hedges, search with dog and gun for Pharaoh, and many traps did they
set. The dogs truly found a cat--two cats, and the guns stopped them,
but one had a nice blue ribbon round his neck, and the other had
kittens; the traps were found by one cat--and that was the pet of the
colonel's lady--one stoat, one black "Pom"--and that was the idol of
the parson's daughter--and one vixen--and she was buried secretly and
at night--but Pharaoh remained where he had chosen to remain, and he
remained also an enigma.
Then the colonel's rare birds began to evaporate in real earnest.
Hawkley's little efforts at depleting them were child's-play to those
of Pharaoh that followed, although, of course, Pharaoh himself did not
know, or care the twitch of a whisker, whether the birds he slew were
rare or not.
Now, if there was one thing more than another about which the colonel
prided himself in his bird sanctuary, it was the presence of the
bittern. I don't know where the bittern came from, nor does the
colonel. Perhaps the head-keeper knew. Bitterns migrate sometimes,
but--well, that keeper was no fool, and knew his master's soft spot.
It was a night or two later that Pharaoh surmounted the limit, so to
speak, and "sprung all mines in quick succession." He had been curled
up all day in his furze fortress, that vast stretch of prickly
impenetrability which, even if a dog had been found with pluck enough
to push through to its heart, would still, in its massed and tangled
boughs, have given a cat with Pharaoh's fighting prowess full chance to
defy any dog.
He was beautifully oblivious of the stir his previous doings had kicked
up, and of the winged words the colonel had used to the head-keeper; of
the traps set all about, of the gins doubled and trebled in the wood
and round the park, and of the under-keepers who, with guns and
tempting baits, took up their positions to wait for him as night fell.
No one seemed to have suspected the furze a mile away, and still less
the marsh and the coverless bleak shore of the estuary, as his home.
Indeed, no one looks for a cat on a wind-whipped marsh when woods are
near at all. Yet this open, wet country seemed to be a peculiarly
favorite hunting-ground of Pharaoh's.
It was a night of rain-squalls and moonlit streaks when Pharaoh,
wandering devious among the reeds, first became aware of the bittern,
in the shape of reptilian green eyes steadily regarding him from the
piebald shadows. Possibly the cat's whiskers first hinted at some new
presence by reason of the "ancient and fish-like smell" which pervaded
this precise reed jungle.
Pharaoh stopped dead. Pharaoh, with cruel, thin ears pressed back,
sank like a wraith into the soft ground. Pharaoh ceased to be even a
grayish-yellow, smoky something, and became nothing but eyes--eyes
floating and wicked. A domestic cat, after one frozen interval, would
have crept away from the foe it could not fathom, but Pharaoh had other
blood in his veins.
To begin with, he was wondering what manner of beast the owner of those
saurian-like orbs might be. To go on with, he was hungry, and--smelt
fish. But though he was looking full at the big bird, he could not see
it, which is the bittern's own private little bit of magic.
Nature has given him a coat just like a bunch of dried reeds and the
shadows between, and he does the rest by standing with his bead stuck
straight up and as still as a brass idol. Result--invisibility.
None know how long those two sought to "outfreeze" the "freezer," while
the rain-showers came up and passed hissing, and the moon played at
hide-and-seek. None knew when Pharaoh, flat as a snake, first began
that deadly, silent circling, which was but acting in miniature the
ways of the lion. None knew, either, at what point of bittern first
begun to sink and sink, till he crouched, and puffed, his neck curved
on his back like a spring ready set, his beak, like a sharpened
assegai, upright.
Only the short-eared owl, with his wonderful eyes, beheld Pharaoh make
his final rush; watched that living spring _sprung_ quick as light,
shooting out straight at the cat's glaring eyes, and saw--greatest
miracle of all the lot--Pharaoh dodge his head aside in the twentieth
of a second, and blink, letting the blow that spelt death whiz by.
And only those same owl's ears--sharpest of all the ears of the
wild--heard the diabolical yell of Pharaoh as the long, sharp beak
pierced through the loose skin of his shoulders, and, thanks to that
same looseness, came out again an inch or two farther on, transfixing
him; or listened to the devilish noise of the "worry," as the cat
turned in agony on himself and buried his fangs where he could behind
those expressionless green reptilian eyes; or caught the stupendous
flurry and whirl of wings and fur and gripping claws and scaly legs, as
a cloud put out the moon and darkness fell with silence, like the
falling curtain that ends a play.
* * * * * *
The very last pale rays of a watery setting sun slid bar-like through
the cottage window, and fell, twirling, aslant the floor.
A late spider had spun a web across the fireplace, and the one last fly
that always lingers sat in the sunbeam. It was Hawkley's cottage,
dismantled and derelict.
Something like a furry round hassock, lying motionless in a far corner,
moved at the sound of rain, and lifted a round head with round eyes
that glared with so terrible an expression that one caught one's
breath. There was blood--dried blood--by the furry shape, and drops of
dried blood across the floor from the window in the next room, that it
had been nobody's business to shut.
The day went out in gloom and howling rain-rushes. Darkness took
possession of the room. And--_the gate clicked_.
Truly, it might only have been the wind, but--Pharaoh was on his feet
in a flash, growling, and there was a glint of green-yellow light as
his eyes whipped round.
Followed a pause. Then, in a lull, once, twice, the unmistakable
crunch of a shod foot on gravel.
Another pause. Pharaoh was crouching close now, trembling from head to
foot.
"Pharaoh! Pharaoh! Pharaoh, old cat, are--are you in there?"
The voice, strained and husky, came in at the open window. In the last
lingering afterglow of dying day, a face, haggard and set, showed
there, framed in the lead casement.
"Phar---- Ah!"
Pharaoh was up. Pharaoh had given a strange, coaxing little cry, such
as a she-cat gives to her kittens. Pharaoh, lame and stiff, but with
tail straight as a poker, was running to the window in the next room,
was up on the sill, was rubbing against and caressing the haggard face
like a mad thing.
There was a long, tense pause, broken only by a continuous purring.
Then the creaking sound as of the lid of a wicker basket being opened.
The purring ceased. The creaking came again, as if the lid were being
shut. There came the crunch once more of stealthy shod feet on gravel,
the click of the gate, and--silence!
Hawkley had come for, and found, his cat.
VI
THE CRIPPLE
It was gradually getting colder and colder as he flew, till at last, in
a wonderful, luminous, clear, moonlit sunset, when day passed,
lingering almost imperceptibly, into night, the wind fixed in the
north, and a hard white frost shone on the glistening roofs--far, far
below.
Up there, at the three-thousand or four-thousand feet level, where he
was flying, the air was as clear and sparkling as champagne, and as
still as the tomb. If he had been passing over the moon instead of
over the earth, the effect would have been something like it, perhaps.
He was only a thrush, _Turdus philomelus_ the songster, but big and
dull and dark for his kind, and he had come from--well, behind him, all
shimmering and restless in the moonlight, like a fountain-basin full of
quicksilver, lay the North Sea; ahead and beneath lay England; and
across that sea, three hundred miles, as I count it, at the very least,
to the lands of melting snow, he was going when late cold weather had
caught him and warned him to come back. And alone? No, sirs, not
quite. Ahead, just visible, blurredly--a little phantom form rose and
fell on the magic air; behind, another; on his right, a third--all
thrushes, flying steadily westward in silence; and there may have been
a few more that could not be seen, or there may not.
His crop, as were the crops of the others, was perfectly empty.
Indeed, he appeared to prefer traveling in ballast that way. But his
eyes shone, and his wing-strokes, with little pauses of rigidity
between, such as many birds take--only one doesn't notice it much--were
strong and sure.
Once a large-winged, smudged shape, making no sound as it slipped
across the heavens, came flapping almost up to him, peering this way
and that at him and his companions, with amber flaming eyes set in a
cat-like, oval face. The thrush's heart gave a great jump, and seemed
threatening to choke him, for that shape--and it howled at him
suddenly, in a voice calculated to make strong men jump--was death of
the night, otherwise a short-eared owl.
But a gun went "boomp!" with that thick, damp sort of sound that smacks
of black powder, somewhere down on earth, and a huge "herd" of green
plover, _alias_ peewits, which are lapwings, rose, as if blown up by an
explosion, to meet them, their thousand wings flickering in the
frost-haze like a shower of confetti, and the owl was so disconcerted
by the disturbance that he dropped back into the night whence he came,
as one who falls into a sea.
Then suddenly the thrush--all the thrushes, indeed--tipped tails, and
flew downward--offering no explanation to help one to understand
why--till they dropped, each one entirely on his own hook, apparently,
in or about some gardens, as if they had tumbled out of the sky; and
our thrush, in twenty seconds, had slipped into some apple-trees, and
thence to some laurels round a shed, and--was asleep! I say "was
asleep." Out of the starry sky, down, in under, and asleep--all
without emotion, and like a machine. Now, what is one to make of such
a bird?
He did not see, or, more correctly, did not appear to see--for I do not
know what he saw and what he pretended not to see, really--the lean,
lithe, long, low weasel that passed, climbing and sniffing, beneath
him--within six inches--possibly scenting out a rat. He did not hear,
or show that he heard, the blackbird--she was rusty, dark brown, as a
matter of actual fact--scream, a piercing and public-spirited scream,
when the very big claws of a little, round, spotted-feathered ball with
wings, like a parody of a cherub--but men call it a little owl,
really--closed upon her and squeezed, or pierced, out her life. He did
not feel, or let on that he felt, the branches gently sway as two eyes,
glinting back the light of the moon--eyes which were the property of a
"silver tabby" female cat--floated among the twigs, looking for him,
him most certainly, whom she seemed faintly to smell, but never saw.
[Illustration: "A 'silver tabby' floated among the twigs, looking for
him"]
These things represented tense moments dotted through hours of cold,
dark silence, and the blue-black dome of night arched, and the moon
drifted, all in rigid, cold, and appalling stillness.
Then the wind changed, and our thrush awoke to a "muggy" day, under a
soaked, cotton-wool, gray sky, all sodden with streaming showers of
rain. And, by that token alone, he must have known that he was in
England. No other climate is capable of such crazy, unwarned,
health-trying changes. He had come in an icy, practically petrified
silence. He left in a steaming, swishing, streaming gale.
But that was not before he had been down to scratch like a fowl among
the dead leaves under the privet-hedge for grubs, who "kidded"
themselves that they were going to be fine, flashing insects next
summer. He also prospected a snail or two, and broke through their
fortifications by hammering the same upon a stone. And, by some magic
process that looked akin to the way in which some men divine water, he
divined a worm out of seemingly bare earth. It was there, too, and it
came up, not joyfully, but tugged, to be hammered and shaken into
something not too disgustingly alive to be swallowed.
Then, while a robin mounted to a spruce-spire and acted as Job's
comforter to all the birds of the garden by singing--ah, so plaintively
and sweetly!--of the dismal days of frost and snow, he "preened"--i.e.
went over and combed every feather, and tested and retested, cleaned
and recleaned, each vital quill. Then, in one single, watery, weak
stab of apology for sunshine, on the top of a fowl-shed, he surrendered
himself to what, in wild-bird land, is known as the "sunning reaction,"
which really consists of giving body and mind utterly to the sun and
complete rest.
And then he left.
Now, it was no chance that he left. Birds don't do business that way.
To you or me, that location and its climate would have seemed as good
for him to "peg out a claim" in as any other. He knew better.
Something--Heaven alone knows what--within him told him what was
coming. He had the power to take a draft on the future, and by that
means to save himself--if he could. Wherefore he flew on
southward--always south.
And six hours after he had gone, the wind swung like a weather-cock,
swung and stopped at northeast, and frost began to grip that garden in
an iron fist that threatened to squeeze the life out of every living
thing in it, and the sky hung like the lid of a lead box.
The thrush flew, with a few halts, practically all day and well into
the night, and the northeast wind and the Frost King chased him south.
He roosted in a great fastness of age-old holly-bushes within a wood,
whose branches were packed with his relations--redwings, thrushes, and
blackbirds, and also starlings--all tired out, all booked for the south.
Some woods seem to hold a curse of gloom. One cannot say why. And
this was one of them. And the tawny owl that nobody saw but everybody
heard, and the white stoat that everybody saw and nobody heard, and the
amorous dog-fox with the cruel bark that everybody saw and heard, did
not, taken together or singly, add to the gayety of the scene.
The thrush was just ahead of the cold when he went to roost in pouring
rain. In the night, however, the cold had overtaken him, and the
thousand-jeweled beauty of frost-flakes flashed to his waking eye.
He was numbed and puffed out and peevish, and disinclined to move, but
anything was better than sticking about in this roosting-place, this
casual ward and clearing-house of the wild. The keen starlings were
already off, swinging away, regiment by regiment, with a fine, bold
rush of wings; the blackbirds were dotting the glades; the redwings
were slipping "weeping" away, to find soft fields to mope in; and the
pigeon host--what was left alive of it after diphtheria had taken its
toll--had streamed onwards, heading southwest.
_Turdus philomelus_ spelt L-u-c-k for our friend that morn, for he had
not prospected two hundred yards when he came on a place where a
vagrant "sounder" of half-grown, domestic, unringed pigs had been
canvassing the wood for beech-mast, acorns, and roots during the night.
The soil was all torn up for a space of about an acre, probably the
only soil for miles--except along streams and by springs--penetrable by
beaks until the sun came out; and the thrush feasted royally upon
hibernating caterpillars and chrysalids that would have become moths,
beetle larvae all curled up and asleep, and other pests; and he must
have done a considerable amount of good in that place during the next
hour or so.
But feasts do not go begging long in a frost-bound wild, even if they
are hidden; and by the time our thrush had driven several other
thrushes away--for he was a jealous feeder--and had been driven away by
blackbirds himself more than once, starlings descended upon the place
with their furious greed, and our thrush concluded that it was about
time to "step off." The crowded place might become a quick-lunch
resort for some others, not insect-feeders--hawks, for instance--and
was unhealthful for that reason. Indeed, he had not more than moved
away into the shelter of the rhododendrons when a shadow with a hooked
bill shot round the corner, going like the wind. He had time to see it
dive like a dipping kite--but it was a sparrow-hawk--and to hear the
death-scream of a feeding blackbird, before he went completely from
that place, and it knew him no more.
Soon after that he sighted the sea, wide-stretched and restless, ahead,
and turned westward parallel with the coast-line, till, in the
afternoon, he came unto "a land where it was always afternoon"--a flat,
damp, dwarf-treed, relaxing, gray land, mild, as a rule, and
melancholy--a land full of water. But for once it was a cold land, and
the thrush realized that the bitter frost had leapt ahead of him, and
that he might now never outstrip it again, perhaps. I do not know if
he realized, too, that the lead sky, that looked as if it were going to
come down and crush one, meant snow.
In a bare orchard he was attracted by the sight of several blue titmice
and two robins, feeding upon one or two odd apples that had been left
unpicked at the very top of a tree. It seemed strange and out of place
to behold apples in midwinter like that; but, for some reason, he took
only a few pecks, and his devil prompted him down to peck at some
soaked bread among the violets, and to drink at a spring so exquisitely
encrusted with moss that it looked as if everything, every floating
dead leaf, stone, and root, had been upholstered in plush.
Then Fate struck--hard.
A snap, a thump, and he was bouncing over and over, with an air-rifle
bullet in his thigh. It was a blow that knocked him half-silly, and he
was down before he knew, but only for a second, because of what he saw.
He beheld a boy, with an air-rifle in hand, running towards him; but
ahead of the boy was the boy's young cat, who evidently had learnt to
look for a meal when the air-rifle went off.
The cat, being young, however, managed to bungle his pounce for the
fraction of a second, and that is long enough for most of the
wild-folk. Came a mad fluttering, a beating of wings, a quick mix-up,
and, before he knew, that cat found himself frantically chasing that
thrush across the orchard, striking wildly always at a thrush that just
wasn't there, as the latter part flew, part hopped, with every ounce of
strength and agility that clean, hard living had given him, till he was
clear of the trees. Then--up and away, with his heart in his beak, so
to speak, and his brain whirling, till the orchard lay "hull down" on
the horizon, and was only another bitter experience, and a warning,
seared into the bird's memory.
So far, so good. He had made his escape, had euchred Fate, but--the
payment for laziness, the terrible cess for a momentary lapse from
vigilance, which great Nature, in her grim, wise cruelty, always
demands, had to be met, and the end of it was not yet.
It began, however, now.
The thrush discovered that he was not alone in the air, and that he had
all at once got himself, as it were, fixed in the public eye, and was
"wanted." A swish in the sky made him look up, to see a rook, with a
leering eye, coming down upon him. He cleverly "side-slipped" in
mid-air, and let the rook, braking wildly, go diving by. Perhaps he
wondered what had turned the rook hawk. As a matter of fact, the
weather had, partly, and the rifle had, the rest; for the rook could
see what the thrush did not yet realize.
The rook went away astern, shouting bad language, and another foe came
to take his, or her, place. Again our thrush discovered that he was
not alone. Little, white, silent, cruel, dancing flakes of white were
traveling more or less with him and downwards, upon the following wind.
The snow! The snow at last! And he was trapped, for it was to keep
ahead of the snow that he had journeyed all that way back again.
Indeed, you can hardly realize, unless you have almost lived their
life, what the snow and the frost mean to all the thrush people, but
more especially to the common song-thrush and the redwing. At the
worst it means death; at the best, little more than a living death.
However, to race the snow were useless. Yet he flew on, and on, and
on, like a stampeded horse, blindly, one-sidedly, while the ordnance
survey map beneath turned from brown, and chocolate, and silver-gray,
and dull green, first to pepper and salt, then to freckled white, then
all over to the spotless white eider-down quilt of the winter returned,
as far as the eye--even his binocular orbs--could reach, muffling tree
and house, and garden and copse, and farm and field, and fallow and
plow and meadow in the one mystical, silent, white disguise of winter.
And the thrush at length came down.
His eye had spotted a little corner of a garden that might have been a
spread table in the wilderness. It was only a small triangle of lawn,
with a summer-house at its apex, and a spruce-fir and a house at its
base, and privet-hedges marking off the rest. But it had a
"bird-table," and a swept-clean circle on the grass, and there was
sopped bread upon both. And that place was given over entirely to
chaffinches, _all hens_, tripping, mincing, pecking, feasting,
fighting--because they were chaffinches, I suppose, and must fight--all
over the place.
The thrush came to anchor upon the roof of the summer-house,
and--straightway fell upon his beak! And that was Fate's punishment
for laziness, one second's relaxation from vigilance.
Righting himself, he almost overbalanced the other way, and only
finally managed to come to an intricate halt on one leg. The other
leg--the right one--was twisted back under him, in line with his closed
wings and tail; that is to say, it was pointing the wrong way for a
bird's leg, or, rather, so far as could be seen among the feathers,
that was how it seemed. But the leg was not broken; he could still
move his toes and expand his foot. Otherwise he could do nothing with
it. The leg might not have been there, for all the use it was to him;
it would have been better if it had not been there, for it hampered his
flight, or unbalanced him, or something, so that he was incapable of
traveling now beyond the snow, even if he would. Undoubtedly the
air-rifle had done its work.
Now, in the wild it is a fairly sound maxim that an injured wildling is
a dead wildling--that is, unless the injury is quite slight. There are
exceptions, of course. Flesh-wounds and quick-healing wounds are
exceptions.
However, our thrush seemed to be no coward, and he at once buckled to,
to fight Fate and all the world--one bird _v_. the rest. It was
appalling odds, and I guess no darn fool could have been found to back
that bird's chance of winning through.
Then he showed that he had at least one trump up his sleeve. A shape
like unto the shape of a silken kite came floating in ample circles
across the low-hung sky. And the color of that shape was brown--pale
brown; and the shape was alive, and had the appearance of eternally
looking for something, which it always could not find. So hunts the
kestrel falcon, and by the same token the thrush knew that this was a
big hen-kestrel. I say "big" advisedly, because in kestrel society it
is the ladies who have the weight and the vote.
And the thrush, who had by that time flown to the ground, promptly
"froze "--froze to stillness, I mean--and vanished. It was a startling
little trick of his, almost an eccentricity; but the fact was that so
long as he kept still on the dark ground where the snow had been swept
away--and earth and grass mingled almost to a black whole against the
white--he was practically invisible. This was because of his peculiar
somber color. Had he been light of dress, like an ordinary
song-thrush, any eye could have picked him up in that spot.
Now, that kestrel was in a bad temper and vicious. She was cursing the
snow which covered the doings of the field-mice, which ordinarily were
her "staff of life"; and she had not killed since dawn. Hence she was
a public danger, even to wild-folk she usually left alone, and just now
she was looking for our thrush, who she had seen fly down and--vanish.