Although in the open clearings it was full noon—the noon of early
September, hot and blue and golden—here in the lofty aisles of the forest
it was all cold twilight. Such light as glimmered down through the
thick-leaved tree-tops was of a mellow shadowy brown and a translucent
green, changing from the one tone to the other mysteriously as the eye
shifted its backgrounds. One tall trunk, long ago shattered and broken
off just below the crown by a stroke of lightning, stood pointing bleakly
toward a round opening in the leafy roof, reaching upward a
thin-foliaged, half-dead, gnarled and twisted arm.
In the outer shell and coarse strong bark of the stricken tree life
lingered tenaciously, but its heart was fallen to decay. Near the base of
the arm a round hole gave entrance, through the shell of live wood, to a
chamber in the hollow heart. The chamber had yet another entrance,
beneath a knot, higher up on the opposite side of the trunk. Through
these two holes filtered a dim warm light, just strong enough to show a
huddle of small, ruddy-brown, furry shapes sleeping snugly at the bottom
of the chamber.
The forest was as still and soundless as a dream, under the spell of the
noonday heat. But presently the silence was broken by the approach of
heavy footsteps, now crackling as they crunched the dry twigs, now
muffled and dull as they sank into beds of deep moss. They were plainly
human footsteps, for no other creature but man would move so crudely and
heedlessly through the forest quiet. Every one of the wild kindred, from
the bear down to the wood-mouse, would move with a furtive wariness,
desiring always to see without being seen, either intent upon some
hunting or solicitous to avoid some hunter.
Down a shadowy corridor of soaring trunks came into view two figures—a
tall heavy-shouldered lumberman, carrying an axe, and a slim boy with a
light rifle in his hand. It was the lumberman, booted and long-striding,
who made all the noise. The boy, in moccasins, stepped lightly as an
Indian, his eager blue eyes searching every nook and stump and branch as
he went, hoping at every step to surprise some secret of the furtive
wood-folk.
Near the foot of the blasted tree he stopped, looking up.
“I wonder what lives in that hole up there, Jabe?” he said.
The lumberman peered upward critically.
“Jiminy, ef that ain’t a likely-lookin’ squir’l tree!” he answered.
“Squirrel tree!” echoed the boy. “As if every tree wasn’t a squirrel
tree, wherever there’s a squirrel ’round!”
“Aye, but there’s squir’ls an’ squir’ls! You’ll see!” retorted the
woodsman; and, swinging his axe, he brought the back of it down upon the
trunk in three or four sounding strokes.
Straightway a dark little shape, appearing in the hole beneath the
branch, launched itself into the air. It looked like a leap of
desperation, as there was no tree within reach of any ordinary
quadruped’s leap. Yet the daring little shape was plainly that of a
quadruped, not of a bird. It was followed instantly, in lightning
succession, by six or seven others equally daring; and all went sailing
away, in different directions, across the mysteriously shadowed air. They
sailed on long downward slants, with legs spread wide apart and connected
on each side by furry membrane, so that they looked like some kind of
grotesque, oblong toy umbrellas broken loose in a breeze. The boy stared
after them with an exclamation of wonder and delight, trying to keep his
eye on them all at once; but in a moment they had disappeared, gaining
the shelter of other trees, and effacing themselves from view as if by
enchantment.
All but one. As the flying squirrels came aeroplaning from their rudely
assaulted citadel, the woodsman had dropped his axe, snatched up a bit of
stick about a foot long, and hurled it after one of the gliding figures.
Your woodsman is an unerring shot with the hurled axe, the pike-pole, or
the billet of wood; but up there, in the deceitful transparency of shadow
and glimmer, the little aeronaut was sailing with an elusive speed. The
whirling missile almost missed its mark. It just caught the outspread
furry tail, which was serving as a rudder and balancer to that
adventurous flight. The tail, tough and flexible, gave way and took no
injury. But the tiny aeroplanist, his balance rudely destroyed, plunged
headlong to the ground.
“Oh-h-h!” exclaimed the boy, with long-drawn commiseration. But, his
curiosity too strong for his pity, he raced forward with the woodsman to
capture and examine their prize.
There was no prize to be found. Both had seen the flier come to earth.
Both had marked, with expert eyes, the exact point of his fall. But there
was nothing to be seen but a softly disappearing dent in the cushion of
moss.
“Well, I’ll be—jiggered!” said the woodsman, fingering his stubbled chin
and scrutinizing the nearest tree-trunks with narrowed eyes.
“Serves us right!” said the boy. “I’m glad he’s got away. I thought you’d
killed him, Jabe!”
“Reckon I just _blowed_ him over,” responded the woodsman. “But now ye
know where they hang out, ye kin ketch one alive in a cage-trap, if ye
want to git to know somethin’ of his manners an’ customs—eh, what? When
ye’ve _killed_ one of these wild critters, after all, to my mind he ain’t
no more interestin’ than a lady’s fur boa.”
As the two man creatures disappeared down the confusing vistas of the
forest, the soft dark eyes of the flying-squirrel, disproportionately
large and prominent, with a vagueness of depth which made them seem all
pupil, stared after them mildly from the refuge of a high crotched
branch. Unhurt, even unbewildered by his dizzy plunge, he had bounced
aside with a motion too swift for his enemies’ eyes to follow, and placed
a tree-trunk between himself and peril. Darting up the trunk like a
fleeting brown streak, he had been safely hidden before his enemies
reached the tree.
In his high retreat, the flying-squirrel did not crouch as a red squirrel
would have done, but lay stretched and spread out as if flattened by
violence upon the bark. His color, of an obscure warm brown, faintly
smudged with a darker tone, blended so perfectly with the hue of the bark
that, if the eye once looked away, it could with difficulty detect him
again. A member of a little-known branch of the flying-squirrel
family,—the flying-squirrel of Eastern Canada,—he was nearly a foot in
length, some two inches longer than the common flying-squirrel, from whom
he differed also very sharply in color, his retiring brown and gray being
in marked contrast to the buff and drab and pure white of his lesser but
more famous cousin. Buff and white would have been so conspicuous a
livery in the brown Canadian forests that his ancestors would never have
survived to produce him had they not managed to change that livery in
time to baffle their foes.
The flying-squirrel, unlike the impudent and irrepressible red squirrel,
had a great capacity for patience, as well as for prudence. Moreover, he
had no great liking for activity as long as the sun was up, his enormous
eyes adapting him for the dim life of the night. For some minutes after
the sound of footsteps had died away in the distance, he lay unstirring
on his branch, his ears alert to the tiniest forest whisper, his nostrils
quivering as they interrogated every subtlest forest scent. All at once
his wide eyes grew even wider, and a sort of spasm of apprehension
flitted across their liquid depths. What was that faint, dry, rustling
sound—the mere ghost of a whisper—on the bark of the trunk behind him?
Nervously he turned his head. There was nothing in sight, but the ghostly
sound continued, so slight, so thin, that even his fine ear could hardly
be sure of its reality.
The little watcher remained moveless as a knot on the bark. The creeping
whisper softly mounted the tree. Then at last a flat, brownish-black,
vicious head came into view around the trunk, and arrested itself,
swaying softly, just over the base of the branch. It was the head of a
large black snake.
The snake’s eyes, dull yet deadly, met those of the squirrel and held
them. For a moment the black head was rigid. Then it began to sway again,
with a slow hypnotizing motion. The eyes—shallow, opaque, venomous—seemed
to draw closer together as they concentrated their energy upon the mildly
glowing orbs of their intended victim. At last the waving head began to
draw near, the black body undulating stealthily into view behind it.
Nearer, nearer it came, the flat hard eyes never shifting, till it seemed
that one lightning lunge would have enabled it to fix its fangs in the
fascinated victim’s neck. But at this moment the little aeronaut whisked
half round, flirted his broad fluff of a tail straight out behind him,
and sailed quietly from his perch on a long gradual swoop, which brought
him back to the base of the tree from which he had originally started.
The hypnotizing experiment of the black snake had been, in this instance,
an unqualified failure. Angry and disappointed, the snake withdrew to
hunt mice or other easier game. The flying-squirrel ran cheerfully up the
tree, slipped back into the hole, and curled himself up complacently to
sleep away the rest of the daylight. Of his companions, two had already
stealthily returned, and the others crept in soon afterwards quite
unruffled.
That night moonrise came to the forest close on the vanishing trail of
the sunset. A long white ray, flooding in through the tree-tops, lit up
the hole beneath the branch of the blasted trunk. Without haste the
flying-squirrels came one after another to their high doorway and
launched themselves upon the still air. One might have thought that their
first purpose would have been to forage for a meal; but, instead of that,
they seemed like children just let out of school, bent on nothing so much
as relieving their pent-up spirits. Probably they were not hungry. It was
the season of abundance, and they had, perhaps, ample store of green nuts
and tender young pine-cones within their hollow tree. In any case, they
knew the forest was full of good provender for them, the forest-floor
covered with berries for when they should choose to descend and gather
them. There was no hurry. It was good to amuse themselves in their high
and dim-lit world.
Their favorite game seemed to be to criss-cross each other, as it were,
in their long gliding flights, which, beginning near the top of one tree
would end generally near the foot of another, as far away as the impetus
of their start and their descent would allow. Thence they would dart
nimbly to the top again, sometimes with a restrained _chirr_ of mirth, to
repeat the gay adventure. Sometimes, when their descent was steep, they
would rise again toward the end of it, by altering, probably, the angle
of their membranes or side-planes. As they flashed spectrally past each
other, touched suddenly by some white finger of moonlight, their play was
like an aerial game of tag. But they never actually “tagged” each other.
Most likely they took good care to avoid any approach to contact in mid
flight, which might have meant a fall to the dangerous forest-floor, the
haunt of prowling foxes, skunks, and weasels.
But though their chief dread seemed to be of the far dark ground and its
perils, there were perils, too, for the little aeronauts even in their
leafy heights. In the midst of their leaping, gliding, and sailing, there
came a hollow cry across the tree-tops. It was a melancholy sound but
full of menace—a _whoo-hoo-hoo-oo-oo_—repeated at long, uncertain,
nerve-racking intervals. It sounded remote enough from the hollow tree,
but at its first note the game of the furry aeroplanists came to a stop.
One would have said that there were no such things as flying-squirrels in
the Quah-Davic woods.
After some fifteen or twenty minutes of sepulchral summons and answer,
the calling of the owls ceased. In perhaps fifteen minutes more, the
flying-squirrels seemed to make up their minds that the danger had
removed to some other part of the forest. Then, at first timorously, but
soon with all their former merriment and zest, the tree-top aeronauts
resumed their game.
The game was at its height. Down a long aisle of the forest the high moon
poured a flood of unobstructed light. Athwart this lane of brilliance the
flying-squirrels went passing and repassing. On a sudden, as one of them
was sailing gayly across, it was as if a fragment of black cloud fell
upon him noiselessly out of the whiteness, blotting him out. Somewhere in
the cloud burned two terrible round eyes, and beneath it reached forth
two sets of rending talons. The life of the gay little glider was
clutched out of him with a strangled scream, and the cloudy shape, its
eyes blazing coldly, drifted away into the shadows with its prey.
The game came to a full stop—for that night at the least. As luck would
have it, the squirrel who had been through the adventures of the
morning—the encounter with Jabe Smith’s missile and the interview with
that would-be mesmerizer, the black snake—had been sailing just below his
unhappy playmate at the moment of the great wood-owl’s swoop. He had seen
the whole tragedy, and it made him distrustful of aeroplaning for the
moment. He decided to emulate his cousin the red squirrel, and trust to
running and climbing, to the solid trunks and branches, rather than to
the treacheries of the air. After hiding in a crotch till his
palpitations had somewhat calmed down, he descended the tree in a
cautious search for food. He had had his fill of nuts and cones; he
wanted juicier fare. He went on all the way down to earth, his appetite
set on the ripening partridge-berries.
Now, as it chanced, the boy had taken to heart that suggestion of the
lumberman’s in regard to the cage-trap. His appetite for knowledge of all
the wild creatures of the woods was insatiable. He was eager to know the
flying-squirrels more intimately than he could know them from the plates
and text of his natural history books. His idea was to catch one, keep it
a while, win its confidence, study it, and then give it back its freedom
before it had time to forget how to take care of itself among the perils
of freedom. That very afternoon, therefore, he had returned to the
“squirr’l tree,” carrying a spacious trap-cage of strong wire—a cage of
two chambers, in which he had already kept with success both red
squirrels and ground squirrels. The second or inner chamber was the
regulation revolving wire cylinder, designed to give the little captive
such strenuous exercise as it might crave, and to divert its thoughts
from its captivity. The door was a wide trap, opening upwards and
outwards, and shutting with a powerful spring at the least touch upon the
trigger within. Beyond the trigger the boy had fixed a varied bait,
cunningly calculated to the vagaries of the squirrel appetite. There were
sweet nut-kernels securely tied down, a fragrant piece of apple, a bit of
green corn-ear, and a crisp morsel of bacon rind.
The boy had no means of knowing whether the flying-squirrel was like his
red cousin or not in the matter of a taste for meat. But he felt sure
that some one or another of these scented dainties would prove too much
for the prudence of anything that called itself a squirrel. Near the
great trunk of the blasted tree he found another giant, half fallen, its
top still upheld by the embrace of its stout-armed neighbors. The long
gradual incline he rightly judged to be a favorite pathway of the
flying-squirrels as they raced upwards from their excursions to the
forest floor. So, upon the slope of the trunk, some six or seven feet
above the earth, he fixed his trap securely, and left it to show what it
could do.
For a long time, however, it did nothing. It was a new strange thing on
the familiar path, and all the little people of the wild avoided it. Till
near the first gray of dawn not a flying-squirrel had dared approach its
neighborhood.
The forest powers seem to have sometimes a mischievous trick of selecting
some particular one of their children for special trial, of following up
that one for days with a kind of persecution. So it came about that the
same adventurous little aeronant who had fallen foul of both Jabe Smith
and the black snake, and had so narrowly escaped the pounce of the brown
owl, had the misfortune to be sighted, as he was feasting on the
partridge-berries not far from the sloping tree, by a weasel which had
had bad luck in his night’s hunting.
Sinuous as a snake and swifter, his cruel eyes glowing like points of
live flame, the long yellow form of the weasel darted forward. With a
faint squeak of terror the squirrel sprang for the sloping trunk, his own
hope being to get high enough to launch himself into the air. But the
flying-squirrel is less nimble on his feet than the red or the gray. He
was much slower than the weasel. He gained the sloping trunk, indeed, but
the foe was almost at his heels. It looked as if the doom of the wild was
upon him. By a frantic effort, however, he evaded for a second the
weasel’s rush. Desperately he raced up the well-known trail. He came to
the cage. There was no time to go over it or to go around it. He hurled
himself straight in and brought up with a shock against the wires of the
partition. At the same instant there was a loud click behind him. The
door snapped down tight. And the weasel, unable to check himself, bumped
his nose against the wires with a violence that brought the blood and
stirred his hunting lust to a madness of fury.
Both pursuer and pursued recovered themselves in a second. It was well
that the boy, an exact, methodical soul, had lashed the cage securely to
the trunk, otherwise the mad assaults of the weasel would have torn it
loose and dashed it to the ground. He was all over it and around it every
moment, flinging himself viciously this way and that in the effort to
catch his quarry against the wires. And the quaking squirrel at the same
time dashed himself frantically from side to side, keeping ever as much
space as possible between himself and those relentless blood-seeking
jaws. He had not the wit or the coolness to crouch in the centre of the
cage, where he might securely have chattered derision at his foe. He had
not yet, perhaps, even arrived at the truth that his prison was his
citadel, his tower of safety. But at length, as luck would have it, in
one of his desperate bounds, he shot himself clean through the round
opening into the second chamber, and, before he knew it, he was racing at
a breathless pace in the vain effort to climb the wall of the spinning
cylinder.
For a moment or two the weasel was nonplussed. He stopped short and
stared at these amazing tactics of his victim, his thin lips wrinkled
back from his pointed jaw and muzzle in a sort of soundless snarl. Then,
apparently coming to the conclusion that such a farce had gone on long
enough, he sprang with all his strength upon the top of the cylinder, in
the direction in which it was spinning. It was a great mistake. The
cylinder did not stop. It spun on and shot him off indignantly,
head-first, into space, and brought him with a stupefying thud upon the
roots of the nearest tree. Very sore and disconcerted, he picked himself
up, gave one look at the spinning mystery, and slunk off behind the tree,
in a humbleness of spirit such as few of his irrepressible tribe have
ever known.
All but paralyzed by exhaustion and by the utter extremity of his fear,
the flying-squirrel stopped racing with his wheel. With all four
hand-like paws, and even with his teeth, he clung to the wires, till
presently his weight brought it to a standstill. Then he crept through
the exit and crouched, trembling and panting, on the floor of the outer
chamber. Here, soon after sun-up, the boy, who was an early riser, found
him. He was puzzled, was the boy, over that smear of blood on the cage
door; but, finding no clew to the events of the night, he was obliged to
lay the matter away among the many insoluble enigmas wherewith the
ancient wood so continually and so mockingly provokes the invader of its
intimacies.