quillpig. Blackbear is the other. With its swift, sinuous gait, the
pekan came closer, whereupon Quillpig unwillingly stopped his sawing
and thrust his head under the broken, frozen staves of the barrel. His
belly hugged the ground, and in an instant he seemed to swell to
double his normal size as he erected his quills and lashed this way
and that with his spiked tail. Pure white, with dark tips, the quills
were thickly barbed down to the extreme point, which is smooth and
keen. The barbs are envenomed, and wherever they touch living flesh
cause it to rankle, swell, and fester for all save the pekan, whose
flesh is immune to the virus.
To-night the blackcat wasted no time. Disregarding the bristling
quills and the lashing tail, the crafty weasel suddenly inserted a
quick paw beneath the gnawer, and with a tremendous jerk tipped him
over on his bristling back. Before the quillpig could right himself,
the fisher had torn open his unguarded belly, and proceeded to eat the
quivering, flabby meat as if from the shell of an oyster, or to be
more accurate, a sea urchin. Throughout these proceedings he
disregarded the quills entirely. Many of them pierced his skin. Others
were swallowed along with the mouthfuls of warm flesh, which he tore
out and greedily devoured. By reason of some unknown charm, the barbed
quills work out of a blackcat without harm, and pass through his
intestines in clusters, like packages of needles, without any
inconvenience, although in any other animal save the bear they would
inevitably cause death.
As the pekan ate and ate, the stars began to dim in the blue-black
sky, and a faint flush in the east announced the end of his hunting
day. With a farewell mouthful, he started back through the snow for
his hollow tree, making a long detour, to bring in the cached marten.
As he approached the tree from whose crotch the slim golden body
dangled, his leisurely lope changed into a series of swift bounds. For
the first time, a snarl came from behind the pekan's mask. The dead
marten was gone from the tree. In an open space which the wind had
swept nearly clear of snow, it lay under the huge paws of a shadowy
gray animal, with luminous pale yellow eyes, a curious bob of a tail,
and black tufted ears. For all the world, it looked like a gray cat,
but such a cat as never lived in a house. Three feet long, and forty
pounds in weight, the Canada lynx is surpassed in size only among its
North American relatives by that huger yellow cat, the puma or
panther.
At the snarl of the fisher, the cat looked up, and at the sight of the
gliding black figure gave a low spitting growl and contemptuously
dropped his great head to the marten's bloody throat. For a moment the
big black weasel and the big gray cat faced each other. At first
sight, it did not seem possible that the smaller animal would attack
the larger, or that, if he did, he would last long. The fisher was
less than half the size and weight of the lynx, who also outwardly
seemed to have more of a fighting disposition. The tufted ears alert,
the eyes gleaming like green fire, and the bristling hair and arched
back, contrasted formidably with the broad forehead and round, honest
face of the fisher.
So, at least, it seemed to young Jim Linklater, who, with his uncle
Dave, the trapper, lay crouched close in a hemlock copse. Long before
daylight, the two had traveled on silent snowshoes up the river bank,
laying a trap-line, carrying nothing but a back-load of steel traps.
At the rasping growl of the lynx, they peered out of their covert only
to find themselves not thirty feet away from the little arena.
"That old lucifee'll rip that poor, little, black innocent to pieces
in jig-time," whispered young Jim.
Old Dave shook his grizzled head. He pulled his nephew's ample ear
firmly and painfully close to his mouth.
"Son," he hissed, "you and that lucifee are both goin' to have the
surprise of your lives."
Unwitting of his audience, the weasel approached the cat swiftly.
Suddenly with a hoarse screech, the lynx sprang, hoping to land with
all his weight on the humped-up black back, and then bring into play
his ripping curved claws, while he sank his teeth deep into his
opponent's spine.
It was at once evident that lynx tactics have not yet been adapted to
blackcat service. Without a sound, the pekan swerved like a shadow to
one side, and almost before the lynx had touched the ground, the
fisher's fierce cutting teeth had severed the tendon of a hind leg,
while its curved claws slashed deep into the soft inner flank.
The great cat screeched with rage and pain and sheer astonishment. As
he landed, the crippled leg bent under him. Even yet he had one
advantage which no amount of courage or speed on the part of the pekan
could have overcome. If only the lynx had gripped the dead marten, and
sprung out into the deep snow, the fisher would have had to fight a
losing fight. Like the hare, the lynx is shod with snowshoes in the
winter, on which he can pad along on snow in which a fisher would sink
deep at every step. In spite of his formidable appearance, however,
the lynx has a plentiful lack of brains. As his leg doubled under his
weight, this one in a panic threw himself on his back, the traditional
cat attitude of defense, ready to bring into action all four of his
sets of ripping claws, with his teeth in reserve.
Against another of the cat tribe such a defense would have been good.
Against the pekan it was fatal. No battler in the world is a better
in-fighter than the blackcat, and any antagonist near his size, who
invites a clinch, rarely comes out of it alive. The pekan first
circled the spinning, yowling, slashing lynx more and more rapidly,
until there came a time when the side of the gray throat lay before
him for a second unguarded. It was enough. With a pounce like the
stroke of a coiled rattler, the pekan sprang, and a double set of the
most effective fighting teeth known among mammals met deep in the
lynx's throat. With all of his sharp eviscerating claws, the great cat
raked his opponent. But the blackcat, protected by his thick pelt and
tough muscles, was content to exchange any number of surface slashes
for the throat-hold. Deeper and deeper the crooked teeth dug; and then
with a burst of bright blood, they pierced the jugular vein itself.
The struggles of the lynx became weaker and weaker, until, with a last
convulsive shudder, the gray body stretched out stark in the snow. The
weasel lay panting and lapping at the hot, welling blood, while his
own ran down his black fur in unconsidered streams.
It was young Jim who first broke the silence.
"Those pelt'll bring all of twenty-five dollars," he remarked,
stepping forward.
"Help yourself," suggested old Dave, not stirring, however, from where
he stood.
At the voices the black weasel sprang up like a flash. With one paw on
the dead lynx and another on the marten, he faced the two men in
absolute silence. The eyes under the mild forehead flamed red and
horrible and the dripping body quivered for another throat-hold.
"Seems like Mr. Blackcat wants 'em both," murmured the old man,
discreetly withdrawing from the farther side of the copse. Jim gazed
into the flaming eyes a moment longer and then followed his uncle.
"He don't look so blame innocent after all," he observed.
VIII
LITTLE DEATH
For three long months the blue-white snow had lain over the gold-white
sand among the dark-green pitch pines standing like trees from a
Noah's Ark. To-day the woods were a vast sea of green, lapping at the
white sand-land that had been thrust up, a wedge from the South, into
the very heart of the North. A crooked stream had cut its course deep
through the forest. On its high bank the ghost-like glory of a
mountain laurel overhung the dark water. Close to the water's edge
were clumps of the hollow, crimson-streaked leaves of the pitcher
plant, lined with thousands of tiny teeth all pointing downward, traps
for unwary insects. All the winter these pitchers had been filled with
clear cone-shaped lumps of ice; but to-day, above the fatal leaves, on
long stems, swung great blossoms, wine-red, crimson, aquamarine,
pearl-white, and pale gold.
From overhead came the trilling song of the pine warbler, like a
chipping sparrow lost in the woods; and here and there could be caught
glimpses of his pale yellow breast and white wing-bars. Below, among
the tangled scrub oaks, flitted the brilliant yellow-and-black prairie
warbler, while everywhere the chewinks called "Drink your tea," and
the Maryland yellow-throat sang "Witchery, witchery, witchery," while
jays squalled in the distance, and crimson-crested cardinals whistled
from the thickets. In the sky, like grim black aeroplanes, wheeled the
turkey buzzards, sailing in circles without ever a wing stroke. Gray
pine-swifts, with brilliant blue patches on their sides, scurried up
and down tree trunks and along fallen logs, and brown cottontail
rabbits hopped across the paths, showing their white powder puffs at
each jump. A huge, umber-brown-and-white pine snake, with a strange
pointed head, crawled slowly through the brush while rows of painted
turtles dotted the snags which thrust out here and there above the
stream.
Earth, air, and water, all swarmed with life at this dawn of the year.
The underground folk were awake, too. Down below the surface, the
industrious mole, with his plush fur and spade-like hands, dug
incessantly his hunting-tunnels for earthworms. Above him, in wet
places, his cousin, the star-nosed mole, whose nose has twenty-two
little fingers, drove passages through the lowest part of the moss
beds and the soft upper mould.
Still nearer the surface, just under the leaf-carpet, sometimes
digging his own way, sometimes using the tunnels of the meadow-mice
and deer-mice, and occasionally flashing out into the open air, lived
the smallest mammal. Of all the tribes of earth, of all the bat-folk
who fly the air, or the water-people who swim the seas and rivers and
lakes, no mammal is so little. From the tip of his wee pointed muzzle
to the base of his tiny tail, he was just about the length of a man's
little finger, or about two and a half inches. Nature had handicapped
her smallest child heavily. Blind, earless, and tiny, yet every
twenty-four hours he must kill and eat his own weight in flesh and
blood; for so fiercely swift are the functions of his strange, wee
body, that, lacking food for even six hours, the blind killer starves
and dies.
To-day, near the edge of the stream, in the soft, white sand, his
trail showed. It looked like a string of tiny exclamation points.
Suddenly, from a patch of dry leaves there sounded a long rustling,
like the crawling of a snake. Nothing could be seen, yet the leaves
heaved and moved here and there, as something pushed its way under the
surface of the leaf-carpet. Then, the masked shrew--for so we humans
have named this escape from Lilliput--flashed out into the open. His
glossy, silky fur was brown above and whitish-gray underneath; and
between the hidden, unseeing eyes and the holes which took the place
of ears was a dark smoky-gray mark, like a mask. His head angled into
a long whiskered snout, so pointed that from above the shrew looked
like a big pen. This flexible muzzle he twisted here and there,
sniffing uncertainly, for the shrew has but little sense of smell. In
fact, he seems to have traded the greater part of his other senses for
a double portion of two--touch and hearing. Not even the long-eared
rabbit can detect the faintest shade of a sound quicker than the
shrew, and only the bat equals his sense of touch. Like that flyer,
the shrew can detect an obstacle in time to avoid it, even when
running at full speed, by becoming conscious of some subtle change in
the air-pressure.
Among the great throng of little wild folk playing at hide-and-seek
with death among the fallen logs, and in the labyrinth of passageways
in the beds of sand and moss and fern, no one was swifter than this
one, the smallest of them all. A flash here, a glimpse farther on, and
he was gone, too fast to be followed by human eyes. In one of his rare
pauses he might have been mistaken for a tiny mouse by reason of his
general coloration; yet the shrew is as different from the mouse as a
lynx from a wolf. No mouse has long, crooked, crocodile jaws, filled
with perhaps the fiercest fighting teeth of any mammal; nor does any
mouse have the tremendous jaw muscles which stood out under the soft
fur of this beastling.
To-day, as the shrew sniffed here and there, trying to locate trails
which a weasel or a dog could have followed instantly, his quick ear
caught some tiny sound from the near-by burrow of a meadow-mouse. With
a curious pattering, burrowing run, unlike the leaps and bounds of the
mice-people, he started unerringly toward a narrow opening almost
hidden under an overhanging patch of yellow-green sphagnum moss.
Disappearing down the tunnel, he dashed along furiously, while his
long widespread whiskers gave him instant notice of the turns and
twists of the tunnel, which he threaded at full speed.
[Illustration: THE KILLERS]
Ahead of him fled a young meadow-mouse, on his way to join other
members of the family who were having a light lunch on what was left
in the storehouse of their winter's supplies. Hearing the rapid
pattering and sniffing behind him, the mouse made the fatal mistake of
keeping on to the storeroom--a large chamber underground, where three
grown mice were feasting. Confident in the fighting ability of his
family, he had yet to learn that odds are nothing to a shrew. In spite
of his speed, the mouse dashed into the round room only a little ahead
of his pursuer. The storehouse was large enough to make a good
battleground, but, unfortunately for the mice, contained only one
entrance.
Then followed a battle great and grim. The mice were on their own
ground, four against one and that one only a tiny blind beastling less
than half the size and weight of any one of them. It did not seem as
if the shrew had a chance against the burly, round-headed
meadow-voles, who are the best fighters of all the mice-folk. Yet the
issue was never in doubt. The shrew attacked with incredible
swiftness. No one of his four foes could make a motion that his quick
ear and uncanny sense of touch did not at once detect. Moreover,
throughout the whole fight, he never for an instant left the
exit-tunnel unguarded. Time and again, from out of the whirling mass
of entangled bodies, a meadow-mouse would spring to the door to
escape. Always it ran against the fell jaws of the little blind death,
and bounded back from the latter's rigid steel-like body. Again and
again the mice leaped high, and like little boxers thrust the shrew
away from them by quick motions of their forepaws. At times they would
jump clear over him, slashing and snapping as they went, with their
two pairs of long curved sharp teeth. The shrew's snout, however, was
of tough leathery cartilage. Its tiny hidden and unseeing eyes needed
no protection, while its thick fur and tough skin could be pierced
only by a long grip, which he prevented by his tactics. Never using
his forefeet like the mice, he stood with feet outspread and firmly
braced, head and snout pointing up, and constantly darted his jaws
forward and downward with fierce tearing bites. With each one he
brought no less than six pointed fighting teeth into play. These,
driven by the great muscles of the shrew's neck and jaws, made ghastly
ripping cuts through the thin skins of the mice. The latter kept up a
continual squeaking as they moved, but the little killer fought in
absolute silence. His wee body seemed to have an inexhaustible store
of fierce strength and endurance, and throughout the battle it was
always the shrew who attacked and the mice who retreated. Like the
raccoon, the shrew is perfectly balanced on all four feet, and can
move forward, backward, or sidewise with equal readiness. With swift
little springs this one constantly tried for a throat-hold; yet amid
the tangle and confusion of the struggle, never once did he fail to
guard the one way out.
Round and round the storehouse the battle surged for a long half hour,
with the shrew always between the doorway and his struggling, leaping
opponents. The grain-fed mice lacked the blood-bought endurance of
their opponent. The young mouse who had led the shrew to the
storehouse was the first to go. In the very middle of a leap, he
staggered and fell at the feet of his enemy. Instantly the long curved
jaws closed on his head, and the fierce teeth of the shrew crunched
into his brain.
It was the beginning of the end. One by one the others fell before the
automatic rushes and slashes of the little fighting-machine, until
only one was left, a scarred, skilled veteran, who had held his own in
many a fight. As he felt his strength ebbing, with a last desperate
effort the mouse dodged one of the shrew's rushes, and managed to sink
his two pairs of curved teeth into the tough muscles of the other's
neck. Then a horrifying thing happened. Without even trying to break
the mouse's grip, the shrew bent nearly double, and buried his pointed
muzzle deep into the soft flesh below the other's foreleg. Driven by
the cruel hunger which ruled his life, he ate like fire through skin
and flesh and bone. The mouse fought, the shrew ate, and the outcome
was certain, as it must be when a fighter who depends on four teeth
dares the clinch with one who uses twelve. Even as the mouse unlocked
his jaws for a better hold he tottered and fell dead under the feet of
the other.
For long days and nights the shrew stayed in the storeroom, until all
that remained of the meadow-mice were four pelts neatly folded and
four skeletons picked bare of even a shred of flesh. Moreover, the
store of seeds left by the mice was gone, too.
Finally, one morning, as the sun came up over the pines, the little
masked death flashed out of the burrow with the same pattering rush
with which he had entered, and hurried toward a near-by brook, to
quench an overpowering thirst. As he approached the bank, he passed
one of his larger brethren, the blarina, or mole shrew, whose track in
the sand was like an uncovered tunnel filled with zigzag paw-prints.
Although both were blind, each felt the other's presence, and it was
fortunate for the smaller of the two that the blarina had also just
fed, since shrews allow no ties of blood to interfere with their
eminently practical appetites.
Just before the little blind runner reached the bank, he encountered
another wanderer, whom few of the smaller animals meet and live. It
was that demon of the woods, the short-tailed weasel, going to and fro
in the earth, seeking whom he might devour. Behind him, as always, was
a trail of dead and dying animals. Into every hole large enough to
admit his slim body, he wormed his way like a hunting snake, and
passed, swift and silent as death itself, through brush-piles, hollow
logs, and up and down trees, to peer into the round window of a
woodpecker's home or a squirrel's nest. Meadow-mice, deer-mice,
chipmunks, rats, rabbits, and even squirrels in their trees the slayer
ran down to their death; for, unlike the shrews, a weasel kills from
blood-lust and not from hunger.
Like some great inch-worm, the weasel looped its way along, until its
path crossed that of the shrew pattering toward the brook. Even in the
face of this incarnate terror of the wild folk the little shrew
showed all the stubborn courage of his race and, refusing to turn
aside, passed within an inch of the deadly jaws of the red killer.
Nothing in nature, save the stab of one of the coiled pit-vipers, is
swifter than the pounce of the weasel. In his grip the shrew, despite
all of his fierce courage, would have had no more chance than a man
ground by the frightful teeth of a killer whale. Against the larger
mammals, however, this fierce fragment of flesh and blood has one last
defense, which saved him that day.
As the weasel caught a whiff of the pungent, evil odor of the shrew's
fur, he drew aside, his lips curled back over his sharp teeth in a
grimace of disgust, and the masked beastling passed unscathed. At a
little cove by the edge of a stump, the shrew drank deep. The pointed
snout had just come to the surface, when his quick hearing caught from
overhead a tiny flutter of sound. Long ages of sudden death from the
air for the shrew-folk made the next movement of this one automatic.
As if this sound-wave from overhead had touched some reflex, he dived
into the water at the first vibration, like a frog, and swam deep down
under the overhanging bank. A fraction of a second later a pair of
sharp, cramped talons sank deep into the bank where he had stood,
printing in the sand the "K" signature of the hawk-folk, and a
buff-waistcoated sparrow hawk swooped into the air again, with a
shrill disappointed, "killi, killi, killi!"
As the little fugitive swam along the bank something long and sinuous
passed him like a flash in the golden water. For a land animal a shrew
is no mean swimmer; but the banded watersnake outswims the fish on
which it feeds. This one went past the speeding mammal so fast, that
it showed only a blur of dingy brown markings on its back and a gleam
of marbled red blotches on its belly, as it disappeared in a hole
which sloped under the bank. Although not venomous, the banded
watersnake has within its flat triangular head a mouthful of sharp
teeth which it is always willing to use, and is an exceptionally
active, powerful serpent. Even one of the larger mammals might well
have hesitated before attacking one in its own den.
Not so the shrew. By the swirl and suction of the water, he knew that
something large and living had gone by. That was enough. Food meant
everything, size and odds nothing, in his life. The snake had scarcely
time to turn around in its dark burrow, before its cold unwinking eyes
saw a dark little figure come out of the water and rush up the long
slope that led to the hollow under the bank. Although less than two
feet long, the watersnake was more than ten times the size of the
shrew, and it seemed as unequal a combat as would be one between a man
and any of the vast monsters spawned of the primeval ooze. The serpent
threw itself into the figure-of-eight coil from which it fights, and
to the advantages of size, weight, and strength added that of
position, since the shrew had to fight uphill. Yet, like the
meadow-voles, the snake never had a chance. As the wide-open jaws
touched the whiskered muzzle, the shrew swerved, and escaped the
snapping teeth by the width of a hair, while the crooked crocodile
jaws clinched in the large muscles at the angle of the snake's jaw.
The barred serpent hissed fiercely, throwing off the sickening
effluvium like decayed fruit, which is one of the defenses of a
fighting watersnake, and threw its thick body into swift changing
loops and coils, hurling the shrew back and forth. The little animal
held on with its death grip, and the crooked jaws burrowed deeper and
deeper, bringing into play the long rows of sharp cutting teeth.
A watersnake is not a constrictor, and the sandy sides of the den were
too soft and narrow to enable it to dislodge the shrew's grip by
battering the animal against the walls of the burrow; but again and
again it tried to throw its coils over its opponent's rigid body, so
as to afford leverage enough to tear the punishing jaws loose. Each
time, by a swift movement, the shrew would escape the changing loops,
and never for an instant ceased to drive its teeth deeper, until they
cut clear through the snake's temporal muscles, and its lower jaw
dangled limp and useless. Freed then from any fear of attack, the
shrew sank his long curved teeth deliberately into the reptile's
brain, and although the snake still struggled, the battle was over.
Once more the ever-hungry little mammal claimed the spoils of victory.
Only when there was nothing left of the snake but a well-picked
skeleton, did he leave the den. Then again he drank deeply, plunged up
through the water, and landed after dark on the same little beach
from which he had dived days before. As he scurried across an open
space in the woods, a dark shadow drifted down from the tree tops and
two great wings hovered over him, so muffled by soft feathers that not
even the shrew heard a single beat or flutter from them. A second
longer above ground, and all his fierceness and courage and swiftness
would have availed him nothing against the winged death that
overshadowed him.