waters. He felt the current, which was strong, plucking like invisible
great fingers at his legs; he felt the cold strike through tawny,
spotted fur and skin to his belly, but he never looked back. His feet
were whirled from under him; he trod upon nothing, cold, cold
emptiness, and that was enough to terrify any grown beast, let alone a
baby; but he struck out right manfully, and his fine eyes and face took
on that regal expression of haughty determination that you see in the
face only of King Leo himself and his mate, and in no other beast in
the world. And the king's daughter unhesitatingly followed--a real
princess, by gad, sirs!
Steadily the pair swam, heading instinctively, one presumes, up-stream,
to counteract the drift of the ever-shouldering current. There was,
perhaps, from two to five feet of water under their sturdy paws; but
had it been twenty or thirty, I, personally, believe it would have made
no difference. There were probably also other things under and around
their sturdy paws--things very much worse and less innocent than any
water--things they must have, dimly, at any rate, if not acutely, been
aware of in an inbred sort of way; but they made no difference either.
"Make way for the king's son and the king's daughter. It is their will
to cross the river. Hear, all of you loathly horrors, you lurking
terrors--make way. Who dares check the will of the king's son?"
Once there came a mighty swirl on their right hand--or right paw, if
you like--and the waters parted, with waves and the spouts of a geyser,
to give up the monstrous nightmare head of a hippopotamus. Once
something cold and leathery and ghastly touched the bottom of their
padded feet; and once--but this was too awful for any expression by
pen--something else, equally cold, but smooth, coiled, writhing, round
the king's son's left hind-leg, but providentially slid clear again, as
he kicked like a budding International.
Then came the ordeal. It arrived in the shape of two knobs, that just
were suddenly, and remained, motionless in the mocking moonlight, on
the surface of the water. It might have been merely some projection
from a half-sunken log. It might, but--well, there had grown in the
air an unspeakable stench of musk, and that wasn't there before the
knobs showed up.
Both lion cubs saw, both little royal ones smelt, and in some dim way,
warned probably by a terrible knowledge handed down to them from their
ancestors, both baby swimmers knew. Terror--real terror, of the
white-livered, surrender-or-stampede-blindly-at-any-price kind--could
never, it seems to me, come into those fine, regal eyes; but the
nearest approach that was possible occurred in that instant, and they
swam. Ah, how those infant lions swam! What had gone before was mere
paddling; and whether or not they had ever swum before in their short
lives--and I doubt it more than a little--there could be no question
about them now; they swam like practiced hands, and almost as fast.
Followed a pause, terrifying enough in all conscience, and then,
slowly, silently as a submarine's conning-tower goes under, so dived
those knobs, and vanished almost, not quite, without a ripple.
The cool night-air showed the breath coming from the broad, brave,
water-frilled cubs' heads in gasps. The silence gave away their
frantic panting. You could literally see them straining every baby
nerve and muscle, could note the jerks with which they fairly kicked
themselves along. And the opposite bank, a black wall of bush and
reeds, was very near now, yet far--oh, how far, to them!
Ssee-shhrr-r-rr-r-shrhh!
As a torpedo hurtles hissing along barely below the surface of the
water, so hurtled the head--the head with its wicked eyes on knobs; the
head with its vast, scaly, long snout, its raised nostrils at the tip,
its shuddering array of jagged teeth, its awful, armed, diabolical
aspect of conscious power--straight at the king's son. Without warning
had it come, and with still less had it attacked.
Swim, oh, swim, little king's son, for your very life! But the king's
son did not swim--at least, not in that sense. He turned. Yes, that
is right--turned; and the monstrosity of the armed snout, that same
being a crocodile, of course, was upon him even as he did so. There
would have been no time to turn after--no life! Still, the king's son
may not have known that. Maybe he turned, as a man attacked by a dog
does, because he felt, in a cold, nervy sort of spasm all up his spine,
the terrible defenselessness of his hind-limbs. And as he turned, he
struck--bat-bat!--struck with all his talons unsheathed; struck with
every ounce and grain of power, and force of brain to back that power,
in his system; struck as only a cornered cat can strike; struck like
a--lion.
The result was astounding.
The crocodile had aimed, true to a hair--you bet, he being a croc.--to
grab the king's son's hindlegs, and pull him under. He had not
reckoned on the turn, and the turn did it. His snout struck hindlegs,
which were not where they ought, by his calculations, to have been, but
were four or five inches away to one side.
Quick as only a reptile can be, he canted, to remedy the error, but the
impetus of his ten-foot bulk was still upon him; it carried him by.
You cannot stop ten feet of bulk and five-feet-seven of girth of flesh
and bone and muscle and armor-plates, going at Old Nick may know how
many knots, in half-a-yard, you know; and it was the half-a-yard that
did the trick.
The king's son was aware, as he half-rose and delivered that desperate
blow, of a mighty bulk shooting by, of an overpowering, sickening
stench of musk, and of eyes, through the foam and the water--two
little, wicked, unspeakably cruel eyes on knobs.
_His chance_! And, quick as light, he took it. Ough!
The rest was chaos.
And that is about all, I think--unless you would like to know that
their mother, the king's consort, who had been working grimly along on
their trail since dusk, slid swiftly down the bank in that crisis, a
fiery-eyed, long, gliding shape, and plunging into the watery inferno
utterly recklessly, brought out, one by one, dripping, shivering, and
by the scruff of the neck, first the king's son, then the king's
daughter, and stopped not till she had placed them high up the bank,
safe among the thorn-scrub, where they crouched together, side by side,
listening to the cataclysmal threshings of the blind devil down in the
black waters below there; and their father, the king, came
up--pad-pad-pad-pad--behind them, to thunder out defiance at all the
world above their sturdy, broad, intelligent heads, and purr his joy at
their return. Moreover, he looked proud as he stood there in the
moonlight, that royal beast; and I like to think it was not all looks
either.
XI
THE HIGHWAYMAN OF THE MARSH
There was some sort of violent trouble going on down in the reeds
beside the dike. The reed-buntings--some people might easily have
mistaken them for sparrows, with their black heads and white
mustaches--said so, swaying and balancing upon the bending reeds, and
calling the makers of that trouble names in a harsh voice.
And all the rest of the reed-people were saying so, too. It was an
amazing thing how full of wild-folk that apparently deserted reed-patch
was. Each bit of the landscape, each typical portion, is a world of
its own, with its special kind of population. This one produced
unexpectedly a pair of sedge-warblers and a reed-warbler, atoms who
gyrated and grated their annoyance; a willow-tit, who made needle-point
rebukes; a water-rail, with a long beak and long legs, running away
like a long-legged pullet; a moorhen very much concerned as to her
nest; a big rat very much concerned as to the moorhen's nest, too, but
in a different way; a grass snake, who glistened as if newly painted in
the sun; and a spotted crake, who is even more of a running winged
ventriloquial mystery than the corn-crake of our childhood's hay-times.
All of them were on thorns--though on reeds, really--and evidently
highly rattled and in a state of nerves over the trouble in the reeds.
And not much wonder either, for, judging by the sounds, murder was
being done in there among the secret recesses of the swishing green
stems--murder cruel and violent, in spite of the sunshine and the light
of day.
And then, all of a sudden, in the midst of almost a gasp of silent
horror, a moment of speechlessness on the part of the wild lookers-on,
out came the trouble, rolling over and over and over upon the soft,
short-cropped grass of the dike-bank, and--they all saw. Also, they
all, except the little warblers, who were safe, more or less, and
stayed to blaspheme the public nuisance, instantly and at the same
moment remembered appointments elsewhere, and went to keep them with a
haste that was noticeable and wonderful.
There before them was a hare. But a hare is a gentle and altogether
negligible wild-person. This hare, however, was fighting, and fighting
like several furies, and grunting, and making all sorts of unharelike
motions and commotions against another beast; and that other beast was
most emphatically not a hare.
It--or, rather, he--was big, as we count bigness among four-footed
wild-folk in Britain to-day. Probably he could stretch the tape to
twenty-three inches, of which about sixteen consisted of very long, low
body, with sturdy, bear-like, dumpy legs, the rest being rather thick,
furry tail; and, though nobody--without steel armor--might have cared
to take on the job of weighing him alive, he would have turned the
scale at about two pounds eight ounces, or perhaps a bit more. Not a
big beast, you will say; but in the wild he ruled big, being snaky and
of a fighting turn, so to say. He was, in fact, the very devil, and he
looked it--hard as nickel-steel. A dull, tawny devil, with a peculiar
purplish sheen in some lights--due to the longer hair--on his short,
hard coat, turning black on his throat, legs, and tail--as if he had
walked in black somewhere--and finished off with patches of creamy
white on head and ears. There was an extraordinary air of hard, tough,
cool, cruel, fighting-power and slow ferocity about the beast--a very
natural born gladiator of the wild places.
Men called him polecat, apropos of nothing about him, apparently, for
he had no connection with poles or cats; or foumart, apropos--and you
wouldn't have needed to be told if you had got to leeward of him just
then--of his _very_ unroselike smell--that is, fou--foul, mart--marten,
his nearest relation; or, again, fitchett, as our forefathers termed
him.
But never mind. What's in a name, anyway? A big sloe-hare, with a
leveret or two _not_ for sale--and that doe's leverets must have been
in the rushes somewhere--may, upon occasion, show unexpected
fighting-powers. And this one did. The polecat was kicked in the
stomach, and kicked and scratched in the ribs, and thumped on the nose,
and kicked and scratched and thumped on the head, before he could get
in the death-stroke, the terrible lightning-thrust at the brain's base,
which, like the sword-stroke that ends the bull-fight, dropped the
victim as if struck by electricity.
And then he had whirled, and darted headlong for the reeds. He
galloped in an odd, jumpy, sidelong gallop, as if he were a sort of
glorified wild dachshund.
It did not take him long to inspect the reed-patch, to search it from
end to end with his nose. His mind was soon made up to the fact that
the wretched leverets had vanished, and that no scenting of his keen
nose could find them. They had gone, evidently, quitted, like the pair
of obedient children that they were, while their mother was cleverly
holding the foe, and making demonstrations in his front. And now the
pair of them were probably far away, lost past all finding among the
mazes of the fields. And there was nothing for him to do but go and
dine upon the old hare, which he did, taking, according to his custom,
little more than a bite and a sip before passing on.
Then he turned and meandered off on the war-path. And this was a
serious business, and a busy one. It was downright hard labor, for he
worked his ground properly and for all it was worth, having a lot to
kill, and not much time to kill it in.
At times he sat bolt-upright, and stared knowingly around--because his
short legs gave him such a limited view otherwise. At times he climbed
a mole-heap. At other times he hunted head down--and again one noticed
the hound-like manner--in every possible direction, questing, casting
here, casting there, working back, throwing forward, describing
circles, and poking into and out of every reed-patch, bramble-heap,
furze-clump, or other bit of cover that that coverless land offered.
And then suddenly he stopped. And then suddenly he ran forward. And
then suddenly, the scent carrying him right smack-bang out into the
open, he dropped flat and began to crawl.
He crept and he crept and he crept across that absolutely bare, flat
ground, with never a tuft of fur or a feather of a single live thing
upon it to be seen, till one might have thought that he had gone mad,
and was stalking an illusion--as many, not beasts, have done before
him; only they were men, and blew their brains out--or went bankrupt
instead--afterwards.
Finally he stopped. And this was the oddest thing of all, because, if
any creature could show intense excitement without showing it--that is
to say, without muscle, eyelid, hair, or limb moving--that polecat did
then. And yet, stare as one would upon the absolutely bare grass,
dotted only here and there with a stone, or a rat's skull, or a
daisy--all looking alike in their whiteness from a distance--not a
living, breathing thing was to be seen.
And yet there was a living, breathing thing there. Indeed, there were
several. It was only the eye that was deceived, not the nose--at
least, not the polecat's nose--by motionlessness.
Right in front of the polecat, within spring, still as the very ground,
the huffish, whitish check of a peewit, lap-wing, or green plover would
have been mistaken for one of the many stones; the thin, curving
top-knot for a stem of the thin, harsh grass: the low curve of the dark
back, with its light reflections in green, for no more than the natural
curve of the close-cropped turf. And she was on her nest, which was no
nest, but a scrape, backing her natural assimilation with her
surroundings to see her through.
And the polecat knew she was there, and he knew she was on her
nest--she would not have been fool enough to keep there otherwise. His
nose told him--not his eyes, I think, for that was nearly impossible.
The thing was, he wanted her to move. That was what he was waiting
for. No more than the twitch of an eyelid would do to show which end
was head and which tail; for he could only smell her, and, in a manner,
would have to pounce blind if she did not move.
She did not move, however, and in the end he had to pounce blind,
anyhow, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, when it did come, shifting like a
streak, that there seemed to have been no time to shout even, or gasp.
Yet that peewit found time in that fraction of a second to rise, open
her wings, and get two feet into the air. And then the polecat took
her, leaping with unexpected agility, and pulling her down out of
limitless freedom and safety. There was just a rush, a snap, a
wild-bird squawk, and down the pair went, to the accompaniment of
furiously fluttering wings and in a cloud of feathers.
She had made a slight mistake in her calculations, that peewit, a
matter of perhaps a quarter of a second, but enough. Nature has not
got much room for those who commit slight mistakes in the wild, I
guess; they mostly quit the stage before passing that habit on, or soon
after.
For a moment there was a horrible, strenuous jumble of fur and feathers
on the ground, and then the polecat's flat head rose up on his long
neck out of the jumble, his eyes alight with a new look, and his lifted
upper lip stained with a single little bright carmine spot. The peewit
was dead.
He pivoted upon his shanks and examined the nest. It was empty.
He got to his feet with rapidity, and, in great excitement, dropped his
head and began hunting. In a minute a mottled pebble seemed to get up
under his nose and run. He snapped at it, and it fell upon the grass,
stretching out slowly in death--a baby peewit.
He circled rapidly, stopped, swerved, and, at the canter, took up
another scent. Suddenly, in a tussock of marram, his nose and he
stopped dead. Nothing moved. Then he bit, and a second
buff-and-black-mottled soft body stretched slowly out into the open as
death took it--a second baby peewit. He circled again, fairly racing
now, and so nearly fell over a third pebble come to life that it
scuttled back between his legs; but he spun upon himself like a snake,
and caught it ere it had gone a yard. He snapped again, held it,
dropped it, and another downy, soft, warm chick thing straightened,
horribly and pathetically, in the unpitying sun, and was still--a third
baby peewit.
But there were no more. He hunted around and around for the next ten
minutes, but never struck a trail. Evidently there had been only
three. And all the time father-peewit, who had just come back from
dinner, swooped, and stooped, and dived, and rocketed, and shot down
and around, his wings humming through the still air above as he went
clean mad, and seemed like to break his neck and the polecat's back in
any and every one of his demented abysmal plunges, but somehow never
did quite.
And all the time, also, the polecat, without seeming to take the
slightest notice of him, was watching him out of the corner of his eye,
waiting, hoping for a chance while he hunted.
But this was not intended as an exhibition of "frightfulness," though
the beast had slain far more innocents than he could eat. It was part
of his duty; and though men have accused his kind of being possessed of
a joy of killing, the accusation is by no means proven. And, in any
case, the accused might reply to civilization, "Same to you, sir, and
many hundreds of times more so."
Anyway, he now picked up a young peewit and made for the nearest dike;
then along this, and presently into the water and across to the other
side, swimming strongly and well; then along a smaller dike, hugging
the reeds as much as possible, and pursued by a running fire of abuse
from the sedge and marsh and grasshopper warblers, from wagtails,
meadow-pipits, reed-buntings, larks, and all the small-bird population
of those parts, till he came to the sea-bank, called by the natives
"sea-wall." This was a high, grass-bearded bank designed to constrain
the waters of the estuary, and there, in a hole, curtained by a
dandelion and guarded by the stiff spears of the coarse marram grass,
he stuffed his victim.
The burrow was not empty when he came to it, for it already contained
two moorhens' eggs; but there was still room for more, and one by one
he fetched the remainder of his victims, mother and all, that way, and
stuffed them into the burrow, with a plodding, steady, exact doggedness
of purpose that was rather surprising in a mere wild beast who, if seen
casually, would have appeared to the ordinary man to be merely
aimlessly wandering about the landscape. And, mind you, this was not
quite such a simple and "soft" job as it looked. Grit was needed to
accomplish it, even.
There was, for instance, the sudden, far too suggestive, swirl in the
water as he crossed the dike for the third time, loaded, that gave more
than a hint of some unknown--and therefore the more sinister--haunter
of those muddied depths of pollution, who took a more than passing
interest in the smell of blood, and must, to judge by the swirl, have
been too big to be safe. And that was probably a giant female eel, as
dangerous a foe as any swimmer of his size--though he ate eels--might
care to face. Then there was the marsh-harrier--and the same might
have been a kind of owl if it wasn't a sort of hawk--who flapped up
like some gigantic moth, and dogged his steps, only waiting--he felt
sure of it--for the polecat to slip, or meet a foe, or have an
accident, or something, before breaking its own avine neutrality.
Then, too, there was the stoat, or, rather, not the stoat only, but the
stoat and his wife, who would have murdered him if they had dared, and
took to shadowing and watching him from cover in the most meaning sort
of way. And, finally, there was the lean, nosing, sneaking dog, the
egg-thief, who had no business there with his yolk-spattered,
slobbering jaws, plundering the homes of the wild feathered ones--he
who was only a tame slave, and a bad one at that. But the dog followed
the polecat into a jungle-like reed fastness, and--almost never came
out again! When he did, it was to the accompaniment of varied and
assorted howls, and at about the biggest thing in the speed line he had
ever evolved. He was no end glad to get out, and the distant haze
swallowed him wonderfully quickly, still howling every yard of the
way--for, mark you, that polecat's teeth, once felt, wore nothing to
laugh at or forget.
These things he accomplished as the night was beginning to fall, and
the solemn eye of the setting sun--such an eye of such a setting sun as
the estuary alone knows; bloodshot, and in a sky asmoke as of cities
burning--regarded him as he finished and stood back outside as one who
considers. He was a grim figure of outlawry and rapine, alone there in
that lonely place, amidst the gathering, dank gray of the marsh mists,
the red rays touching his coat and turning it to deep purple, and his
eyes to dull ruby flame; a beast, once seen, you would not forget, and
could never mistake.
But his work was not yet done. He was hungry again, but for him there
could be no more food yet, and he turned with the same immutable and
dumbly dogged air that characterized so many of his actions, and made
off down the "sea-bank." Once he hid--vanished utterly would better
express it--to avoid the passage of an eel-spearer, an inhabitant of
the estuary almost as amphibious and mysterious as himself. Once he
very nearly caught a low-flying snipe as he leapt up at it while
cutting low over the top of the "bank"; and once--here he sprang aside
with a half-stifled snarl and every bristle erect--he was very nearly
caught by a horrible steel-toothed trap, set there to entertain that
same dog we have already met, by reason of the small matter of a late
lamb or two that had suddenly developed bites, obviously not
self-inflicted, in the night. Then he crossed the dike at the foot of
the sea-wall, shook himself, sat down to scratch, and straightway
hurled himself backwards and to one side, as something that resembled a
javelin whizzed out of six straggling, upright, faded, tawny reeds at
the water's edge, by which he had sat down. The javelin struck deep
into the little circle of lightly-pressed-down grass where his haunches
had rested, and he caught a glimpse, or only a half-glimpse, of weird
onyx eyes, and heard strange and shuddery reptilian hissings. Eyes and
noises might have belonged to a crocodile, or some huge lizard thing,
or snapping turtle, but the javelin was clearly the property of no such
horror, and was very obviously a beak--now, by the way, withdrawn.