arrow-weed stems, a black tadpole lay basking. Light to him meant not
only growth, but life. Whenever, with the slow wheeling of the sun,
the shadow of a lily leaf moved over him, he wriggled impatiently
aside, and settled down again on the brightest part of the mud. Most
of the time he seemed to be asleep; but in reality he was keeping that
incessant sharp lookout which, for the pool-dwellers, was the price of
survival.
Swimming slowly up toward the other side of the arrow-weed stems, came
a fantastic-looking creature, something more than an inch and a half
in length. It had a long, tapering, ringed and armoured body, ending
in a spine; a thick, armoured thorax, with six legs attached; and a
large head, the back of which was almost covered by two big, dully
staring globes of eyes. The whole front of its head--part of the eyes,
and all the face--was covered by a smooth, cleft, shieldlike mask,
reaching well down under the breast, and giving the creature an
expression both mysterious and terrible. On its back, folded close and
obviously useless, were rigidly encased attempts at wings.
The little monster swam slowly by the motion of its long and strong
legs, thrusting out two short, hornlike antennae over the top of its
mask. It seemed to be eyeing a snail-shell on a stem above, and
waiting for the snail's soft body to emerge from the citadel; when on
a sudden, through the stems, it caught sight of the basking tadpole.
Instantly it became motionless, and sank, like a waterlogged twig, to
the level of the mud. It crept around, effacing itself against the
brown and greenish roots, till it was just opposite the quarry.
Then it sprang, propelling itself not only by its legs, but by the
violent ejection of a little stream of water from the powerful
breathing-valves near its tail.
The tadpole, as we have seen, was not asleep. With a convulsive
wriggle of its tail it darted away in a panic. It was itself no mean
swimmer, but it could not escape the darting terror that pursued. When
the masked form was almost within reach of its victim, the mask
dropped down and shot straight out, working on a sort of elbow-shaped
lever, and at the same time revealed at its extremity a pair of
powerful mandibles. These mandibles snapped firm hold of the victim at
the base of its wriggling tail. The elbow-shaped lever drew back, till
the squirming prize was held close against its captor's face. Then
with swift jets from the turbine arrangement of its abdominal gills,
the strange monster darted back to a retreat among the weed stems,
where it could devour its prey in seclusion.
Under those inexorable jaws the tadpole soon disappeared and for a few
minutes the monster rested, working its mandibles to and fro and
rubbing them with its front legs before folding back that inscrutable
mask over its savage face. Presently a plump minnow, more than an inch
long, with a black stripe along its bronze and silver sides, swam down
close by the arrow-weed stems. The big eyes of the monster never
moved. But, suddenly, out shot the mask once more, revealing the face
of doom behind it; and those hooked mandibles fixed themselves in the
belly of the minnow. Inexorable as was the grip, it nevertheless for
the moment left unimpeded the swimming powers of the victim; and he
was a strong swimmer. With lashing tail and beating fins, he dragged
his captor out from among the weed stems. For a few seconds there was
a vehement struggle. Then the minnow was borne down upon the mud, out
in the broad sheen where, a little before, the tadpole had been
basking. Clutching ferociously with its six long legs, the conqueror
crawled over the prey and bit its backbone in two.
Swift, strong, insatiably ravenous, immeasurably fierce, the larva of
the dragon-fly (for such the little monster was) had fair title to be
called the wolf of the pool. Its appearance alone was enough to daunt
all rivals. Even the great black carnivorous water-beetle, with all
its strength and fighting equipment, was careful to give wide berth to
that dreadful, quick-darting mask. Had these little wolves been as
numerous as they were rapacious, there would soon have been left no
life at all in the pool but theirs and that of the frogs. Between
these there would have been a long and doubtful struggle, the frogs
hunting the larvae among the weed stems, and the larvae devouring the
tadpoles on their basking-grounds.
It chanced that the particular larva whose proceedings we have noted
was just on the eve of that change which should transport it to the
world of air. After eating the minnow it somehow failed to recover its
appetite, and remained, all the rest of the day and through the night,
clinging to one of the weed stems. Next morning, when the sun was warm
on the pool, it crawled slowly up, up, up, till it came out into a new
element, and the untried air fanned it dry. Its great round eyes,
formerly dull and opaque, had now grown transparent, and were gleaming
like live jewels, an indescribable blend of emerald, sapphire, and
amethyst. Presently its armour, now for the first time drying in the
sun, split apart down the back, and a slender form, adorned with two
pairs of crumpled, wet wings, struggled three-quarters of its length
from the shell. For a short time it clung motionless, gathering
strength. Then, bracing its legs firmly on the edges of the shell, it
lifted its tail quite clear, and crawled up the weed a perfect
dragon-fly, forgetful of that grim husk it was leaving behind. A few
minutes later, the good sun having dried its wings, it went darting
and hurtling over the pool, a gemlike, opalescent shining thing,
reflected gloriously in the polished mirror beneath.
The Little Wolf of the Air
The pool lay shimmering and basking in the flood of the June sun. On
three sides, east, west, and north, the willows and birches gathered
close about it, their light leafage hanging motionless in the clear,
still heat. On the south side it lay open toward the thick-grassed
meadows, where bees and flies of innumerable species flickered lazily
over the pale crimson clover-blooms. From the clover-blooms and the
vetch-blooms, the wheel-rayed daisies, and the tall umbels of the wild
parsnip, strange perfumes kept distilling in the heat and pulsing in
across the pool on breaths of air too soft to ruffle its surface.
Above this unruffled surface the air was full of dancing life. Gnats
hung in little, whirling nebulae; mosquitoes, wasplike flies, and
whirring, shard-winged beetles, passed and repassed each other in
intricate lines of flight; and, here and there, lucently flashing on
long, transparent, veined wings, darted the dragon-flies in their
gemlike mail. Their movements were so swift, powerful, and light that
it was difficult, in spite of their size and radiant colour, to detect
the business that kept the dragon-flies so incessantly and tirelessly
in action. Sometimes two or three would hurtle out for a brief
expedition over the blossoming meadow. Often one would alight for a
moment on a leaf or twig in the sun, and lie there gleaming, its two
pairs of wings flatly outspread in a way that showed every delicate
interlacing of the nerves. Then it would rise again into the air with
a bold, vehement spring; and when ever it began its flight, or
whenever it abruptly changed the direction of its flight, its wings
would make a dry, sharp, rustling sound.
The business that so occupied these winged and flashing gems, these
darting iridescences, was in truth the universal business of hunting.
But there were few indeed among all the kindred of earth, air, and
water whose hunting was so savage and so ravenous as that of these
slender and spiritlike beings. With appetites insatiable, ferocity
implacable, strength and courage prodigious for their stature, to call
them the little wolves of the air is perhaps to wrong the ravening
gray pack whose howlings strike terror down the corridors of the
winter forest. Mosquitoes and gnats they hunted every moment,
devouring them in such countless numbers as to merit the gratitude of
every creature that calls the mosquito its foe. But every summer fly,
also, was acceptable prey to these indomitable hunters, every
velvet-bodied moth, every painted butterfly. And even the envenomed
wasp, whose weapon no insect can withstand, was not safe. If the
dragon-fly could catch her engrossed in some small slaughter of her
own, and, pouncing upon her from above, grip the back of her armed
abdomen in his great grinding jaws, her sting could do nothing but
dart out vainly like a dark, licking flame; and she would prove as
good a meal as the most unresisting bluebottle or horse-fly.
Down to the pool, through the luxurious shadows of the birches, came a
man, and stretched himself against a leaning trunk by the waterside.
At his approach, all the business of life and death and mating in his
immediate neighbourhood came to a halt, and most of the winged
kindred, except the mosquitoes, drew away from him. The mosquitoes, to
whom he had become, so to speak, in a measure acclimatized, attacked
him with less enthusiasm than they would have displayed in the case of
a stranger, and failed to cause him serious annoyance. He fixed
himself in a position that was thoroughly comfortable, and then lay
quite still.
The man's face was under the shadow of the birch-tree, but his body
lay out in the full sun, and the front of his soft white summer shirt
made a patch of sharp light against the surrounding tones of brown and
green. When it had for a time remained quite still, the patch of
whiteness attracted attention, and various insects alighted upon it to
investigate. Presently the man noticed a very large steel-blue
dragon-fly on rustling wings balancing in the air a few feet in front
of him. At this moment, from a branch overhead, a hungry shrike dashed
down. The dragon-fly saw the peril just in time; and, instead of
fleeing desperately across the pool, to be almost inevitably overtaken
by the strong-winged bird, it dashed forward and perched for refuge on
a fold of the dazzling white shirt. The foiled shrike, with an angry
and astonished twitter, flew off to a tree across the pool.
For perhaps a minute the great fly stood with moveless, wide-spread
wings, scintillating aerial hues as if its body was compacted of a
million microscopic prisms. The transparent tissue of its wings was
filled with a finer and more elusive iridescence. The great rounded,
globose, overlapping jaws, half as big as the creature's whole head,
kept opening and shutting, as if to polish their edges. The other half
of its head was quite occupied by two bulging, brilliant spheres of
eyes, which seemed to hold in their transparent yet curiously
impenetrable depths a shifting light of emerald and violet. These
inscrutable and enormous eyes--each one nearly as great in
circumference as the creature's body--rolled themselves in a steady
stare at the man's face, till he felt the skin of his cheeks creep at
their sinister beauty. It seemed to him as if a spirit hostile and
evil had threatened him from beneath those shining eyes; and he was
amused to experience, for all his interest, a sense of half-relief
when the four beautiful wings hurtled crisply and the creature darted
away.
It would seem, however, that the fold of white shirt had found favour
in those mysteriously gleaming eyes; for a minute or two later the
same fly returned to the same spot. The man recognized not only its
unusual size and its splendour of colour, but a broken notch on one of
its wing films, the mark of the tip of a bird's beak. This time the
dragon-fly came not as a fugitive from fate, but as a triumphant
dispenser of fate to others. It carried between its jaws the body of
a small green grasshopper, which it had already partly eaten.
Fixing the enigmatic radiance of its eyes upon the man's face, the
dragon-fly calmly continued its meal, using the second joints of its
front pair of legs to help manipulate the rather awkward morsel. Its
great round jaws crushed their prey resistlessly, while the inner
mouth sucked up the juices so cleanly and instantaneously that the
repast left no smallest stain upon the man's spotless shirt. When the
feast was over there remained nothing of the victim but a compact,
perfectly rounded, glistening green ball, the size of a pea, made up
of the well-chewed shell-like parts of the grasshopper's body. It
reminded the man of the round "castings" of fur or feathers which an
owl ejects after its undiscriminating banquet. Having rolled the
little green ball several times between its jaws, to make sure there
was no particle of nourishment left therein, the dragon-fly coolly
dropped it into a crease in the shirt-bosom, and rustled away.
[Illustration: "A LARGE FROG RISE TO THE SURFACE JUST BELOW HER."]
It chanced that this particular and conspicuous individual of the
little wolves of the air was a female. A half-hour later, when the man
had almost grown tired of his watching, he again caught sight of the
great fly. This time she alighted on a half-submerged log, one end
of which lay on shore by the man's feet, while the other end was
afloat in deep water, where it could rise and fall with every change
in the level of the pool. Quivering and gleaming with all her subtle
fires, the dragon-fly stood motionless on the log for a few seconds.
Then she backed down close to the water's edge, thrust her long,
slender abdomen a good inch into the water, and curled it under her as
if she were trying to sting the hidden surface of the log. In reality,
as the man at once understood, she was busy laying eggs,--eggs that
should presently develop into those masked and terrible larvae of hers,
the little wolves of the pool. She laid the eggs in a row under the
log, where there was no danger of the water receding from them. She
moved along the log daintily, step by step, and her wings fluttered
over the task.
The man had taken out his watch as soon as he saw what she was about,
in order that he might time the egg-laying process. But he was not
destined to discover what he wanted to know. The dragon-fly had been
at her business for perhaps two minutes, when the man saw a large frog
rise to the surface just below her. He liked all dragon-flies,--and
for this one in particular he had developed a personal interest.
Suddenly and violently he jumped to his feet, hoping to chase her away
from the approaching doom. But he was just too late. As he jumped, the
big frog sprang, and a long, darting, cleft tongue clutched the busy
fly, dragging her down. The frog disappeared with his prize,--to come
to the surface again at the edge of a lily-pad, a few feet off, and
blink his goggle-eyes in satisfaction. He had avenged (though about
that he cared as little as he knew) the lives of a thousand tadpoles.
The Alien of the Wild
A full day's tramp back from the settlement, on the edge of a
water-meadow beside the lonely Quah-Davic, stood the old woodsman's
cabin. Beside it he had built a snug log-barn, stored with hay from
the wild meadow. The hay he had made that August, being smitten with a
desire for some touch of the civilization to which as a whole he could
not reconcile himself. Then, with a still enthusiasm, he had built his
barn, chinking its crevices scrupulously with moss and mud. He had
resolved to have a cow. The dream that gave new zest to all his waking
hours was the fashioning of a little farm in this sunny, sheltered
space about his cabin. He had grown somewhat weary of living by trap
and snare and gun, hunting down the wild creatures whom he had come to
regard, through lapse of the long, solitary years by the Quah-Davic,
as in some sense comrade and kin to him.
It was late autumn, and the asters fading out like smoke along the
river edges, when the barn was finished and the hay safe stored
therein. Then the old woodsman journeyed out to the settlement to buy
his cow. He found one exactly to his whimsical liking,--a small, dark
red, long-horned scrub, with a look in her big, liquid eyes that made
him feel she would know how to take care of herself in the perilous
wilds. He equipped her with the most sonorous and far-sounding bell he
could find in all the settlement. Then proudly he led her away to her
new domain in the wilderness.
When the long-horned little cow had been salted and foddered in the
new barn, and when her liquid eyes had taken in the surroundings of
the sunny little meadow and cabin by the lonely Quah-Davic, she was
well enough content, and the mellow _tunk-a-tonk, tank tonk_ of her
bell was sounded never out of ear-shot from the cabin. The meadow and
the nearest fringes of the woods were range enough for her. Of the
perils that might lurk in the further depths she had a wary
apprehension. And the old woodsman, busy grubbing out a narrow cellar
under his cabin, was happy in his purchase. The _tunk-a-tonk_ of the
mellow bell was sweetest music in his ears as he worked.
Now it chanced that that autumn was one of unusual drought. In the
channel of the Quah-Davic rocks appeared which the old woodsman had
never seen before. The leaves fell early, before half their wonted
gamut of colour was run through. They wore a livery of pallid
tones--rusty-reds, cloudy light violets, grayish thin golds, ethereal
russets--under a dry, pale sky. The only solid, substantial colouring
was that of the enduring hemlocks and the sombre, serried firs. Then
there came a mistiness in the air, making the noonday sun red and
unradiant And the woodsman knew that there were forest fires somewhere
up the wind.
A little anxious, he studied the signs minutely, and concluded that,
the wind being light, the fires were too far distant to endanger the
Quah-Davic region. Thereupon he decided to make a hurried trip to the
settlement for a sack of middlings and other supplies, planning to
return by night, making the round trip within the twenty-four hours in
order that the little red cow should not miss more than one milking.
On the afternoon of the woodsman's going, however, the wind freshened
into a gale, and the fires which had been eating leisurely way through
the forest were blown into sudden fury. That same evening a hurricane
of flame swept down upon the lonely cabin and the little wild meadow,
cutting a mile-wide swath through the woods, jumping the Quah-Davic,
and roaring on to the north. It was days before the woodsman could get
back along the smoking, smouldering trail, through black, fallen
trunks and dead roots which still held the persistent fire in their
hearts. Of cabin and barn, of course, there was nothing left at all,
save the half-dug cellar and the half-crumbled chimney. Sick at heart
and very lonely, he returned to the settlement, and took up his new
abode on a half-reclaimed farm on the outskirts, just where the tilth
and the wilderness held each other at bay.
The red cow, meanwhile, being shrewd and alert, had escaped the
conflagration. She had taken alarm early, having seen a fire in the
woods once before and conceived an appreciation of its powers. Instead
of flying straight before it, and being inevitably overtaken, she ran
at once to the river and galloped madly down the shallow margin.
Before the flames were actually upon her, she was beyond the zone of
their fury. But she felt the withering blast of them, and their
appalling roar was in her ears. With starting eyes and wide,
palpitating nostrils, she ran on and on, and stopped only when she
sank exhausted in a rude cove. There she lay with panting sides and
watched far behind her the wide red arc of terror drawn across the
sky.
The next day she wandered some miles farther down the Quah-Davic, till
she came to a neighbourhood where the water-meadows were strung
thickly along the stream and where the pasturage, though now dry and
untasty, was abundant. Back from the water-meadows was a region of low
hills covered with a second growth of young birches and poplars. Among
the hills were ravines thick with hemlock and spruce. Here she
established herself, and at night, either because she missed the
narrow quarters of her stable, or because some wild instinct within
her led her to adapt herself quickly to the ways of the wild kindred,
she would make her lair in the deepest and most sheltered of the
ravines, where a peculiarly dense hemlock veiled the front of an
overhanging rock. This retreat was almost as snug as her old stable;
and, lying down with her long horns toward the opening, she felt
comparatively secure. As a matter of fact, though all these woods of
the Quah-Davic were populous with the furtive folk, the little red cow
saw few signs of life. She was surrounded, wherever she moved, by a
wide ring of resentful solitude. The inexplicable _tunk-a-tonk,
tunk, tonk_ of her deep-throated bell was disquieting to all the
forest kindred; and the least move of her head at night was enough to
keep the most interested prowler at a distance from the lair behind
the hemlock. There was not a bear, a wolf, or a panther on the
Quah-Davic (there was but a single pair of panthers, indeed, within a
radius of fifty miles!) that cared to investigate the fighting
qualities of this keen-horned red creature with the inexplicable
voice.
Till the snow fell deep, covering the dry grass on the meadows, the
little cow throve well enough. But when the northern winter had fairly
settled in, and the great white stillness lay like sleep upon the
ancient wood, and the fir-trees, with their cloaking of snow, were so
many spires and domes and pinnacles of glittering marble under the icy
sunlight, then the wanderer would have starved if she had not chanced
to be both resourceful and indomitable. From her lair under the
hemlock, which was sheltered from all winds, her deeply trodden trail
led both to the meadows and the birchen hill-slopes. She could paw her
way down to the deep-buried grasses; but it took so much digging to
uncover a few poor and unsatisfying mouthfuls that she could never
have kept herself alive in this fashion. Being adaptable, however, she
soon accustomed herself to browsing on the slimmest of the birch and
poplar twigs, and so, having proved herself one of the fittest, she
survived. When the late, reluctant spring brought the first green of
sprouting grasses to the meadows of the Quah-Davic, it found the red
cow a mere bag of bones, indeed, but still alive, and still presenting
an undaunted pair of horns to a still distrusted world.
Into this unfriendly world, when the painted trilliums and the purple
wake-robins were dotting every half-exposed glade, was born a sturdy
bull-calf. His sire was a handsome black half-breed Durham which had
been brought into the settlement the previous summer for the
improvement of the scrubby backwoods stock. The calf was jet-black in
colour. As he grew, he soon began to show hints of his sire's broad
forehead and massive fore-quarters. He had his mother's large,
half-wild, discriminating eyes; and his legs, soon throwing off the
straddling awkwardness of calfhood, developed his mother's almost
deer-like activity.
The summer passed uneventfully for the pair of aliens in the
wilderness. With abundant pasturage on the Quah-Davic water-meadows,
they had no occasion to wander into the perils of the deep wood; and
the little red cow had none of that prevision of wild mothers, which
leads them to instruct their young in the two great vital points of
woodcraft,--the procuring of food and the avoiding of enemies. She
herself knew little woodcraft save what she and the calf were
absorbing together, unconsciously, day by day. For the time they
needed none, their food being all about them, their enemies kept at
bay by the ceaseless _tunk-a-tonk_ of the mellow bell. Thus it came
about that to the black bull-calf the wilderness seemed almost empty
of life, save for the birds, the insects, the squirrels, and the fish
leaping in the pool. To all these the bell was a matter of
indifference.