whatever--it was a cry of extreme distress, a final, despairing S.O.S.,
flung out to the night in the frantic hope that one of the same species
would hear and help.
Several night-foraging wild-folk have S.O.S. signals of their own, but
none like this. It was not a rabbit's cry, for bunny's signal is thin
and child-like; nor a hare's, for puss's last scream is like bunny's,
only more so; nor a stoat's, for that is instinct with anger as well as
pain; nor a cat's, for that thrills with hate; nor an owl's, for that
is ghostly; nor a fox's, for Reynard is dumb then; nor a rat's, for
that is gibbering and devilish; nor a mouse's, for that is weak and
helpless. Then what? And why had it touched up Prickles as if with a
live wire? It was perhaps the rarest S.O.S. signal of all heard in the
wild, or one of the rarest, the peculiar, high, chattering, pig-like,
savage tremolo of a hedgehog booked for some extra deathly form of
death. And Prickles--naturally he knew it.
It came from straightaway down the ditch; from ahead, where Prickles
had been heading for; from the farm, and Heaven know what it portended!
Perhaps, too, Prickles could tell a lady hedgehog's S.O.S. from that of
a gentleman of the same breed; or, perhaps--but how do I know? He
certainly acted that way.
Prickles waited the one-fifth part of an instant, to listen and locate.
Then he got going, and provided one astonishment. Till then he had
seemed slow as the times he had descended from--like a rhinoceros.
But, like a rhino, he proved that he could shift some when hustled. He
did. It looked like suddenly releasing a clockwork toy wound up to
breaking-point. His short legs gave this impression, and his
next-to-no-neck, giving him a look of rigidity, assisted it. He did
not run so much as rush, and his spines and bristles, coming low on
either side in an overhang, so to speak, like an armored car, made him
rustle and scuffle tremendously. Three rabbits doing the same act, or
five cats, could scarce have made more row than he did.
It was not, however, so much the fact that Prickles had gone that was
so noticeable as the fact that he had _arrived_. His arrival seemed to
follow his going as one slide follows another on a screen. One would
never have believed such quickness of him; nor, as a matter of fact, do
I think he would have believed it of himself; but--well, love is a
mighty power, and makes folks do some strange things.
What he found was two ditch-banks, pock-marked with the untidy dug-outs
of the rat-people, smelling ratty, and looking worse, one original ray
of moonlight lighting the beaten ditch between. In the moonlight one
young female hedgehog, who may have been pretty by hedgehog standards,
but was now pretty by none, and five rats, frankly beastly, very busy
indeed with that same hedgehog. They must have caught that young lady
of the spikes "napping"--a rare thing. Yet, allowing for the fact that
she was in love--with love and nothing else, so far--and careless, or
allowing that she may have mistaken the unclean ones momentarily, she
may have given them one brief half-instant. And it doesn't do to give
a rat even the half of a half-instant. If you do, he has got you, or
you haven't got him.
Apparently they had pretty well got her before she could quite roll up,
and in a half-rolled-up condition she was doing her best to meet the
jabs of five pairs of gnawing, cold-chisel, incisor, yellow-rats' teeth
at once. To time, apparently, she had not been successful in the
attempt--you could see the dark stains of blood glisten in the
moonlight, and the end was certain, on the face of it.
Prickles, however, was a new factor that had got to short-circuit that
end, and Prickles didn't wait to meditate prehistorically _that_ time.
He came. He came full tilt into the midst of the mêlée like--well,
like a clockwork toy still, that couldn't stop. Only he did stop,
against the biggest rat of all, ducking his head, and jerking forward
his shoulder-muscles, and spines, with a sort of a thrust over his
head, and a noise like a pair of expiring bellows; and the prickles hit
home.
That rat removed about one foot in one bound in one-fortieth of a
second, and he let rip one squeal in the process that sent away every
other rat into the nearest available hole as if it had been fired there
from a spring. Then the lady hedgehog took the Heaven-sent opportunity
to complete her rolling-up completely, and Prickles took his own
created opportunity to roll up almost more completely, and--well, they
were rolled up into two balls, you see, and there is nothing more to be
said about them. The rats did that, but it was all they did, except
hurt their noses presently, and delicate, pink, hand-like fore-paws,
and make 'em bleed on prickles. They were very angry indeed, those
unspeakable ones--very angry; but it didn't make any difference to the
hedgehogs. They were there; they were rolled up; they were together.
What _could_ make any difference after _that_? And at last, when the
rats gave them up as a very bad job, they went away _together_, and
that's all there is to say. _Together_ clinches it, you understand.
V
PHARAOH
I
Upon a day Hawkley came to the district, and took up his abode in a
cottage of four rooms. He "did" for himself. Every housekeeper will
know what "did" for himself means. But he did for himself in another
way also. He came to read up for an exam. He told everybody this,
which was one reason why he would be seen at ungodly hours, when no one
was about, going to and from lonely spots, with a pair of blue glasses
on his nose, a book under one arm, and a walking-stick with a silver
band and a tassel--he was always careful to display the silver band and
the tassel--under the other.
Then Nemesis descended upon him.
He was caught by Colonel Lymington's head-keeper on Colonel Lymington's
most strictly preserved wild-bird sanctuary, shooting certain rare
birds--many rare birds. Now, the colonel prided himself on his
sanctuary, and upon the number of rare birds he had living therein, and
the colonel was wroth. Hawkley had, in fact, ruined the sanctuary, and
taken or slain pretty well every other bird worth having in the place,
so that five years would not make good the harm he had done. Moreover,
it was shown in the evidence that Hawkley had been able to accomplish
his work by aid of a folding pocket-rifle with a silencer on, and his
cat--especially the cat, whose name was Pharaoh.
No words of the keeper's could be found sufficiently to revile that
cat. Indeed, the head-keeper went speechless, and nearly had epilepsy,
in trying to describe it to the Court, and if it had done only one-half
the things that the keeper asserted, it must have been a very
remarkable beast indeed; the magistrate said so. In consequence
Hawkley got rather heavily fined, and went. He went more quickly than
was expected, because the police got a telephone message from the
police of another district--several other districts, I think--to say
that he was "wanted" for precisely the same game there: and Hawkley
must have expected this, for he walked out of the court with a grin on
his face, and was no more seen.
So quickly did he go that he had no time to take the cat. He left it
at home in the cottage--which shows that he must have been badly
scared, for such a cat must have been worth a lot to a collector's
agent, such as Hawkley was. But perhaps he left it by way of revenge.
I do not know. Anyway, there it was in his cottage, asleep on the sofa
before the fire--just as Hawkley, at the invitation of the authorities,
had left it that morning.
It was about five o'clock in the afternoon when the cat, Pharaoh, woke
up, and transformed himself instantly from deep sleep to strained
alertness, in that way which is peculiar to the children of the wild,
but has been lost by their domestic degenerates. The sun was shining
full in at the little diamond-paned window. The window was open, and a
late fly of metallic hue was shooting about with a pinging noise, like
the twang of some instrumental string. But neither fly, nor sun, nor
the tick of the little clock on the mantelpiece had awakened the cat.
It was the click of the little front-gate latch.
The cat--the pupils of his eyes like vertical slits in green-yellow
stone--gave one quick look at, and through, the open window. He had
the impression, framed in the window, of a bobbing, black, "square"
bowler hat--not often seen these days--and a red face with small eyes,
and a sticking-out beard of aggressiveness. This was no Hawkley. The
cat knew it, as he knew, probably, the alien tread. Hawkley had a
white, clean-shaven face, and big eyes--the eyes that an animal may
love and trust. Possibly the cat knew even the profession of him who
came that way so softly and alone in the still afternoon. Anyway, he
acted as if he did.
Like a snake, and with rather less noise, Pharaoh slid off the sofa and
to the door leading into the scullery. For a moment he stopped,
looking back over his shoulder, one paw uplifted, body drooping on bent
legs, inscrutable, fierce eyes staring. Then he was gone.
I don't know how he went. He just seemed to fade out in the frame of
the doorway and into the shadowed coolth of the scullery like a
dissolving picture.
A pause followed, while the little clock on the mantel-piece ticked
hurriedly, as if anxious to get on and pass over an awkward moment.
Came then the click of the front-door latch, the flinging open of the
door wide, the bar-like gleam of hastily raised gun-barrels in the new
flood of light, and--silence. Only the one or two late flies "pinged,"
while the little clock fairly raced.
The tall, uncompromising figure of the head-keeper was standing in the
doorway, with a double-barreled 12-bore gun half-raised.
He stood there a moment with his dog, bent a little, peering in. He
had come to find "that there pesky cat." And in this, perhaps, he
showed more sense than most people gave him credit for. Apparently, he
had seen enough to know that the cat was quite unlike any ordinary
cat--and cats of any kind are bad enough--and certainly he guessed that
the cat under control of its master was one, and away from that
questionable influence likely to be another, and very much worse,
calamity.
The keeper searched that cottage from chimney to doorstep. No cat
there. His dog did not, as might have been expected, help him in this
search. Indeed, his dog, he now discovered, had vanished--had, in
fact, gone out at the back-door and cleared off.
Meanwhile the cat was, for his sins, being horribly pricked by the
holly-hedge through which he was sliding. He growled under the
punishment. Ordinary domestic cats do not, as a rule, growl in such
cases, though they may "swear."
Once through the hedge, the cat dropped into the ditch on the other
side, turned to his right, and galloped up it. It ran upwards,
skirting a sloping wet field, to a dark, damp, black wood, as woods
always are that stand on cold clay and have much evergreen growth.
They remind one of a wet, chill rhododendron forest of Tibet.
The cat's gallop was in itself peculiar, loose, long, his head low, his
forepaws straight, his hindlegs trailing out behind. So does the tiger
gallop across the jungle glade when the beaters rouse him.
There were other things peculiar about Pharaoh also, now that one had
him on the move and could see. He was, perhaps, a fraction big for his
kind; his coat was yellowish, fading beneath, with "faint pale stripes"
well marked on the sides; his tail was long, and oddly slender and
"whippy," ringed faintly to the black tip; his fur was short and harsh,
quite unlike that of a domestic cat, and the expression of his eyes was
one of permanent, unsleeping fierceness.
Once he stopped and stared back, and in the pause which followed one
could distinctly hear a faint but rapidly increasing drumming sound
following his trail up the ditch. And least of all beasts had that cat
delusions. He turned and galloped on. The keeper's dog was of an
independent turn of mind. He had quietly run that cat's trail,
forgetting that, in the long-run, dogs are not fitted to maneuver
independently, and may suffer if they do so. You see him flying up the
trail, square nose to ground, tracking really very cleverly indeed, and
with a fine amount of what huntsmen call "drive."
Ho had overtaken Pharaoh before the hunted one could reach the wood.
He realized it as he took the last bend in the ditch, when he saw a
yellow streak rise under his nose, and bound, with all four legs stuck
out quite straight, and claws spread abroad, like a rubber ball out of
his path, avoiding his clumsy, murderous snap by an inch, and then felt
it rebound right on to his back.
The next few seconds were quite crowded, and that dog had the time of
his life.
Even an ordinary domestic "puss" can make wonderful havoc of a dog's
back when once it gets there; and stays, as it does, like a burr, and
this one could go a bit better than most; and when that dog at last got
the cat's "leave to go," he went rather sooner than at once,
proclaiming his misery aloud to all the world, so that his master,
coming at that moment out of the back-door of the cottage, heard him
afar off, and swore.
As for the cat, he turned about, all bristling, and went too. He went
straight up to, and through, the wood, disturbing in clouds the
starlings, who had just come in to roost in the rhododendrons, so that
they rose with a rushing of wings like the voice of a thunder-shower on
forest leaves, and incidentally drenched the cat with a deluge of
raindrops collected in the leaves as he raced through underneath. A
lesser beast, it may be noted, would have climbed a tree, but Hawkley,
I think, had convinced his cat of that folly when a man might be
following up behind.
Straight through the wood galloped Pharaoh, and into a stretch of
age-old furze, or gorse, if you like, beyond. That showed strategy.
The furze was a maze of a million spikes, and branches, and twisted,
gnarled stems tough as wire-rope; a wonderful place, all honeycombed
with rabbit-runs; a world unto itself.
The cat moved on quickly into the heart of the furze, pausing every few
strides to listen and glare round. Several times he sniffed the sickly
grass and the carpet of dead spikes.
Once or twice something moved ahead; a branch was shaking as he came
up, a blade of grass slowly righting itself, as if something that had
been sitting upon it had but just stolen away. All round were hints of
life, but no life was visible. It was as if the cat were moving
through an army of ghosts.
Then, in a flash, without any kind of hint or warning to prepare one
for the unnerving contrast of the change, was war--raw, red war.
There had come up a rabbit-run--a regular rabbit-turnpike--a creature.
It was strikingly colored, that creature, and big--nearly three feet
long, to be exact; but it looked much bigger in the ghostly
twilight--and yet till it was actually upon him he, even he, had failed
to see it.
Long, low, bear-like, and burly, with claws caked with earth, gashed
and bleeding on flank and shoulder it was, red-fanged and wild-eyed.
It charged home upon Pharaoh without a second's pause, and with an
obscene chatter that was unnerving to any one, let alone so highly
strung a bag of tricks as a cat.
Men and dogs had been besieging this badger in its den for twelve
hours. It had in the end made a desperate _sortie_, upset one man who
had failed to grab its tail, run into and bitten another, and got clean
away. Pharaoh was unfortunate in that he stood between the half-mad
beast and another den for which it was making.
There was no time to go back, no room to execute one of those beautiful
lightning side-leaps which are the pride of all the cats, and less to
spring into the air, a neat trick of the tribe which it has also
perfected.
The cat was cornered, and, being cornered, fought like--a cornered cat!
That is to say, an electrified devil.
He reared up. He struck, pat! pat! right and left, with the terrible,
rending, full stroke of his kind. He met open jaws with open jaws--you
could hear fang clash against fang. He grabbed, scrunched, drew back,
grabbed, scrunched again, as a lion will--for the cats neither hold
fast like a weasel nor snap like a wolf. Then, as the full force of
the charge and the weight of the enemy's body--some twenty-seven and a
half pounds--took him, he hugged, round-arm fashion, with his talons,
and, still grabbing and scrunching, rolled over backwards.
Cat and badger turned into a ball--a parti-colored ball, very lively as
to its center, and it whirled. Unfortunately there was not much room
to whirl in. That made things all the more grisly. You could almost
see the grim skeleton shape of death, hovering over that growling,
snarling, spitting, worrying, tearing, kicking, gnashing, scrunching,
foaming, blood-flecked Catherine-wheel--almost see death, I say,
bending down with upraised arm ready to strike. But death never struck.
In an instant there came, sounding strangely hollow in that still, damp
air of dusk, as though it were in a cave, the unmistakable noise of a
deep, dry, hacking cough. Truly, it was nothing much--just a good old
churchy and human cough. But it might have been a blast from the
trumpet of the archangel Gabriel himself by the effect it had upon the
two combatants. They shot apart like released electrified dust-atoms,
and--pff!--they were gone--wiped out. Like pricked bubbles, they had
ceased to be. And neither gave any explanation. Being wild things, of
course they wouldn't.
The cough had only come from a laborer, who, passing along a pathway
through the furze, had heard the commotion, and stopped. He never saw
anything, though he crashed into the furze and hunted--he never saw
anything, which was no wonder, seeing that he could hardly have
selected a way to see less. The cat was four hundred yards away by
that time, and goodness knows where the badger was---deep down in his
den, one presumes.
Later the cat slept, in a fortress of nature safe enough, surrounded by
a hundred unseen sentries with brown jackets and white tails--rabbits,
who would give him all the warning he required.
II
The lean night wind next evening came down, and day went out almost
imperceptibly. Blackness grew under the furze caverns, and the last
glimpse of the estuary faded away in a steely glimmer; a brown ghost of
an owl slid low over the spiked ramparts, and wings--the wings of
fighting wild-duck coming up from the sea to feed--"spoke" like swords
through the star-spangled blue-black canopy of heaven.
The night-folk began to move abroad. You could hear them pass--now a
faint rustle here, now a surreptitious "pad-pad" there. Once some
bird-thing of the night cried out suddenly, very far away in the sky,
"Keck! keck!" and was gone.
It was not Pharaoh, however, that you would have heard move. None of
the wild-folk could tell how at midnight he managed to land himself far
out over the marsh, unperceived. He was there--you must take my word
for it--just two faintly luminous yellow-green lamps floating on the
mist.
Not many men knew their way across the marsh by day; certainly not five
even of the oldest wildfowlers could have got over safely by night. It
was not man, therefore, that was causing the cat to melt into the
short, salt grass, so closely that there was nothing of him left.
Something else was coming his way.
Along the edge of the dike it came--tall, thin, pale, ghostly,
and--yes, I could have sworn it, though night does play odd tricks with
the human eyesight--faintly phosphorescent. At least, it seemed to
glow ever so dimly, like one that moves in a nearly burnt-out halo.
Every yard or two it paused, that thing. Once there was a splash, as
if some one were spearing fish and had missed.
The cat moved rather less than an average stone. He knew that in the
wild to be motionless is, in nine cases out of ten, to be invisible.
The tenth case doesn't matter, because the creature that discovers it
usually dies. Moreover, there was no cover to move to, and cover is
the cat's trump card.
Now, everything would have gone off all right if--well, if the cat
hadn't been a cat, I suppose; that is, if he had been able to stop the
ceaseless twitching of the black tip of his tail. Tiger-hunters know
that twitching, and those who have stalked the lion will tell you of
it, as also the sparrow on the garden wall, whose life may have been
saved from somebody's pet "tabby" by that same twitching. It is a
characteristic habit of the tribe, I take it.
The luminous ghost-thing was close now. Heaven knows whether it saw
that twitching then! I think so. It stopped, anyway, and became a
pillar of stone. The cat, almost under it, fairly pressed himself into
the grass.
Then--whrrp!
Something shot through the air like a lance, and pinned that twitching
tail-point to the ground. There had been no warning--nothing! Just
that javelin from the ghost, and---the cat on his hindlegs, screaming
like a stricken devil, clawing at the ghost, now revealed as a very
big, long-legged bird which flapped. It flapped huge wings and danced
a grotesque dance, and it smelt abominably, with the stench of ten
fish-markets on a hot day.
Then at last, the cat clawing and yelling the whole time, the bird's
slow brain seemed to realize the mistake. The javelin, which was its
beak, was withdrawn from the protesting tail-tip hurriedly--to be
driven through the cat's skull as a sheer act of necessary
self-defense, I fancy. But the cat did not wait to see. Imagine the
infamy, the absolute sacrilege, from a cat's point of view, of spitting
a feline tail in that disgusting fashion. Why, if you only tread on
one, you hear about it in five-tenths of the average second, and offend
the supercilious owner for a month afterwards!
There was a vision, just a half-guessed vision, of our cat shooting
straight upwards through the air, and outwards over the still waters of
the dike; there was a number one splash that set the reflected stars
dancing, and the water-voles ("rats," if you like) bolting to their
holes; and there was the sighing "frou-frou-frou!" of great wings as
the big bird rose and fled majestically. There was the sucking gurgle
and drip-drip of a furred body leaving the water on the far side, eyes
that glared more hate than pen can set down, and a deep, low, malignant
feline curse. That cat had swum the rest of the way over the dike
which he could not jump.
The bird was only a heron, and that does not sound much unless you are
acquainted with the ways of the heron and all his beak implies. A
heron is one of those birds that can fight at need, and--knows it.
Moreover, in his long beak, set on his steel-spring neck, he has a
weapon of awful "piercefulness," and--knows that too. The bird is an
example of armed defense.
This one had merely been fishing for eels in that pessimistic way
peculiar to all fishermen, and seeing the tail-tip waving in the grass,
and nothing else, had mistaken the same for his quarry. And this will
be the easier to believe because we know, and probably the heron did
also, that eels are given at times to overland journeys on secret
errands of their own.
The cat crawled away down the dike in offended silence. He was wet,
and the only cat I ever knew who did not seem to be scandalized past
speech at the fact. Indeed, he went farther. He came upon a ripple
and a dot, some fifty yards farther on, which to the initiated such as
he, represented a water-vole ("rat," if you will) swimming.
Then, before you could take your pipe from your mouth to exclaim, the
water-vole was not swimming. He was squealing in a most loud and
public-spirited fashion from between Pharaoh's jaws, and it was the cat
who was swimming. He had just taken a flying leap from the bank and
landed full upon the dumbfounded water-vole--splash! Then he swam
calmly ashore and dined, all wet and cold. Now, what is one to say of
such a cat?
[Illustration: "Landed full upon the dumbfounded water-vole--splash!"]
III