The island was a mere sandbank off the low flat coast. Not a tree broke
its bleak levels, not even a shrub. But the long, sparse, gritty stalks
of the marsh-grass clothed it everywhere above tide-mark, and a tiny
rivulet of sweet water, flowing from a spring at its centre, drew a
riband of inland herbage and tenderer green across the harsh and sombre
yellow-gray of the grass. One would not have chosen the island as an
alluring place to set one’s habitation, yet at its seaward end, where the
changing tides were never still, stood a spacious, one-storied,
wide-verandahed cottage, with a low shed behind it. The one virtue that
this lone plot of sea-rejected sand could boast was coolness. When the
neighbor mainland would be sweltering, day and night alike, under a
breathless heat, out here on the island there was always a cool wind
blowing. Therefore a wise city dweller had appropriated the sea waif, and
built his summer home thereon, where the tonic airs might bring back the
rose to the pale cheeks of his children.
The family came to the island toward the end of June. In the first week
of September they went away, leaving every door and window of house and
shed securely shuttered, bolted or barred, against the winter’s storms. A
roomy boat, rowed by two fishermen, carried them across the half mile of
racing tides that separated them from the mainland. The elders of the
household were not sorry to get back to the distractions of the world of
men, after two months of the companionship of wind and sun and waves and
waving grass-tops. But the children went with tear-stained faces. They
were leaving behind them their household pet, the invariable comrade of
their migrations, a handsome moon-faced cat, striped like a tiger. The
animal had disappeared two days before, vanishing mysteriously from the
naked face of the island. The only reasonable explanation seemed to be
that she had been snapped up by a passing eagle.
The cat, meanwhile, was fast prisoner at the other end of the island,
hidden beneath a broken barrel and some hundredweight of drifted sand.
The old barrel, with the staves battered out on one side in some past
encounter with the tides, had stood half buried on the crest of a
sand-ridge raised by the long prevailing wind. Under its lee the cat had
found a sheltered hollow, full of sun, where she had been wont to lie
curled up for hours at a time, basking and sleeping. Meanwhile, the sand
had been steadily piling itself higher and higher behind the unstable
barrier. At last, it had piled too high, and suddenly, before a stronger
gust, the barrel had come toppling over beneath a mass of sand, burying
the sleeping cat out of sight and light; but at the same time the sound
half of the barrel had formed a safe roof to her prison, and she was
neither crushed nor smothered. When the children, in their anxious search
all over the island, came upon the mound of fine white sand, they gave it
but one careless look. They could not hear the faint cries that came at
intervals from the close darkness within. So they went away sorrowfully,
little dreaming that their friend was imprisoned almost beneath their
feet.
For three days the prisoner kept up her intermittent appeals for help. On
the third day the wind changed, and presently blew up a gale. In a few
hours it had uncovered the barrel. At one corner a tiny spot of light
appeared. Eagerly the cat stuck her paw through the hole. When she
withdrew it again, the hole was considerably enlarged. She took the hint,
and fell to scratching. At first her efforts were rather aimless; but
presently, whether by good luck or quick sagacity, she learned to make
her scratching more effective. The opening rapidly enlarged, and she
squeezed her way out.
The wind was tearing madly across the island, filled with flying sand.
The seas hurled themselves trampling up the beach, with the uproar of a
bombardment. The scourged grasses lay pallid, bowed flat in long
quivering ranks. Over the turmoil the sun stared down from a deep
unclouded blue. The cat, when she first met the full force of the gale,
was fairly blown off her feet. As soon as she could recover herself, she
crouched low and darted into the grass for shelter. But there was little
shelter there, the long stalks being held down almost level as if by an
implacable hand. Through their lashed lines, however, she sped straight
before the gale, making for the cottage at the other end of the island,
where she would find, as she fondly imagined, not only food and shelter,
but loving comfort to make her forget her terrors.
Unutterably still and desolate in the bright sunshine, and under the
howling of the wind, the house frightened her. She could not understand
the tight-closed shutters, the blind unresponding doors that would no
longer open to her anxious appeal. The wind swept her savagely across the
naked veranda. Climbing with difficulty to the dining-room window-sill,
where so often she had been let in, she clung there a few moments and
yowled heart-brokenly. Then, in a sudden panic, she jumped down and ran
to the shed. That, too, was closed. She had never seen the shed doors
closed, and could not understand it. Cautiously she crept around the
foundations, but those had been honestly and efficiently constructed.
There was no such thing as getting in that way. On every side it was
nothing but a dead face, dead and forbidding, that the old familiar house
confronted her with.
The cat had always been so coddled and pampered by the children that she
had had no need to forage for herself; but, fortunately for her now, she
had learned to hunt the marsh-mice and grass-sparrows for amusement. So
now, being ravenous from her long fast under the sand, she slunk
mournfully away from the deserted house, and crept along, under the lee
of a sand-ridge, to a little grassy hollow which she knew. Here the gale
caught only the tops of the grasses, bending but not prostrating them;
and here in the warmth and comparative calm, the furry little marsh-folk,
mice and shrews, were going about their business undisturbed. The cat,
quick and stealthy, soon caught one, and eased the ferocity of her
hunger. She caught several. And then, making her way back to the house,
she spent hours in heart-sick prowling, around it and around, sniffing
and peering, yowling piteously on threshold and window-sill, and every
now and then being blown ignominiously across the smooth naked expanse of
the veranda floor. At last, hopelessly discouraged, she curled herself up
out of the wind, beneath the children’s window, and went to sleep.
On the following day the gale died down, and the salt-grass once more
lifted its tops, full of flitting birds and small brown-and-yellow autumn
butterflies, under the golden September sun. Desolate though the island
was, it swarmed, nevertheless, with the minute busy life of the
grass-stems and the sand-flats. Mice, crickets, sand-hoppers—the cat had
no need to go hungry or unoccupied. She went all over house and shed
again, from foundation to roof and chimney-top, yowling from time to time
in a great hollow, melancholy voice that might have been heard all across
the island had there been any one to hear, and again, from time to time,
meowing in small piteous tones no bigger than a kitten’s. For hours at a
time when hunger did not drive her to the hunt, she would sit expectant
on the window-ledge, or before the door, or on the veranda steps, hoping
that at any instant door or window might open, and dear familiar voices
call her in. When she did go hunting, she hunted with peculiar ferocity,
as if to avenge herself for some great but dimly apprehended wrong.
In spite of her loneliness and grief, the life of the island prisoner
during the next two or three weeks was by no means one of hardship.
Besides her abundant food of birds and mice, she quickly learned to catch
tiny fish in the mouth of the rivulet, where salt water and fresh water
met. It was an exciting game, and she became expert at dashing the gray
tour-cod and blue-and-silver sand-lance far up the slope with a sweep of
her armed paw. But when the equinoctial storms roared down upon the
island, with furious rain and low black clouds torn to shreds, then life
became more difficult for her. Game all took to cover, where it was hard
to find—vanishing mysteriously. It was hard to get around in the drenched
and lashing grass, and, moreover, she loathed wet. Most of the time she
went hungry, sitting sullen and desolate under the lee of the house,
glaring out defiantly at the rush and battling tumult of the waves.
The storm lasted nearly ten days before it blew itself clean out. On the
eighth day the abandoned wreck of a small Nova Scotia schooner drove
ashore, battered out of all likeness to a ship. But, hulk as it was, it
had passengers of a sort. A horde of bedraggled rats got through the surf
and scurried into the hiding of the grass-roots. They promptly made
themselves at home, burrowing under the grass and beneath old half-buried
timbers, and carrying panic into the ranks of the mice and shrews. When
the storm was over, the cat had a decided surprise in her first long
hunting expedition. Something had rustled the grass heavily, and she
trailed it, expecting a particularly large fat marsh-mouse. When she
pounced and alighted upon an immense old ship’s rat, many-voyaged and
many-battled, she got badly bitten. Such an experience had never before
fallen to her lot. At first she felt so injured that she was on the point
of backing out and running away. Then her latent pugnacity awoke, and the
fire of far-off ancestors. She flung herself into the fight with a rage
that took no accounting of the wounds she got, and the struggle was soon
over. Hungry though she was, she dragged the slain rat all the way to the
house, and laid it proudly on the veranda floor before the door, as if
displaying it to the eyes of her vanished friends. For a few moments she
stood over it, waiting hopefully. Perhaps she had a wistful idea that so
splendid an offering might melt the hearts of the absent ones and
persuade them to come back. Nothing happened, however, so she sadly
dragged the prize down the steps again to her accustomed lair in the
sand, and ate it up all but the tail. Her wounds, faithfully licked, soon
healed themselves in that clean and tonic air, and after that, having
learned how to handle such big game, she no more got bitten.
During the first full moon after her abandonment, the first week in
October, the island was visited by still weather, with sharp night
frosts. The cat discovered then that it was most exciting to hunt by
night and do her sleeping in the daytime. It was a natural reversion to
the instincts of her ancestors, but it came to her as a discovery. She
found that now, under the strange whiteness of the moon, all her game was
astir, except the birds. And the birds had all fled to the mainland
during the storm, gathering for the southward flight. The blanched
grasses, she found, were now everywhere a-rustle, and everywhere vague,
spectral, little shapes went darting, with thin squeaks, across the
ghostly white sands. Also, she made the aquaintance of a new bird, which
she regarded at first uneasily, and then with vengeful wrath. This was
the brown marsh-owl, which came over from the mainland to do some autumn
mouse-hunting. There were two pairs of these big, downy-winged,
round-eyed, voracious hunters, and they did not know there was a cat on
the island.
The cat, spying one of them as it swooped soundlessly hither and thither
over the silvered grass-tops, crouched with flattened ears. With its wide
spread of wing it looked bigger than herself, and the great round face,
with hooked beak and wild staring eyes, appeared extremely formidable.
However, she was no coward, and presently, though not without reasonable
caution, she went about her hunting. Suddenly the owl caught a partial
glimpse of her in the grass, probably of her ears or head. He swooped,
and at the same instant she sprang upward to meet the assault, spitting
and growling harshly, and striking with unsheathed claws. With a frantic
flapping of his great wings, the owl checked himself and drew back into
the air, just escaping the clutch of those indignant claws. But after
that the marsh-owls were careful to give her a wide berth. They realized
that the black-striped animal, with the quick spring and the clutching
claws, was not to be interfered with. They perceived that she was some
relation of that dangerous prowler, the lynx. But if they were disturbed
by the presence on the island of so dangerous a rival as the cat, they
were amply compensated by the coming of the rats, who afforded them fine
hunting of a kind which they had never before experienced. In spite of
all this hunting, however, the furry life of the marsh-grass was so
teeming, so inexhaustible, that the depredations of cat, rats, and owls
were powerless to make more than a passing impression upon it. So the
hunting and the merrymaking went on side by side under the indifferent
moon, and the untouched swarms whom Fate passed by were as indifferent as
the moon herself to the mysterious disappearances of their fellows.
As winter drew on, with bursts of sharp cold and changing winds that
forced her to be continually changing her refuge, the cat grew more and
more unhappy. She felt her homelessness keenly. Nowhere on the whole
island could she find a nook where she might feel secure from both wind
and rain. As for the old barrel, the first cause of her misfortunes,
there was no help in that. The winds had long ago turned it completely
over, open to the sky, then drifted it full of sand and reburied it. And
in any case the cat would have been afraid to go near it again; she had
no short memory. So it came about that she alone, of all the island
dwellers, had no shelter to turn to when the real winter arrived, with
snows that smothered the grass-tops out of sight, and frosts that lined
the shore with grinding ice-cakes. The rats had their holes under the
buried fragments of wreckage; the mice and shrews had their deep warm
tunnels; the owls had nests in hollow trees far away in the forests of
the mainland. But the cat, shivering and frightened, could do nothing but
crouch against the blind walls of the unrelenting house, and let the snow
whirl itself and pile itself about her.
And now, in her misery, she found her food cut off. The mice ran secure
in their hidden runways, where the grass-roots on either side of them
gave them easy and abundant provender. The rats, too, were out of sight,
digging burrows themselves in the soft snow, in the hope of intercepting
some of the tunnels of the mice, and now and then snapping up an unwary
passer-by. The ice-fringe, crumbling and heaving under the ruthless tide,
put an end to her fishing. She would have tried to capture one of the
formidable owls, in her hunger, but the owls no longer came to the
island. They would return, no doubt, later in the season, when the snow
had hardened, and the mice had begun to come out and play on the surface,
but for the present they were following an easier chase in the deeps of
the upland forest.
When the snow had stopped falling, and the sun came out again, there fell
such keen cold as the cat had never felt before. Starving as she was, she
could not sleep, but kept ceaselessly on the prowl. This was fortunate
for her, for had she gone to sleep, without any more shelter than the
side of the house, she would never have wakened again. In her
restlessness she wandered to the farther side of the island, where, in a
somewhat sheltered and sunny recess of the shore, facing the mainland,
she found a patch of bare sand, free of ice-cakes and just uncovered by
the tide. Opening upon this recess were the tiny entrances to several of
the mouse-tunnels.
Close beside one of these holes, in the snow, the cat crouched,
quiveringly intent. For ten minutes or more she waited, never so much as
twitching a whisker. At last a mouse thrust out its little pointed head.
Not daring to give it time to change its mind or take alarm, she pounced.
The mouse, glimpsing the doom ere it fell, doubled back upon itself in
the narrow runway. Hardly realizing what she did, in her desperation the
cat plunged head and shoulders into the snow, reaching blindly after the
vanished prize. By great good luck she clutched it and held it.
It was her first meal in four bitter days.
Now she had learned a lesson. Naturally clever, and her wits sharpened by
her fierce necessities, she had grasped the idea that it was possible to
follow her prey a little way into the snow. She had not realized that the
snow was so penetrable. She had quite obliterated the door of this
particular runway, but she went on and crouched beside another. Here she
had to wait a long time before an adventurous mouse came to peer out. But
this time she showed that she had grasped her lesson effectively. It was
straight at the side of the entrance that she pounced, where instinct
told her that the body of the mouse would be. One outstretched paw thus
cut off the quarry’s retreat. Her tactics were completely successful, and
as her head went plunging into the fluffy whiteness, she felt the prize
between her paws.
Her hunger now fairly appeased, she found herself immensely excited over
this new fashion of hunting. Often before had she waited at mouse-holes,
but never had she found it possible to break down the walls and invade
the holes themselves. It was a thrilling idea. As she crept toward
another hole, a mouse scurried swiftly up the sand and darted into it.
The cat, too late to catch him before he disappeared, tried to follow
him. Scratching clumsily but hopefully, she succeeded in penetrating the
full length of her body into the snow. Of course she found no sign of the
fugitive, which was by this time racing in safety down some dim
transverse tunnel. Her eyes, mouth, whiskers, and fur full of the powdery
white particles, she backed out, much disappointed. But in that moment
she had realized that it was much warmer in there beneath the snow than
out in the stinging air. It was a second and vitally important lesson.
And though she was probably unconscious of having learned it, she
instinctively put the new lore into practice a little while later. Having
succeeded in catching yet another mouse, for which her appetite made no
immediate demand, she carried it back to the house and laid it down in
tribute on the veranda steps, while she meowed and stared hopefully at
the desolate snow-draped door. Getting no response, she carried the dead
mouse down with her to the hollow behind the drift, which had been caused
by the bulging front of the bay-window on the end of the house. Here she
curled herself up forlornly, thinking to have a wink of sleep.
But the still cold was too searching. She looked at the sloping wall of
snow beside her, and cautiously thrust her paw into it. It was very soft
and light; it seemed to offer practically no resistance. She pawed away
in an awkward fashion till she had scooped out a sort of tiny cave.
Gently she pushed herself into it, pressing back the snow on every side,
till she had room to turn around. Then turn around she did several times,
as so many dogs do in getting their beds arranged to their liking. In
this process she not only packed down the snow beneath her, but she
rounded out for herself a snug chamber with a comparatively narrow
doorway. From this snowy retreat she gazed forth with a solemn air of
possession, then went to sleep with a sense of comfort, of “homeyness,”
such as she had never before felt since the disappearance of her friends.
Having thus conquered her environment, and won herself the freedom of the
winter wild, her life, though strenuous, was no longer one of any
terrible hardship. With patience at the mouse-holes, she could catch
enough to eat, and in her snowy den she slept warm and secure. In a
little while, when a crust had formed over the surface, the mice took to
coming out at night and holding revels on the snow. Then the owls, too,
came back, and the cat, having tried to catch one, got sharply bitten and
clawed before she realized the propriety of letting it go. After this
experience she decided that owls, on the whole, were meant to be let
alone. But, for all that, she found it fine hunting out there on the
bleak, unfenced, white reaches of the snow.
Thus mistress of the situation, she found the winter slipping by without
further serious trials. Only once, toward the end of January, did Fate
send her a bad quarter of an hour. On the heels of a peculiarly bitter
cold snap, a huge white owl from the Arctic barrens came one night to the
island. The cat, taking observations from the corner of the veranda,
caught sight of him. One look was enough to assure her that this was a
very different kind of visitor from the brown marsh-owls. She slipped
inconspicuously down into her burrow, and until the great white owl went
away some twenty-four hours later, she kept herself discreetly out of
sight.
When spring came back to the island, with the nightly shrill chorus of
fluting frogs in the shallow sedgy pools, and the young grass alive with
nesting birds, the prisoner’s life became almost luxurious in its easy
abundance. But now she was once more homeless, since her snug den had
vanished with the snow. This did not matter much to her now, however, for
the weather grew warmer and more tranquil day by day, and, moreover, she
herself, in being forced back upon long latent instincts, had learned the
heedless vagrancy of the wild. Nevertheless, with all her capacity for
learning and adapting herself, she had not forgotten anything. So when,
one day in June, a crowded boat came over from the mainland, and
children’s voices, clamoring across the grass-tops, broke the desolate
silence of the island, the cat heard, and sprang up out of her sleep on
the veranda steps. For one second she stood listening intently. Then,
almost as a dog would have done, and as few of her supercilious tribe
ever condescend to do, she went racing across to the landing-place, to be
snatched up into the arms of four happy children at once, and to have her
fine fur ruffled to a state which it would cost her an hour’s assiduous
toilet to put in order.