THE UNWRITTEN LAW
THIS is the law of the All-Mother, the more immovable because unwritten;
this is the law of surfeit.
Many foods there are which are wholesome, except that they have in them
a measure of poison.
For these the All-Mother has endowed the wild things' bodies with a
subtle antidote, which continues self-replenishing so long as the
containing flask is never wholly emptied. But if it so chance that in
some time of fearful stress the flask is emptied, turned upside down,
drained dry, it never more will fill. The small alembic that distils it
breaks, as a boiler bursts if it be fired while dry. Thenceforth the
toxin that it overcame has virulence and power; that food, once
wholesome, is a poison now.
[Illustration]
A "surfeit" men call this breaking of the flask; all too well is it
known. By this, unnumbered healthful foods--strawberries, ice-cream,
jam, delicate meat, eggs, yes, even simple breads can by the devastating
drain of one rash surfeit be turned into very foods of death. The poison
always was there, but the secret, neutralizing chemical is gone, the
elixir is destroyed, and by the working of the law its deadly power is
loosed. As poor second now to this lost and subtle protection, the
All-Mother endows the body with another, one of a lower kind. She makes
that food so repellent to the unwise, punished creature that he never
more desires it. She fills him with a fierce repulsion, the bodily
rejection that men call "nausea."
This is the law of surfeit. Bannertail had fallen foul of it, and Mother
Carey, loving him as she ever loves her strong ones, had meted out the
fullest measure of punishment that he, with all his strength, could bear
and yet come through alive.
[Illustration]
The Red Moon of harvest was at hand. The Graycoat family was grown, and
happy in the fulness of their lives, and Bannertail was hale and filled
with the joy of being alive, leading his family beyond old bounds,
teaching them the ways of the farther woods, showing them new foods that
the season brings. He, wise leader now, who once had been so unwise.
Then Mother Carey put him to the proof. She led, he led them farther
than they had ever gone before, to the remotest edge of the hickory
woods. On a bank half sunlit as they scampered over the leaves and down
the logs, he found a blushing, shining gnome-cap, an earth-born madcap.
Yes, the very same, for in this woods they came, though they were rare.
One whiff, one identifying sniff of that Satanic exhalation, and
Bannertail felt a horrid clutching at his throat, his lips were quickly
dripping, his belly heaved, he gave a sort of spewing, gasping sound,
and shrank back from that shining cap with eyes that bulged in hate, as
though he saw a Snake. There is no way of fully telling his bodily
revulsion. The thing that once was so alluring, was so loathsome that he
could not stand its fetid odor on the wind. And the young ones were
caught by the unspoken horror of the moment, they took it in; they got
the hate sense. They tied up that horror in their memories with that
rank and sickly smell. They turned away, Bannertail to drink in the
running brook, to partly forget in a little while, yet never quite to
forget. He was saved, the great All-Mother had saved him, which was a
good thing, but not in itself a great thing. This was the great thing,
that in that moment happened--the loathing of the earth-born fiend was
implanted in his race, and through them would go on to bless his
generations yet to be.
[Illustration]
_SQUIRREL GAMES_