excavation the queen had made below the city, and there, rolling over
and over, continued the struggle in the dark among the refuse, the
queen eternally feeling with her poison-dagger for a space to drive
home her death-blow between the other's smooth, shining armor-plates;
the cricket eternally endeavoring to behead the queen between its awful
jaws.
It was a fight to the death, as most insect duels are, and it could not
last long. It was too tense, too fiendish, too shockingly wicked for
that.
Suddenly the queen's body shot out like a spring. The opening she had
been feeling for had appeared, and she had driven her death-blow home.
At the same instant, with a supreme effort, she bent double and shot
herself free, the last convulsive, shearing crush of her foe's laws
clashing to so close above her head that they actually caught in their
death-grip, and held, till she pulled them out by the roots, two
bristles of her neck.
And then--well, then the queen hurried back up to her city, just in
time to help out of its cell the first of her children--and citizens at
last--the first limp, clambering, damp, newly painted, freshly bedecked
young worker-wasp, perfect from feeler to sting, from wing to claw.
Quickly they broke out now from the cocoons, and the queen bustled from
one to the other, assisting, cleaning, encouraging; for it is a tricky
job for an insect to come out of its chrysalis-case. The queen's work,
however, was really done; for, though for a day or two, till their
cuirasses and wings hardened, these new young worker-wasps only did
light labor, acting as nurses to the others that were following, and so
on, they quickly took upon their own shoulders the whole of the work of
the city: the nursing and feeding of the young, the hunting, the
building, the scavenging, and the waiting upon and feeding the
queen-mother herself completely, so that she should henceforth labor
not, nor fight, nor waste herself in the chase, but should keep at home
and lay countless eggs, and eggs, and always nothing but eggs, for the
workers to rear for the benefit of the State.
* * * * * *
To-day that city has a population of nearly 60,000, and contains over
11,000 cells; and the queen is still there, laying eggs, eggs, and
again eggs, till--
IV
NINE POINTS OF THE LAW
Sharp's the word with her.--SWIFT.
Some people never know when they are well off. It is a complaint which
afflicts cats, you may have noticed, and gets them into much trouble
that their contemptuous temper might otherwise leave them free from.
The silver tabby would have done better if she had remained asleep upon
Miss Somebody's arm-chair, instead of squatting, still as marble, out
in a damp field on a damp night, watching a rabbits' "stop"--which is
vernacular for a bunnies' nursery--and thinking how nice raw, pink
baby-rabbit would taste if she got the chance to sample it. She
didn't. At least, she hadn't for an hour and a half; but, then, what's
an hour and a half to a cat? Apparently the silver tabby could wait,
just like that, utterly inert, till the crack of doom--or dawn.
Mind you, she was not alone. She had company. One always has in the
wild at night, or nearly always. You couldn't see that company, but I
don't know whether the silver tabby could. Who can tell how much a cat
sees, anyway? Nor do I think the company could see her, she being
still, and wild eyes not being good at picking out the still form.
Neither could they hear her, for she said nothing; neither did she
purr. They must have smelt her, though. Anyway, she seemed to be a
little island in the mist--the faint, faint, ethereal dew-mist--where
nobody walked. You could hear them--a rustle here, a squeak there, a
thud somewhere else, a displaced leaf, a cracked twig--this only
once--a drumming, a patter, a sniff, a snuffle, a sigh; but they all
passed by on the other side, so to say, and gave the silver tabby room
to think. Apparently cats are not considered good company in the wild;
lonely creatures, they are best left alone.
No mother-rabbit came to the "stop"--which the cat knew to be there--to
feed her babies, which the cat, thanks to her nose, knew to be there,
too. No baby-rabbits came out to be fed--or to feed the cat either.
"Stops" are secrets, kept from the rest of rabbitdom by the wise
mothers, and, they hope, from other inquisitive people also. The
little short holes in the middle of the field are plugged up by the old
does with grass and fur when they are away, which is pretty often.
Then the silver tabby heard a thump come out of the night--a thud,
hollow, resounding, and noticeable. It was repeated after an interval,
and again repeated. There was a certain note of insistence about
it--like a signal. And if the cat had been a wild creature she would
have thrown up the sponge, or gone away, and returned secretly later,
or, anyway, not persisted in crouching there; for those thuds were a
signal, and they meant that the game was up. In other words, some wily
old mother circling the approach, or some wandering back-eddy of wind,
had given the cat away; she had been scented, and rabbit after rabbit,
squatting invisible in the night, was thumping the ground with its feet
to say so and warn all off whom it might concern. The silver tabby,
however, neither wild nor satisfied to be tame, did not know. She sat
on, and in doing so wondered, perhaps, at the scarcity of rabbits
thereabouts.
She sat, or hunched, or crouched, or couched, or whatever you call that
precise position of cats, which is neither lying down nor sitting up,
for some time longer--for another twenty minutes, to be precise; and
all the while the thuds of mystery serenaded her from nowhere in
particular out of the dark--and from down-wind.
Then she must have come to the conclusion that she was being made a
fool of, for she got up, stretched herself lazily, with arched back and
bared claws, and yawned a bored feline yawn. And even as she did so
she was aware of a sudden final flourish of thuds, and then
dead-silence. Next moment, in that same dead-silence, she distinctly
heard something coming towards her, and that something was taking no
pains to conceal the fact.
Now, in the wild it is not the custom to go towards anything and take
no pains to conceal the fact. The unhealth of such a procedure is
swiftly borne in upon such rash ones as make the experiment, and they
seldom live long enough to pass their folly on. Only the mighty can
afford not to walk circumspectly, and they are very few, and, with man
about, even they have learnt wisdom. That is why the wild is so
guarded, and why self-effacement becomes almost a religion therein.
Even the cat knew this, I fancy. Anyway, she looked surprised as she
crouched again, and quickly.
Now, of all the wild-people, probably one of the most brazen is the
pig; it is also one of the bravest. I mean, the wild pig. And it
would seem that he, or she, who came that way was a pig, only a
precious little one. You know the ways of a pig? How you can hear him
coming long before he comes; how he must snuffle, and grunt, and poke
dead leaves, and snort, and tread on things, and snore. Very good. So
it was here; and these things did this new-comer, who approached
through the mist--only all in a dwarfed way, as if they were done by a
tiny grown-up pig. Its gruntings were almost to itself; its snortings,
snorings, and sniffings quite small; and its snorts little miniature
ones. Only, in the profound silence of the night, and in comparison
with the furtive noises of all the rest of the night-wild, they sounded
quite loud.
The cat, as she crouched, passed from supercilious surprise to
amazement. You could tell that by the roundness of her eyes. She had
no knowledge of pigs, and had never met any of the wild-folk gone mad;
yet it seemed that one must have done so now, and that one--to her
growing uneasiness--was coming straight towards her. I fancy that in
that moment she thought of the warm fire, the singing kettle, the
saucer of milk, and Miss Somebody's best arm-chair.
The thing, whatever it was, came straight on in a more or less zigzag
line, till the cat could make it out dimly in the moonlight, a
blotched, roughly egg-shaped form, less than a foot long, so low to the
ground that it appeared to be running on wheels, and covered all over
with prickles, like a Rugby ball into which tin tacks had been driven
head first, the sharp ends pointing outwards and backwards. Its head
was the small end, and much lower than its back. Its eyes, little and
pig-like, set in a black cowl, gleamed red in the tired moonlight; and
its face was the face of a pig, nothing else--just pure pig; insolent,
cunning, vulgar, and blatant. Occasionally men name a wild beast
correctly, and this little beast could only have one name--hedgehog: It
was obvious on the face of it.
But the cat, being a cat and an aristocrat, knew, as has been said,
nothing about pigs, real or only so called. She had killed a shrew
once, and spat it out for tasting abominably and smelling worse; and
shrews are cousins of the hedgehogs, of the same great clan,
Insectivora--far removed from the pigs, really--and that is the nearest
she had got.
She had never heard of hedgehogs, and never, never met a beast that
walked through the wild as if he owned it. And, more, he expected her
to get out of his way, which she did with feline and concentrated
remarks; and he--by the whiskers and talons!--the fool exposed his
back--turned his back openly, a thing no wild beast in its senses would
do, unless running away. And that, for a cat who had waited close on
two hours for baby business that didn't turn up, had got most
unfashionably drenched, and had, moreover, in her time, tackled more
than one grown-up rabbit, which was considerably larger than any
hedgehog--that, I say, was, for the silver tabby, too much.
She sprang. Rather, she executed two bounds, and somewhat unexpectedly
found herself on top of the hedgehog. I say "unexpectedly," because
she had hitherto bounded upon wild-folk who contrived mostly not to be
there. This one contrived nothing, except to stop still. And the cat
executed a third bound--_off_ the hedgehog, and rather more violently
and more quickly than the first two. Also, she spat.
When she had got over the intense pain--and cats feel pain badly--of
sharp spines digging into her soft and tender forefoot-pads, she
stopped, about two yards away, and glared at the hedgehog as if he had
played off a foul upon her, and she was surprised to see that he was no
longer egg-shaped, but rolled up into himself like a ball, so to speak,
and utterly quiescent. (I wonder if she remembered the little
wood-lice that she had so often amused herself playing with in idle
hours. They rolled themselves up just like that. Perhaps she thought
she'd come upon the Colossus of all the wood-lice.) Anyway, after she
had spat off at him all the vile remarks she could think of for the
moment, without producing any more reply than she would get from the
average stone, she came back, drawn with curiosity as by strings.
The hedgehog did not move; there was no need. It was for the cat to
make the next move--if she chose. He did not care. All things were
one to him, and all the views which he presented to the world were
points, a _cheval-de-frise_, a coiled ball of barbed wire, a living
Gibraltar, what you will, but, anyway, practically impregnable; and the
beggar knew it. "He who believeth doth not make haste"--that seemed to
be his motto, and he had, by the same token, a fine facility for
withstanding a siege.
He felt the cat, that cat who did not know hedgehogs, pat him
tentatively. Then he heard her swearing softly and tensely at the
painful result. She did not pat again--at least, only once, and, in
spite of care, that hurt her worse than ever. Then she began growling,
low and beastily--for all the cat tribe have a horrible growl; you may
have noticed it. Perhaps the hedgehog smiled. I don't know. He knew
that growl, anyhow; had heard it before--the anger of utter
exasperation. He was an exasperating brute, too, for he never said
anything, only shut himself up, and let others do the arguing, if they
were fools enough to do so.
Suddenly he heard the growl stop. Followed a tense pause, during which
he tightened his back-muscles under his spines, and tucked himself in,
to meet any coming shock, more tightly than ever. Followed the pause a
short warning hiss, jerked out almost in fright, it seemed--that cat's
hiss that is only a bluff, and meant to imitate a snake--a sudden
explosion of snarls, and a thud. A fractional silence, then a perfect
boil-over of snarls, and thud upon thud.
Now, our friend hedgehog was an old hand, and he had heard many and
curious sounds take place outside himself, so to speak; but, all the
same, he was just tickled to death to know what, in claws and whiskers,
was happening out there in the leering moonlight now; so much so,
indeed, that at last he risked it, and took a furtive peep out of a
chink in himself, as it were. And what he saw might have amazed him,
if he had not been a hedgehog and scarcely ever amazed at anything. He
just got a snapshot view of the cat's fine ringed tail whirling round
and round as she balanced herself on the swerve, vanishing into the
ghostly moonlight haze of the night; and in front of him, close beside
him, squatting, stare-eyed and phlegmatic, he saw the form of a big,
gaunt, old doe-rabbit. And I think he knew what had happened. He
seemed to, anyway, and remained rolled up.
Rabbits are thoughtless, headstrong, headlong, hopeless, helpless
cowards as a race and a rule. "The heart of a rabbit," they say in
France, speaking of a coward. But all races and rules have exceptions.
Occasionally the exceptions are old buck-rabbits, who know a thing or
two; but more often they are old doe-rabbits with young. And, mark
you, from the point of view of those wild-folk, there may be easier
rough handfuls to tackle than old doe-rabbits with young. This one had
simply streaked out of the night from nowhere--and behind--and knocked
the cat flying before she knew. Then, ere ever the feline could gather
her wits, the old doe had descended upon her with an avalanche of
blows--punches they were with the forefeet, all over the head and the
nose, where a cat hates to be hit--and all so swiftly, so irresistibly,
that that cat had never been given a chance to consider before she was
stampeded into the night. It was the silver tabby's first experience
of Mrs. Rabbit doing the devoted-mother act, and, by the look of
her--tail only--and the speed at which she was going, it appeared most
likely that it would be her last.
[Illustration: "This one had simply streaked out of the night from
nowhere"]
Meanwhile the old doe-rabbit sat there in the moonlight as immovable
and impassive as a Buddha, and the hedgehog, peering at her, guessed
that the time to unroll was not yet. He knew that it would hurt any
one to attack him; the cat knew it; all rabbits in their senses knew
it; but was that mother-rabbit in her senses? He concluded to lie low
and remain a fortress, therefore.
Then, after waiting about five minutes, as if she knew that cats
sometimes steal back, the old doe-rabbit came to a "stop" quite close
to the hedgehog, and went in. She remained there some time, during
which a fox came by and sniffed at the hedgehog, but was quite wise as
to the foolishness of doing more; and a deadly, curved-backed,
flat-headed little murderer of a stoat galloped by, and sniffed too,
but was no bigger fool than the fox, and went his way.
Both missed the "stop" by about two yards, though I don't know what
would have happened if they had found it. Digging and death in the
former case, and battle and blood in the latter, perhaps. But no
matter, they passed on their unlawful occasions; and half-an-hour after
the going of the stoat the old doe-rabbit came out, and dissolved into
the moon-haze.
Then the hedgehog came out, too--of himself, and--well, dissolved into
the "stop."
What happened in there it was too dark to see, but not to hear; and
what one could hear was--pitiful. He was there some time, for your
hedgehog rarely hurries; and when he came out again, his little pig's
eyes gleaming red under their spined cowl, it was with the same
snuffling, softly grunting deliberation with which he had gone in; but
the pale moon, that showed the gleam in his eyes, showed also blood on
his snout, and on the bristles of his forefeet, blood.
Then, slowly, snorting, sniffing very audibly--as loud as a big dog
often does--grunting softly in an undertone, as if talking to himself,
he departed, rustling through the grass, leaving an irregular winding
track behind in the dew and the gossamer, as he searched, eternally
searched, for food.
The hedgehog moved through the night as if he owned it and had no fear
of anything on earth; but many, it would seem, had cause to fear him.
He turned and snorted, and snatched up a slug. Three very quick and
suggestive--quite audible--scrunches, and it was gone. He described a
half-circle, sniffing very loudly, and chopped up a grub. He paused
for a fraction to nose out a beetle, and disposed of it with the same
quick three or four chopping scrunches. (It sounded rather like a
child eating toast-crusts.) He continued, always wandering devious,
always very busy and ant-like, always snorting loudly; grabbed another
beetle, and then a worm--all by scent, apparently--and reached the
hedge-ditch, where, in the pitch-darkness, he could still be heard
snorting and scrunching hapless insects, slugs, and worms at scarcely
more than one-minute intervals. And he never stopped. He seemed to
have been appointed by Nature as a sort of machine, a spiked "tank," to
sniff tirelessly about, reducing the surplus population of pests, as if
he were under a curse--as, indeed, the whole of the great order of
little beasts to which he belonged, the Insectivora, are--which,
afflicting him with an insatiable hunger, drove him everlastingly to
hunt blindly through the night for gastronomic horrors, and to eat 'em.
Anyway, he did it, and in doing it seemed to make himself worthy of the
everlasting thanks and protection of the people who owned that
land--thanks which to date he had never received.
Strange to say, he never stopped of his own free-will, though he was
stopped: once when he walked up to a man kneeling--and he was a
poacher--and did not see him till, if I may so put it, the man coughed,
when he ran like winkle into the hedge, and promptly became a ball for
ten minutes; and once when he came upon a low, long, sinister, big, and
grunting shadow, which again, if I be allowed the term, he did not see,
though quite close, till he heard it grunt, when he instantly jerked
himself into a ball on the spot and in the open. In both cases it
seemed, on the face of it, more as if he had scented, rather than had
either seen or heard, the dangers, and in both cases he had come within
two yards of them--though they were not hidden--before scenting,
seeing, or hearing them, whichever he did do.
Now, books and men have said that friend hedgehog fears only two
things: gypsies and badgers--who eat him. I should not be surprised at
anything the "gyp" did; nor, to this day, can we stake much on our
knowledge of the secret badger; but this badger, at any rate, seemed to
know nothing of books and men. He was delving for roots when the
hedgehog cast up out of the night and jumped him to "attention" by his
loud sniffs--much like a big dog's, I said. Thereafter, however, when
our prickly friend was represented as a ball only, and was as silent as
the grave, the badger took no further notice of him, beyond keeping one
eye--the weather eye--upon him, and treating him to a low growl, or
curse, truly, from time to time.
The hedgehog, however, once there, did not seem keen upon unrolling and
exposing himself till the badger had gone, which it did finally,
vanishing so suddenly and unexpectedly into the dark as almost to seem
to have been a ghost. And after some minutes the hedgehog straightened
out, and ate his way--one can call it nothing else--to the hedge. Here
he came upon a wounded mouse, complaining into the night in a little,
thin voice, because its back was broken, and it could not return to its
hole. It was a harvest mouse, rejoicing in the enormous weight of 4.7
grains and a length of 57 mm., but with as much love of life and fear
of death as an elephant. Heaven knows what had smitten it! Perhaps it
was one of the very few who just escape the owl, or who foil that
scientific death, the weasel, at the last moment--but no matter. The
result was the same--death, anyway.
The hedgehog saw its eyes shining like stars in a little jet of
moonlight, and I fear the hedgehog slew far less adroitly than the owl,
and not nearly so scientifically as the weasel; but he slew, none the
less, and he did that which he did.
From thence we find our hedgehog, still wandering devious, but with
always a direction, just as an ant has, heading his way down-ditch to a
farm, and all the way he ate--beetles mostly, but with slugs and worms
thrown in.
Now, those of the wild-folk who approach the farm, even by night, do so
with their life in their paws, and most of them know it. Far, far
safer would it be to remain in wood or field-hedge, gorse-patch or
growing crop. Yet they go, like the adventurers of old.
First of all, if he approached by ditch, before getting to the farm
proper, the hedgehog knew that he must pass the entrenchments of the
rat-folk, and that alone was enough to put off many, for the rat-folk
are no longer strictly wild, and, wild or tame, are hated with that
cordiality that only fear can impose. I don't know that our hedgehog
was given to fearing anything very much. He came of a brave race, and
one cursed, moreover, with a vile, quick temper, more than likely to
squash in its incipient stage any fear that might threaten to exist;
but he did most emphatically detest rats, except to eat them--a
compliment which the rats would have returned, if they had got a chance.
As a matter of fact, it is unlikely that Prickles--for such was the
name of our hedgehog--would have gone that risky way, traveled so
unhealthily far, left his more or less--mostly less--safe home wood at
all, had it not been that it is sometimes with hedgehogs as it is with
men--in the warm seasons--their fancy turns to thoughts of love.
Prickles's fancy had so turned, not lightly, for he was of an ancient
and antediluvian race, heavy in thought, but certainly to love. And
love, I want you to realize, in the wild, or anywhere else, for the
matter of that, is the very devil. "Unite and multiply; there is no
other law or aim than love," one great savant despairingly assorts is
Nature's cry, and adds that she mutters to herself under her breath,
"and exist afterwards if you can. That is no concern of mine."
To be precise, Prickles, who did more business with his nose than all
the rest of his organs put together, was following a love-trail. A
lady hedgehog, a flapper undoubtedly, and beautiful--all loves are
beautiful in imagination--had passed that way. Why _that_ unhealthful
way, Heaven knew; but, allowing for the capriciousness of the sex, and
mad because in love, Prickles followed, slowly, deliberately, heavily,
as befitted one descended from one of the oldest races on earth.
The air was heavy with the scent of may and of honeysuckle, and his way
was a green-gold--silver where the moon cascaded down the hedge--and
blue-black bridal-path, arched with scented swords, strewn with pink
and rose and cream and white confetti of blossom. But he only saw and
smelt one thing, and that, those who have known hedgehogs intimately
will agree, is not like unto the scent of any blossom.
Prickles was ruminating anciently upon these things, possibly, and
others, as he came down the trench--ditch, I mean--when the cry smote
him. It smote everything--the filtered silence of the wonderful,
tranquil night, the pale moon half-light, the furtive rustling shadows
that stopped rustling, the wonderful breathing pulse of growing
vegetation. And Prickles stopped as abruptly as if it had smitten him
on his nose, too. He heard _that_, at any rate, whatever might have
been hinted about the value of his ears elsewhere.