Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: "Jaws, monstrous and wet, grabbing at him in enraged
confusion"]
THE WAY OF THE WILD
BY
F. ST. MARS
WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRY ROUNTREE
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHED IN ENGLAND UNDER THE TITLE "PINION AND PAW"
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
I GULO THE INDOMITABLE
II BLACKIE AND CO.
III UNDER THE YELLOW FLAG
IV NINE POINTS OF THE LAW
V PHARAOH
VI THE CRIPPLE
VII "SET A THIEF"----
VIII THE WHERE IS IT?
IX LAWLESS LITTLE LOVE
X THE KING'S SON
XI THE HIGHWAYMAN OF THE MARSH
XII THE FURTIVE FEUD
XIII THE STORM PIRATE
XIV WHEN NIGHTS WERE COLD
XV FATE AND THE FEARFUL
XVI THE EAGLES OF LOCH ROYAL
XVII RATEL, V.C.
XVIII THE DAY
ILLUSTRATIONS
"Jaws, monstrous and wet, grabbing at him in enraged confusion" . . .
_Frontispiece_
"The owl had lost a foot on the turn
"A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead"
"This one had simply streaked out of the night from nowhere"
"Landed full upon the dumbfounded water-vole--splash!"
"A 'silver tabby' floated among the twigs, looking for him"
"An angry eagle-owl"
"Turning over and over, in one long, sickening dive back to earth"
"That little black-headed fellow doing the stalking act upon that
python was great"
"Shooting straight upwards on the top of what appeared to have been a
submarine mine in a mild form"
"He clutched, and tore, and gulped, and gorged"
"All allowed that he was the pluckiest beast on earth"
THE WAY OF THE WILD
I
GULO THE INDOMITABLE
If his father had been a brown bear and his mother a badger, the result
in outward appearance would have been Gulo, or something very much like
him. But not all the crossing in the world could have accounted for
his character; that came straight from the Devil, his master. Gulo,
however, was not a cross. He was himself, Gulo, the wolverine, _alias_
glutton, _alias_ carcajou, _alias_ quick-hatch, _alias_ fjeldfras in
the vernacular, or, officially, _Gulo luscus_. But, by whatever name
you called him, he did not smell sweet; and his character, too, was of
a bad odor. A great man once said that he was like a bear cub with a
superadded tail; but that great man cannot have seen his face. If he
had, he would have looked for his double among the fiends on the top of
Notre Dame. There was, in fact, nothing like him on this earth, only
in a very hot place not on the earth.
He was, in short, a beast with brains that only man, and no beast,
ought to be trusted with; and he had no soul. God alone knows if love,
which softens most creatures, had ever come to Gulo; his behavior
seemed to show that it had not. Perhaps love was afraid of him. And,
upon my soul, I don't wonder.
It was not, however, a hot, but a very cold, place in the pine-forest
where Gulo stood, and the unpitying moon cast a dainty tracery through
the tasseled roof upon the new and glistening snow around him--the snow
that comes early to those parts--and the north-east wind cut like
several razors. But Gulo did not seem to care. Wrapped up in his
ragged, long, untidy, uncleanly-looking, brown-black cloak--just his
gray-sided, black fiend's face poking out--he seemed warm enough. When
he lifted one paw to scratch, one saw that the murderous, scraping,
long claws of him were nearly white; and as he set his lips in a
devilish grin, his fangs glistened white in the moonlight, too.
Verily, this was no beast--he would have taped four feet and a quarter
from tip to tip, if you had worn chain-mail and dared to measure
him--no beast, I say, to handle with white-kid ball gloves. Things
were possible from him, one felt, that were not possible of any other
living creature--awful things.
Suddenly he looked up. The branches above him had stirred uneasily, as
if an army were asleep there. And an army was--of wood-pigeons.
Thousands upon thousands of wood-pigeons were asleep above his head,
come from Heaven knows where, going to--who could tell in the end?
All at once one fell. Without apparent reason or cause, it fell. And
the wolverine, with his quick, intelligent eyes, watched it fall, from
branch to branch, turning over and over--oh! so softly--to the ground.
When he had poked his way to it--walking flat-footed, like a bear or a
railway porter--it was dead. Slain in a breath! Without a flutter,
killed! By what? By disease--diphtheria. But not here would the
terrible drama be worked out. This was but an isolated victim, first
of the thousands that would presently succumb to the fell disease far,
far over there, to the westward, hundreds of miles away, in England and
Wales, perhaps, whither they were probably bound.
But the poor starved corpse, choked to death in the end maybe, was of
no use to the wolverine. As he sniffed it he found that out. The
thing was wasted to the bones even. And turning away from it--he
suddenly "froze" in his tracks where he stood.
One of those little wandering eddies which seem to meander about a
forest in an aimless sort of way, coming from and going now hither, as
if the breeze itself were lost among the still aisles, had touched his
wet muzzle; and its touch spelt--"Man!"
If it had been the taint of ten thousand deaths it could not have
affected him more. He became a beast cast in old, old bronze, and as
hard as bronze; and when he moved, it was stiffly, and all bristly, and
on end.
Animals have no counting of time. In the wild, things happen as
swiftly as a flash of light; or, perhaps, nothing happens at all for a
night, or a day, or half a week. Therefore I do not know exactly how
long that wolverine was encircling that scent, and pinning it down to a
certain spot--himself unseen. All animals, almost, can do that, but
none, not even the lynx or the wild cat, so well as the wolverine. He
is the one mammal that, in the wild, is a name only--a name to conjure
with.
He found, in the end, that there was no man; but there _had_ been. He
found--showing himself again now--that a man--a hunter, a trapper, one
after fur--had made himself here a _cache_, a store under the earth;
and--well, the wolverine's great, bear-like claws seemed made for
digging.
He dug--and, be sure, if there had been any danger there he would have
known it. He dug like a North-Country miner, with swiftness and
precision, stopping every now and again to sit back on his haunches,
and, with humped shoulders, stare--scowl, I mean--round in his
lowering, low-browed fashion.
Once a bull-elk, nearly a six-footer, but he loomed large as an
elephant, came clacking past between the ranked tree-boles, stopping a
moment to straddle a sapling and browse; while the wolverine, sitting
motionless and wide-legged, watched him. Once a lynx, with its
eternal, set grin, floated by, half-seen, half-guessed, as if a wisp of
wood mist had broken loose and was floating about. Once a fox,
somewhere in the utter silence of the forest depths, barked a hoarse,
sharp, malicious sound; and once, hoarser still and very hollowly, a
great horned owl hooted with disconcerting suddenness. (The scream of
a rabbit followed these two, but whether fox or owl had been in at that
killing the wolverine never knew.) Twice a wood-hare turning now to
match the whiteness of its surroundings, finicked up one of the still,
silent forest lanes towards him, stopped, faced half-round, sat
"frozen" for a fraction, and vanished as if it were a puff of
wind-caught snow. (And, really, one had no idea till now that the
always apparently lifeless forest could have been so full of life in
the dark hours.)
But all these things made no difference to the wolverine, to Gulo,
though he "froze" with habitual care to watch them--for your wild
creature rarely takes chances. Details must never be overlooked in the
wild. He dug on, and in digging came right to the _cache_, roofed and
anchored all down, safe beyond any invasion, with tree-trunks.
And--and, mark you, not being able to pull tree-trunks out of the
ground, and being too large to squeeze between them, he gnawed through
one! Gnawed through it, he did, and came down to the bazaar below.
So far, he had been only beast. Now we see why I said he had more
brains than were good for any animal except man.
He bit through the canvas, or whatever it was that protected the
_cached_ articles. He got his head inside. He felt about
purposefully, and backed out, dragging a trap with him. With it he
removed into the inky shadows, and it was never found again.
He returned. He thrust his head in a second time, got hold of
something, and backed out. It was another trap, and with it he
vanished also; and it, too, was never found. He returned, and went,
and a third trap went with him.
The fourth investigation revealed an ax. It he partly buried. The
fifth yielded a bag of flour, which he tore up and scattered all over
the place. The sixth inroad produced a haunch of venison, off which he
dined. The seventh showed another haunch, and this he buried somewhere
unseen in the shades. The eighth overhaul gave up some rope, in which
he nearly got himself entangled, and which he finally carried away,
bitten and frayed past use. The ninth search rewarded him with tea,
which he scattered, and bacon, which he buried.
What he could not drag out, he scattered. What he failed to remove, he
defiled. And, at last, when he had made of the place, not an orderly
_cache_, but a third-rate _débâcle_, he sauntered, always slouching,
always grossly untidy, hump-backed, stooping, low-headed, and
droop-tailed, shabbily unrespectable, out into the night, and the
darkness of the night, under the trees.
By the time day dawned he was as if he never had been--a memory, no
more. Heaven knows where he was!
Gulo appeared quite suddenly and very early, for him, next afternoon,
beside some tangled brush on the edge of a clearing. He was sitting
up, almost bolt-upright, and he was shading his eyes with his forepaws.
A man could not have done more. And, in fact, he did not look like an
animal at all, but like some diabolically uncouth dwarf of the woods.
A squirrel was telling him, from a branch near by, just what everybody
thought of his disgraceful appearance; and two willow-grouse were
clucking at him from some hazel-tops; whilst a raven, black as coal
against the white of the woods, jabbed in gruff and very rude remarks
from time to time.
But Gulo was taking no notice of them. He was used to attentions of
that kind; it was a little compliment--of hate--they all paid him. He
was looking persistently down the ranked, narrowing perspective of the
buttressed forest glade to where it faded in the blue-gray mist,
southward, as if he expected something to come from there. Something
was coming from there now; and there had been a faint, uneasy sort of
whisper in that direction for some time. Now it was unmistakable.
A cow-elk, first of the wary ones to move on alarm, came trotting by,
her Roman nose held well out; a red-deer hind, galloping lightly like
some gigantic hare, her big ears turned astern; a wolf, head up,
hackles alift, alternately loping and pivoting, to listen and look
back, a wild reindeer, trotting heavily, but far more quickly than he
seemed to be--all these passed, now on one side, now on the other,
often only glimpses between the tree-boles, while the wolverine sat up
and shaded his eyes with his paws. Something was moving those beasts,
those haunters of the forest, and no little thing either. Something?
What?
Very softly down the glade runs a waiting, watching shade,
And the whisper spreads and widens far and near;
And the sweat is on thy brow, for he passes even now--
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear.
Down came Gulo in that grim silence which was, except for his domestic
arguments, characteristic of the beast, and trotted to a pool hard by.
The pool was spring-fed, and covered, as to every dead leaf and stone,
with fine green moss of incomparable softness. He drank swiftly and
long, then flung about with a half-insolent, half-aggressive wave of
his tail, and set off at a rolling, clumsy, shuffling shamble.
At ordinary times that deceiving gait would have left nearly everything
behind, but this afternoon it was different. Gulo had barely shed the
shelter of the dotted thickets before he realized, and one saw, the
fact. He broke his trot. He began to plunge. Nevertheless, he got
along. There was pace, of a sort. Certainly there was much effort.
He would have outdistanced you or me easily in no time, but it was not
you or I that came, and who could tell how fast that something might
travel?
The trouble was the snow--that was the rub, and a very big and serious
rub, too, for him. Now, if the snow had been a little less it would
not have mattered--a little more, and he could have run easily along
the hard crust of it; but it was as it was, only about two feet, just
enough to retard him, and no more. And it is then, when the snow is
like that, just above a couple of feet deep, that man can overtake
friend wolverine--if he knows the way. Most men don't. On that he
trusted. At any other time--but this was not any other time.
Sound carries a long way in those still parts, and as he hurried Gulo
heard, far, far behind in the forest, the faint, distant whir of a
cock-capercailzie--the feathered giant of the woods--rising. It was
only a whisper, almost indistinguishable to our ears, but enough, quite
enough, for him. Taken in conjunction with the mysterious shifting of
the elk and the red deer and the reindeer and the wolf, it was more
than enough. He increased his pace, and for the first time fear shone
in his eyes--it was for the first time, too, in his life, I think.
A lynx passed him, bounding along on enormous, furry legs. It looked
all legs, and as it turned its grinning countenance to look at him he
cursed it fluently, with a sudden savage growl, envious, perhaps, of
its long, springing hindlegs. Something, too--the same something--must
have moved the lynx, and Gulo shifted the faster for the knowledge.
Half-an-hour passed, an hour slid by, and all the time Gulo kicked the
miles behind him, with that dogged persistency that was part of his
character. Nothing had passed him for quite a while, and he was all
alone in the utterly still, silent forest and the snow, pad-pad-padding
along like a moving, squat machine rather than a beast.
At last he stopped, and, spinning round, sat up. A gray-blue haze,
like the color on a wood-pigeon, was creeping over everything, except
in the west, where the sky held a faint, luminous, pinky tinge that
foretold frost. It was very cold, and the snow, which had never quite
left off, was falling now only in single, big, wandering flakes. The
silence was almost terrifying.
Then, as Gulo sat up, from far away, but not quite so far away, his
rounded ears, almost buried in fur, caught faintly--very, very
faintly--a sound that brought him down on all fours, and sent him away
again at a gallop with a strange new light burning in his little,
wide-set eyes. It was the unmistakable sound of a horse
sneezing--once. Gulo did not wait to hear if it sneezed twice. He was
gone in an instant. Man, it seemed, had not been long in answering
that challenge of the _cache_ escapade.
After that there was no such thing as time at all, only an everlasting
succession of iron-hard tree-trunks sliding by, and shadows--they ran
when they saw him, some of them, or gathered to stare with eyes that
glinted--dancing past. The moon came and hung itself up in the
heavens, mocking him with a pitiless, stark glare. (He would have
given his right forepaw for a black night and a blinding snowstorm.)
It almost seemed as if they were all laughing at him, Gulo the dreaded,
the hated hater, because it was his turn at last, who had so freely
dealt in it, to know fear.
Hours passed certainly, hours upon hours, and still, his breath coming
quickly and less easily now with every mile, Gulo stuck to the job of
putting the landscape behind him with that grim pertinacity of his that
was almost fine.
At last the trees stopped abruptly, and he was heading, straighter than
crows fly, across a plain. The plain undulated a little, like a sea, a
dead sea, of spotless white, with nothing alive upon it--only his
hunched, slouching, untidy, squat form and his shadow, "pacing" him.
At the top of the highest undulation he stopped, and glowered back
along the trail.
Ahead, the forest, starting again, showed as a black band a quarter of
an inch high. Behind, the forest he had already left lay dwarfed in a
ruled, serried line. But that was not all. Something was moving out
upon the spotless plain of snow, something which appeared to be no more
than crawling, ant-like, but was really traveling very fast. It looked
like a smudged dot, nothing more; but it was a horse, really, galloping
hard, with a light sleigh, and a man in it, behind. The horse had no
bells, and it was not a reindeer as usual. Pace was wanted here, and
the snow was not deep enough to impede the horse, who possessed the
required speed under such conditions.
The horse had been trotting along the trail, till it came to the place
where Gulo had looked back and heard the sneeze, and knew he was being
followed. Then it had started to gallop, and, with ears back and teeth
showing, had never ceased to gallop. This, apparently, was not the
first wolverine that horse had trailed. It seemed to have a personal
grudge against the whole fell clan of wolverine, and to be bent upon
trampling Gulo to death.
Gulo watched it for about one quarter of a second. Then he quitted,
and the speed he had put up previously was nothing to that which he
showed now--uselessly. And, far behind him, the man in the sleigh drew
out his rifle from under the fur rugs. He judged that the time had
about come. The end was very near.
But he judged wrong. Gulo made the wood at length. With eyes of dull
red, and breath coming in short, rending sobs, he got in among the
trees. He did it, though the feat seemed impossible, for the trees had
been so very far away. Got in among the trees--yes, but dead-beat,
and--to what end? To be "treed" ignominiously and calmly shot down,
picked off like a squirrel on a larch-pole. That was all. And that
was the orthodox end, the end the man took for granted.
In a few minutes the horse was in the forest too, was close behind
Gulo. In spite of the muffling effect of snow, his expectant ears
could hear the quadruple thud of the galloping hoofs, and--
Hup! Whuff! Biff-biff! Grrrrrr! Grr-ur-ururrh! Grrrr-urr!
It had all happened quick as a flash of light. A huge, furry, reeking
mass rising right in the wolverine's path from behind a tree, towering
over him, almost mountainous to his eyes, like the very shape of doom!
Himself hurling sideways, and rolling over and over, snarling, to
prevent the crowning disaster of collision with this terrible portent!
A blow, two blows, with enormous paws whose claws gleamed like skewers,
whistling half-an-inch above his ducked head! Jaws, monstrous and wet,
grabbing at him in enraged confusion, and rumblings deep down in the
inside of the thing that ran cold lightning-sparks all up his spine.
That was what Gulo saw and heard.
The wolverine rolled, clawing and biting, three times, and without a
pause sprang to his feet again, and leapt madly clear, stumbled on a
hidden tree-root, rolled over again twice, and up, and hurled,
literally with his last gasp and effort, headlong through the air
behind a tree-bole, where he remained all asprawl and motionless,
except for his heaving sides, too utterly done at last for _any_ terror
to move him.
There followed instantly a horse's wild snort; another; a shout; the
crack of a rifle cutting the silence as a knife cuts a taut string;
another crack; an awful, hoarse growl; the furious thudding of horse's
hoofs stampeding and growing fainter and fainter; and an appalling
series of receding, short, coughing, terrifying, grunting roars. Then
silence and utter stillness only, and the cold, calm moon staring down
over all.
Gulo picked himself up after a bit, and slouched round the tree to
investigate. He found tracks there, and blood; and the tracks were the
biggest footprints of a bear--a brown bear--that he had ever come
across, and I suppose that he must have sniffed at a few in his time.
Presumably the man had fired at the bear when the startled horse shied.
Presumably, too, the bear was hit. He had gone straight away in the
track of horse and man, anyway, and--he had saved the wolverine's life,
after, with paw and teeth, doing his best to end it. Possibly he had
been disturbed in the process of making his winter home.
Gulo lay low, or hunted very furtively, after that for some time, until
it was little less dark in the east than it had been, and the gaunt
tree-trunks were standing out a fraction from the general gloom. The
moon had apparently nearly burnt itself out. Still, it yet appeared to
be night.
Gulo was a long way out of his own hunting-district, and guessed that
it was about time for him to get himself out of sight. He had a
passionate hatred of the day, by the way, even beyond most night
hunters.
On the way he smelt out and dug up a grouse beneath the snow.
Dawn found him, or, rather, failed to find him, hidden under a tangled
mass that was part windfall, part brush-wood, and part snow. The place
had belonged to a fox the night before, and that red worthy returned
soon after dawn. He thrust an inquiring sharp muzzle inside, took one
sniff, and, with every hair alift, retired in haste, without waiting to
hear the villainous growl that followed him. The smell was enough for
him--a most calamitous stink.
It snowed all that day, and things grew quieter and quieter, except in
the tree-tops, where the wind spoke viciously between its teeth. When
Gulo came out that evening, he had to dig part of the way, and he
viewed a still and silent, white world, under a sky like the lid of a
lead box, very low down. He stood higher against the tree-trunks than
he had done the night before, and, though he did not know it, was safe
from any horse, for the snow was quite deep. The cold was awful, but
it did not seem to trouble him, as he slouched slowly southward.
There appeared to be nothing alive at all throughout this white land,
but you must never trust to that in the wild. Things there are very
rarely what they seem. For instance, Gulo came into a clearing, dim
under the night sky, though it would never be dark that night. To the
ear and the eye that clearing was as empty as a swept room. To Gulo's
nose it was not, and he was just about to crouch and execute a stalk,
when half the snow seemed to get up and run away. The runners were
wood-hares. They had "frozen" stiff on the alarm from their sentries.
But it was not Gulo who had caused them to depart. Him, behind a tree,
they had not spotted. Something remained--something that moved. And
Gulo saw it when it moved--not before. It was an ermine, a stoat in
winter dress, white as driven snow. Then it caught sight of Gulo, or,
more likely, the gleam of his eyes, and departed also.
Gulo slouched on, head down, back humped, tail low, a most
dejected-looking, out-at-heels tramp of the wilderness.
Once he came upon a wild cat laying scientific siege to a party of
grouse. The grouse were nowhere to be seen; nor was the wild cat,
after Gulo announced his intention to break his neutrality. Gulo knew
where the grouse were. He dug down into the snow, and came upon a
tunnel. He dug farther, and came upon other tunnels, round and clean,
in the snow. All the tunnels smelt of grouse, but devil a grouse could
he find. He had come a bit early. It was as yet barely night, and he
should have waited till later, when they would be more asleep.
However, he dug on along the tunnels, driving the grouse before him.
And then a strange thing happened. About three yards ahead of him the
snow burst--burst, I say, like a six-inch shell, upwards. There was a
terrific commotion, a wild, whirring, whirling smother, a cloud of
white, and away went five birds, upon heavily beating wings, into the
gathering gloom. Gulo went away, too, growling deep down inside of,
and to, himself.
He was hungry, was Gulo. Indeed, there did not seem to be many times
when he was not hungry. Also, being angry--not even a wild animal
likes failure--he was seeking a sacrifice; but he had crossed the
plain, which the night before had been as a nightmare desert to him,
and the moon was up before his chance came.
He crossed the trail of the reindeer. He did not know anything about
those reindeer, mark you, whether they were wild or semi-tame; and _I_
do not know, though _he_ may have done, how old the trail was. It was
sufficient for him that they _were_ reindeer, and that they had
traveled in the general direction that he wanted to go. For the
rest--he had the patience, perhaps more than the patience, of a cat,
the determination of a bulldog, and the nose of a bloodhound. He
trailed those reindeer the better part of that night, and most of the
time it snowed, and part of the time it snowed hard.
By the time a pale, frozen dawn crept weakly over the forest tree-tops
Gulo must have been well up on the trail of that herd, and he had
certainly traveled an astonishing way. He had dug up one lemming--a
sort of square-ended relation of the rat, with an abbreviated tail--and
pounced upon one pigmy owl, scarce as large as a thrush, which he did
not seem to relish much--perhaps owl is an acquired taste--before he
turned a wild cat out of its lair--to the accompaniment of a whole
young riot of spitting and swearing--and curled up for the day.
He was hungry when he went to sleep. Also, it was snowing then. When
he woke up it was almost dark, and snowing worse than ever. If it
could have been colder, it was.
While he cleaned himself Gulo took stock of the outside prospect, so
far as the white curtain allowed to sight, and by scent a good deal
that it did not. This without appearing outside the den, you
understand. And if there had been any enemy in hiding, waiting for him
outside, he would have discovered the fact then. He had many enemies,
and no friends, had Gulo. All that he received from all whom he met
was hate, but he gave back more than he got. In the lucid terms of the
vernacular, he "was a hard un, if you like."
Nothing and nobody saw the wolverine leave that lair that was not his.
He must have chosen one blinding squall of snow for the purpose, and
was half a mile away, still on the track of the reindeer, before he
showed himself--shuffling along as usual, a ragged, hard-bitten
ruffian. And three hours later he came up with his prey.
Gulo knew it, but nobody else could have done. There were just the
straight trees ahead, and all around the eternal white, frozen silence,
and the snow falling softly over everything; but Gulo was as certain
that there was the herd close ahead as he was that he was ravenous.
And thereafter Gulo got to work, the peculiar work, a special devilish
genius for which appears to be given to the wolverine.
He ceased to exist. At least, nothing of him was seen, not a tail, not
an eye-gleam. Yet during the next two hours he learnt everything,
private and public, there was to be learnt. Also, he had been over the
surroundings almost to a yard. Nothing could have escaped him. No
detail of risk and danger, of the chance of being seen even, had been
overlooked; for he was a master at his craft, the greatest master in
the wild, perhaps. The wolf? My dear sirs, the wolf was an innocent
suckling cub beside Gulo, look you, and his brain and his cunning were
not the brain and the cunning of a beast at all, but of a devil.
When, after a very long time, he reappeared upon his original track, it
was as a dark blotch, indistinguishable from a dozen other dark blots
of moon-shadow, creeping forward belly-flat in the snow. This
belly-creep, hugging always every available inch of cover, he kept up
till he came to a big clearing, and--there were the reindeer. At
least, there was one reindeer, a doe, standing with her back towards
him--a quite young doe. The rest were half-hidden in the snow, which
they had trampled into a maze of paths in and out about the clearing,
which was, in fact, what is called their "yard."
A minute of tense silence followed after Gulo had got as close as he
could without being seen. Then he rushed.
The reindeer swung half-round, gave one snort, and a great bound. But
Gulo had covered half the intervening space before she knew, and when
she bounded it was with him hanging on to her.
Followed instantly a wild upspringing of snorting beasts, and a mad,
senseless stampede of floundering deer all round and about the
clearing--a fearful mix-up, somewhere in the midst of which,
half-hidden by flying, finely powdered snow, Gulo did his prey horribly
to death.
There was something ghastly about this murder, for the deer was so big,
and Gulo comparatively small. The fearful work of his jaws and his
immense strength seemed wrong somehow, and out of all proportion to his
size. This remarkable power of his jaws had that sinister
disproportion only paralleled by the power of the jaws of a hyena;
indeed, his teeth very much resembled a hyena's teeth.
With the deer rushing all around him, Gulo fed, ravenously and
horribly, but not for long. A new light smoldered in his eyes now as
he lifted his carmine snout, and one saw that, for the moment, the
beast was mad, crazed with the lust of killing, seeing red, and blinded
by blood.
Then the massacre began. It was not a hunt, because each deer,
thinking only of itself, feared to break from the trodden mazy path of
the "yard," and risk the slow, helpless, plunging progress necessary in
the deep snow. Wherefore panic took them all over again, and they
dashed, often colliding, generally hindering each other, hither and
thither, up and down the paths of the "yard" with the hopeless,
helpless, senseless, blind abandon of sheep. The result was a shambles.
This part we skip. Probably--nay, certainly--Nature knows best, and is
quite well aware what she is up to, and it is perhaps not meant that we
should put her in the limelight in her grisly moods. Suffice it to say
that Gulo seemed to stop at length, simply because even he could not
"see red" forever, and with exhaustion returned sense, and with
sense--in his case--in-born caution. He removed, leaving a certain
number of reindeer bleeding upon the ground. Some of them were dead.
In an hour dawn would be conspiring to show him up before the world,
and he was not a beast sweet to look upon at that moment--indeed, at
any moment, but less so now.
Now, it is surprising how far a wolverine can shift his clumsy-looking
body over snow in an hour, especially if he has reasons. This one had
good reasons, and he was no fool. He knew quite well the kind of
little hell he had made for himself behind there, and he did not stay
to let the snow cover him. He traveled as if he were a machine and
knew no fatigue; and the end of that journey was a hole in a hollow
among rocks.
Dawn was throwing a wan light upon all things when he thrust his short,
sharp muzzle inside that hole, to be met by a positively hair-raising
volley of rasping, vicious growls.
He promptly ripped out a string of ferocious, dry, harsh growls in
return, and for half-a-minute the air became full of growls, horrible
and blood-curdling, each answering each.
Then he lurched in over the threshold, and coolly dodged a thick paw,
with tearing white claws, that whipped at him with a round-arm stroke
out of the pitch-darkness. The stroke was repeated, scraping, but in
nowise hurting his matted coat, as he rose on his hindlegs and threw
himself upon the striker.
Followed a hectic thirty seconds of simply diabolical noises, while the
two rolled upon the ground, grappling fiendishly in the darkness. Then
they parted, got up, growled one final roll of fury at each other, fang
to fang, and, curling up, went to sleep. But it was nothing, only the
quite usual greeting between Gulo and his wife. They were a sweet
couple.
There appeared to be no movement, or any least sign of awakening, on
the part of either of the couple between that moment and sometime in
the afternoon, when, so far as one could see, Gulo suddenly rolled
straight from deep sleep out on to the snow, and away without a sound,
at his indescribable shamble and at top speed.
Mrs. Gulo executed precisely the same amazing maneuver, and at exactly
the same moment, as far as could be seen, on the other side, and
shuffled off into the forest. They gave no explanation for so doing.
They said never a word--nothing. One moment they were curled up,
asleep; the next they had gone, scampered, apparently into the land of
the spirits, and were no more. Nor did there seem to be any reason for
this extraordinary conduct except--except---- Well, it is true that a
willow-grouse, white as the snowy branch he sat upon, _did_ start
clucking somewhere in the dim tree regiments, a snipe did come
whistling sadly over the tree-tops, and a raven, jet against the white,
did flap up, barking sharply, above the pointed pine-tops; but that was
nothing--to us. To the wolverines it was everything, a whole wireless
message in the universal code of the wild, and they had read it _in
their sleep_. Through their slumbers it had spelt into their brains,
and instantly snapped into action that wonderful, faultless machinery
that moved them to speed as if automatically.
Then the chase began, grim, steady, relentless, dogged--the chase of
death, the battle of endurance.
A pause followed after the vanishing of the hated wolverines. A crow
lifted on rounded vans, marking their departure, and it was seen. A
blackcock launched from a high tree with a whir and a bluster like an
aeroplane, showing their course, and it was noted. An eagle climbed
heavily and ponderously over the low curtain of the snow mist, pointing
their way, and it was followed. All the wild, all the world, seemed to
be against the wolverines. The brigands were afoot by day. The scouts
were marking their trail.
Then a lynx, moving with great bounds on his huge swathed paws, shot
past between the iron-hard tree-boles; a fox followed, scudding like
the wind on the frozen crest; a hare, white as a waste wraith, flashed
by, swift as a racing white cloud-shadow; a goshawk screamed, and drew
a straight streaking line across a glade. And then came the men, side
by side, deadly dumb, with set faces, the pale sun glinting coldly
cruel upon the snaky, lean barrels of their slung rifles, moving with
steady, fleet, giant strides on their immense spidery ski that were
eleven feet long, which whispered ghostily among the silent aisles of
Nature's cathedral of a thousand columns. The Brothers were on the
death-trail of Gulo at last; the terrible, dreaded Brothers, who could
overtake a full-grown wolf in under thirty minutes on ski, and whose
single bullet spelt certain death. Now for it; now for the fight. Now
for the great test of the "star" wild outlaw against the "star" human
hunters--at last. The reindeer were to be avenged.
Then Time took the bit of silence between his teeth and seconds became
hours, and minutes generations.
No sound made the wolverines as they rolled along in Indian file,
except for the soft whisper of the snow underfoot.
No noise encompassed the Brothers as they sped swiftly side by side
over the glittering white carpet, save for the slither of the snow
under their weight.
All the wild seemed to be standing still, holding its breath, looking
on, spell-bound; and save for the occasional crash of a collapsing
snow-laden branch, sounding magnified as in a cave, all the forest
about there was as still as death.
Half-an-hour passed, and Gulo flung his head around, glancing over his
shoulder a little uneasily, but with never a trace of fear in his
bloodshot eyes. Then he grunted, and the two fell apart silently and
instantly, gradually getting farther and farther from each other on a
diverging course, till his wife faded out among the trees. But never
for an instant did either of them check that tireless, deceptive,
clumsy, rolling slouch, that slid the trees behind, as telegraph-poles
slide behind the express carriage window.
Half-an-hour passed, and one of the Brothers, peering up and along the
trail a little anxiously, saw the forking of the line ahead. Then he
grunted, and the two promptly separated without a word, gradually
increasing the distance between them on the widening fork till they
were lost to each other among the marshaled trunks. But never for an
instant did they relax that swift, ghostly glide on the wonderful ski,
that slid the snow underfoot as a racing motor spins over the ruts.
An hour passed. Sweat was breaking out in beads upon the faces of the
Brothers, now miles apart, but both going in the same general direction
over the endless wastes of snow, and upon their faces was beginning to
creep the look of that pain that strong men unbeaten feel who see a
beating in sight; but never for a moment did they slacken their swift,
mysterious glide.
An hour passed. Foam began to fleck the evilly up-lifted lips
glistening back to the glistening fangs of the wolverines, now miles
apart, but still heading in the same general line, and upon their faces
began to set a look of fiends under torture; but never for a moment did
they check their indescribable shuffling slouch.
After that all was a nightmare, blurred and horrible, in which endless
processions of trees passed dimly, interspersed with aching blanks of
dazzling white that blinded the starting eyes, and man and beast
stumbled more than once as they sobbed along, forcing each leg forward
by sheer will alone.
At last, on the summit of a hog-backed, bristling ridge, Gulo stopped
and looked back, scowling and peering under his low brows. Beneath
him, far away, the valley lay like a white tablecloth, all dotted with
green pawns, and the pawns were trees. But he was not looking for
them. His keen eyes were searching for movement, and he saw it after a
bit, a dot that crept, and crept, and crept, and--_stopped_!
Gulo sat up, shading his eyes against the watery sun with his forepaws,
watching as perhaps he had never watched in his life before.
For a long, long while, it seemed to him, that dot remained there
motionless, far, far away down in the valley, and then at length,
slowly, so slowly that at first the movement was not perceptible, it
turned about and began to creep away--creep, creep, creep away by the
trail it had come.
Gulo watched it till it was out of sight, fading round a bend of the
hills into a dark, dotted blur that was woods. Then he dropped on all
fours, and breathed one great, big, long, deep breath. That dot was
the one of the Brothers that had been hunting him.
And almost at the same moment, five miles away, his wife had just
succeeded in swimming a swift and ice-choked river. She was standing
on the bank, watching another dot emerge into the lone landscape, and
that dot was the other one of the Brothers.
They had failed to avenge the reindeer, and the wolverines were safe.
Safe? Bah! Wild creatures are never safe. Nature knows better than
that, since by safety comes degeneration.
There was a warning--an instant's rustling hissing in the air
above--less than an instant's. But that was all, and for the first
time in his life--perhaps because he was tired, fagged--Gulo failed to
take it. And you must never fail to take a warning if you are a wild
creature, you know! There are no excuses in Nature.
Retribution was swift. Gulo yelled aloud--and he was a dumb beast,
too, as a rule, but I guess the pain was excruciating--as a hooked
stiletto, it appeared, stabbed through fur, through skin, deep down
through flesh, right into his back, clutching, gripping vise-like.
Another stiletto, hooked, too, worse than the first one, beat at his
skull, tore at his scalp, madly tried to rip out his eyes. Vast
overshadowing pinions--as if they were the wings of Azrael--hammered in
his face, smothering him, beating him down.
Ah, but I have seen some fights, yet never such a fight as that; and
never again do I want to see such a fight as the one between Gulo and
the golden eagle that made a mistake in his pride of power.
All the awful, cruel, diabolical, clever, devilish, and yet almost
human fury that was in that old brute of a Gulo flamed out in him at
that moment, and he fought as they fight who go down to hell. It was
frightful. It was terrifying. Heaven alone knows what the eagle
thought he had got his claws into. It was like taking hold of a flash
of forked lightning by the point. It was--great!
Still, flight _is_ flight, and lifting-power is lifting-power. Gulo,
even Gulo, could not get over that. He could not stop those vast vans
from flapping; and as they flapped they rose, the eagle rose,
he--though it was like the skinning of his back alive--rose too,
wriggling ignominiously, raging, foaming, snapping, kicking, but--he
rose.
Slowly, very slowly, the great bird lifted his terrible prey up and
up--ten, twenty, thirty, forty feet, but no higher. That was the limit
of his lift, the utmost of his strength; and at that height parallel
with the ridge, he began to carry the wolverine along, the wolverine
that was going mad with rage in his grasp.
It was a mistake, of course--a mistake for the wolverine to be out on
the open ridge in stark daylight; another mistake for the eagle,
presuming on his fine, lustful pride of strength, to attack him.
And then suddenly Gulo got his chance. It hit him bang in the face,
nearly blinding him as it passed--the tree-top. Like lightning Gulo's
jaws clashed shut upon it, his claws gripped, and--he thought his back
was going to come off whole. But he stuck it. He was not called Gulo
the Indomitable for nothing. And the eagle stopped too. He had to,
for he would not let go; nor would Gulo.
An awful struggle followed, in the middle of which the pine-top broke,
gave way, and, before either seemed to know quite what was happening,
down they both came, crashing from branch to branch, to earth.
The fall broke the king of the birds' hold, but not the fighting fury
of the most hated of all the beasts. He rose up, half-blind, almost
senseless, but mad with rage beyond any conception of fury, did old
Gulo, and he hurled himself upon that eagle.
What happened then no man can say. There was just one furious mix-up
of whirling, powdered snow, that hung in the air like a mist, out of
which a great pinion, a clawing paw, a snapping beak, a flash of fangs,
a skinny leg and clutching, talons, a circling bushy tail appeared and
vanished in flashes, to the accompaniment of stupendous flappings and
abominably wicked growls.
* * * * * *
That night the lone wolf, scouting along the ridge-top, stopped to
sniff intelligently at the scattered, torn eagle's feathers lying about
in the trampled snow, at the blood, at the one skinny, mailed, mightily
taloned claw still clutching brown-black, rusty fur and red skin; at
the unmistakable flat-footed trail of Gulo, the wolverine, leading away
to the frowning, threatening blackness of the woods. He could
understand it all, that wolf. Indeed, it was written there quite
plainly for such as could read. He read, and he passed on. He did not
follow Gulo's bloody trail. No--oh, dear, no! Probably, quite
probably, he had met Gulo the Indomitable before, and--was not that
enough?
II
BLACKIE AND CO.
Blackie flung himself into the fight like a fiery fiend cut from coal.
He did not know what the riot was about--and cared less. He only knew
that the neutrality of his kingdom was broken. Some one was fighting
over his borders; and when fighting once begins, you never know where
it may end! (This is an axiom.) Therefore he set himself to stop it
at once, lest worse should befall.
He found two thrushes apparently in the worst stage of d.t.'s. One was
on his back; the other was on the other's chest. Both were in a
laurel-bush, half-way up, and apparently they kept there, and did not
fall, through a special dispensation of Providence. Both fought like
ten devils, _and both sang_. That was the stupefying part, the song.
It was choked, one owns; it was inarticulate, half-strangled with rage,
but still it _was_ song.
A cock-chaffinch and a hen-chaffinch were perched on two twigs higher
up, and were peering down at the grappling maniacs. Also two blue
titmice had just arrived to see what was up, and a sparrow and one
great tit were hurrying to the spot--all on Blackie's "beat," on
Blackie's very own hunting-ground. Apparently a trouble of that kind
concerned everybody, or everybody thought it did.
Blackie arrived upon the back of the upper and, presumably, winning
thrush with a bang that removed that worthy to the ground quite
quickly, and in a heap. The second thrush fetched up on a lower
branch, and by the time the first had ceased to see stars he had
apparently regained his sanity. He beheld Blackie above him, and fled.
Perhaps he had met Blackie, professionally, before, I don't know. He
fled, anyway, and Blackie helped him to flee faster than he bargained
for.
By the time Blackie had got back, the first thrush was sitting on a
branch in a dazed and silly condition, like a fowl that has been waked
up in the night. Blackie presented him with a dig gratis from his
orange dagger, and he nearly fell in fluttering to another branch. And
Blackie flew away, chuckling. He knew that, so far as that thrush was
concerned, there would be no desire to see any more fighting for some
time.
But, all the same, Blackie was not pleased. He was worked off his feet
providing rations for three ugly youngsters in a magnificently designed
and exquisitely worked and interwoven edifice, interlined with rigid
cement of mud, which we, in an off-hand manner, simply dismiss as "A
nest." The young were his children; they might have been
white-feathered angels with golden wings, by the value he put on them.
The thrush episode was only a portent, and not the first. He had no
trouble with the other feathered people he tolerated on his beat.
Blackie went straight to the lawn. (Jet and orange against deep green
was the picture.)
Now, if you and I had searched that dry lawn with magnifying-glasses,
in the heat of the sun, there and then, we should not have found a
single worm, not the hint or the ghost of one; yet that bird took three
long, low hops, made some quick motion with his beak--I swear it never
seemed to touch the ground, even, let alone dig---executed a kind of
jump in the air--some say he used his legs in the air--and there he was
with a great, big, writhing horror of a worm as big as a snake (some
snakes).
Thrushes bang their worms about to make them see sense and give in;
they do it many times. Blackie banged his giant only a little once or
twice, and then not savagely, like a thrush. Also, again, he may or
may not have used his feet. Moreover, he gave up two intervals to
surveying the world against any likely or unlikely stalking death. Yet
that worm shut up meekly in most unworm-like fashion, and Blackie cut
it up into pieces. The whole operation took nicely under sixty seconds.
Blackie gave no immediate explanation why he had reduced his worm to
sections. It did not seem usual. Instead, he eyed the hedge, eyed the
sky, eyed the surroundings. Nothing seemed immediately threatening,
and he hopped straight away about three yards, where instantly, he
conjured another and a smaller worm out of nowhere. With this
unfortunate horror he hopped back to the unnice scene of the first
worm's decease, and carved that second worm up in like manner. Then he
peeked up all the sections of both worms, packing them into his beak
somehow, and flew off. And the robin who was watching him didn't even
trouble to fly down to the spot and see if he had left a joint behind.
He knew his blackbird, it seemed.
Blackie flew away to his nest, but not to a nest in a hedge. To dwell
in a hedge was a rule of his clan, but the devil a rule did he obey.
Nests in hedges for other blackbirds, perhaps. He, or his wife, had
different notions. Wherefore flew he away out into the grass field
behind the garden. Men had been making excavations there, for what mad
man-purpose troubled him not--digging a drain or something. No matter.