a speck you could see for a mile. His size--just on two feet--proved
what his snowy hood proclaimed, in case there were any doubts. A
smaller gull, an uncommon common gull--of eighteen inches--came and
looked, to make quite sure--and went away again. The herring-gull, in
spite of his silly name, has a reputation, and a "plug ugly" one.
And the herring-gull, he--did nothing. That is the strength of the
herring-gull--doing nothing. He can do it for an hour, half a morning,
or most of a day. His battle-cry might well have been, "Wait and see,"
but he must be one of the few living, breathing things on this earth
who have made the game pay, and--lived. He might have been a lump of
chalk, or a marble carving, or a stuffed specimen, or asleep, or dead,
for all the signs of living that he gave. One began to wonder if he
ever would move again. He had been a bird, but was now the life-size
model of one cut in alabaster, with clear pebbles for eyes--they were
quite as hard and cold as that, his eyes.
And all the time the body of the skua floated, and danced, and drifted,
and lifted in, making an inch on one wavelet, to lose three-quarters of
it on the next, but still, unnoticeably perhaps, but undoubtedly,
gradually, surely, for all that, drifting in.
Somebody has written somewhere that gulls never touch a carcass on
land. Sometimes they touch things on land which were not carcasses
before they touched them. This gull, however, did not wait for any
landing. Perhaps he knew that, once stranded, the gray crows might
come to assist him in their own peculiar way, or a raven, who would not
assist him at all, except into the next world, if he did not relinquish
all claim to the feast. Anyway, whatever we poor mortals may kid
ourselves into thinking he did or did not know, or what we may think he
ought to have known, he began operations as soon as the skua came
alongside, so to speak--that is, drifted against the particular bowlder
upon which the sphinx-like herring-gull happened by chance--always by
chance, of course--to be standing.
Now, there is no particular joy in having your eyes hammered at by a
blunted sharp instrument, like a herring-gull's beak, for instance,
even if those eyes happen to be shut, as I think the skua's were, and
the instrument wielded with the extreme clumsiness of the half-trained,
as I know the herring-gull's beak was. But, all the same, it was the
kindest thing that could have happened, for, had it not been for that,
the skua was like to have drifted in that fashion from that little
inlet out upon another sea; not the one connected with the inlet, but
one where you can drift forever, and whose name is Death. The physical
pain, however, brought him round. He was only stunned, and the agony
of the eyes, or eye, rather, was acute.
He opened the other eye--a wonderful, piercing, fierce orb. He
contracted his feathers. The world grew from a mist in that eye to a
little bay in a little inlet, with the seaweed-covered bowlder-rocks,
the old-gold sand, the green grass, the brown-plush furze, and the
patch of wonderful blue sky over-top. Then it took in the spotless,
gaunt form of the herring-gull, and--he remembered that he was a skua,
only some twenty-one inches long, 'tis true, but still a skua, to be
treated and respected as such.
Wherefore, who so surprised as that big father of herring-gulls when
the bedraggled, smoky-hued thing under his bill, which he may, or may
not, have taken for a corpse, woke up, returned to life suddenly, and
erupted into his very face, with the yells of a fiend, the weapons of a
fury, and the rage of several devils? He yelled, too, that
herring-gull, not entirely with rage, and did his best to get under way
as quickly as might be, but became, before he knew where he was,
altogether too busy even for that.
Not being in the habit of performing optical operations upon Arctic
skuas as a rule, he had nothing in his memory to warn him of what
followed, nothing to put him up to the absolutely diabolical fury of
the onslaught he had to meet in the next few seconds. He certainly did
his level best with such weapons as Nature had given him, but his
blunt, hooked beak and the claws he had not got seemed suddenly meager
against the hammering, tearing, stabbing, rending dagger weapons of
his--"meal."
The skua saw red, and the herring-gull saw mainly red skua, as he was
hurled back and down under the first rush, and instantly, without a
second to recover, was hurled, equally helplessly, the other way,
shrieking for his very life, and decorating the air and the old-gold
sand with a pretty little cloud of his spotless feathers.
He fought with the desperation of almost all the wild-people, when
there is no help for it; hammering, too, but wildly and clumsily. The
skua fought with the cunning and precision of the professional, plus
such a rage as can only be described as berserk.
It was not a long fight. Perhaps the skua felt that, after his
collision at sea, his bolt would be soon shot, and he had better do
what he was going to do as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
Certainly he did appear to do so; and when at length he drew back,
rocking and gasping like a drunken creature, the famed purity of that
herring-gull's uniform was a thing of beauty no longer. That part of
him, indeed, which was not red was mud, or sand, or green slime, and in
his eyes was the most worried and tired look you ever saw.
He rocked, too, in his gait, as he ran and blundered, and he gasped
with his beak open. When he rose, which he did without any sort of
procrastination, he rocked worse than ever, and twice nearly fell, and
once hit the water, before finally slowly dragging himself away upward,
flapping low and heavily across the little waves.
With the one available eye--the eye left him in working condition by
the herring-gull's clumsy efforts--flaming like a live-coal, that
implacable skua watched him go. He may or may not have known it, of
course, but I feel pretty certain that he would a few thousand times
rather have been standing there upon the old-gold sand, with only one
eye doing duty and an unspeakable agony in the other eye, than be that
herring-gull in the condition he was then, going back to the bosom of
his tribe. It is not a thing to dwell upon in polite society, but I
tell you that the gull-folk do not always treat their wounded well, and
there would be no chance, no earthly chance at all, of his finding a
place in all that vast horizon of sea and sky and island where they,
the ceaseless, never-resting "White Patrol," would not eventually find
him.
Then the skua lay down, and thereafter surrendered himself to that
utter reaction which birds, who live more intensely in action than
almost any other creatures, have brought to an apparently exaggerated
pitch. He did not sleep, but he did not move, and every muscle in him,
every fiber, every nerve, faculty, organ, was surrendered utterly to
rest.
Night came fluttering her sable wings across the scene, breathing and
sighing audibly in the first silence that wild landscape of storms and
squalls had known throughout the day, and the skua moved. His neck
went up straight, and his head turned, looking sharply this way and
that, fierce apprehension written upon him.
There was nothing one could see to give cause for this. A flock of
curlew were passing, wailing one to the other, across the sunset; a
string of late gulls trailed athwart the sky; and a wedge of those
beautiful little wild-duck known as wigeon was letting itself down to
the shores of the inlet. Far out to sea a black line, which might have
been a sea-serpent if it hadn't been scoter ducks, trailed undulating
over the waves, and a single great white gannet plunged from aloft into
the deep at intervals with a report like a sunset gun. But they were
all innocent, except in the opinion of the fish and shell-fish, and no
manner of folk to trouble the pirate skua. Set a thief to catch a
thief, however. And, besides, there was blood on the bird and around
him, or the taint of it, and blood is the devil and all in the wild.
There was nothing to be _seen_. No. That was the worst part of it.
It was what was unseen that the skua was thinking about.
Wherefore, then, our friend of the pirate rig rose and walked stiffly
to the summit of one of the bowlder-rocks right at the water's edge.
He was by no means recovered yet, or in any condition for a fight in
that desolate scene, and had to select the most strategic position he
could crawl to. He did, and awaited Fate's reply.
The day died, and the moon came out to wink and dodge and play a
foolish game of hide-and-seek in and out among the clouds. She showed
the skua, a black knob atop of the black blob of his bowlder,
apparently fast asleep, invisible if we did not know he was there. She
showed black dots bobbing upon silver lanes, which were sea-duck of
various kinds--scaup, long tail, scoter, and the rest. She showed a
line of old, rotten posts, broken off short by the waves, along a
sand-ridge, which were wild-geese; and she showed three big, white
swans--wild-swans, wilder even than the geese--floating like ghosts in
the enchanted light.
But she also showed other things, indistinctly, 'tis true; but
enough--quite enough. She revealed for an instant, as she shone on the
spot on the sand where the skua had sat, the fact that the sand seemed
to be alive, horribly alive, as if the pebbles had taken legs and ran
about. It was a sudden, ghastly flashlight, hidden as soon as seen,
and it gave one the shudders. Those pebbles were crabs mad with
hunger, as crabs always seem to he.
They had arrived there as if by magic--been creeping in ever since
dusk, probably (one of the things that were unseen); but whether blood,
or feathers, or taint of blood, or what horrible, ghoulish system of
espionage drew them, is not for me to say. They were there, anyway,
and--and--well, and then they were not there. The next flashlight of
the moon showed that some others had taken their place. This was
ghastly, for the others were bigger than any shore crabs, and they
hopped, and they sat up hunched, like hobgoblins, and--they scratched!
This last identified them, for the soulless, shelled crab-people are
not given to scratch much--at least, not in _that_ way. They were
rats--shore rats. The last designation is necessary, for there are
rats _and_ rats, all bad, but the shore rat is the worst. How many
sleeping birds, wounded, tired, or unalert, die at his hands, or,
rather, his teeth, in the course of a year would amaze anybody if
known, and the shell-fish he relieves of life are legion.
The hard, horny carapace of a retreating crab scraped, in the dead
silence, against the rock-bowlder on which the skua sat. He made no
move at the sound, the suggestive sound; but his feathers were shut
down quite tight, and he looked far smaller than usual. When birds
shut down their feathers in that fashion they put on an armor coat, as
it were, through which very little can pierce. It showed that he was
ready.
And you think that the mere shore crabs could be nothing to him. But a
few hundred ravening shore crabs, with their lives for sale--all
digging pieces out of you in the dark--are not so easy a proposition to
dispose of as people may think. Try it.
One of the rats turned suddenly and faced towards him. The skua could
see its little, cruel eyes gleaming like gimlet-holes in the wall of a
lighted room. Then another, and another, and another did the same.
The skua was scarcely bleeding at all now, but he had left enough of a
trail for _them_--they who make a specialty of the job. And they
followed it. Hopping grotesquely across the mottled, hurrying patches
of moonlight they came, one behind the other, and without noise.
The skua remained as still as the bowlder he sat upon. In that
position, even peering closely, you would never have seen him, unless,
like ourselves, you knew he was there. But he was drawn together,
drawn in all his muscles like a tense spring, and--though this his
persecutors could not know--he was recovering from his hurts rapidly,
with the wonderful power of recuperation of all the wild-folk, who pay
their price for it in clean, hard living.
Then suddenly there was a scuffle below him in the dark. One of the
rats squeaked a little, acknowledging receipt of a crab's pincers
closed upon him, or her. Followed the sounds of some scuttering,
confusion, and the horrible slide and scrape of horny shells upon
stone. Then silence, and the skua knew that, in that wonderful way
they have, the crabs, at any rate, were gone--for the moment.
Remained, however, the rats, and one peered up over the bowlder the
next instant, its eyes glinting in a momentary splash of moonlight
fiendishly. Also, his quick ears could hear the soft creepings of the
others on every side of the bowlder, back and front. They had
surrounded him, and, like wolves, would now rush, and then--and
then---- They had gone.
Yes, there could be no shadow of doubt about it. There had come an
instant's furtive, hurried movement, a glimpse--no, half a glimpse--of
hunched forms hopping through the dark, and they were no more.
The skua stared, and as he stared a great terror seized him. What more
deadly form of death than themselves had they suddenly become aware of,
to cause them to invite themselves into nowhere in that magic fashion?
In the dead silence that fell, he could hear nothing, see nothing. Yet
he felt--indeed he knew--something seemed to tell him, that a deadly
foe was at hand.
Hours passed. They were minutes really, but they seemed hours to him.
Nothing happened; nothing showed. But the rats did not come back.
Therefore, whatever incarnation of death it was that removed them must
be there still. He knew that. That lonely, wounded bird knew that.
And he was right.
Behind him, practically invisible, flat to the ground, a long, low,
narrow, dark shape was lying crouched, creeping, creeping, creeping
towards his tail. Slowly, almost painfully slowly, it drew upon him
gradually, so gradually that the distance between them could scarce be
seen to lessen. And soundlessly, so soundlessly that even his quick
ears, trained far beyond the quickest human aural perception, could not
hear it.
Then, so quickly that the eye could not follow it, the crouching form
made its rush.
The skua was sitting motionless, with his head looking straight in
front of him. The dark form came from behind, and there would have
been no time for the skua to move before the thing, whatever it was,
had him by the back of the neck, and dead, save for one little tiny
fact. As it propelled itself forward, in the first bound, the claws of
the beast's hindpaw's scraped upon a stone. It was only a little
sound, and it gave the skua barely a fraction of a second's warning;
but, he being a wild thing, it was enough.
Quick as light the bird had half turned upon one side, and flung up one
claw and wing to cover his neck, whilst his head jerked round hindpart
before in the same atom of time.
Thus it happened that the beast, unable to stop, found himself with his
head and eyes being dug at by a hooked beak, and his jaws closed upon a
skinny leg instead of upon the skua's spinal column, as he had
intended, which would have put the skua out of life like turning out a
gas-jet.
And it was then, in that instant, that the moon chose to dodge from
behind a cloud and reveal the beast as a big, long, lean, and hungry
dog-stoat. Probably he had thought that the skua was a gull, and a
wounded one. There is a difference, however, between the skuas and the
gulls, though they bear a family likeness. He discovered the
difference now, and for the next few minutes was not overjoyed at the
knowledge.
One cannot do much blood-sucking to weaken one's prey out of a scrawny
leg that resembles a twig wrapped round with leather. And the stoat
found this out, too, and he would have shifted his hold to the bird's
body like a flash, if he had been given a chance, but he never was.
Before he knew what was happening, he was blinded by the beating of
vast wings, his claws began to slip and slide, and--oh, horror!--still
slipping and sliding, he found the bowlder going from him. It went
from him, receding downwards with terrifying rapidity, and the dancing,
silvery, sparkling water was sliding below, too.
Being a stoat, he hung on with V.C. doggedness and courage; but it was
the worst thing he could have done. Moreover, as it was, he forced the
bird to attempt reprisals in mid-air--a terrible proceeding.
Now, this was difficult, might almost seem impossible; but the skua is
one of the most wonderful flyers that haunt the seas even--and most of
the best are there--and what he could not execute in the air was
scarcely worth mentioning. It included in this case a perfectly
diabolical scraping of the foe's head with his available claw, and
after that, since the dogged stoat did not leave go, and the pain was
excruciating, a wonderful bend forward, and, at a pronounced and
dangerous angle, a fiendish stabbing at the stoat's head with his
murderous beak. This last involved a drop of nearly a hundred feet,
but it did the trick.
Blinded, dazed, shaken, and maddened by the agony of blows upon his
sensitive nose, the stoat opened his jaws to grip higher up the leg;
and in an instant he was gone, turning over and over, down, down, down
to the hungry waves below.
Ten minutes later the skua was calmly and safely asleep upon the top of
a frowning black stack of rock, untroubled, I think, even by dreams of
the terrible things he had gone through.
* * * * * *
Next morning, an apparition of wonder and fierce beauty, the skua,
quite recovered except that he had a lameness in one leg and a weakness
in one wonderful eye that would last him a lifetime, came racing
down-shore out of a stormcloud into the full gold of the sun at some
seventy miles an hour. He was in pursuit of a common gull who, with
more luck than judgment, had caught a fish.
The gull held on for a few minutes, on and in and around the horizon,
going like the wind up and down and around, as for his life, with
friend skua ever close to his tail, before a wild yell, which he could
not mistake, sounded in his ear, and he dropped the prize. The skua
executed his wonderful dive, and caught the gleaming silver thing
before it reached the waves, and shooting up again, was just about to
continue his course, when a constant and peculiar flickering above the
beach caught his telescopic eye.
He checked, flung up, came round beautifully effortless, and headed
towards the sight. Probably he knew what it was, had fathomed it even
from that distance. It was a gang of gulls flying round and mobbing a
hapless wounded gull on the beach.
It was a foul thing to do, a horrible, blundering, clumsy murder, done
slowly; but even so, it was all over before, with a scream that rang
like the battle-cry of a Highland chief, and set the murderous heads up
in wild alarm, the skua came shooting, twisting, turning, diving, and
darting right into the heart of the crowd.
And they went circling, and wheeling, and hurling down-wind like sheets
of paper, those murderous sea-birds, dispersed and scattered over the
face of the waters, and were gone almost without a word.
Then the skua came lightly down, rocking on the wind, and settled
beside the poor, draggled, white body, no longer white, upon the
shingle, which had been so foully done to death by gulls of various
clans. He may, or may not, have known it, but I can tell _you_ that
the gull was the self-same herring-gull who had tried to kill him the
day before. Now he--but we will draw a curtain here.
Next day the skua went away, and the fishing wild-folk breathed a sigh
of relief as they watched him go, and for three days peace brooded over
the winged fishers of those parts, so that birds could feed upon what
they caught, nor be in fear of getting hunted for it. But upon the
fourth day the skua came back. And he was not alone. A dusky, nearly
brown--for they vary much in color--female skua came with him. And in
due course they built them a home on the ground among the heather, and
they guarded their treasured eggs and reared with amazing fierce
devotion their beloved young.
Before his advent that strip of wild sea-coast had been, mercifully,
without its skuas. Our bold buccaneer, however, having won his
footing, took care to see that, so far as one bird could accomplish the
great task, it never should be again.
XIV
WHEN NIGHTS WERE COLD
And the Northern Lights come down
To dance on the houseless snow;
And God, who clears the grounding berg,
And steers the grinding flow,
He hears the cry of the little kit-fox
And the lemming on the snow.--RUDYARD KIPLING.
A snipe rose suddenly, and began to call out; a capercailzie lofted all
at once, with a great rush of winged bulk, above the snow-bound forest;
and a white hare slid, like a wraith of the winter, down a silent
forest aisle.
Then came the White Wolf of the Frozen Wastes, the terror of the
blizzard, ghost-like, enormous, and swift. In dead, grim silence came
he, loping his loose, tireless wolf's lope, and stopped at a windfall,
where two forest giants, their decaying strength discovered by the
extra weight of snow, lay prone, one across the other.
For a moment he paused, nose up, testing the still, cold air; then he
leapt upon the upper fallen tree. He had, seen up there and clearly,
an enormously thick and woolly coat, that magnified his already record
size. You see him trotting along the tree-trunk. Then he stopped and
stared down into the dark hollow under the upper tree. Then he
sniffed--audibly. Then he licked his nose--and very red was his
tongue. Then--but this he couldn't help, I verily believe, as he
balanced there with his pricked ears and bright eyes--he whined.
And instantly his little, impatient, dog-like whine was answered by a
deep, deep growl, that seemed to come out of the bowels of the earth.
He was just in time, as he leapt lightly off the windfall, to avoid the
rush of a vast brown bulk, reeking of carrion, furry, terrible, with
live-coals for eyes, and threshing the air with claws Heaven knows how
long, which hurled itself like an avalanche out of the hollow at him.
And that thing was a bear.
Now, bears do not, as a rule, without extraordinary reason, in that
land, rouse themselves out of their winter sleep for the mere whine of
a wolf. They are impregnable where they are, and know it. The
extraordinary reason, however, was present. The white wolf was
sniffing at it now--the bear's blood-trail to the windfall. Bruin had
been roused once before that day--by beaters. He had then been driven
forward, shot at by hunters, wounded, escaped, and returned to his den.
But--but, I give you my word, if those beaters, those peasants, had
known the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was out, nothing in the wide
world would have induced them to beat for bears or anything else in
that vicinity.
The white wolf stretched himself to a canter, and slid away through the
forest, dropping the trees past him like telegraph-poles past a
railway-carriage window. He looked like the very spirit of winter, the
demon of the snows, and stood for that in the ignorant minds of the
sparsely scattered people--perhaps because at a short distance he was
nearly invisible. His white coat, which was simply a conspicuous curse
to him when there was no snow--which was one reason, maybe, why he
retired from the limelight to some lonely fastness during summer--was
an incalculable asset to him in winter, and he knew it.
He ran, with his smooth, loose, effortless lope, perhaps a quarter of a
mile, then stopped, and putting up his head, howled a howl so full of
hopeless, cruel yearning, so vibrant with desolation, that it sounded
like the cry of a soul doomed forever to seek something it could never
find. It was a lugubrious yowl there, in that setting, and it made
one's scalp creep all over one's cranium.
And instantly almost, even as the last, long, horrible echoes died,
sobbing adown the blue-haze perspective of the forest glades, the
answer came--a far-away, fluttering, wandering howl, like the moan of
the wind in its sleep.
The white wolf waited a moment, then howled again, and the ghastly
sound came back to him, louder and nearer this time.