chopping and hauling of cord wood for the settlements. On a certain day
he was enjoying himself greatly in the felling of a huge birch. The
crisp, still air was like wine in his veins. The axe was keen, and under
the bite of its rhythmic strokes the big white chips flew off keenly.
Sitting on the wood sled at a safe distance, Jeff watched the chopping
with alert interest, while the old sorrel dreamed with drooping head and
steamed in the dry frost. The tree, cut nearly through, was just
beginning to lean, just tottering to its fall, when once more John Hatch
was conscious of that hated crawling in the skin of his cheeks, the
lifting of the hairs on his neck. With a savage curse, he wheeled about,
swinging up his axe. With a soft, swishing, crackling roar, down came
the tree. It fell true, as he had chopped it, so he did not have to
spring out of its path or even to glance at it. But, as it fell, it
crashed heavily upon a dead branch in a neighboring tree. The dead
branch flew hurtling through the air and smote John Hatch violently on
the back of the head. He dropped like a log and lay quite still in the
chip-strewn snow.
There was a clatter of chains and harness, as the old sorrel, sniffing
the enemy, started at a gallop for home. Jeff, seeing that his master
was down, sprang to his side, whining, and fell to licking frantically
at his unconscious face. Getting no response, he suddenly remembered the
taint in the air, which was already making his back bristle. Bestriding
Hatch's body, he turned his head with a savage snarl. He could not see
the enemy, but he smelled them all too clearly. With ears laid flat to
the skull, lips curled up from his long white teeth, and half-open eyes
flaming green, he glared at the spruce thicket whence that menacing
scent came to his nostrils. With the responsibility for his master's
care thus suddenly thrust upon him, his fear of lynxes vanished.
The noise of the old sorrel's flight died away down the white wood road,
and for several minutes nothing stirred. The lynxes had long practiced
patience, and, for all their hate, they were prudent. They could not
make out at first why their enemy, who was always so vehemently active,
should now be lying so still there in the snow. But wild animals are
usually quick to realize it when an enemy or a quarry has been
disabled. They presently concluded that here at last was the opportunity
which they had been waiting for. For the dog they had nothing but scorn.
They had mauled and beaten him once before. They had grown accustomed to
his frank terror of them. Now he did not enter into their calculations.
One from each side of the spruce thicket, they crept stealthily forth,
crouching low, their ears laid back, their round, pale eyes glaring
boldly from their round, gray, cruel faces. Their big padded paws went
lightly over the snow. Very gradually they crept up, half expecting that
John Hatch might spring to his feet any moment and rush at them with a
roar. They had no great fear of his roars, however, having never known
much hurt to come of them.
And all the time Jeff was tugging madly at John Hatch's arm, adjuring
him to wake and meet the peril.
Apparently satisfied at length that there was no trap laid for them in
John Hatch's quiescence, the two lynxes ran forward swiftly and sprang
at his neck. To their surprise, they were met by Jeff's teeth. With that
lightning side-snap which he had inherited from his collie ancestors,
the dog managed to slash both his opponents severely in the space of
half a second. In a blaze of fury, they fell upon him, both at once. A
yellow tangle of claws and teeth and legs and fur surged and bounced
upon John Hatch's body.
John Hatch slowly came to. The pandemonium of snarls and screeches that
filled his ears bewildered him. He thought he was having a nightmare.
His legs were held down, it seemed, by battling mountains. With a mighty
effort he sat up. Then in a flash his wits came back to him. He saw Jeff
with one lynx down, slashing at its throat, while the other clung upon
his back and ripped him with its claws.
Bouncing to his feet, he clutched this latter combatant with both hands
by the scruff of the neck, whirled it around his head and dashed it,
yowling wildly, against a tree. Then he turned his attention to the
other, which, though at a terrific disadvantage, was still raking Jeff
murderously with its hinder claws.
Hatch grabbed up his axe. But he could find no chance to strike, lest
he should injure the dog. At last, in desperation at seeing how Jeff was
getting punished by those raking claws, he dropped the axe again and
seized the beast by the hind legs. Dragging it out from under the
astonished Jeff, he swung it several times about his head, and then
launched it sprawling and screeching, high through the air. As it landed
he was upon it again, this time with the axe, and a straight short-arm
blow ended the matter. The other lynx, which was recovering from its
contact with the tree, saw that its mate was slain, and sped off among
the trees, just escaping the axe which Hatch hurled after it.
Jeff was lying down in the snow, licking his outrageous wounds, and
content to leave the finishing of the affair in his master's hands.
"I was mistaken in yeh, Jeff," said John Hatch, "an' I apologize
handsome. Ye're sure some dawg. I reckon there'll be no more shadders
come sneakin' along _our_ trail after this, an' thanks to you!"
The Fisher in the Chutes
He was plainly a duck. The most casual and uninitiated of observers
would have said so at a glance. Yet not the most stupidly casual could
have taken him for any ordinary duck. He was too imposing in appearance,
too gorgeous in apparel, too bold and vigilant in demeanor to be so
misunderstood. Moreover, he was not in the situation or the surroundings
which one is wont to associate with ducks.
In fact, after the fashion of a cormorant or a kingfisher, he was
perched motionless on a big dead stub of a branch. This branch was
thrust out very obligingly in just the place where this most singular of
ducks would have desired it if it had been consulted in the matter. It
directly overhung a transparent amber-brown chute of unbroken water in
the midst of the loud turmoil of North Fork Rapids. The strange-mannered
duck had no proper talons wherewith to grasp his perch, but his
strong-clawed webs held him steadily, none the less, as he peered
downward into the clear rush of the torrent.
The duck was a handsome male of the red-breasted merganser family, and
the absorbing interest of his life was fish. It was not in the quiet
pools and long, deep reaches of dark water that he loved to seek his
prey, but rather to snatch it from the grasp of the loud chutes and the
roaring rips. Here, where the North Fork stream fell into the
Ottanoonsis, was a resort exactly to his liking. And most of the
fish--trout, salmon, grilse or parr--which journeyed up and down either
the Fork or the parent river chose to pass through that sluice of swift
but unbroken flow immediately beneath the overhanging branch on which he
perched.
For all the splendor of his plumage, the merganser was not conspicuous
where he sat. All about him was a tumult of bright and broken color,
scattered in broad splashes. The rapids were foam-white, or
golden-ruddy, or deep, shining green-brown under the sharp and patchy
sunlight, and they were sown thickly with wet black rocks, here and
there glinting with purple. The merganser had a crested head of
iridescent green-black, a broad collar of lustrous white, black back,
black-and-white wings, white belly, sides finely pencilled in black and
white, and a breast of rich chestnut red, streaked with black. His feet
were red, his long narrow beak, with its saw-toothed edges and sharp
hooked tip, was bright red. In every line and hue he was unmistakably an
aristocrat among ducks, and an arrogant one at that.
His fierce red eyes, staring down fixedly into the flowing amber of the
current, marked piercingly every fish that passed up and down. Most of
them were much too big, not for his appetite, but for his powers. His
beak, with its keen-toothed edges, was a formidable weapon, by means of
which he could doubtless have captured, disabled, and dragged to shore
even a fish of a pound or so in weight. But here he was at a terrible
disadvantage as compared with the owls, hawks, and eagles. He had no
rending claws. Had he taken such a prize, he could not have profited by
it, having no means of tearing it to pieces. He had no use for fish too
big to be swallowed whole; so he was obliged to watch greedily and
savagely the great salmon, the grilse, and the larger trout, as they
darted through the sliding glow beneath his perch.
But suddenly, straight and swift as a diving cormorant, he shot down
into the torrent and disappeared beneath the surface. A watcher directly
overhead, escaping the baffling reflections, might have seen him
swimming, head outstretched, mastering the tremendous rush of the stream
with mighty strokes, fairly out-speeding the fish in their own element.
Near the limit of the clear water he overtook and seized the quarry
which he had marked--a trout not far from seven inches in length. The
saw-toothed edges of his beak gripped it securely, and he rose with it
to the surface just where the chute was breaking into a smother of
trampled foam.
With a furious flapping of wings, he lifted himself almost clear of the
flood, and beat along the tossed surface, dragging tail and feet for
perhaps a dozen yards before he could get into full flight. Once fairly
a-wing, however, he wheeled and made back hurriedly for his perch. Here
he proceeded to swallow his prize head first. It was a long, difficult,
choking process, for the fish was one of the stoutest he had ever
attempted. But a little choking was of small consequence in view of his
heroic appetite, and, after many an undignified paroxysm, he
accomplished the task. It might have seemed that a trout of this size
was a fairly substantial meal. But such was his keenness that, even
while the wide flukes of his engorged victim were still sticking out at
the corners of his beak, his fierce red eyes were once more peering
downward into the torrent in search of fresh prey.
Just about this time, in the clear blue overhead, a green-winged teal
was beating his way above the treetops, making for the stream with the
fear of death at his heart. A mighty flier, his short, muscular wings
drove him through the air at a speed not much less than ninety or a
hundred miles an hour. But behind him, overtaking him inexorably, came
the shape that stood for doom itself in the eyes of all his tribe--the
dreadful blue falcon, or duck-hawk. The teal knew that his only chance
of escape from this long-winged pursuer was to reach the water, plunge
beneath it, and swim for some hiding-place under the fringing weeds.
The teal's wings, throbbing with a swift, short vibration, whistled
shrilly in the still air, so that a prowling wildcat by the waterside
heard the sound even above the dull roar of the rapids, and glared
upward alertly. The long wings of the hawk, bent sharply at the elbows,
worked more slowly, but with a nervous, terrific thrust which urged him
through the air like a projectile. For all its appalling speed, the
sound of his flight was nothing more than a strong pulsating hiss.
Close ahead of him now the teal saw refuge--the flashing line of the
rapids. But the hawk was already close upon him. In despair he hurled
himself downward too soon. The pursuer also shot downward and struck.
But the lofty top of a water ash, just missed by the short wings of the
fugitive, forced the long pinion of the hawk to swerve a little, so that
he partly missed his stroke. Instead of clutching the victim's neck and
holding it securely, he dealt merely a glancing blow upon the back
behind the wings. It was enough, however, and the unhappy teal was
hurled earthward, flapping through the tips of the branches. The great
hawk followed hurriedly, to retrieve his prey from the ground.
As it chanced, however, the victim came down with a thud almost beneath
the whiskered nose of the wildcat. A pounce, and the great cat had her
paw upon it, and crouched snarling up at the hawk. In a fury the hawk
swooped and struck downward. But wisdom came to him just in time, and he
did not strike home. His swoop became a demonstration merely, an
expression of his rage at having his prey thus snatched from his beak.
With one short, shrill cry of anger, he swerved off and sailed upward
over the river. The cat growled softly, picked up the prize in her jaws
and trotted into the bushes to devour it.
The spot where all this happened was perhaps a hundred yards below that
dead tree upon whose outthrust naked branch the splendid merganser drake
was making his meal. In fact, he had just finished it--the last of the
trout's tail had just vanished with a spasm down his strained
gullet--when the baffled hawk caught sight of him and swooped. Happily
for him, he on his part caught sight of the hawk, and dropped like lead
into the torrent. The hawk alighted on the dead branch, and sat upright,
motionless, as if surprised. The change was so sudden that it almost
seemed as if the duck had been metamorphosed into a hawk on the instant,
by the stroke of an invisible enchanter's wand.
The fisher of the chutes, meanwhile, was swimming straight downstream
for the broken water. Like his unfortunate little cousin, the teal, he,
too, had felt the fear of death smitten into his heart, and was heading
desperately for the refuge of some dark overhanging bank, deep-fringed
with weeds, where the dreadful eye of the hawk should not discern him.
The hawk sat upon the branch and watched his quarry swimming beneath the
surface. At last the swimmer came to the broken water and plunged into
it. Almost instantly he was forced to the top. With only head and wings
above the mad smother, he flapped onward frantically, beating down the
foam about him. Straightway the hawk glided from his perch and darted
after him.
The drake sank again instantly. But at this point in the rapids it was
impossible for him to stay down. As long as his body was completely
submerged, it was at the mercy of the twisting and tortured currents,
which rolled him over and over, in spite of his swimming craft. He would
have been drowned, the breath battered clean out of him, in half a
minute more, had he maintained the hopelessly unequal struggle. Once
more he half emerged, filled his gasping lungs, and pounded onward
desperately, half flying and half swimming. It was a mongrel method of
progression, in which he was singularly expert.
Immediately over his outstretched gleaming head flew the hawk. But this
frequenter of the heights of air, for all his savage valor, was troubled
at the leaping waves and the tossing foam of these mad rapids. He did
not understand them. They seemed to jump up at him, and he dare not let
his sweeping wing-tips touch them, lest they should seize and drag him
down. As he flew, his down-reaching, clutching talons were not half a
yard above the fugitive's head. Where the waves for an instant sank,
they came closer,--but not quite within grasping reach. The marauder
from the upper air was waiting till his quarry should reach less
turbulent waters.
A few yards further on, the torrent fell seething over a long ledge into
a pool of brief quiet. Immediately beyond the lip of the ledge the hawk
lifted his wings high over his back and struck downward, so that his
talons went deep into the water. But water was all they clutched. The
wily drake had plunged with the plunge of the fall itself, and was now
darting onward at a safe depth. The hawk followed, his wing-tips now
almost brushing the water. The pool was, perhaps, a hundred yards in
length. Then the combined flow of the North Fork and the Ottanoonsis
broke once more into turbulence, and once more the desperate swimmer was
forced to the surface. But, as before, the leaping waves of the rapids
were too much for his pursuer, and he was able to flap his way onward in
a cloud of foam, while doom hung low above his head, yet hesitated to
strike.
The odds, however, were now laid heavily against the fugitive. The hawk,
embittered by the loss of his first quarry, had become as dogged in
pursuit as a weasel, not to be shaken off or evaded or deceived. The
rapids would presently come to an end. Then, in the still water, unless
he should chance upon a hiding-place, the drake would soon be forced to
come to the top for breath, and those throttling talons would instantly
close upon his neck. But the antic forest Fates, wearied of the simple
routine of the wilderness, had decreed an altogether novel intervention,
and were giggling in their cloaks of ancient moss.
Beside the pool at the foot of the rapids stood a fisherman, casting for
trout amid the whirling foam-clusters. He had three flies on his cast,
and, because in these waters there was always the chance of hooking a
grilse, he was using heavy tackle. His flies, as befitted these
amber-brown, tumultuous northern streams, were large and conspicuous--a
Parmacheenie Belle for the tail fly, with a Montreal and a Red Hackle
for the drops.
Far across the pool, where an eddy sucked sullenly at the froth-patches
as they swung by, the fisherman had just had a heavy rise. He had struck
too quickly, deceived by the swirl of the current, and missed his fish.
He had a lot of line out, and the place was none too free for a long
cast; but he was impatient to drop his flies again on the spot where the
big fish was feeding.
Just as he made his cast, he saw the fleeing drake and the pursuing hawk
come round the bend. He saw the frantic fugitive dive over the ledge and
disappear. He saw the great hawk swoop savagely. He tried to check his
cast, but it was too late. A remark unsuitable to the printed page
exploded upon his lips, and he saw his leader settle deliberately over
the long beating wings, the tail-fly coiling about them like a
whip-lash.
The last drop-fly, as luck would have it, caught just in the corner of
the hawk's angrily open beak, hooking itself firmly. At the sudden sharp
sting of it, the great bird turned his head and noticed, for the first
time, the fisherman standing on the bank. At the same moment he felt the
light restraint of the almost invisible leader upon his wings, where the
other two flies had affixed themselves. He shot up into the air, and
heard a sharp, disconcerting rattle as the taut line raced from the
reel. The drag upon his beak and the light check upon his wings were
inexplicable to him, and appalling. Drake, teal, hunger and wrath were
all alike forgotten, and he beat upwards with a rush that made the reel
fairly screech its indignant protest. For a moment the fisherman,
bewildered, tried to play him like a salmon. Then the leader parted from
the line. The fisherman reeled in the limp coils, and the worried hawk
flew off with the flies.
The drake, unrealizing that the dreadful chase was done, sped onward
beneath the surface till he could go without breath no longer. Then he
came up among some arrowweeds, lifted his head beneath the shelter of
one of the broad-barbed leaves, and floated there quivering. For a good
ten minutes he waited, moveless, with the patience of the wild things.
Then his terror faded, appetite once more began to invite his attention,
and he took note of a minnow flickering slowly over the sun-flecked mud
below him. He dived and caught it, came to the surface and swallowed it.
Much refreshed, he looked about him. There was no such thing as a hawk
in sight. Some way up the shore there was a man at the water's edge,
fishing. The drake was suspicious of men, though he did not greatly fear
them, as he and his rank-fleshed tribe were not interesting to the
hunters. He rose noisily into the air, made a detour over the tree-tops
to avoid the fisherman, and flew back to his dead branch overhanging the
amber rush of the chutes.
The Assault of Wings
In his high place in the unclouded blue, a thousand feet above the
topmost pinnacle of Bald Face, the great white-headed eagle stared
downward toward the far-off reek and roofs of the busy town by the sea.
It was not often that his eyes troubled themselves to turn in that
direction, for all his concern was with the inland lakes and
watercourses which linked themselves tranquilly about the spreading
bases of Old Bald Face, and he hated the acrid smokeclouds which rose
from the chimneys of the town. But this morning his gaze--that
miraculous vision which could scrutinize a rabbit or an ailing lamb at a
distance when our best eyes would hardly discern an elephant--had been
caught by an apparition which amazed and disconcerted him.
Flying in wide circles above a green field on the outskirts of the city
was a gigantic bird, in form and stature quite unlike any other bird
that the great eagle had ever seen. As it passed over a red brick
cottage at one corner of the field, quite blotting it from view for an
instant, he got an impression of its incredible size, and felt, with a
pang of angry dread, that his own stately dimensions would have seemed
little better than a sparrow's beside it. Its vast white wings were
square at the tip, and of the same width from tip to base--an
inexplicable innovation in wings--and he noted with apprehension that
they flew without any motion at all.
He himself, soaring in the blue heights as he was, flew _almost_ without
motion of the wings, riding by subtle poise and balance on the thrust of
the light aerial draught. But even now, the breeze failing, he had to
recover his impetus by a rushing descent. He tipped his snowy head and
shoulders forward, and the air hissed sharply in the tense web of the
hinder edges of his wings as he swept down the viewless slopes of air,
turning upwards again after a swoop of a hundred yards or so, which was
as nothing at that height. A slow stroke or two restored him to his
former level, with impetus to spare for his splendid effortless
soaring. But, meanwhile, he had not taken his eyes for a moment from
that portentous shape circling so mysteriously above the green field on
the outskirts of the town, and he had not seen it either swoop or mount
or once flap its flat-spread wings.
Moved from his accustomed arrogant indifference, the eagle flew over
toward the town to get a better look at this disquieting phenomenon. On
nearer approach he made out that the monstrous square-winged bird was
ridden by one of those man-creatures whom he so hated and
despised--ridden as he had seen, with wonder and scorn, that horses
permitted themselves to be. The man sat in a hollow in the strange
bird's back, between its wings, and seemed to master and guide it even
as he would master and guide a horse.
The eagle hated man, because man was the only creature that had ever
given him, hitherto, the loathed sensation of fear. He despised man
because he saw the proud and cunning creature chained to earth,
compelled to crawl upon earth's surface even as a sheep or a woodchuck.
But now, if man were able to ride the dwellers of the air, there would
be no escaping his tyranny.
The eagle had been conscious for some moments of a curious humming roar
in his ears, the source of which was not at once obvious to him.
Suddenly he realized that it was the noise of the blunt-winged monster's
flight. The realization daunted him. How was it possible that such an
awful sound should come from those unmoving wings? He was inclined to
turn and fly back to the shelter of Old Bald Face, but, after a moment's
irresolution, his stout heart arose to the magnitude of the peril. He
flew onward, till soon he was directly over the field, but so high that
to the spectators around the edges of the field he was a scarcely
visible speck against the blue.
At this moment the aeroplane began to mount skyward. It scaled the air
swiftly in a steep spiral. The eagle was almost panic-stricken to
observe that even now, when mounting so directly, it did not flap its
wings, although there was no wind on which to rise. At the curious blunt
beak of the monster he discerned a sort of circle of faint haze, a
bluish blur, but this was something which did not seem to concern him,
and he made no effort to understand it. What did concern him was the
fact that the monster, with its human rider, was apparently coming up
after him. His courage and his curiosity gave way together, and he fled
back in a panic to his ledge in the recesses of Old Bald Face.