moose, the blackbear and the wolverine was
it other than the very voice of Death.
Fifty feet above the ground, from a blasted and hollow white pine, the
plaintive sound again shuddered down the wind. From a hollow under an
overhanging bough, a brownish-black animal moved slowly down the tree
trunk, headfirst, which position marked him as a past-master among the
tree folk. Only those climbers who are absolutely at home aloft go
forward down a perpendicular tree trunk. As the beast came out of the
shadow it resembled nothing so much as a big black cat, with a bushy
tail and a round, grayish head. Because of this appearance the
trappers had named it the blackcat. Others call it the fisher,
although it never fishes, while to the Indians it is the _pekan_--the
killer-in-the-dark. In spite of its rounded head and mild doggy face,
the fisher belongs to those killers, the weasels. Next to the
wolverine, he is the most powerful of his family, and he is far and
away the most versatile.
To-night, on reaching the ground, the pekan followed one of the many
runways he had discovered in the ten-mile beat that formed his
hunting-ground. Like most of the weasels, he lived alone. His brief
and dangerous family life lasted but a few days in the fall of every
year. When his mate tried to kill him unawares, the blackcat knew that
his honeymoon was over, and departed again to his hollow tree, many
miles from Mrs. Blackcat. To-night, as he moved at a leisurely pace
across the snow, in a series of easy bounds, his lithe black body
looped itself along like a hunting snake, while his broad forehead
gave him an innocent, open look. If in the tree he had resembled a
cat, on the ground he looked more like a dog.
There was one animal who was not misled by the frank openness of the
fisher's face. That one was a hunting pine marten, who had just come
across a red squirrel's nest made of woven sticks thatched with
leaves, and set in the fork of a moose-wood sapling some thirty feet
from the ground. Cocking his head on one side, the marten regarded the
swaying nest critically out of his bright black eyes. Convinced that
it was occupied, with a dart he dashed up the slender trunk, which
bent and shook under his rush.
But Chickaree had craftily chosen a tree that would bend under the
lightest weight, and signal the approach of any unwelcome visitor.
Before the marten had covered half the distance, four squirrels boiled
out of the nest and, darting to the end of the farthest twigs, leaped
to the nearest trees and scurried off into the darkness. The marten
had poised himself for a spring when he saw the fisher gazing up at
him. Straightway he forgot that there were squirrels in the world.
With a tremendous spring, he landed on the trunk of a near-by hemlock
and slipped around it like a shadow.
It was too late. With a couple of effortless bounds, the blackcat
reached the trunk and slipped up it with the ease and speed of a
blacksnake. The marten doubled and twisted and turned on his trail,
and launched himself surely and swiftly from dizzy heights at arrowy
speed. Yet, spring and dash as he would, there was always a pattering
rush just behind him. Before the branches, which crackled and bent
under the lithe golden-brown body, had stopped waving, they would
crash and sag under the black weight of the fisher. With every easy
bound the black came nearer to the gold. The pine marten is the
swiftest tree-climber in the world, bar one. The blackcat is that one.
As the two great weasels flashed through the trees, they seemed to be
running tandem. Every twist and turn of the golden leader was followed
automatically by the black wheeler, as if the two were connected by an
invisible, but unbreakable bond.
Under the strain it was the nerves of the marten which gave way first.
Not that he stopped, and cowered, helpless and shaking, like the
rabbit-folk, nor ran frothing and amuck as do rat-kind when too hardly
pressed. No weasel, while he lives, ever loses his head completely.
Only now the marten ran more and more wildly, relying on straight
speed and overlooking many a chance for a puzzling double, which would
have given him a breathing-space. The imperturbable blackcat noted
this, and began to take short cuts, which might have lost him his prey
at the beginning of the hunt.
At last, the long and circling chase brought them both near an
enormous white pine, which towered some forty feet away from the
nearest tree. A bent spruce leaned out toward the lone pine. With a
flying leap, the marten reached the spruce and flashed up the trunk,
with never a look behind. His crafty pursuer saw his chance. Landing
in a lower crotch of the spruce, with a flying take-off he launched
himself outward and downward into mid-air, with every ounce and atom
of spring that his steel-wire muscles held. It seemed impossible that
anything without wings could cover the great gap between the two
trees; but the blackcat knew to an inch what he could do, and almost
to an inch did the distance tax his powers. In a wide parabola his
black body whizzed through the air half a hundred feet above the
ground, beginning as a round ball of fur, which stretched out until
the fisher hung full length at the crest of his spring. If the tree
had been a scant six inches farther away, the blackcat would never
have made it. As it was, the huge clutching, horn-colored claws of his
forepaws just caught, and held long enough to allow him to clamp down
his hold with his hind paws.
The marten, who had started fifty feet ahead of the blackcat and had
lost his distance by having to climb up, jump, and then climb down,
passed along the trunk of the pine on his way to the ground just as
the blackcat landed, his lead cut down to a scant ten feet. Without a
pause, the pekan deliberately sprang out into the air and disappeared
in a snow bank full forty feet below. Not many animals, even with a
snow buffer, could stand a drop of that distance, but the great black
weasel burst out of the snow, his steel-bound frame apparently
unjarred, and stood at the foot of the tree.
As the marten reached the ground and saw what was awaiting him, his
playful face seemed to turn into a mask of rage and despair. The round
black eyes flamed red, the lips curved back from the sharp teeth in a
horrible grin, and with a shrieking snarl and a lightning-like snap
he tried for the favorite throat-hold of the weasel-folk. He was
battling, however, with one quite as quick and immeasurably more
powerful. With a little bob the blackcat slipped the lead of his
adversary, and the flashing teeth of the marten closed only on the
loose tough skin of the fisher's shoulder. Before he could strike
again the blackcat had the smaller animal clutched in its fierce
claws, with no play to parry the counter-thrust of the black muzzle.
In another second, the golden throat was dabbled with blood, which the
fisher drank in great gulps like the weasel that he was. According to
human notions, the dreadful and uncanny part of the contest was that,
throughout the whole fight and the blood-stained finish, the
blackcat's face was the mild, reflective, round face of a gentle dog.
His first blood-thirst slaked, the fisher slung the limp body of the
marten over his shoulder with a single flirt of his black head, and
winding his way up the tree trunk, cached it for a time in a
convenient crotch, feeling sure that no prowler would meddle with a
prey which bore upon its pelt the scent and seal of the blackcat.
All through a two-day snowstorm, the fisher had kept to his tree, and
his first kill that night only sharpened the blood-lust which swept
raging through his tense body. Following the nearest runway, he came
to the shore of a wide, rapid, little forest river, which at this
point had a fall which insured current enough to keep it from
freezing. Near its bank, the ranging blackcat came upon a fresh track
in the soft snow. First there were five marks--one small, two large,
and two small. The next track showed only four marks with the order
reversed, the larger marks being in front, instead of behind the
smaller. A little way farther on, and the smaller marks, instead of
being side by side, showed one behind the other.
The blackcat read this snow-riddle at a glance. The five marks showed
where a northern hare, or snowshoe rabbit, had been sitting; the fifth
mark being where its bobbed tail had touched the snow. The larger
marks had been the marks of the fur snowshoes, which it wears in
winter on its big hopping hind-legs, and the smaller the mark of the
little forepaws which, when he was sitting, naturally touched the
ground in front of the hind paws. When the hare hopped the position
was reversed, as the big hind paws, with every hop, struck the ground
in front of the others, the hare traveling in the direction of the
larger marks. The last tracks showed that the hare had either scented
or seen its pursuer; for a hare's eyes are so placed that it can see
either forward or backward as it hops. As the little forelegs touched
the ground, they were twisted one behind the other so as to secure the
greatest leverage possible.
The blackcat settled doggedly down to the chase. Although far slower
in a straightaway run than either the hare or the fox, it can and will
run down either in a long chase, although it may take a day to do it.
To-night the chase came to a sudden and unexpected end. The hare
described a great circle nearly half a mile in diameter, at full
speed, and then, whiter than the snow itself, squatted down to watch
his back trail and determine whether his pursuer was really intending
to follow him to a finish. Before long, the squatting hare saw a black
form on the other side of the circle, with humped back looping its way
along. At such a sight the smaller cottontail rabbit would have run a
short distance, and would then have crouched in the snow, squealing in
fear of its approaching death. The hare is made of sterner stuff.
Moreover, this one was a patriarch fully seven years old--a great age
for any hare to have accomplished in a world full of foes.
Wabasso, as Hiawatha named him, had not attained to this length of
years without encountering blackcats. In some unknown way, probably by
a happy accident, he had learned the one defense which a hare may
interpose to the attack of a fisher, and live. Reaching full speed
almost immediately, he cleared the snow in ten-foot bounds, four to
the second, while the wide, hairy snowshoes, which nature fits to his
white feet every winter, kept him from sinking much below the surface.
The keen eyes of the blackcat caught sight of the hare's first bound
in spite of his protective coloration, and he at once cut across the
diameter of the circle. In spite of this short cut, the hare reached
the bank of the open river many yards ahead. Well out in the midst of
the rushing icy water lay a sand bar, now covered with snow. To the
blackcat's amazement and disgust, and contrary to every tradition of
the chase, this unconventional hare plunged with a desperate bound
fully ten feet out into the icy water. Wabasso was no swimmer, and had
evidently elected to travel by water in the same way which he had
found successful by land. Kicking mightily with his hind legs he
hopped his way through the water, raising himself bodily at every
kick, only to sink back until but the top of his white nose showed.
Nevertheless, in a wonderfully short time he had won his way through
the wan water, and lay panting and safe on the sand bank. If pursued,
he could take to the water again and hop his way to either shore,
along which he could run and take to the water whenever it was
necessary.
To-night no such tactics were needed. The fisher, in spite of his
name, hates water. He can swim, albeit slowly and clumsily, in the
summer time. As for leaping into a raging torrent of ice-cold
water--it was not to be considered. The blackcat raced up and down the
bank furiously, and not until convinced that the rabbit was on that
snow bank for the night, did he give up the hunt and go bounding along
the bank of the river after other and easier prey. For the first time
that night the mildness of his face was marred by a snarling curl of
the lips, showing the full set of cruel fighting teeth with which
every weasel, large or small, is equipped.
As the blackcat followed the line of the river, his sharp ear caught a
steady and monotonous sound, like someone using a peculiarly dull saw.
Around a bend the still water was frozen. Against the side of the bank
an empty pork-keg had drifted down from some lumberman's camp, and
frozen into the ice. In front of the shattered keg crouched a
large, blackish, hairy animal, gnawing as if paid by the hour. It was
none other than the Canada porcupine--"Old Man Quillpig," as he is
called by the lumberjacks, who hate him because he gnaws to sawdust
every scrap of wood that has ever touched salt. The porcupine saw the
blackcat, but never ceased gnawing. Many and many an animal has
thought that he could kill sluggish, stupid Quillpig. The wolf, the
lynx, the panther, and the wildcat all have tried--and died. So
to-night the porcupine kept on with his gnawing, under the star-shine,
convinced that no animal that lived could solve his defense.
[Illustration: THE SAFE RABBIT]