last analysis a man's brain can outwit that of a fox. It was when the
blaze and the glow of the crimson and gold frost-fires had died away
to the russet of late fall that the fox family was most in danger, for
the Raven Hunt Club needed a fox. Three times now the men had dressed
themselves with great care, in wonderful scarlet coats and shiny
top-boots, while the women wore comfortable breeches and uncomfortable
collars; and they had all jumped fences and waded brooks and crashed
through thickets; but never a fox could they find, so close had the
dwellers in Fox Valley lain hidden. In fact, the last hunt had been a
drag-hunt, and the pack had followed for hours the scent of a bag of
anise which had been dragged the day before by a string, through the
woods and across the fields, by a sleepy stable-boy on a broken-down
hunter. But you cannot rise in your stirrups and shout "Tally-ho!" or
"Stole away!" or any of the other proper hunting remarks, over a bag
of anise. Then, too, the hounds have nothing to worry and kill at the
end of the hunt; nor can the brush be cut off for a trophy, for an
anise bag hasn't any brush.
Thanksgiving was two scant weeks away, and it was absolutely necessary
for the happiness of the Hunt that a live fox be secured at once.
Accordingly the Raven Hunt Club offered fifty dollars for a live red
fox. Grays were barred, because they prefer to hide in burrows and be
safe rather than run and be killed. For a week all the farmers' boys
for miles around Fox Valley trapped desperately, but without success.
Father Fox had not paid four toes for nothing. Then they sent for Fred
Dean. Thereafter, one night Blackcross, while hunting over a hilltop
pasture, noted a long, freshly turned furrow that ran straight across
the field, which was filled with old chaff taken from deserted barns
and smelt delightfully of mice. Along the furrow and through the
litter the young fox nosed his way, ready to pounce upon the first
mouse which darted out. Suddenly there was a snap, and Blackcross was
caught by his slim dark muzzle. There the old trapper found him the
next morning, hardly alive; and when he saw that he had secured a
cross-fox, demanded a hundred from the committee instead of the
offered fifty. Said committee took the fox, and advertised far and
wide that the Thanksgiving Hunt would be after such a fox as had never
been hunted before in the memory of man.
The holiday turned out to be one of those rare and fleeting days of
Indian summer which Autumn sometimes borrows from her sister. The pack
was in fine fettle. The horses and the hunters were fit, and the hunt
breakfast excellent. Everybody was thankful--except the shivering
little fox. For days he had been cooped in a dirty wire cage, and
eaten tainted meat and drunk stale water, and he was stiff and sore
from his night in the trap and from lack of exercise. Just at sunrise
on Thanksgiving morning, he was crammed into a bag, and then let out
two fields ahead of the pack. As he shot into the sunlight, there was
a chorus of shouts, yells, and yelps, and a crowd of men, women,
horses, and hounds rushed after him in a tremendous burst of speed.
The young fox's legs tottered under him as he ran. Moreover, for a
mile around the country was level. As he crossed the first field, the
pack was already at the farther wall, and would surely have overtaken
him in the third field if it had not been for one of the old fox's
lessons. The pasture sloped up to where a sand bank showed as a great
crescent gash in the turf. Springing to the side of the bank, the fox
clung to it like a fly, scurried along its side, cleared the stone
wall beyond, and headed for the thickets of Fox Valley. The shifting
sand left no track or scent, and while the pack puzzled out the trail,
Blackcross won to the shelter of the nearest thicket.
Up and down the hillsides, across marshes and through tangles of
underbrush, he doubled, checked, turned, and twisted. Raven Hunt,
however, boasted the best pack of fox-hounds in the state, nor had
Blackcross either the strength or endurance for a long run. His pace
became slower and slower, while the bell-like notes of the hounds and
the shouts of the hunters sounded ever nearer and louder.
Only just in time the beset fox saw looming up before him the best
hidden of all the fox fortresses in the Valley. It seemed only an
impenetrable tangle of greenbrier on the hillside--that vine whose
stems are like slim, green wires, studded everywhere with up-curved
thorns through which neither man nor beast can force a way. Through
the very middle of the tangle ran the naked trunk of a fallen
chestnut, showing just above the barbed vines. As the pack scrambled
through the barway at the foot of the hill, the little fox ran along
the log, and with all his last remaining strength sprang far out
across the interlaced tangle of vine and thorn, where the smooth
needles under a little white pine made a tiny island in the thicket.
From there the fox bounded over a narrow belt of greenbrier into a
mass of wild honeysuckle, whose glossy green leaves and bending
vine-stocks carpeted the hill at that point fully two feet deep.
Across the yielding surface he hurried, until he reached the entrance
of a little tunnel beneath the vines, entirely hidden from sight by
the drooping leaves. Through this he crept noiselessly, beneath the
green carpet, until he reached the entrance to a burrow which led far
up the hillside and had no less than three well-concealed exits.
For a long hour the pack and the hunters and the horses circled and
beat and trampled back and forth through the thicket, and as far into
the greenbrier tangle as they could force a way; but no one of them
found the lost trail. A hundred dollars had been spent and nothing
killed. Everybody agreed that it was a most unfortunate ending to a
good day--everybody, that is, except the fox.
As the months wore on, Blackcross hunted more and more by himself, nor
did he use any of the family dens. This was partly because snow leaves
a telltale trail, which he who hunts can read, and partly because of a
difference in the attitude toward him of the old foxes. Among the wild
folk the love and care of parents cease when their children have
become full-grown. This is part of nature's plan to scatter families,
and prevent the in-breeding which will weaken the stock. At last the
time came when Mother Fox no longer allowed him the freedom of the den
in which he had been born, and Father Fox growled in his throat when
he met him carrying his kill.
Then the love-moon of the foxes in February showed in the sky, and
something drove Blackcross far afield--something that called and
cried, and would not let him sleep, and took away even the interest
and joy of a successful hunt. Across the ridges, through Fern Valley
and beyond Blacksnake Swamp he journeyed, until, far beyond them all,
he found a lonely valley shut in on all four sides by steep slopes,
and untenanted by any of the fox-folk. On the crest of one of the
hills stood an abandoned haystack, left by some thriftless farmer
years before, and so bleached and weathered by sun and storm that it
was useless as hay, but an ideal place for a fox-warren. Under this
Blackcross dug a home with many entrances, all of them cunningly
concealed by the overhanging hay. Through the centre of the stack
itself, he ran a series of tunnels and rooms, besides the safer ones
far underground.
Finally, it was almost completed--almost but not quite. Night after
night the young fox barked from the top of the hill with a sharp
staccato screech, which could be heard a long mile away. Then came the
night of the full moon. There was no snow and overhead in the crisp
air wheeled Orion the Hunter, Lepus the Hare, the Great and Little
Dog, and all the other mighty constellations of winter. Under the
sheen and shimmer of the stars and through the still moonlight,
Blackcross sent his bark echoing and ringing, until at long last it
was answered by a curious, high-pitched squall which to Blackcross
contained all the magic and music of sky and earth. Nearer and nearer
the sound approached, until finally, in the moonlight, a slim tawny
figure stole up to the stack. For a moment black muzzle and tawny
touched. Then Blackcross turned and disappeared down one of the
entrances to his burrow, and the stranger followed. At last, his home
was complete.
X
SEA OTTER
The short Arctic summer had flung its flower fields among the glaciers
of the Siberian coast, like many-colored jewels set in crystal. Flocks
of skuas, jaegers, and little auks circled and screamed above the
smoky green waters of the Straits; and far out from shore a bed of
kelp writhed and tossed like a mass of golden-brown sea snakes.
There, cradled on the swaying stems, a water-baby was born. He had a
funny little nose, with a padded cushion on top which made it look
like the ace of spades, and his round, blunt head was of a dingy white
color, while the rest of his fifteen inches was covered with a loose,
kinky, gray-brown coat. Its harsh outer surface, sprinkled with long
white hairs, covered a velvet-like inner fur that gave promise of the
glory that was yet to be.
In spite of his insignificant appearance, the little cub was of blood
royal, of the lineage of the sea otter, that king of fur-bearers, who
wears a fortune on his back and is dogged by death every moment of his
life. Vitus Behring and his shipwrecked crew discovered them in 1741,
in the surf and shallows around a barren island, in the sea which now
bears his name. When they won their way back to Asia, sly, wise
Chinese merchants paid their weight in silver for the new furs, so
lustrous, silky, and durable, which the sailors had been using for
coats and blankets. In Russia they came to be worth their weight in
gold, outranking even the royal sables, which none but the Tsar and
his nobles might wear. To-day the pelt of a sea otter is worth its
weight in platinum or palladium.
This last-born princeling soon learned how to float on his back, with
his round little head just showing above the kelp. For the most part,
however, he lived clasped in his mother's arms and wrapped in the
silky folds of her fur, while he nuzzled and fed against her warm
breast, making happy little chirps and grunts of satisfaction, quite
like a human baby.
To-day, as they rocked back and forth in the swinging water, the
kelp-carpet in front of them parted, and a great, blunt, misshapen
head thrust itself into the air a few yards away. It had little eyes
set high in the skull, while the ears showed below the grinning mouth
filled full of blunt teeth like white water-worn pebbles--the hallmark
of a sea otter.
The newcomer was none other than Father Otter, come to look over his
son and heir. He did not come very close to his family, for mother
otters do not permit even their mates to approach too near a newborn
cub. As the old dog otter stretched himself out on the kelp-raft, his
cylindrical body, all gleaming ebony and silver in the sunlight,
showed nearly as long as that of a man, and weighed perhaps a hundred
and twenty-five pounds. It was the great otter's pelt, however, that
stamped him as the sea king that he was. Lustrous as light on the
water, the inner fur had a close pile like velvet and, frosted with
long white hairs, showed a tinge of silver-purple gleaming through its
long loose folds.
For some time the old dog otter gravely surveyed his mate and his new
cub, approvingly. Then he scanned sea and sky and kelp, listening the
while with a pair of the sharpest ears that ever guarded the life of
one of the wild folk, at the same time winnowing the air through a
pair of nostrils that could smell smoke--that danger-signal to all
wild people--a mile away. There was no sign of danger anywhere, and a
moment later he disappeared under the water, after the food which his
vibrant body unceasingly required.
For long after his disappearance the mother otter anxiously studied
the horizon for the tiniest danger-signal. Convinced at last that all
was well, she stretched herself out on the slow-swinging kelp, for one
of those periods of quiet happiness which come even into the lives of
the hunted. While her cub snuggled against her soft fur, she tossed a
kelp-bulb high into the air, catching it like a ball, first in one
bare little palm, then in the other, while she sang the cradle-song
which all little sea otters know. High and shrill she chirped and
twittered like a bird, in the midst of that lonely sea, clasping her
sleepy baby closer as she sang.
There seemed no living thing near, yet death is never far from the sea
otter. From mid-sky what seemed a dark wisp of cloud drifted toward
the sea. Driven down by hunger from the North, an eagle owl, all buff
and gray and brown, was crossing from Asia to America; for, unlike
most of his fierce clan, he hunted by day. Larger than that
death-in-the-dark, the great-horned owl, or that fierce white ghost of
the North, the snowy owl, he skimmed down toward the kelp-bed, his
round, fixed eyes gleaming red and horrible in the sunlight. Muffled
by the softest of down, his great wings, although they had a spread of
nearly five feet, were absolutely noiseless.
Not until the shadow of the bird, like the shadow of death itself,
fell upon her cub, did the otter have the slightest warning of any
danger. By that time it would have been too late for any other
creature to escape. No animal, however, on land or sea can dive with
the sea otter. Just as the crooked talons were closing, she slipped
through the kelp into the water, without a splash, like something
fluid, her cub clasped close, while overhead the baffled owl snapped
its beak like a pistol shot, and flew on toward the Alaskan coast.
Down through the swaying tangles she twisted her way like an eel,
until she passed clear through the floating bed of this strange growth
of the sea, which grows with its roots in the air. There the water
darkened, and as she neared the bottom a shape flashed ahead of her,
lighted with that phosphorescence which all dwellers in the northern
seas seem to acquire. The otter recognized the glowing figure as that
of a sea bass, a bronze-green fish hardly to be distinguished from
the small-mouthed black bass of fresh water. The bass was no mean
swimmer, but the long, oar-like, webbed hind legs of the sea otter
twisted over and over each other like the screw of a propeller, and
drove her through the water with such tremendous speed that, in spite
of the handicap of the cub, she soon swam down the fish, following its
every twist and turn, and in less than a minute had caught it in her
blunt teeth. Then, with the plump fish in her jaws, she swam up again
through the kelp, and fed full, never for a moment, however, loosening
her grip of her cub--for the babies of the sea folk who wander only a
few feet from their mothers may never return.
The meal finished, the great otter climbed out on a pinnacle of rock
just showing above the kelp. Immediately from a miracle of lithe,
swift grace, she changed into one of the slowest and most awkward of
animals. The webbed flipper-like hind feet, which drove her with such
speed through the water, were of very little use on land, and her tiny
forepaws were so short that they seemed to have no wrists at all.
Slowly and painfully she waddled up on the rock, and there preened and
cleaned and combed and licked every inch of her fur just as a cat
would do, until it shone in the sunlight like a black opal.
As the weeks went by, the cub was trained in the lessons of the sea.
He learned to enjoy salads of kelp-sprouts, and to dive with his
mother to the bottom of the shallows, and watch her grind her way
through the great clams of the northwest, whose bivalves are a foot
in width, or crunch with her pebble-like teeth into the white meat of
the vast, armored crabs of those seas. Another one of her favorite
foods was the sea urchin--that chestnut burr of the sea. Protected by
a bristling hedge of steel-sharp spines, it would seem safe from any
attack. Yet, just as the squirrel on land opens without injury the
real chestnut burr, so the sea otter had learned the combination which
unlocked this little spiked safe of the sea, and devoured with much
relish every one she could find.
As the weeks went by, the larder of the kelp-bed began to empty. The
clam-beds had been stripped, the sea urchins were gone, and the fish
had learned to keep away. Little by little, the mother otter hunted
farther and farther from the safety of the kelp; until there came a
day when, driven by hunger, she followed a fleeing pollock out into
the open sea. The big gleaming fish, with the black line along its
silver sides, swam far and fast. Yet, if the otter had not been
hampered by her clinging cub, the chase would have been a short one.
As it was, she did not overtake the fugitive until it was fully a
quarter of a mile away from the kelp. In desperation it swam down into
the lower depth, until the dull green of the water changed to black;
but always the weasel of the sea was hard on its track, following the
phosphorescent trail which the fleeing fish left behind.
Suddenly, as the pollock dived to even lower depths, in the hope that
the water-pressure might drive back its pursuer, a grotesquely
horrible head thrust itself up from the darkness right in its path.
Dark, and shining like wet rubber, the shape resembled nothing so much
as that of a great, double-headed sledgehammer. From either of the
living hammer-heads gleamed a greenish, malignant eye. Before the
pollock could dart aside, the great hammer-head shark turned partly
over, there was a flash of sharp teeth, and the fugitive fish
disappeared.
A second later the ridged, gray, fifteen-foot body shot toward the
otter, with such speed that the water fairly hissed from the
scimetar-shaped side-fins. The sea otter is among the swiftest
swimmers of the mammals, but no air-breathing creature can compete in
speed with a shark. Almost instantly the hammerhead was upon her. The
jaws of all the sharks are so undershot that, in order to grip their
prey, they must perforce turn over on their sides. This peculiarity of
their kind was all that saved the otter. For a second the grim head
overshadowed her. Then, with a twist of its long tail, shaped like the
fluke of an anchor, the shark turned over and the vast mouth swung
open, armed with six rows of inch-long, steel-sharp, triangular teeth,
whose edges were serrated like a saw. Each separate tooth was curved
back toward the gullet, so that for any living thing caught in their
dreadful grip there was no more chance of escape than there would be
from the interlocking cogwheels of a stone-crusher.
As the jaws of death gaped for the sea otter, with a writhe of her
swift body she flashed to one side, while the little cub whimpered in
her arms and the fatal teeth of the shark just grazed her trailing,
flipper-like hind legs, so close they snapped behind her. Swerving
beneath the great bulk, the otter began a desperate flight for life.
Every foot of the shark's gaunt, stripped body was built for speed.
There was not a bone anywhere under his drab and livid skin--only
rings and strips and columns of tough, springy cartilage, which
enabled him to cut through the water like a blade of tempered gray
steel. With the rush of a torpedo the grim figure shot after the
fleeing otter, who had but one advantage and that was in length. It
takes a six-foot body less time to turn than one that measures fifteen
feet. In a straightaway race, the fish would have overtaken the mammal
in a few seconds; but when it came to twisting, turning, and doubling,
the sea otter had an advantage, albeit of the slightest. Again and
again the desperate sea mother avoided death by an inch. More than
once the ringing jaws of the great fish snapped together just behind
her, and only the tiny tick of time which it took to turn over saved
her. Desperately she sought to win the refuge of the kelp-bed; but
always the gray shape thrust itself between her and safety.
At last an ally of the sea folk joined in the hunt. Water was claiming
her toll of oxygen from the alien within her depths. A sea otter can
stay under for half an hour at a pinch--but not when swimming at full
speed, with the laboring heart pumping blood at capacity; and this one
realized despairingly that soon she must breathe or die. Little by
little she shaped her course toward the surface, dreadfully fearing
lest the second she must spend in drawing one deep breath would be her
last. She flashed upward through a whole gamut of greens--chrome,
cedar, jasper, myrtle, malachite, emerald, ending with the pulsing,
golden sap-green of the surface. Swim as she would, however, the
monstrous head was always just at her flank, and the slightest pause
would give those fatal teeth their grip. Once again she avoided by a
hair's breadth a snap of the deadly jaws, and struggled despairingly
toward the upper air.
As the great fish turned to follow, out from the sunlight, through the
gleaming water, shot a long dark body. Away from the safety of the
kelp to the head of horror with its implacable eyes came the old dog
otter, for the creed of the sea otter is unchanging--one mate for life
and death. With his round misshapen head bristling and his snaky black
eyes gleaming like fire, this one crossed the vast back of the shark
like a shadow. As the great fish turned to follow the fleeing mother,
the blunt pebble-teeth of the dog otter, which can grind the flintiest
shells to powder, fastened themselves with a bull-dog grip just behind
the last fin of the shark, where its long, sinuous tail joined the
body. With all the force of his tremendous jaws, the great sea otter
clamped his teeth through the masses of muscles, deep into the
cartilage column, crushing one of its ball-and-socket joints.
Like a steel spring, the shark bent almost double on itself. Just as
the gaping jaws were about to close, with a quick flirt of his body
the otter swung across to the other side, without relaxing for an
instant the grip of those punishing teeth. The undershot jaws of the
great fish could not reach the head of its tormentor, fixed as it was
in the central ridge of the shark's back. Again and again the
hammer-head bent from side to side; but each time the old dog otter
evaded the clashing teeth and ground to bits joint after joint of the
shark's spine, while the lashing tail-strokes became feebler and
feebler. Not until the mother otter and her cub were safe on their way
to the kelp-bed, breathing great life-saving draughts of fresh air at
the surface, did the grim jaws of the old otter relax. Then, with an
arrowy dive and double, he shot under and over the disabled fish, and
sped away to join his mate in the hidden thickets of the kelp.
The swift Arctic summer soon passed, to be followed by the freezing
gales of an Arctic winter. With the storms would come an enemy from
the land, fiercer and more fatal than any foe that menaced the otter
family by sea or sky; for these sea otter were among the last of their
race, and there was a price upon their pelts beyond the dreams of the
avarice of a thousand murky Aleuts and oily Kolash and Kadiakers, to
say nothing of a horde of white adventurers from all the five
continents of earth. Only in storms, when the kelp-beds are broken and
the otter are forced to seek the shelter of beaches and sea caves, do
hunters still have a chance to secure these rarest of all the
fur-bearers.
At last came the first of the great winter gales. Day after day the
wind howled up from the southeast, the storm quarter of that coast,
and the air throbbed with the boom of breakers, while all the way down
the Straits the white-caps foamed and roared among a tangle of
cross-currents.
Out at sea, the great kelp-raft on which the otter family had lived
since spring was at last broken and scattered under the pounding of
the gale. Otter need sleep as much as humans, and like them, too, must
sleep where they can breathe. Battered and blinded by the gale, the
little family started to hunt for some refuge where they might slumber
out the storm. Along all the miles of coast, and among the myriads of
barren islands, there seemed to be no place where they could find a
yard of safety. At the first sign of bad weather every strip of beach
was patrolled and every islet guarded.
To lonely little Saanak the dog otter first led them, hoping to find
some tiny stretch of safe beach among the water-worn boulders piled
high along the shore. A mile to windward he stopped, thrust his blunt
muzzle high up into the gale, and winnowed the salt-laden air through
the meshes of his wonderful nostrils. Then he turned away at right
angles, toward another island. A little band of Indian hunters,
starved with cold, had built far back among the rocks a tiny fire.