The deep copper-red channel of the little tidal river wound inland
through the wide yellowish levels of the salt marsh. Along each side of
the channel, between the waving fringes of the grass and the line of
usual high tide, ran a margin of pale yellowish-brown sand-flats, baked
and seamed with sun cracks, scurfed with wavy deposits of salt, and
spotted with meagre tufts of sea-green samphire, goose-tongue, and
sea-rosemary. Just at the edge of the grass-fringe an old post,
weather-beaten and time-eaten, stood up a solitary sentinel over the
waste, reminder of a time when this point of the river had been a little
haven for fishing-boats—a haven long since filled up by the caprice of
the inexorable silt.
Some forty or fifty paces straight back from the mouldering post, a low
spur of upland, darkly wooded with spruce and fir, jutted out into the
yellow-green sea of grass. Off to the left, some hundred yards or so
away, ran a line of round-topped dike, with a few stiff mullein stalks
fringing its crest. Beyond the dike, and long ago reclaimed by it from
the sea, lay basking in the sun the vast expanses of sweet-grass meadow,
blue-green with timothy, clover, and vetch, and hummed over by
innumerable golden-belted bumblebees. Through this sweet meadow wound the
slow curves of a placid and brimming fresh-water stream, joining itself
at last to the parent river through an _abat-d’eaux_ in the dike, whose
sunken valves protected it completely from the fluctuation of the tides.
The dividing line between the tall, waving, yellow salt grass and the
naked mud-flat was as sharp as if cut by a diker’s spade, and it was
fringed by a close brown tangle of grass-roots, which seemed to feel
outward over the baked mud and then curl back upon themselves in
apprehension. Close to the foot of the mouldering post, where this fringe
half encircled it, appeared suddenly a pointed brownish head, with tiny
ears and a pair of little, bright, bead-like eyes set very close
together. The head was thrust cautiously forth from the mouth of a narrow
tunnel under the grass-roots. The sharp, overhung muzzle, with nostrils
dilating and quivering, interrogated the perilous outer air; the bead
eyes searched the sky, the grass-fringe, the baking open of the flat.
There was no danger in sight; but just in front, some five or six feet
distant, a gaudy caterpillar on some bold venture bent was making his
slow way across the scurfed mud, from one goose-tongue tuft to another.
The pointed head shot swiftly forth from the tunnel, followed by a
ruddy-brown body—straight out across the bright naked space, and back
again, like a darting shuttle, into the hole, and the too rashly
adventuring caterpillar had disappeared.
A little way back from the edge of the flats a mottled brown marsh-hawk
was flying hither and thither. His wings were shorter and broader than
those of most members of his swift marauding race, and he flew flapping
almost like a crow, instead of gliding, skimming, and soaring, after the
manner of his more aristocratic kindred. He flew close above the swaying
grass-tops, his head thrust downward, and his hard, unwinking eyes peered
fiercely down between the ranked coarse stems of the “broad-leaf” grass.
He quartered the meadow section by section, closely and methodically as a
well-handled setter. Once he dropped straight downward into the grass
abruptly, as if he had been shot; and when, an instant later, he arose
again, with a great buffeting of the grass-tops, he was clutching some
tiny gray object in his talons. Had one been near enough to see, it would
have proved, probably, to be a young shrew. Whatever it was, it was too
small to be worth carrying off to his high perch on the dead pine-tree
beyond the ridge of the uplands. He flew with it to the open crest of the
dike close by, where he devoured it in savage gulps. Then, having wiped
his beak on the hard sod, he dropped off the dike and resumed his
assiduous quartering of the salt grass.
About this time the little brown, pointed head with the bead eyes
reappeared in the mouth of the tunnel by the foot of the post. Everything
seemed safe. The samphire and the goose-tongue tufts, palely glimmering
in the sun, were full of salt-loving, heat-loving insects. Warily the
ruddy-brown body behind the pointed head slipped forth from the tunnel,
and darted to the nearest tuft, where it began nosing sharply and
snapping up small game.
The marsh-mouse was a sturdy figure, about six inches in length, with a
dull chestnut-brown back sprinkled with black hairs shading downwards
through warm gray to a delicate fawn-colored belly. Its shoulders and
short forelegs were heavily moulded, showing the digger of tunnels, and
its forepaws moved with the swift precise facility of hands. The tiny
ears were set flat and tight to the head, and the broad-based skull over
the triangular muzzle gave an impression of pugnacious courage, very
unlike that of the wood-mouse or the house-mouse. This expression was
more than justified by the fact, for the marsh-mouse, confident in his
punishing little jaws and distrustful of his agility, had a dangerous
propensity to stay and fight when he ought to be running away. It was a
propensity which, owing to the abundance of his enemies, would have led
speedily to the extermination of his race but for the amazing and
unremitting fecundity which dwelt in his blood.
For all his courage, however, there were some foes which he had no
inclination to meet and face—even he, one of the biggest and strongest of
his kind. As he glanced aside from his nosing in the samphire tufts, he
caught sight of a broad black splotch of shadow sweeping up the baked
surface of the flat at terrific speed.
He did not look up; he had no need to. Only too well he knew what was
casting that sinister shadow. Though agility was not supposed to be his
strong point, his movement, as he shot across the open from the samphire
tuft to the mouth of his tunnel, was almost too quick to follow. He
gained the root-fringed door just in time. As his frantic, cringing hind
quarters disappeared into the hole, the great talons of the pouncing hawk
plunged into the root-fringe, closing and clutching so savagely that the
mouth of the tunnel was obliterated. Grass-roots, however, were not what
those rending talons wanted, and the great hawk, rising angrily, flapped
off to the other side of the dike.
Within the tunnel the brown mouse ran on desperately, as if he felt those
fatal talons still reaching after him. The tunnel was not quite in
darkness, for here and there a gleam of light came filtering through the
roots which formed its roof, and here and there a round opening gave
access to the yellow-green world among the big stiff grass-stalks. The
floor was smooth from the feet and teeth of countless other marsh-mice,
water-voles, and marsh-shrews. To right and left went branching off
innumerable side-tunnels and galleries, an apparently inextricable maze.
But the brown mouse raced straight on, back from the waterside, deep into
the heart of the marsh, anxious only to put himself as far as possible
from the scene of his horrid adventure.
Running thus suddenly, he bumped hard into a little wayfarer who was
journeying in the opposite direction. The tunnel was so narrow that only
by the use of a certain circumspection and consideration could two
travellers pass each other comfortably. Now the stranger was a
mole-shrew, much smaller than the brown mouse, but of a temper as
unpleasant as that of a mad buffalo. That the mouse should come butting
into him in that rude fashion was an indignity not to be tolerated.
Gnashing his long, chisel-like teeth, he grappled blindly, and rent the
brown mouse’s ear to ribbons. But this was a mistake on his part, a
distinct error of judgment. The brown mouse was no slim timorous
barn-mouse or field-mouse, no slow and clumsy mole. He was a fighter and
with strength to back his pugnacity. He caught the angry shrew by the
neck, bit him mercilessly, shook him limp, trod him under foot, and raced
on. Not until he reached his snug nest in the burrow at the foot of the
dike did he quite regain his equanimity.
Just about this time there came a succession of heavy southwest gales,
which piled up the water into the funnel-like head of the bay, dammed
back the rivers, and brought a series of high tides. Tides as high were
quite unseasonable, and caught the swarming little tunnel runners of the
salt marsh unprepared. As the first flood came lapping up over the
sun-baked flats, covering the samphire tufts, setting all awash the
root-fringes of the grass, and sliding noiselessly into the tunnels,
there was a wild scurrying, and a faint elusive clamor of squeaks came
murmuring thinly up through the grass. Myriads of brown-and-orange
grasshoppers, beetles black and green and blue and red, with here and
there a sleek grub, here and there a furry caterpillar, began to climb
the long, stiff grass-stalks. The battalions of the mice and voles and
shrews, popping up indignantly through the skylight of the tunnels, swept
unanimously toward the barrier of the dike. Every one of them knew quite
well that to the sweet meadows beyond the dike the peril of the tide
could not pursue them.
The big brown marsh-mouse, as it chanced, was asleep at the bottom of his
burrow. Stealing up between the grass-stems, a chill douche slipped in
upon him. Startled and choking, he darted up the steep slope of his
gallery, and out into the wet turmoil. He was an expert swimmer, but he
liked to choose his own time for the exercise of his skill. This was not
one of the times. For one second he sat up upon his sturdy little
haunches, squeaking angrily and surveying the excitement. Then, shaking
his fur free of the few drops of water which clung to it in tiny
globules, he joined the scurrying migrant throngs which were swarming
through the dike.
Along the dike-top the migrants were running the gantlet with death. With
the first invasion of the tide across the flats, all the marsh-hawks of
the neighborhood—some four or five—had gathered to the hunt, knowing well
just what the flood would do for them. Also many crows had come. At
intervals along the crest of the dike stood the hawks, with wings half
spread, screaming excitedly, clutching at their victims and devouring
them with unlordly haste. Two, already gorged, were flapping away heavily
toward the forest-clad inland ridges, carrying limp trophies in their
talons. As for the crows, there were perhaps two score of them, all
cawing noisily, flying low along the crest of the dike, and alighting
from time to time to stab savagely with their dagger-like beaks.
The big brown marsh-mouse, wise with experience and many escapes, took
this all in as he mounted the slope of the dike. Marking a hawk just
above him, he doubled nimbly back, jumping over half a dozen blindly
blundering fugitives. Some ten feet farther along he again ascended. As
he came over the crest, in a mob of shrews and smaller mice, he saw a
glossy crow just dropping upon him. The eyes of the crow, impish and
malevolent, were fixed, not upon him, but upon a small shrew close at his
side. Imagining himself, however, the object of attack, the brown mouse
fell into a rage. Darting upward, he fixed his long teeth in the black
marauder’s thigh, just above the leg joint, and pulled him down into the
scurrying stream of rodents. With a squeak of rage and alarm, the crow
struck out savagely. His murderous beak stabbed this way and that in the
crowd, laying out more than one soft-bodied victim, while his strong
black wings beat others into confusion and panic. But in the throng
swarming over the dike at that point were many more of the marsh-mice and
the shrews, all savage in temper. They leaped upon the crow, ran over and
bore down the buffeting wings, and tore vengefully at the hard iridescent
armor of close-laid feathers which shielded their foe from any fatal
wounds. In spite of this disadvantage, they were wearing him out by sheer
fury and weight of numbers, when the other crows came darkly to his
assistance. In a moment he was liberated, and the dike-top strewn with
gashed furry bodies. Bleeding and bedraggled, his eyes blazing with
wrath, he sprang into the air and flapped away to the uplands to recover
his composure in the seclusion of some dense pine-top. The brown
marsh-mouse, the cause of his discomfiture, darted out from under his
wing as he arose, and slipped over the edge of the dike with no worse
injury than a red gash across the haunches. Having scored such a triumph
over so redoubtable an enemy as the crow, he was not troubled by his
wound; but discretion led him to plunge instantly into the deep green
shelter of the grass.
Here in the sweet meadow, where the timothy and clover stood much closer
than did the coarse stalks of the “broad-leaf” in the salt meadow, the
runways of the mice were not, as a rule, underground. They were made by
gnawing off the stems close to the firm surface of the sod. The stems on
each side, tending to be pressed together, formed a perfect roof to the
narrow tunnels, which pierced the grass in every direction and formed a
seemingly insoluble labyrinth. The brown mouse, however, knew his way
very well through the soft green light, flecked with specks and streaks
of pollen-dusty sunshine. The tunnels were swarming with travellers; but
beyond nipping them on the haunches now and then, to make them get out of
his way or move faster, he paid no attention to them. At last he came to
the edge of the stream, and to a burrow beneath the roots of a wild-rose
thicket which fringed the water.
This burrow the brown mouse had once inhabited. He felt it was his. Just
now it was occupied by an irritable little mole-shrew; but the brown
mouse, strong in the sense of ownership, proceeded to take possession.
The outraged shrew put up a bitter fight, but in vain. With squeaks and
blood the eviction was accomplished, and the brown mouse established
himself complacently in the burrow.
After a few days the southwest gales blew themselves out, the tides drew
back within their ordinary summer bounds, and most of the refugees
returned to their old haunts among the “broad-leaf.” But the brown mouse
elected to remain in his burrow beside the rose-thicket. His taste had
turned to the clover and timothy stalks, and the meadow was alive with
brown crickets and toothsome, big, green grasshoppers. Moreover, in the
heat of late July, he loved to swim in the bland waters of the stream,
keeping close along shore, under the shadow of the long grass and the
overhanging roses, and avoiding the dense patches of weed which might
give shelter to the darting pickerel. His burrow was roomy and gave
accommodation to a silken-furred brown mate, who set herself without
delay to the duty of replenishing the diminished population of the
marsh-mice.
In spite of foraging hawks, foxes, weasels, and minks, in spite of
calamities, swift and frequent, overtaking this, that, and another of the
innumerable kindred of the mice, the summer hours passed benignly over
the burrow by the rose-thicket. Then, one sultry scented morning, there
came a change. The deep quiet of the meadow went to pieces in blatant
clamor. Loud-voiced men and snorting, trampling, clanking horses came to
the edge of the grass, and with them two strange scarlet machines which
clattered as they moved.
One of these scarlet monsters, dragged by its horses, swerved off toward
the farther side of the meadow. The other started straight down through
the deep grass along the edge of the stream. Into the grass, belly-deep,
the big horses plunged, breasting it like the sea. Instantly the scarlet
machine, which was ridden by a man, set up a new cry. It was a harsh,
strident, terrifying cry, as if a million twanging locusts had found one
voice. Before it, to the amazed horror of all the furry, scurrying
grass-dwellers, the grass went down flat in long ranks. The peril of the
floods was as nothing to this loud uncomprehended peril. Marsh-mice,
water-voles, shrews, with here and there a foraging musk-rat, here and
there a murderous and ravaging weasel, all fled frantically before it. A
few, a very few, fled too late. These never knew what happened to them,
for great darting knives, dancing unseen through the grass close to the
earth, caught them and slew them.
The high cry of the deadly scarlet thing, however, gave warning fair and
sufficient. As the big brown marsh-mouse heard it approaching, he dived
straight to the bottom of his burrow and lay there trembling. His
companion, on the other hand, holding different views as to the proper
place of safety, darted from the burrow, wriggled through the thorny
stems of the rose-thicket, and plunged into the water, where she hid
herself close under the opposite bank. The noise and the darting knives
glided almost over the mouth of the burrow, and the thumping heart of the
brown mouse almost burst itself with terror. But they passed. Slowly they
marched away. And when they had grown comparatively faint, far down at
the foot of the meadow, beside the dike, the brown mouse, recovering
himself, dared to peep forth. He was astonished to see a long breadth of
grass lying prostrate, with bewildered bumblebees and grasshoppers
striving to extricate themselves from the ruins. Having a valiant heart
and a quick eye for opportunity, he sprang out of his hole and began
pouncing on the confused and helpless insects. This, for a few minutes,
was a profitable game, and a safe one, too, for the strident noise, with
the presence of the men and horses, had driven hawks and crows to a
discreet distance. But presently the cry of the scarlet thing, which had
turned at the dike and was moving straight up the middle of the meadow,
began to grow loud again, and the brown mouse whisked back into his
burrow.
All through the time of the haying the meadow-folk lived in a turmoil of
alarm and change. At first, under the heavy prostrate ranks of the slain
grass, they ran bewildered but secure, for their foes could not easily
detect them. For another day they were comparatively safe under the long
scented lines of the dying “windrows,” full of grasshoppers and wilted
clover-heads. When the windrows were tossed together into innumerable
pointed hay-cocks, they crowded beneath the ephemeral shelter, to be
rudely bared next day to the blinding sun as the cocks were pitched into
the rumbling hay-carts. It was a day of horrors, this, to the meadow
kindreds, for a yellow Irish terrier, following the hay-makers, would run
with wild yelpings under the lifted cocks, and slay the little people by
the hundred. But as for the brown mouse, all this time he and his
temporary mate dwelt secure, keeping to their burrow and to the barren
but safe tunnels which they had driven amid the roots of the
rose-thicket.
When the hay was gone—part of it carted away to upland barns, part built
cunningly into high conical stacks—the meadow-dwellers found that they
had fallen on evil times. The naked meadow, all bare close stubble, open
to the eyes of hawk and crow by day, and of the still more deadly owl by
night, had become their worst foe. Some drew back to the fringes of the
uplands. Some colonized along the winding edges of the stream. Some
returned across the dike to the salt meadow, where the broad-leaf grass
was not yet ripe for mowing; while the remnant huddled precariously under
the bases of the stacks, an easy prey for every foraging weasel. In a
little while, however, the short thick herbage of the aftermath thrust
its head above the stubble. Then new tunnels were run, and life for the
scurrying and squeaking meadow-folk once more began to offer its normal
attractions. It was now more perilously insecure, however, for the herds
of cattle turned to pasture on the aftermath kept it eaten down; and the
shrewd crows learned that their beaks could pierce the fragile and
too-open roofs of the tunnels.
At last the snow came, the deep snow and the hard cold, enemy to almost
all the other kindred of the wild, but friendly to the mouse-folk. The
snow, some two feet deep all over the meadows, over the dikes, and to the
eating edges of the tides, gave them a perfect shelter, and was exactly
suited to the driving of their tunnels. Food was abundant, because they
could subsist very well on the nutritious root-stalks of the grass. And
none of their enemies could get at them except when they chose to seek
the upper air. In the daytime they kept to the glimmering blue light of
the tunnels, but at night they would slip forth and play about the firm
surface of the snow. It was then that they suffered, for though the hawks
were gone, and the crows asleep, the icy winter night was alive with
owls; and foxes, weasels, and minks would come prowling hungrily down
from the uplands. The owls were the worst peril by far—marsh-owls,
barn-owls, the darting little Acadian owls, swift as the sparrow-hawk;
and now and then the terror of the winter wilds, the giant snowy owl of
the North, driven down by storm and famine from his bleak Arctic wastes.
The revels of the mouse-folk over their dim-lit playgrounds were varied
with incessant tragedy. But the memories of the little people,
fortunately, were short. Their perilous diversions went on unchecked,
while their furry battalions thinned amazingly.
But through all these dangers the brown marsh-mouse went his way secure.
He kept every exit of his tunnels perfectly hidden among the thorny tips
of the wild rose-bushes, which stood up some five or six inches above the
top of the snow. The successive families which were born and grew up in
his safe burrow passed out into the maze, to be merged in the precarious
and passing legions. His first mate disappeared mysteriously, and as he
had no facilities for pressing an inquiry among the hawks or weasels, he
never knew the details of her disappearance. Her place was speedily
filled in the burrow. But to the brown mouse himself nothing happened. He
confined his nightly revels beneath the moon to the region of the
rose-thickets, and so eluded effectually the eyes and claws of the owls.
It was along toward the end of winter, however, when the brown mouse met
with his most dangerous adventure. Shunning, as he did so craftily, the
games on the open snow, he was wont to amuse himself—and incidentally
seek variations in his diet—beneath the ice of his threshold stream. An
expert swimmer and diver, almost as swift as his cousin the musk-rat or
his hereditary enemy the mink, he would swim long distances under the
water, finding fresh bits of lily-root, tiny clams, water-snails,
half-torpid beetles, and many kinds of larvæ. As the stream had been high
at the time of freezing, and had afterwards shrunken in its channel,
letting the ice down with it, there were many air-chambers along the
brink, between ice-roof and water surface; and slanting downward to the
nearest of these he had dug himself a tunnel from the roots of his
thicket. Even here, to be sure, there were perils for him. There was one
big mink which loved to hunt along these secret and dim-lit air-chambers,
taking long swims beneath the ice. But he was an autocrat, and kept all
rival minks away from his range; so the wise brown mouse knew that as
long as he kept a sharp enough lookout against that foe, he was secure in
the air-chambers. Then, in the stream itself, there was always the peril
of the great pike, which had its lair at the bottom of the deep pool down
by the _abat-d’eaux_. The brown mouse had seen him but once—a long,
straight, gray-green, shadowy shape in the distance—but that one sight
gave him counsels of caution. He never forgot, when in the water, to keep
watch for that great darting shadow.
One day, when the brown mouse had swum far downstream, and was hurrying
back home, he was alarmed by loud sounds on the surface of the ice, a
little below his back door. Some one with an axe was chopping a hole in
the ice. The brown mouse swam away downstream again as fast as he could,
and the jarring noise of the axe-strokes, carried by the ice and by the
water, seemed to follow him with terrifying concussions. Hiding himself
in a remote air-chamber, he waited for the noises to cease. Then, with
mingled trepidation and caution, he swam upstream again.
As he neared home, he saw a round beam of light pouring downward to the
stream’s bed through a hole in the ice. In the midst of this light there
hung, moving softly to the slow current, a big lump of fat pork. The
brown mouse did not know it was pork, but he knew at once it was
something very good to eat. Very cautiously he swam up to investigate it.
There seemed to be no reason why he should not nibble it. In fact, he was
just going to nibble it, when, just a few feet farther upstream, those
terrifying sounds began again. The brown mouse took them as a warning,
and fled back downstream in a panic.
In a few minutes the noise stopped, and the courage of the brown mouse
returned. As he swam once more homeward, firmly resolved that he would
taste that delectable mystery on his way, a chill in his spine made him
remember the great pike, and look back.
There _was_ the great pike, a long dreadful shadow, gliding up behind
him.
The brown mouse, as we have said, was a wonderful swimmer. He swam now as
he had never swum before—a brown streak cleaving the dim-lit current; and
as he went tiny water-bubbles, formed by the air pressed out from under
his fur, flew up till they broke against the ice. But, with all his
speed, the great pike swam faster, and was slowly overtaking him. Just as
he passed that strange dangling lump of pork, he realized that this was a
race which he could not win. The entrance to his burrow was still too
distant. But he remembered a tiny air-chamber under the bank close by. It
had no exit. It was so small that he might not find room there to haul
himself clear out of the water, beyond reach of his enemy’s jaws, but he
had no choice, and in frantic suffocating desperation he dashed for it.
Even as he turned, however, the sense of doom descended upon him. Was he
not already too late? The long awful shape of the great fish was close
upon him. With a convulsive effort that almost burst his heart, he gained
the air-chamber, scrambled half-way out of the water, and then, in that
cramped space, turned at bay, game to the last gasp.
To his amazement, the great pike was not at his tail. Instead, he was
still some three or four feet away, out there just in the descending beam
of light from the hole in the ice. The mysterious lump of pork had
disappeared, but the gasping brown mouse did not notice that. His
attention was engrossed in the amazing and terrifying performances of the
pike. The long gray-green body was darting this way and that, in and out
of the beam of light, but never any great space out of it. The great jaws
shook savagely from side to side, and then the mouse saw that from
between them a slender gleaming cord extended upward through the hole. A
moment more, and the pike sprang straight up, with a heavy swirl of the
water, and vanished above the ice.
It was incomprehensible; and there was something altogether appalling
about it. The brown mouse shivered. For several minutes he crouched there
quite still, more utterly panic-stricken than he had ever been before in
all his precarious little life. At last, with hesitation, he worked his
way up along the bank, beneath the ice, to his own tunnel, and scurried
in all haste to hide himself in the deepest corner of his burrow. And
never thereafter could he comprehend why nothing more was seen, or heard,
or rumored of the great pike.