Fate to feed his wife. She would freeze there on her nest in the snow
among the icicle-studded ledges else. And every time he had got hold
of a big enough dainty to tug free and fly off with, Cob had cut in and
collared the said morsel. As a matter of fact, friend raven was a
better carver than the sea-pirate, had a beak better suited for the
grisly purpose. Finally, the black one got hold of a piece of meat,
and did not let go. He hung on, and, before anybody realized that he
had moved, Cob's yellow-and-red-painted bill--nearly all red now--had
closed upon that raven's neck. There was one wild, asthmatical croak
from the raven, a whirl of sturdy black and overshadowing
black-and-white wings, and the raven was jerked clean head-over-heels,
where, among the heather, he lay for a brief second, kicking
ignominiously, on his sable back.
Here the crows fled to strategic positions upon bowlders, waist-deep in
heather, hard by, expecting a like fate, and leaving the herring-gull
to gobble up what he could in the confusion, and risk his life in the
process, when suddenly, above the beating of wings and the hiss of
wind, all distinctly heard, and jumped at, the sound of a single,
horrible, instantaneous, metallic clash.
Cob's agonized yell, the clash itself, and the whir and rush of wings,
as every bird there present literally flung itself into the air, seemed
really, though of course they were not, coincident--such is the
quickness with which these wild creatures act. But Cob alone remained.
He stopped in mid-spring horribly, and suddenly, as if a Hand had
reached up and plucked him back. For a second his wonderful wings beat
and beat tremendously, frenziedly, with a noise you could hear all up
the hill; then he fell back in one demented, frenzied mix up of
bashing, smashing pinions, legs, tail, and whirling feathers.
That clash, which had jarred Cob's frame from head to hind-toe, was a
trap, _alias_ a gin, _alias_ a clam, and the rack of man's Inquisition
of the wild. He had stepped upon it; it had gone off, and caught him
by the right leg, and, being anchored by a chain, had refused to let
him go when he sought to remove himself, trap and all.
What followed during the next minute or two it would scarcely be fair
to so fine a bird to print. Moreover, it was unnice to behold.
Wild-folk have a habit often of going temporarily insane when they
first find themselves trapped, because the trap represents to them the
most supreme, the most unbearable, of all terrors--loss of freedom; and
freedom is to them more than life, especially to birds, and more
especially still to those whose lives are dedicated to the wild, free
sea.
At the end of that time Cob lay exhausted upon his side, one mighty
pinion pathetically trailing in the snow, his beak open, his whole jet
and spotless white body shaken and convulsed with pantings that were
almost sobs. He seemed in danger of dying there and then upon the
spot, with sheer, sickening horror or a broken heart.
The herring-gull was a silver line--about as big as a thrip--to
seaward. The gray crows climbed the heavens to landward, like flies
that climb a window-pane. Only the raven had not gone, quite.
The raven was a bird, of course, and every bird has got to do its duty.
There can be no shirking. _His_ duty was to supply food to keep the
fires of life burning in his mate as she sat upon her icy nest. His
duty was to see that his eggs, _their_ eggs, hatched out; and with him
the motto was: "The end justifies the means." This bird, this
sea-rover, this big pirate, alone stood between him and the discharge
of duty. There was no other way, no other food; he had searched.
Wherefore, the raven stayed; he knew all about traps, few better, and
he stayed, waiting, if it please you, for Cob to--die!
But Cob would not oblige. He had not got a broken and crushed leg, as
the raven possibly expected. He was not injured, as he should have
been, according to program; only puffed. The mercy of Allah had seen
to it that some teeth of that instrument of vile torture that had hold
of him were broken off, and that his leg should have been caught in the
gap thus formed. Moreover, the trap had not been looked after; it was
rusty, and did not shut quite properly. The spring was weak, or some
grit had got in, or something, and a smart rat would have got out of it
easily, but a rat is not a gull, and knows too much.
Thereafter, nothing happened for a long while. Cob's first delirium
seemed to have spent him, and perhaps taught him how much a leg can
hurt when tugged by the full lift of sixty-nine-inch wings, especially
when one tries to whirl round upon it when it cannot turn.
The raven sat on his lichen-decorated, snow-draped bowlder, hands in
pockets, so to speak, abominably untidy, with a pessimistic hunch of
the shoulders, but a light in his eyes, a strangely malignant,
devilishly roguish leer, that belied his appearance. Perhaps he was
waiting to see if Cob during his struggles obligingly touched off any
further deadly surprises that might lie hidden in the vicinity. One
never knows. He had seen a gray crow double-catch himself in two traps
lying close to one another--once.
Nothing happening, however, that raven presently sailed in on his fine
work. He broke his neutrality with a sudden dry rustle of wings, and
clumsily half-hopped, half-heavily napped, down to Cob, lying there
still and silent, but very much awake, upon the snow. He almost seemed
to be rubbing his hands, or, rather, his claws, that ebon rascal. This
was, indeed, a game after his own heart.
Cob never moved when the raven arrived. I suppose he knew all about
ravens, and what one may expect from them. He only stared at him with
one cold eye, a tense, lop-sided stare; and he mouthed a little--if one
may be permitted the expression--with his beak, like a man moistening
his lips.
The raven looked him over critically, leeringly, insolently, with a
hateful air of ownership. Then the raven sharpened the gouge thing
which he called his beak--wheep-wheep--upon a stone, as birds do, and
tightened his feathers, as if almost visibly tucking up his sleeves
for--well, for the job.
Then he tweaked Cob's tail, apparently just to see how much alive he
was. But Cob did not move, beyond drawing one webbed leg--the free
one--up under him.
Then the raven dug him under the wing--punched him in the ribs, so to
speak. But Cob did nothing more than cringe--cringe from head to
hind-toe, like a worm.
Then suddenly, startlingly suddenly, with the full stroke, the dreaded
pickax blow, of all the ravens, he let drive straight at Cob's clear,
shining eye--the left one, with which Cob, with his head twisted, had
all along been regarding him. He had disclosed his hand, that raven.
It was devil's work.
Till that moment Cob had never moved, as we have said. Save for his
one eye and his quivering, one would scarcely have known that he lived.
That was his game, perhaps. Who can tell? For a stolid, slow-thinking
gull may have, in his way, just as deep, or low, a cunning as a
brilliant-brained raven. Anyhow, in that fiftieth of a second allowed,
just when it seemed as if nothing could save his eye, Cob's head
snicked round and up, and he slid the enemy's beak down off his own
with as neat a parry as ever you saw. And he did more. He caught hold
of the said raven's beak, got a grip on beak in beak, and once having
got hold, he kept hold. This was nothing new to him. It was his
way--one of his ways--of fighting rival great black-backed gulls. But
it was new to the raven, and he had not previously thought out any
proper counter to it. (There is a counter, I think.) Result--caught
raven as well as caught gull.
Then it was that raven's turn to go mad, and dance a paralytic kan-kan;
but he could not get any change out of that gull. Cob hung on almost
as well as the trap hung on to him, and far more twistfully. He was
quite at home, of course. He had been brought up to this sort of
thing. It was the official regulation gull way of fighting under set
rules, but he could rarely get any other bird than a gull to fight with
him like it. It was not the raven's way of fighting, though, and I
think he felt himself in a trap. He certainly acted like a bird out of
its senses, while the gull, flapping hugely, and forgetting, in the
excitement, his own bondage, gradually forced the raven's head back and
back over his back, till that raven was in the unenviable position of
staring over his own back at his own tail, upon which he was
ignominiously sitting. Also, his neck was half-dislocated, and he was
nearly choking. And about this time it began to dawn upon him that it
did not pay in the wild to monkey with great black-backed gulls, even
trapped ones. He swore, as well as he could, in a gurgling croak.
Then----
Clash!
Horrors upon diabolical horrors! Another trap?
The same ghastly thought flashed to both birds' brains at the same
moment, and both literally sprang bodily up into the gale in one
maddened leap, both forgetting all else in the panic to be gone.
Both stopped at the same instant, with a jerk that nearly unhinged
every bone in their bodies. Both yelled with terror at the identical
moment.
Both were released--as by the cutting of a string--at the same fraction
of time, and both hurtled aloft at the same fear-blinded, rocket-like
speed.
But both had not been caught by the same kind of trap.
It was the jerk that had freed Cob from the really quite light hold, as
we have already explained, of the jaws of the steel trap.
And it was the jerk that had torn out some of the raven's
tail-feathers, and left them in the jaws of the--gray, old, hill fox.
And it was the fox who was standing all alone, watching, with oblique
eyes, the two great birds fast dissolving with every desperate,
stampeding wing-beat into the hurrying cloud-wrack and the wild
seascape--in opposite directions. He had made a good stalk, but had
sprung a little short, had brer fox.
Upon a day, weeks later, we find the raven, whose young had left the
nest, stolidly soaring over a small, flat island, golden with furze,
purple with heather, pale-rose chiffon where it was covered with
sea-pinks.
In addition to these, only one other hue, beside green, was there upon
that island gem floating on the jade-green sea, and that was a patch of
black and white! It flashed to the eye of the raiding rogue-raven, and
he altered course towards it, when it turned into a female great
black-backed gull, running, literally racing, to her nest, which the
raven could now see, with its two big, buff, dark-splashed eggs.
Down flopped the giant gull upon her treasure, and began yelling,
"How-how-how-how!" at the top of her voice.
But the island seemed empty of life, and her yelling useless.
Down dropped the raven in front of her.
Down winnowed the hen-raven at the back of her.
And, both together, they approached. And all the time the great
black-backed gull continued to yell, "How-how-how-how!"
At last, when he had got close enough, the cock-raven lunged at her,
or, rather, underneath her. She parried his stroke, and--the hen-raven
lunged. Nothing now, she knew, could save her eggs, unless she rose to
fight the cock-raven. The hen-raven then ran in. She only required a
second in which to ruin each egg, but she never got it.
Nobody saw the avalanche coming, but everybody heard it arrive. It was
of snow-white, and it was of jet-black, and it knocked the cock-raven
one way, and sent the hen-raven, picking up her skirts, as it were, and
fleeing, the other. And the name of the avalanche was Cob.
I fancy he considered that he bore a grudge against that cock
bandit-raven. Perhaps in dreams he could still feel that trap on his
leg. Who knows? He certainly used to wake up with outcries, and he
equally certainly made that cock-raven shy of that island for evermore.
VIII
THE WHERE IS IT?
No one would have thought of looking for any living beast in the raffle
of dried twigs and tamarisk "leaves" between the crawling, snake-like
roots of the feathery tamarisks if it had not been for the noise. The
noise was unmistakable, as the noise of a fight always is; and the only
other living thing near the spot, a tiny, tip-tailed, brown wren--a
little ball of feathers, dainty as you please, and all alone there, and
out of place down by the terrible, snow-covered, wind-tortured estuary
shore--made shift to remove herself, making remarks--wrens can't help
saying what they feel--as she flitted.
Then the combatants fell out--literally. Up from the solid earth
between the twisted roots they seemed to come, but that proved the art
of one of them in concealing his front-door from the curious, and down
the bank of the sea-wall, over and over and over, squeaking the most
murderous language, and grappling like pocket-devils--tumbled a little
jet-black and a little dark-brown beast.
They continued the duel upon the dry gravel below--the finest and the
whitest gravel ever you did see--and they would apparently have gone on
for goodness knows how long if a gray-white, thin, worn post a couple
of yards away had not turned into a heron and stalked an ungainly stalk
towards them.
Then they fell apart, and one of them, at any rate--the brown one--ran
away in the shape of a water-vole--water-"rat," if you will--the heron
making spear-lunges at him with his bill as he ungainlily skipped at
the other's tail all the way up the bank. The other fighter, the black
one, could not rightly be said to have turned into anything very
much--at least, not anything that any one could swear to. It just
seemed as if a dark blur whizzed about--more bird-like than
beast-like--around the astonished and prancing heron, and then into
nowhere. It was like watching a blue-bottle in a tumbler, and very
extraordinary. The heron never even professed to follow it or lunge at
it. He preferred the water-vole, whose agility was not too fast to see.
At the place where it had come from, the mouth of the hole, it
stopped--this beast that could move quicker than eye could
follow--stopped so suddenly and completely that its change from almost
lightning motion to stony motionlessness in the fraction of a second
was nearly as amazing as its first marvelous exhibition. It stopped, I
say, and became a--a rat.
To nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand, the word
"rat" conveys only one impression. This rat did not fulfill that
impression. In fact, there is more than one kind of rat, and though
fate and their fathers' Kismet has cursed them all with a name of
shame, they are not all the kind of people that made it so. There is
the foreigner, the invader, the common brown rat, who is accursed;
there is the old English black rat, whom the accursed one has nearly
wiped out into little more than a ghost; and there is the water-rat,
who is not a rat, but a vole, and would thank you to remember the fact.
And this rat was a black rat, as black as jet, shark-jawed, star-eyed,
elfin-eared, snake-tailed, lean, long-legged, and graceful--a very
greyhound among the rats. He was there, in that dancing-floor of the
winds by the estuary, because no common or sewer rats were there. They
were anathema to him, and they were worse--death in many horrible
forms. He had been there all the summer, all the autumn, and all
the---- No, by whiskers! he was not going to remain there all the
winter. He had his limit, and he hated cold; and here, down by the
flat, sodden, mud-choked shore of the estuary, it was so cold that if
you didn't jolly well mind what you were up to and keep your tummy
always full, you went to sleep, and--never woke up any more.
A little pile of mussel, winkle, and shore-crab shells, and the
backbone of what had been a stranded fish, close to the mouth of the
hole, showed the rat's account-book to date; but there was a line to be
drawn even in this trade. That dawn--if you could call the gray dark
of a snowstorm dawn--he, wondrously adventurous, had gone shell-fish
collecting, away out upon the freezing wet mud-ooze. He had got three
mussels; a muddy face; muddier feet; nearly an eye pecked out by a
mighty, great black-backed gull; three chivyings from herring-gulls;
one nip from a crab who ought to have been dead; two winkles under big
stones that took half-an-hour to shift; one dead pigmy shrew--length
two inches--with a hole in its skull, no brains, and a horrible smell;
nearly his life removed by the swoop of a kestrel falcon and the
javelin-stab of a heron's beak; and twenty minutes' hard cleaning to
remove the mud-stains that were not properly off--to his nice
liking--yet. And, to add to that, he had no sooner finished than he
found that some clumsy fool of a water-rat--vole, I mean--with a mania
for mining, had run a shaft into his hole, and brought the whole roof
crumbling down upon his scrupulously neat and tidy nest of fine hay and
carefully shredded rush--the only approximately warm corner he
possessed in all that biting cold--so that days of labor would not
repair the silly damage; and he had had to enter into a free fight with
and turn the fool out, nearly losing his life, for the fourth time that
short, dark, bitter day, in the process. And now he had to clean
himself all over again!
No wonder he was fed-up, and decided to quit. He loved the dank marsh,
the brackish channels, the long, lone wind blowing through the
tamarisks, and the smell--salt, seaweed, mud, and fish--of it all; but
in this--weather, when the cold here, even in shelter, was greater than
the cold in any other spot--and the unchecked wind cut like swords of
ice--he realized that one must be an eider-duck or an Iceland gull, a
northern diver or an Arctic owl, to stand it, and he was none of these.
Wherefore, though the dusk had made the dull day only a little more
dark as yet, and the pink, luminous frost-haze still hung in the west,
he called down his hole to his wife--his one and only wife, but that
was not his fault--and quitted.
Ten minutes later you behold our black rat--if you had eyes quick
enough, but it was a matter of momentary glimpses, anyway--trekking up
a ditch. You have pretty well got to take my word for it, because,
though sometimes you saw him for the half of a second, mostly you
didn't, and couldn't tell whether there was his wife only, or he only,
or both. Really there were both, but our black friend with the
embarrassingly, the abnormally, long tail and the genteel head--Mr.
_Mus rattus_ on Sundays, if you please, and in nowise to be confused
with that _canaille_, Citizen _Mus decumanus_, the common brown
rat--had not the slightest intention that any one should see him, if he
could help it. His wife might be trusted to look out for herself. And
for this reason, perhaps, his march was a progress to wonder at.
Did a flock of wild-duck come over from the sea with whistling wings,
he did not so much get under the over-hanging grass as _be_ there. Did
a "gaggle" of wild-geese go by high over, clamoring like hounds, he
went out like a blown candle. Did a party of teal--for it was the
magic hour of "flight," when all wildfowl shift their quarters to feed,
or not to feed--fairly hissing with speed, like masterless bullets,
dash over, he--well, he was not before you could realize that he had
moved.
Then up and flew round them a shape, and the name of that shape was
death. It might have been a gull with hawk-like form. It might have
been a hawk in gull-like light-gray uniform. And it might have been an
owl with gull-like dress and hawk-like lines. Whatever it was, it was
clipper-built, swift, and in fighting trim. As a matter of fact, it
was neither gull nor hawk nor owl, but a harrier, a hen-harrier--that's
its name, not its sex, for it was a cock--and the same is a half-way
house, so to speak, between hawk and owl. Possibly because they are
crepuscular, harriers may be thought more rare than they are. This one
was "crepusculing," and--the black rat did not like it. They had met
before, and Mr. Ratus had gained a lively dislike for this hawk-owl
combination, greater than his respect--which itself was not small--for
owl or hawk.
Seeing nowhere to go, and nothing to hide in when he got there, our Mr.
Ratus shifted from one spot to the other when the harrier made his
cat-like pounce--yes, he was something cat-like, too--and had the
pleasure of seeing the harrier's uninviting talons grab a clawful of
grass, which, by all powers of judgment, ought to have been black rat's
fur.
A mere hawk, or even an owl, might have considered this rebuff enough,
but not the harrier. _He_ wafted himself ten feet aloft on his long
narrow vans, and, flapping owl-like, or almost butterfly-like, began to
beat, and the beating of the harrying harrier, up and down, is one of
the most trying ordeals, for the game beaten for, in the wild.
Mrs. Ratus sat where she was, he presumed, playing the same bluff.
But both were without cover, and the black rat, I fear, devoutly hoped
that she would be fool enough to move and give herself away first;
whilst she, on her part, was cursing him for many kinds of a fool for
starting their "flitting" before it was dark.
While she sat and froze--in both senses--however, the black rat, rigid
as a beast cut out of coal, with one bright, shining eye upon the
harrier beating up and down, was probing the dusk with the other eye.
And presently he thought he saw his chance. He would have had to move,
anyway, I fancy, for the strain of sitting there bang in the open was
unendurable. His nerves would have snapped. So he went to his
chance--a hole in the bank of the ditch.
I say he went, but I only take it to be so because he got there. One
could not actually see him go. One had only an idea, quite an
uncertain idea, that something, most like a swift bird, had passed up
the ditch, and one could not swear even to that. It seemed impossible
that the flying something had been a four-legged animal.
It was the black rat. Nor did he go straight. He went, if I may so
put it, every way at once, ending up with a merry-go-round dance with
death--the harrier was pouncing savagely--round a tuft of grass, at
such a speed that he looked exactly like the rim of a quickly spun
bicycle-wheel--a halo, that is to say, and nothing else.
And then--he was crouched, panting, inside the hole, wondering whether
his heart or his lungs would be the first to burst. And then? Oh, and
then he--cleaned himself, naturally and of course. What else did you
expect? He was the original black rat of Old England, and one of the
cleanest animals on earth.
Mrs. Ratus, having vanished past finding while the hunt to the hole was
on, presently scented her lord out, when the night had come and the
harrier was gone, and together, starting like antelope at every hint of
a sound, they traveled up the ditch, and up the bank of a stream that
the ditch folded into.
Once an owl--the nomad, short-eared owl of the marshes--let forth a
hoot that would have sent a nervous lady into "astericks," and sent
_them_ into no-where, as if it had detonated a charge of that lively
mystery called T.N.T. under their dainty feet. Once, just as they were
lapping like dogs at the edge of the ice that was conspiring to span
the brook, an otter shot up his head--jaws wide and dripping--almost
under their long and pointed noses, and they, with one accord, and
driven by their long tails acting as a spring, leapt simply into space.
At any rate, they could not be followed by mortal eye, wherever they
did leap to.
And once they met a wandering cat. And that cat seemed to go mad, for
she shifted about the steep bank of that stream, and up, and
about--here she swore because the spikes pricked her--and down a
holly-bush, as if she had got a rocket tied to her tail. She had not,
of course. She was hunting black rats. I suppose she saw them. If
so, she was the only person who did, and I feel sure that, instant as
she was, when she was up the bank or the holly-bush they were down it,
and when she was down they were up. Finally, when her lost temper had
completely run her out of breath, she slouched away, spitting like a
worn sparking-plug, and very much disgusted. And--the black rats
cleaned themselves!