and melted away among the accursed thorn-scrub with a look about him
that said, as plainly as words, "And that's what comes of hunting in
daylight."
The jackal, after a long skirmish and a drink, retired homewards
towards sunset, when suddenly, from a tuft of grass ahead of him, a
shadow shot and vanished. He picked up the trail at once, diagnosed it
as that of a hare, and gave chase.
It was a fine chase, characterized by every aspect of first-class
trailing, and carried along at such a speed that the quarry never got a
chance to stop and get its second wind. Indeed, the quarry never had a
chance to stop at all, until it was stopped, and the manner of that
happening was strange.
Whether designedly driven, or whether by chance, one cannot tell, but
the fact remains that the hare took a "line of country" which, if
persisted in, would lead her close past the jackal's lair, or, rather,
his wife's lair. This was important--for the jackal.
Once, indeed, our hunter all but overran a small--but quite big
enough--boa-constrictor, which must have aimed to drop from a tree upon
the hare passing below, and missed. It was in an even more evil
temper, in consequence, than snakes usually are, and struck at the
jackal with its head and shut mouth. The jackal quietly side-stepped,
snapped, missed, and made off after his quarry, and about five hundred
yards farther on he came up with "puss"--dead.
The jackal sat on his bushy tail, stuck out his fore-feet straight, and
stopped as quickly as ever he could. Then he snarled, and full right
had he to snarl.
The hare was lying on her back, weakly kicking out the last of her life
with her hindlegs, and a stocky, short-nosed, evil, leering,
side-striped jackal was standing over her. _He_ had done the deed.
And our black-back knew that side-stripe, had met him before. The two
families lived only a few hundred yards apart, and it was Mrs.
Side-stripe who was responsible for our friend's wife's crippled
condition at that moment. This was a typical side-striper, one of the
creeping, hunting-by-surprise-and-pounce sort, and it may be that he
had never run down any prey worth speaking about in his life. In a
way, he was the very opposite from our black-back, who was mostly legs,
and a bit of a sportsman, and, I believe, really delighted in a good
ringing hunt. Wherefore there was not much cause for surprise at the
bitter blood-feud that had gradually grown up between them, till now
things had come pretty well to a head.
The other beast folded back his lean upper-lip till his teeth
glistened, and grinned at him--a menacing grin. I don't know if he
guessed that it was, by all the laws of the chase, the black-back's
hare, but he knew that he had pounced upon her as she passed--pounced
like a cat, as was his way, what time he was profiting by his enemy's
absence to keep that enemy's lame wife indoors, and from hunting even
for insects or fruit, by prowling round her lair, and threatening her
with growls. Perhaps he had designs upon her puppies. Perhaps his
wife had. And perhaps Mrs. Mesomelas knew that. It is difficult to
tell.
There was a sort of a blackish-tawny line drawn to the
side-stripe--whose other and learned name was Adustus--and back. It
scarcely seemed possible that the black-backed little chap had moved,
but he had--leaped in and out again, chopping wickedly with a
sword-like gleam of fangs as he did so. The other pivoted, quick as
thought, and counter-slashed, and, before you could wink, Mesomelas was
in and away, in and out, once, twice, and again. One bite sent a
little flick of the other's brown fur a-flying; one missed, one got
home, and the side-stripe's ugly snarling changed to a yap to say so.
Twice the two beasts whirled round and round, like roulette-balls, the
black-back always on the outside, always doing the attacking, dancing
as if on air, light as a gnat. Once he got right in, and the foe
sprang at his throat. He was not there when the enemy's teeth closed,
but his fangs were, and fang closed on fang, and the resulting tussle
was not pretty to behold.
Mesomelas cleared himself from that scrunch with very red lips, but
never stopped his whirling, light-cavalry form of attack. He was
trying to tease the other into dashing after him, and giving up the
advantage which his foe had in size and strength, but it was no good;
and finally Adustus suddenly scurried into cover, redder than he had
been, and our black-back, too, had to bolt for his hole, as an
aardwolf, clumsy, hyena-like, and cowardly, but strong enough for them,
scenting blood, came up to investigate.
Mercifully, the side-stripe seemed to attract the more attention, or
shed the more blood, and while the aardwolf was sniffing at his
hole--not intending to do anything if the jackal had a snap left in
him, which he had, for the aardwolf possessed the heart of a sheep,
really--the black-back managed to dash out and abscond to his hole with
the hare. When the aardwolf came back, and sniffed out what he had
done, he said things.
Our jackal's head appeared at his hole next dawn as a francolin began
to call, and a gray lowrie--a mere shadow up among the
branches--started to call out, "Go away! go away!" as if he were
speaking to the retreating night. A gay, orange-colored bat came and
hung up above the jackal's den--well out of reach, of course--and a
ground-hornbill suddenly started his reverberating "Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!"
and, behold--'twas dawn!
The jackal scuttled down to the river to have a drink, which he got
rather riskily among the horns of drinking, congregated hartebeests,
impala, and other antelope, and returned with the leg-bone of a
bush-buck, which had been slain the night before by a leopard, and he
went to ground very quickly, for the great spotted cat could be heard,
grunting wrath, at his heels.
Then the day strode up, and the light, creeping in, showed our jackal,
curled up and fast asleep, in his lair, as far away as he could
possibly get in the space--two ant-bears', or aardvarks', holes run
into one--from his also curled-up wife.
Later--for it was quite chilly--he came out to sleep in the sun, under
a bush, till the sun, in turn, half-baked him, and he retired again to
the den.
The days were, as a rule, for the jackal, a succession of sleeping
blanks, but at the end of this day it was the fate of a small
python--small for a python--to hunt a pangolin--who was as like a thin
pineapple with a long tail, if you understand me, as it was like
anything, or like a fir-cone many times enlarged, only it was an
animal, and a weird one--into that den of thieves.
Mrs. Mesomelas, she appeared to shoot straight from dreamless slumber
on to the pangolin's back in some wonderful way, and Mr. Mesomelas, he
bounced from the arms of Morpheus into--the jaws of the snake? No,
sirs; on to the nape of that snake's neck, if snakes may be said to
have napes to their necks. But to get hold of the neck of a python is
one thing, to keep there quite a different, and very risky, affair; and
our jackal, who was no pup, knew that. If that legless creation of the
devil could only have got his tail round something, our jackal might
have been turned into food for his food, so to speak. Wherefore,
possibly, he was frightened. It was like taking hold of a live wire by
the loose end. Moreover, the space was confined, and there were the
whelps and all, and I rather fancy black-back was more frightened to
leave go and stay than he was to hold on and run.
Anyway, he held on and ran.
An old, fat zebra stallion, round-barreled and half-asleep, snorted
suddenly, and stared with surprise at the sight of a black-backed
jackal galloping as fast as circumstances would permit him, with the
wide-mouthed head of a python in his jaws, and the remaining long,
painted body trailing out behind. The snake was not going with any
pleasure, and his wriggling tail was feeling for a hold every inch of
the way, and if he could have got one--oh, jackal! But he could not,
for the jackal kept on going, and the snake's after-length kept on
trailing out straight, like a loose rope behind a boat, through the
perishing glare and the heat-flurry that seemed to be making the whole
world jump up and down, as it does when you look at it over the top of
a locomotive-funnel.
Snakes take a long time to die, or to _seem_ dead, even with a double
set of glistening sharp teeth scrunching as hard as their owner knows
how into their neck. At last, however, after a final series of efforts
to get, and keep, in the shape of a letter S, the python's tail
gradually ceased to feel for a hold, and the writhing strain in the
jackal's jaws relaxed. Still, our Mesomelas was taking no chances, and
he galloped home with his capture before he stopped, as proud and happy
an old dog, rascally jackal as ever cracked a bone on a fine day.
He was a little puffed, and more than a little puffed up, and it may
have been that he did not keep his eyes all round his head, as a jackal
should always do. Anyway, there, in the gathering shadows of night,
came a waiting, watching shadow, that was presently joined by another,
and the two--their eyes glinted once in a nasty metallic fashion--stood
head to head, watching him.
By the time Mrs. Mesomelas had hobbled out to view the "kill" for
herself, and snarl her appreciation--truly, it was a strange way of
showing it--with thin, wicked ears laid back, and more than wicked
fangs bared, the waiting, watching shadows had crept forward a little,
on their bellies, head up, and--Mrs. Mesomelas, with the quick
suspicion of motherhood awake in her, saw them.
The snarl that she whipped out fetched the jackal round upon himself as
if stung. Then he saw, and understood, and rage flamed into his
intelligent, dog's eyes. It was the side-striped jackals, Mr. and
Mrs., plotting to loot his "kill."
It was the black-back who attacked. Perhaps he knew that one secret of
defense is swift and unexpected offense. Anyway, he attacked, sailing
in with his dancy, chopping, in-and-out skirmishing methods; and Mrs.
Mesomelas, on three legs and with the bill for the other to be settled,
helped him.
It was very difficult, in the tropic dust, to follow what exactly
happened next. For the next few minutes black-back was here, there,
and everywhere, leaping and dodging in and out like a lambent flame.
The human eye could scarcely follow him, but the human ear could hear
plainly the nasty, dog-like snarling and the snap of teeth.
The side-stripe, as I have said, was the weightier beast, but the
black-back never gave him the advantage, which he sought, of the
close-fought fight.
More than once he was chased, but only to lead his foe into the open,
where he could play his own game to his own liking; and at last, when
the moon rose, and his mate had the female black-back driven back to
her last ditch, so to speak, at the entrance to her lair, the
side-stripped jackal, spouting blood at every joint, it seemed,
collapsed suddenly, and apparently gave up the ghost.
Now, our black-backed jackal was not a young beast, and he was up to
most wild-folks' games--which was as well. He approached the corpse
with caution, and as he poised for the last spring the corpse was at
his throat. Black-back, however, was not there, but his tail was, and
the side-striped one got a mouthful of the bushy black tip of that.
Whereupon Mesomelas recoiled on himself, and for a moment a horrible
"worry" followed, at the end of which the other dropped limply again,
this time, apparently, really done for.
Very, very gingerly the black-back--himself a red and weird sight in
the eye of the moon--approached, and seized and shook the foe, dropped
him, and--again that foe was a leaping streak at his throat.
Mesomelas side-stepped, and neatly chopped--a terrible, wrenching
bite--at his hindleg in passing. It fetched him over, and he lay
still, the moon shining on his side, doubly and redly striped now.
This time it was Mesomelas who sprang at his throat--to be met by
fangs. But in the quarter of an instant, changing his mind after he
sprang, he shot clean up in the air, and came down to one side, and,
rebounding like a ball, had the other by the neck.
For one instant he kept there, hung, wrenching ghastlily, then sprung
clear, and, backing slowly, limping, growling horribly, flat-eared and
beaten, the side-striped jackal began his slow, backward retreat into
the heart of the nearly impenetrable thorns, where the winner was not
such a fool as to follow him. And the black-backed jackal never saw
him again. Living or dead, he faded out of our jackal's life forever.
And when he turned, his wife was standing at the entrance to the
"earth" alone. The other, the female side-striped jackal's form, could
be dimly seen dissolving into the night--on three legs.
"Yaaa-ya-ya-ya!" howled Mesomelas.
XIII
THE STORM PIRATE
The sea-birds were very happy along that terrible breaker-hewn coast.
Puffin, guillemot, black guillemot, razorbill, cormorant, shag, fulmar
petrel, storm petrel perhaps, kittiwake-gull, common gull, eider-duck,
oyster-catcher, after their kind, had the great, cliff-piled,
inlet-studded, rock-dotted stretch of coast practically to
themselves--to themselves in their thousands. Their only shadow was
the herring-gulls, and the herring-gulls, being amateur, not
professional, pirates, were too clumsy to worry too much.
Then came the rain-shower. Not that there was anything in that.
Rain-showers came to that land as easily as blushes _used_ to do to
maidens' cheeks--rain-showers, and sudden squalls, and all manner of
swift storm phenomena. But behind the rain-shower, or in it, maybe--it
blotted out cliff and inlet and sandbar and heather-covered hills, and,
with the wind, whipped the sea into spume like an egg-whisk--came he,
the storm pirate.
A guillemot--you know the guillemot, the fish-hunter, who flies under
the waters more easily than she flies the air above the waters--had
risen, and was making inshore with a full catch, when the squall caught
her without warning. For a little she faced it, her wings whirring
madly, her body suspended in mid-air, but she not making headway one
inch against the sudden fury of a forty-mile-an-hour wind. Then, since
she could no longer see the shore, which was blotted out with hissing
rain, she turned and ran down-wind, like a drawn streak, to the lee of
a big stack of rock.
The next that was seen of her, she was heading out to sea at top speed,
in wake of the rain-shower and the squall, which had passed as suddenly
as it had come; and behind her, pursuing her with a relentless fury
that made one gasp, shot another and a strange bird-shape. Its lines
were the lines of the true pirate; its wings long and sharp-cut; its
beak wickedly hooked at the tip; its claws curved, for no gentle
purpose, at the end of its webbed feet; its eye fierce and haughty; its
uniform the color of the very stormcloud that had just passed--dun and
smoked cream below, and sooty above. True, he was not big, being only
twenty-one inches--two inches less than the herring-gull. But what is
size, anyway? It was the fire that counted, the ferocity, the "devil,"
the armament, and the appalling speed. Just as a professional boxer of
any size can lay out any mere hulking hooligan, so this bird carried
about him the stamp of the professional fighter that could lay out
anything there in that scene that he chose--almost.
The guillemot flew as never in all her life had she flown before, and
every known artifice of dodging she had heard of she tried, and--it all
failed. The terrible new bird gained all the time steadily, following
her as if towed by an invisible string, till at last he was above her,
his wonderful wild scream was ringing in her ears, his cruel eyes
glaring into hers, his beak snapping in her very face, his claws
a-clutch.
No, thank you. In sheer terror she opened her beak and dropped her
fish. It fell like a column of silver, and in a flash her pursuer was
gone--nay, was not gone; had turned, rather, into a second column, a
sooty one, falling like a thunderbolt, till he overtook even the
falling fish, and wonderfully snatched it up in his hooked bill ere
ever it could touch the waves, without a word or explanation of any
kind whatever.
That, apparently, was his manner of getting his living; a strange
manner, a peculiar way--the way of the pirate on the ocean.
Despoiled, but safe, the guillemot rattled away "for another cast"; but
the foe settled, riding lightly on the lift and fall of the
bottle-green waves.
Here he was no longer a wonderful phantom spirit of the storm, but just
a bird that might have been passed over at first glance as simply a
seagull. But not at a second glance.
Men called this strange bird Richardson's skua, or Arctic skua, or
lesser skua, or, officially, _Stercorarius crepidatus_, or, most
unofficially, in the vernacular, "boatswain," or "man-o'-war," or
"gull-tormentor." Apparently you could take your choice what you
called him. But he did not belong to Mr. Richardson really. He
belonged to nobody, only to himself, to the wind and the rain, that
seemed to have begot him, and to the grim north, from which he took his
other name. He might have claimed the gulls as his near
relations--they loathed him enough.
For a long time he sat on the lifting, breathing swell, floating idly.
There was nothing else on the face of the lonely waters except himself
and a flock, or fleet, I should say, of razorbills and guillemots, very
far away, who alternately showed all white breasts, and vanished--as
they dived and rose all together--like white-faced, disappearing
targets, and one gull, who wheeled and wheeled in the middle distance,
with one eye on the divers and one on the skua, as if, gull-like,
waiting on a chance from either.
Then at last the skua rose again, and swept hurriedly out to sea to
meet a small black-and-white speck that was coming in. It was a
little, rotund, parrot-beaked puffin, loaded with fish--sprats--four of
them set crossways in his wonderful bill. He seemed to know nothing
about the skua till that worthy was upon him, and then, as he fled,
after a furious chase of about three minutes, he suddenly surrendered
by letting fall all his spoil.
The skua caught up one sprat before it hit the surface, but, being too
late to overtake the rest, seemed to take no further notice of them,
but swept on, to settle upon the water a mile away and preen himself.
And this was where the waiting, watching gull came in--the
herring-gull. He sprang to strenuous life, and, arriving swiftly at
full speed over the spot, snatched up off the surface, and by clumsily
attempting to plunge, two more of the sprats, before the skua could
intervene.
Then it was that a terrible and a totally unexpected thing happened,
and yet, if one comes to think about it and study the matter more, the
most natural in the world; probably, also, on those wild seas, even
common-place. Only, you see, there was no interval at all between the
skua sitting placidly on the lap of the waves, eyeing the gull
vengefully, and that same skua shooting straight upwards, all doubled
up, on the top of what appeared to have been a submarine mine in a mild
form in active demonstration.
[Illustration: "Shooting straight upwards on the top of what appeared
to have been a submarine mine in a mild form"]
This submarine mine, however, in addition to the burst and heave of
torn and upflung falling waters and foam, had a visible heart, a great,
shining, wet, torpedo-shaped body, which rose on end beneath the
stricken bird, and fell again with a splintering crash that shot up the
heads of the diving birds half a mile away. It might have been a
thresher-shark, or some other northern shark, or it might have been a
dolphin, which is bad, or a killer whale, which is a good deal worse,
if it had not been a great gray seal seeking dinner; and its effect on
the luckless skua was the effect of a battering ram, and the skua that
fell back again with the fall of snarling water was to all intents and
purposes a corpse.
But it was a good thing that he was so. Had it been otherwise, had he
tried to get away or fluttered, there would have been no more of him.
That is to say, the head of the seal came up--or its wet and suggestive
big nose did--and poked about, trying to find the bird. It had
evidently meant to grab him, to engulf him utterly and forever in the
first rush; but something--some unlooked-for lift of a wave or turn of
the bird--had made the shot miss, or nearly miss, so that the bird had
been hit by the bloated six-footer's nose, instead of being crushed in
its teeth--its terrible long and glistening array of murderous teeth.
All the same, the nose blow was bad enough. It was like being hit by
the beak of a torpedo at full speed, fit almost to bash a boat in.
The seal was quite evidently looking for the bird, and, equally quite
evidently, seemed bound to find him. To know why it did not at once
see him is to know that the seal's view, from below the surface, of the
world above is about a twelve-foot circle of white-gold light, that is
all; and the skua, floating limp and floppy, had been, by chance, till
then always carried hither and yon by the waves just outside that
circle. But that chance could not last.
Then came the other seal. Came she easily and gracefully, as a seal
should in her element, effortlessly gliding along, her head from time
to time up like a dog's--some gentle dog's, say a mild-eyed
spaniel's--looking about. She was just a female seal. She knew
nothing of the bird or her companion, who were at sea-level, and more
often than not hidden in the trough, till she came sliding down the
slope of a round-barreled swell, practically on top of them. Then it
was too late to avoid mutual recognition.
Quick as sound she had seen, had realized, had spun on her apology for
a tail, and had gone, leaving a little trail of foam behind her to
prove her speed and her coyness. But, quick as light, the magnificent
male seal had sunk from sight, leaving a little chain of bursting
bubbles behind to mark his speed. And the last that was seen of that
lady seal was a speck far on the horizon, going like a masterless
torpedo, alternately leaping forward through the air and shooting along
on, or just under, the surface--switchbacking, they call it; and that,
I dare to fancy, if it proves anything, proves that the coyness was
only make-believe, and that she had allowed the daring admirer to catch
her up and force her to act as if she were already vanquished and using
the last arts of swift swimming she knew.
It left the skua, however; left him still floating, floating, floating
up one long breaker's side, and sliding down its other side to its
fellow behind, towards the shore--always towards the shore. It is true
that the tide was falling offshore, but that made no difference to the
currents of those parts, which were independent currents and of a great
force. They were shouldering the skua steadily to land, and if you had
dropped a line overboard there, with an ordinary lead on, you would
have felt them pulling at it, and taking the lead along like a live
thing. And the currents were Fate, so far as that bird was concerned.
There was a little inlet, and a little bay in the inlet no larger than
a good-sized dining-table, and seaweed, green and red, upon the
rock-bowlders that encircled it, and old-gold patches of sand between
the rock-bowlders, and green grass behind the rock-bowlders, and
brown-plush furze behind the green grass, and a patch of blue sky over
all. And in the middle of the little bay in the inlet, bob-bobbing on
the lap-lapping of the littlest waves, that--sifted out by then, as it
were--had found their way so far, floated the skua, the Richardson's or
Arctic skua, dead, to all appearances, as the proverbial door-nail.
But that was not the rub. The rub was in the--ah!
"He-oh!" pealed down the clear, ringing bugle-cry from above, and a
shadow floated upon the reflections a-dance on the surface in the
little bay in the little inlet--floated and hung, so that it exactly
covered the skua like a funeral pall; floated, and hung, and came down.
As its claws scraped a bowlder, and it furled its long, narrow vans, it
was revealed as the big herring-gull--him we left out upon the face of
the waters, watching and waiting on chance.