were gone, and there was little instead on the stream--only snow, and
the snow fell quietly at intervals throughout the night, hiding
everything. Rats, too, are creatures of warmth. They hate cold as
much as the writer, and these two black rats became very miserable.
They had no home, and did not know where to go; and, save for a few
berries, they had nothing to eat. Mercifully, they had plenty to
drink, and that is an item with rats, who die in a very few hours if
they cannot get a drink.
A bitter, dull paling of the sky, which by courtesy we will call dawn,
found them cleaning again, with their hand-like forepaws, exactly like
cats, inside a water-vole burrow. The owner had been out,
bark-chipping, all night--it was the only thing he could find to keep
body and life from parting company--and was not over-pleased, on his
return, to find that he had company at home. A short two-round contest
ensued, during which the water-vole must have felt as if he had taken
on a bit of black lightning. Then the water-vole went away, somewhat
bewildered, to turn some smaller water-vole out of his winter bed; and
the rats curled themselves up, heads between hindlegs, tail encircling
all, with only their ever-ready, elfin ears poking out to give the
alarm, and they slept. And, by the way, it was a saying in the wild
that no one had ever seen them asleep, or knew if, or how, they did
sleep.
Nothing came to disturb them during the day--which was a wonder, for
all the wild was hungry and looking for food--and at the hour when
Night, busy with her dawn, begins it with a star,
they came out, after a prolonged, starry-eyed stare, from their
fastness, and continued their journey.
Things were serious now. They had not fed, and could find nothing to
feed upon but two hawthorn-berries, dropped by the wasteful fieldfares;
but they drank, _and_ cleaned, and proceeded up-stream, with that
caution one only learns in a world full of enemies and empty of friends.
Another six hours of this cold on an empty stomach would send them into
that sleep--the dread, drugged slumber of the cold--from which there is
no awakening in this world, and they seemed to know it. They were
desperate, and their eyes burnt in their sharp heads like gimlet-holes
of light. Desperate they were, as the poor, little, brilliantly
resplendent, and tropic-looking kingfisher had, no doubt, been, whom
they found, frozen into a dried, huddled heap, under the stream-bank,
and so emaciated that, after they had picked his bones, they scarcely
knew that they had touched him.
But anon the face of the snow changed--meaningly for them. Whereas
before they had been alone, almost, in a frozen world, scarcely
crossing a trail but the quadruple track of water-voles or the
chain-pattern impression of a moorhen--nor had seen a living thing but
the square-ended, squat, little, black form of a water-vole out upon an
alder-branch, gnawing bark--they now began to be aware of gradually
increasing company. Not that the company advertised itself, mark you.
Being wild company, it would not; but they knew it was there.
The chain-trail of the moorhen reduplicated itself. It was joined by
that of a water-rail--they saw his ruby eyes and rat-like form in
passing. The fourfold track of a rabbit led the way ahead of them, as
if pointing the path, to be joined by the broken footprints of another
rabbit, and then by the track made by the longer leap of a hare,
fourfold also. The delicate lined marks left by a wood-mouse now kept
company with the others, and anon the little fairy imprints of two
field-voles--short-tailed field-mice, if you prefer. They crossed the
track of another rabbit going, at right-angles, down to the water to
drink, and then the little, busy tattoo of bank-voles. Another hare's
trail, and more rabbits' tracks, began to meander about, but all
heading more or less one way--the way they were going. And then they
stopped dead at the smudged groove and ancient and fish-like scent of
an otter. Moreover, they had scarcely got over that than they came
upon the dog-like tracks, and the smell, like nothing else, of Reynard,
the fox; and, with nerves fairly tingling now, and eyes everywhere at
once, they arrived at last--as the converging trails seemed to say they
would--at the towering, smudged blur against the sky, which was the
farm-buildings.
The black rat peered under the lower rung of a gate into a straw-yard,
and heard the rustlings of little folk--field-vole, bank-vole, and
wood-mouse--who had gone before him. There was no sign of the others;
but that was not strange, for the hares and the rabbits had probably
gone round to the kitchen-garden, for which they were making in their
extremity of hunger; and the otter and the fox were, most likely,
keeping each other off the fowlhouse.
Wherefore, plucking up courage, the black rat skipped into the yard,
and made straight for the manger, where, in the inky blackness under
the open-sided roofs, he could hear the long-drawn blowing and sigh of
fat cattle lying down.
A pale moon came out behind him, and showed him tripping lightly over a
bullock's broad back. Then he was up on the manger-edge, had paused to
make sure, and was down in the manger, picking up crumbs and dust of
linseed-cake and chaff. Three mice were doing the same thing, but fled
at his approach; but he did not trouble about that, for the cattle had
not left even him and his wife a full meal, having blown what was left
of the chaff away, and licked up practically all of the cake-crumbs and
dust. However, it was better than nothing.
The rat's natural curiosity was awakened, and his comparative warmth in
this place, out of the razor-edged wind--oh, what a relief to be out of
that infernal sawing blast!--made him explore. And he ran along the
edge of the manger to a hole in the wall, which led--the peculiar and
indescribable smell said so--through to the pig-sties. But here he
stopped, and his wife behind him stopped. Some one was coming through
from the opposite side--some one who smelt very much worse than any pig.
Next instant both black rats had gone off together like sparks--if ever
sparks were black--and the brown rat, coming through the hole, wondered
what on earth had happened. Then he sniffed at their trail, tried, but
found it impossible, to follow, and passed on. He would have felt
great pleasure in slaying them if he could, and they knew that.
The black rat now essayed to cross the yard to the stable. He could
not very well stop there--up among the rafters, that is--all night, so
he came down, and, with his wife following him, gingerly rustled out
upon the partially snow-covered straw.
Then he got a shock that turned him into a winking series of black
streaks.
Then he got another shock which turned him, literally, into--well, into
black lightning. You never saw anything like it in all your life. You
never would have believed that any living beast could have so
frantically and so furiously got itself about from place to place so
instantaneously. It was--dazzling. It made you blink. It was It in
the agility line, and no mistake.
Firstly, the brown rat, having hidden up in some black corner, with
brown-rat cunning, came hopping out instantly--nay, charging--on the
black rat's trail. And there was murder in his wicked, little,
glinting eyes at he came.
Secondly, a white eider-down quilt--at least, that was what it seemed
like--descended lightly as--as an eider quilt, and as soundlessly, out
of the blue-black sky, and covered the brown rat up. You could hear
his horrid, muffled screaming of rage and fear under the quilt; you
could see the quilt--but they saw that it looked pale brown on
top--lifting about, and feeling for that murder-child of a rat
underneath. Then the quilt got him--you could hear the unspeakably
beastly death-squeal reverberate mufflingly--and then the quilt rose,
still utterly without sound, and one saw it was a big barn-owl, with a
rat--a brown rat--twitching in its white-mittened claws.
But do you think that made any difference? If so, you don't know the
cruel devil of perseverance that is the brown rat.
As the black rat, at the end of his amazing lightning display, reached
the barn, with his mate behind him, he leapt--he could not stop--clean
over the back of one great twenty-inch, glitter-eyed brown ghoul,
called by the death-scream of his colleague--other rats usually answer
it--coming out of a hole. The black rats dashed into the hole like
flickering streaks, but the brown rat had instantly spun upon himself,
and was after them.
The barn was an unfortunate choice. It seemed full of brown rats, and
four of them, in the darkness, instantly took up the pursuit of the now
fairly hunted black couple. Nothing but their miraculous agility saved
those two from being eaten alive, but they came out of the barn on to
the spotless snow on the far side, with only a foot to spare between
their long tails and the mangy, scarred head of the leading brown fiend
behind them.
Straight across the open, like a drawn black bar, they shot, to a
towering building of wood, and along this--here they lost six inches of
the precious twelve by which they led--looking for a hole. They found
it, whizzed in, five brown rats close behind them, nine brown rats hard
behind the five.
They discovered themselves in a great room half-filled with sacks and
the sweet smell of corn, and in and out among these sacks they led
their hunters such a dizzy chase as no man ever witnessed, or could
witness, for the matter of that, since human eyes could not follow it.
But the end seemed positive, anyway. It was only a question of tiring
the black sparks out, for the four brown rats in the place, engaged
upon lowering the weight of the flour in the sacks--one of those rats a
dreaded cannibal of twenty-one and a half inches--joined in the
mobbing, and soon the black rats found themselves in such a position
that there was no escape--no escape for any but a black rat. For them
there was one way. And those two living electric sparks on four feet
took it. They went up the wall!
I don't know, but I guess that, as the black rats' upper jaws were
longer and sharper and more shark-like than the brown rats', and their
tails very much longer, they got a spring off the tail--and legs,
too--and had an agility in hanging on to knots and crannies above that
possessed by the brown ghouls. Be that as it may, they did it, and got
a respite under the floor of the room above, before their enemies,
traveling more normally, and by holes, could swarm up after them.
Then the two, cornered at last, with one last desperate rush, shot up
through a hole in the boards, out into the middle of the room on the
first floor, and stopped dead.
Ah! they stopped. Good reason, too. Good reason had the five brown
rats, excited with blood-lust, hard on their tails, to stop also.
They found themselves suddenly revealed in the middle of a big room,
furnished mainly with a few sacks, and flooded with a dazzling,
blinding glare of electric light, that seemed brighter than the very
sun.
There they were, all seven, black and brown, struck rigid, plain and
clear for any to see. And four men and two dogs stood there seeing
them. They, those men and dogs, had just come quietly for their
evening rat-hunt, turning on the light suddenly, for the place was a
mill as well as a farm, making--from the mill-wheel--its own
electricity.
There was a strained, aching pause for about as long as a man takes to
gasp. Then the dogs sprang in, and one of the men jumped to the only
hole in the room they had not previously stopped up.
But the black rats! The brown rats died, at intervals, fighting
horribly, as cornered brown rats do. In five minutes they were, all
five, dead--that is, all that had come into the room and been cut off.
The black rats, however, in five minutes, were not dead. Nobody seems
to have seen them, after the hunt had once begun, till the others were
killed. Even then all four men aver that they could never rightly
swear that they saw them. They saw lines, and streaks, and flashes,
and whirls, and halos of black, which might have been rats--and the
dogs said they were--but no one could swear to it. At times these
giddy phenomena were among the rafters, at other times they were on the
floor, and yet again they were going up or coming down the walls; but
all the while both men and dogs seemed to be everlastingly too late,
and hunting them where, half-a-second before, they had been. In fact,
they perpetually had been, and were always where snapping jaws and
beating sticks were not.
At the end of half-an-hour the men, mopping their foreheads, even in
that cold, gasped, "Lor' love yer! Did yer ever see th' like?"
At the end of three-quarters of an hour the men flung themselves,
gasping, on to the sacks of flour, and the dogs, panting, on to the
floor--done. And the black rat and his mate, lively as ever, perkily
watched them from the rafters.
Then the men and dogs went away, the light went out, and presently
great sounds of war below suggested that the brown rats on the
ground-floor were having the time of their lives. So were the two
black rats, but a different sort of time. They were feasting upon meal
and grain. And there, so far as I know, as they were like birds,
flying among the rafters like black lightning if molested, they live to
this day.
IX
LAWLESS LITTLE LOVE
She rolled over and regained her feet in a flash, to find herself facing
a dark beast, with a huge, bushy, white tail, held up straight like a
pleased cat's--but this was a sign of warning, not pleasure--that shone
ghostily in the gloom of the mysterious, dread thorn-scrub. And the face
of the beast was the face of a black and grinning devil, and its eyes
shone red.
She stood there, shivering a little, with the tiny young thing crawling
weakly away from almost under her feet, and the long, vivid, raw gash
that the white-tailed beast, coming from nowhere special out of the
night, had set upon her shoulder--a murderess caught in the act.
On three legs--her left hindleg had been bitten off by a trap set for a
hyena--emaciated, with all her natural buoyant courage gone out of her,
her wonderful agility gone too, she felt instantly in her heart that she
could neither face this diabolical-faced foe, nor yet get away from it.
This same crippled condition had spoilt her hunting forays, and, driven
by hunger, had made her nose into other people's nurseries, and be caught
just on the point of slaying somebody else's baby, when the owner had
come home, like a streak out of the night.
But that was not the worst of it, for she was longer than the enemy, a
bit, and might have put up a good fight--she had fought for her life, as
a matter of course, ever since she left her mother's side--if the enemy
had not brought with her an ally. It was not visible to the eye, that
ally, but it was to the nose--a most distinct and appalling stink, and it
could be felt, for it made her nostrils smart. Apparently, then, that
white tail was intentional, was as a red flag, insolently displayed,
warning all to beware of the stink. Well, there is more than one way of
holding your own in the wild, and a most unholy smell is not such a bad
way, either, when you come to think about it.
The owner of that nameless odor was a polecat--not our polecat; worse
than that--and--well, you know the breed. Fear they know not; neither is
pity with them a weakness, especially where the lives of their young are
concerned. This one did not wait. She attacked quicker than you could
cry "Knife," taking off with all four feet together, in a peculiar and
patent way of her own.
The would-be murderess, who was long, and absurdly short in the leg, too,
just like her opponent, only with a more graceful and not such a
thick-set body, turned on herself in a snaky fashion, and her neck, that
the fangs had aimed at, was not there when the polecat arrived, but her
teeth were, and they closed on the polecat's cheek.
The latter gibbered horribly at the spark of pain, and set herself really
down to fight.
The intending murderess said nothing at all, but, unbalanced with her
game hindleg, having no force to push or spring with, and being very
weak, she knew she was done for directly they closed to the clinch.
In a few seconds the polecat had her down, and only an awful, mad,
desperate clashing of fang against fang kept the attacker off her throat.
It could not last.
Then it was, at that moment, that a sharp little, gray little,
dark-spotted, clean-cut, close-cropped, intelligent head, on a snaky,
long neck, peeped out of the shadows, and peered about, as if to see what
in whiskers all the pother was about. The head might have been there by
chance, but it wasn't. Its owner had been running her trail for hours,
and looking for it for days, and didn't mean to let her go, now that he
had finally come up with her, polecats or no polecats, smells or not.
But he was not a fool. He knew the game, the bitter, cruel game of
death, as it is played throughout the wild. With man the inexorable law
is, "Get on or get out." In the wild they phrase it another way: "Kill
or be killed." Man puts it more politely, perhaps, but it's all the same
old natural law, I guess.
The head and snaky neck developed a long, creamy, tawny-spotted body, and
the body a long, banded, tapering tail--all set on legs so short, they
scarcely kept the owner off the ground; and the name of that beast was
genet. The same are a sort of distant relation of the cats, a fourth
cousin once removed; but it is necessary to tell you, because you might
think they were beautiful weasels, otherwise. _And she was a genet_,
too--the murderess that might have been.
Then the new-comer moved. Then he began to move, and--here! It was just
like the buzzing of a fly in a tumbler. Certainly you could say that he
was still there, but you could not swear that you actually saw him.
The first that the polecat knew of him was that red-hot fork-like feeling
that means fangs in the back of your neck. The polecat spun on herself,
and bit, quick as an electric needle, at the spotted thing, that promptly
ceased to be there, and, to use the professional term, she "made the
stink" for all she was worth. She forgot all about the long female
would-be slayer of her children, and the genet was mightily thankful to
drag herself clear, but she would not have been she if she had failed to
get her fangs home, as a parting shot, before she went.
Then, I fancy, she was ill; and, upon my soul, I don't wonder. It was
enough to asphyxiate a whale-factory hand. But the male genet was not
ill, or, if he was, he was moving from place to place too quickly to give
the fact away; and by the time he shot up a tree, like a long, rippling,
cream and tawny-dappled, banded line, he left that polecat considerably
redder than when he found her, and weak, as if she had been bitten by
leeches. The polecat had certainly saved her young, or thought she had,
although I cannot swear that the female genet had really meant them harm;
but she did not look as if she had saved much else. However, she held
the field of battle, and the foe had fled, and that is supposed to be the
sign of victory; but that had been done by her "gassing" methods, so to
speak, not by fighting alone.
Rippling about among the branches, an incarnation of grace personified,
and hunting for her by nose alone, for in the moonlight her exquisite
creamy, dappled coat was invisible--a real piece of magic, this--the male
genet quickly found her for whom he sought. She remained low, lying
along a bough, line for line, shadow-patch for shadow-patch, flat as the
very bark, and as undulating, until she felt sure that he would run over
her; then she rose, spitting and snarling in his face, cat-like and
vicious.
It was a poor kind of thanks for having saved her life, perhaps, but it
was her way--_then_. And, anyway, who can blame her? She had never met
any living creature that was not a foe or an armed "unbenevolent" neutral
in all her life, and she did not know that any other category or creature
existed, the recent fight notwithstanding.
But the male genet neither ran nor fought. He dodged her snap, by a
tenth of an inch, almost without seeming to move, and there he stood
looking at her meekly. She leapt to him, and he shot off, as she arrived
upon, the place where he had been. Perhaps she knew that only a genet,
or a mongoose, could do that trick in a manner at once so machine-like
and precise; and after that she merely sat, bent in a curve, with her
lips up. But her spring had given her away, and he saw that she was
lame. Perhaps he saw, too, the gleam of hunger, the wild, cruel gleam
that forgets all else, in her eyes; but who am I to say whether he
understood it?
Be that as it may, the male vanished suddenly and without explanation,
doubling on his trail and going out like a snuffed candle. He was in
view, as a matter of fact, several times during the next few minutes,
climbing quietly; but the dark blotches of the leaf-shadows magicked him
into invisibility, and no one could tell where he was, till suddenly the
silence was smitten by one piercing squawk somewhere among the greenery
above. Then a crash, wild flutterings, a hectic commotion, and he and a
terrified guinea-fowl came down together, more nearly falling than he
liked. Indeed, he must have let it fall, or gone himself with it, as he
slid past, grabbing for holds, if she had not dropped quickly to the next
bough and taken a hold, too. Then, side by side, they hauled the warm,
feathery, fluttering thing up, and he slew swiftly, in order to silence
the noisy prey, who foolishly kicked up such a noise, as if maliciously;
for he knew--and perhaps the gleany (guinea-fowl) did, too--how quickly a
crowd may gather to interfere in an advertised "killing" in that wild.
The female genet, however, was past caring about risks. She had reached
a stage of hunger when no risks can overshadow the risk of starvation,
and she had the guinea-fowl by the throat, and was sucking its blood
before the other had time to realize what she was at. Then, with fine
discrimination, she ate the breast and thigh, and later might, or might
not, have let him have a look in, if some blotched shape had not slid up,
without sound, across the blue black night sky, and, halting in the tree,
begun, apparently, to crack nuts very sharply and very quickly.
Whereupon, without saying anything, the genets faded out.
It was nothing much, really--only the noise she makes when the giant
eagle-owl is angry; but when you are a genet, with a body under two feet
long, you may find it rather a bore, if nothing else, to remain cheek by
jowl with an angry eagle-owl three feet or so across the wings, with the
feline temper of an owl, and armed, owl-like, to the teeth, if I may so
put it.
[Illustration: "An angry eagle-owl"]
Now the question came as the two genets arrived at the ground--would she
follow him, or would he have to follow her? He was determined, anyway,
that nothing short of calamity should part them. Yet I don't see, since
he never uttered a sound, how she understood him to say that if she would
follow him he would find her food, even though she was still hungry, for
she had not yet got to trusting him much more than she trusted any other
beast, and seemed to think that he was half as likely to eat her as to
get her something to eat. Such a thing as another creature finding her
food for only just friendliness--love was out of the question yet, or out
of her question--was an idea her suspicious nature could not yet grasp.
However, she followed.
Twining and twisting, turning and tripping, in and out among the bush and
the tree-trunks, soundless, and quite invisible, except when they crossed
a moonbeam--and then nearly so, because the moon has a trick of, as it
were, dissolving the colors of even fairly conspicuous creatures--they
crept on their low way. There was not a sound that they did not crouch
for, often flat as a whip-lash--and that wild is full of sounds by night,
too--not a puff of air that they did not throw up their sharp little
muzzles to test, not a movement or the hint of a movement which their
eyes did not fix with a suspicious stare.