beaten beast; and, to complete the catastrophe, by a miracle he had
landed where there was not a mouse or mole or vole hole, or any other
cover, within reach. Only one big clod of earth there was, and round
that he flung himself, with that stub, scaly snout weaving at his very
tail, and rolled over and over and over--done, too utterly spent even
to squeak.
Then Fate lifted her finger, and things happened. All that had gone
before didn't count, it seemed.
The little bank-vole was dimly aware of rolling under a big, warm, live
shape. He was also aware of a funny little fussy grunt in his ear, and
that a set of very white and business-like teeth flashed for an instant
in the sun, as they chopped surprisedly at him going under them, and
missed. Thereafter the shape sat down, nearly stifling him; and in the
same instant the whole air seemed to fill with the sudden, long-drawn,
venomous, terrifying hiss of the viper close at hand. Evidently the
limbless death had come round the corner too quickly, and had all but
rammed the shape that grunted.
I can give you my word, though, that the vole was not happy one bit.
He appeared to be between the Devil and the deep sea. He had no
confidence in the deep sea, or any other thing that he could think of
in his world. Moreover, the deep sea, besides keeping all the air off,
was most horribly bristly, even on the belly. Wherefore that vole made
haste to quit station, so to speak. But in a second, it seemed, before
he could clear himself, that unspeakable serpent's hiss appeared to
sound in his very ear, and the deep sea, folding upon itself, made the
poor vole yell as if he had touched off a live-wire. He had not, of
course; but it was like being struck with a dozen pins at once. He
would have got out if he could, but to move was to discover more pins,
and he just had to keep where he was, squealing fit to burst.
And that saved the vole, probably.
Not that there was any magic or rubbish of that kind, of course. It
was simply that the viper, shooting his every inch round the corner in
the effort to grab the vole's hindlegs then or never, had hit, full
pelt and nose first, the nice little array of pointed arguments carried
on the back of the neck of a hedgehog, snuffing under the clod,
pig-fashion, for spiders. The hedgehog, whose phlegmatic disposition
and special armament allowed him the luxury of never being surprised at
anything, promptly and literally shut up, so that long before the viper
thing had unhooked his nose and was waving his forward part about over
the hedgehog, with murder in his eye and death behind his flickering
tongue, looking for a place to strike home, old hedgehog was rolled up,
and snuffling and snoring away inside there, like an old man chuckling
when he has just cried "Mate!" at chess.
This trying position continued for perhaps five minutes. It seemed
like five days to the wretched bank-vole.
Then the slow temper of the funny old hedgepig smoldered gradually
alight. His eyes grew red in the foxy head of him, his snout "worked,"
and he snuffled and grunted faster and faster. He made up his mind to
fight. And the extraordinary combat began. Lit by the blood rays of a
setting sun, from a sky all raw and red, backed by the blue-gray haze
of the watching woods, the silence broken only by the ghostly whisper
of the snake's scales and the tiny pig-like grunting of the
hundred-spiked hedgehog, that duel started.
Peering out of a peep-hole in himself, the hedgehog waited for an
opening. It was no blunderer's game, this. Death was the price of a
slip. He knew, however, and accepted the risks deliberately--a plucky
enough act, when you come to think of it, for a beast no more than a
foot long and one and a half pounds heavy.
The opening came. Quicker than you could realize, the hedgehog half
unrolled, and side-chopped with his glistening teeth. Quick, too, and
quicker, the venomous, flat serpent head writhed aloft and back-lashed,
swift as a released spring; but the hedgehog had ducked, or tucked if
you like, more than instantly back into himself. Followed an infernal,
ghastly writhing and squirming of the long, unprotected mottled serpent
body as it struck--too late to stop itself--simply spines, spines only,
that tore and lacerated maddeningly. Whip, whip, whip! flashed the
deadly reptilian head, pecking, quicker than light flickers, at the
impassive round _cheval-de-frise_ that was the hedgehog, in a blind
access of fury terrible to see; and each time the soft throat of the
horror only tore and tore worse, in a ghastly manner, on those spines
that showed no life and said no word, and defied all. It was a siege
of the wild, and a terrible one.
Probably this was the first time in his life that anything had dared to
stand up to that viper. He acted as if it was, anyway. Usually his
malignant hiss, so full of hateful cruelty, was enough of a warning.
And those who ignored that did not generally live to repeat the
omission. He seemed utterly unable to understand that anything could
face his fangs of concentrated death and not go out in contortions.
And there were no contortions about this prickly foe, only an
impassable front, or, if you love exactness, back.
Wild things, unlike man, are rarely given to lose their tempers. It
isn't healthy--in the wild. But if ever a creature appeared to human
eyes to do so, it was that snake. He struck and he struck and he
struck, impaling himself ghastlily each time, and using up his small
immediate magazineful of venom uselessly on--uncompromising spikes!
At last he drew back, a horrible affront to the fairy scene, and, in
the snap of a finger, the hedgehog had unpacked himself, run forward--a
funny little patter it was, much faster than you would expect--slashed
with his dagger fangs, and repacked himself again in an instant.
The snake, writhing afresh under the punishment, threw himself once
more upon the impassive "monkey-puzzle" on four legs, but beyond
tearing himself into an even more ghastly apparition than before, he
accomplished nothing. Finally he broke away, and slid off, a rustling,
half-guessed, fleeting vision, and there was fear at last in those
awful eyes, that could never close, as he went.
Then it was that the quiet, unobstrusive, retiring, self-effacing
hedgehog threw off the mask, and hoisted his true colors. And yet, if
one came to think of it, there was no cause for surprise, for was he
not a member of the strange, the mysterious, the great Order of
Insectivora, which includes among its members probably the most
pugnacious, the most implacable, the most furiously passionate fighters
in all the wild? He fairly flung himself, unrolled, and running with
an absurdly clock work-toy-like gait, whose speed checked the laugh
that it caused, was after that viper in considerably less than
half-a-second, his eyes red as the sun they glinted in, his fangs bared
for action, his swinish snout uplifted at the tip in a wicked grin. No
beast to bandy words with, this. It was a fight to a finish, with no
surrender save to death.
The bank-vole had already fled; but it was in the direction that the
fight finally veered that he had gone, and so, peeping from between the
weed-stems at the mouth of a hole, he saw all. He saw the viper, his
head swaying to and fro, come sliding along, making for that very hole;
he heard the sudden quick rustle in the grass behind that followed,
beheld the dusky, squat form that it heralded pounce. He watched the
snake's head whip round, and drive with all its power in one last
desperate stroke; watched it straighten out suddenly, and recoil in an
awful quivering spasm, like a severed telegraph-wire, as the hedgehog's
razor-sharp teeth cut through skin and flesh and backbone; and,
trembling from head to foot, he witnessed, half-fascinated, I think,
the awful last threshing flurry of the viper that followed.
Later, when the moon peeped out of a hole in the clouds, and the
bank-vole peeped out of one in the bank, together--and his beady eyes
were not much behind the moon for brightness--when the tiny, long-eared
bats were imitating black lightning overhead, and a single owl was
hooting like a lost soul seeking a home, away in the black heart of the
woods, the bank-vole witnessed the burial of that hated viper. It was
not a big affair. Only one person--the hedgehog--took part in it, and
he was singularly unhurried, for he ate that poisonous fiend all up,
beginning at the tail, and thoughtfully chewing on from side to side to
the head--twenty inches of snake--as if he, the hedgehog, had been
inoculated in infancy, and was poison-proof.
Then, still grunting, he went away, slowly, nosing here and there,
rustling loudly in that stillness, an odd, squat figure in the
moonlight; and the bank-vole thought he had seen the last of him, and
came out to pass about his "lawful occasions," as per custom.
Now, if you or I had taken our meals after the fashion of that "wee,
timorous beastie," we should probably have departed this life from
indigestion or nervous prostration inside a month.
He came very cautiously from his hole, and the first thing his fine
long whiskers telegraphed him the presence of was an oak-gall--one of
those round knobs that grow upon twigs like nuts, you know, but have a
fat grub inside instead of a kernel. At the same instant a leaf
rustled, and--flp!--there was no bank-vole.
Allowing one minute for the passing of whoever rustled that leaf, and a
cloud-shadow, and there he was again, back at the gall, his shining
eyes, that mirrored the moon, being the only visible part of him. He
rolled the gall over and sniffed, and--that was quite enough, thank
you. No nut there, and he knew it--by scent, I fancy. In that moment
something trod softly, ever so softly, somewhere, and a spray of laced
bracken swayed one quarter of an inch, and--the bank-vole was not.
Again about a minute's pause, and three bank-voles came out together.
Our friend was the last, and another was the first, to discover a
little hoard of seeds that some other tiny beastie--not a
bank-vole--must have collected and forgotten all about, or been killed
in the interval.
In the wild, it is the law that "they should take who have the power,
and they should keep who can." It isn't a bad law, because it has much
to do with that other law called the "survival of the fittest," but it
is apt to come expensive if persisted in.
Our vole hopped promptly towards the other vole, and made out that the
seeds were his; but before any kind of ultimatum could be delivered, a
twig fell, as twigs will sometimes, for no special reason that one can
see. The noise it made in that stilly wood was astonishing, and ere
the twig had reached the earth there wasn't a bank-vole above ground.
And yet so astonishingly quick and evasive are these little creatures
that in less than thirty seconds there were the two disputants, each
erect upon his haunches, with little hand-like forepaws held up and
joined under the chin--as if they were actresses having their
photographs taken--fighting, like little blunt-headed furies, for
possession of those seeds--so it seemed. I say "so it seemed"
advisedly, since close by, and almost invisible because sitting quite
still, was another bank-vole, who looked as if she were waiting for
something; which she probably was--a lover.
It was, however, death that came, and he is a too attentive lover. The
battle had been going on some seconds without apparent result, possibly
because the voles had to bite upwards, shark-fashion, owing to the fact
that their fighting-teeth are wedge-shaped incisors, instead of
stabbing fangs, when there was a hrrr! That is all, just like
that--hrrr!
Then there were no voles; but there seemed to have been no going of the
voles, either. They just were, fighting and watching the fight--then
they just were not. Instead of them, on the very spot where they had
been, a sheeted ghost, with wings that flapped and flapped, and never
made any noise, with the face of a cat, and big round eyes that
gleamed, and a snore most horrible, had simply been evolved from
nowhere, and under its claws was the little red-backed lady who waited
for a lover.
Now, the coming of that apparition, whose wings did not say
"Hough-hough!" or "Whew-whew!" like other birds' wings do when they
fly, thus proving itself, or rather herself, to be an owl, and the
fight of Mr. Hedgehog and the poisoned death, had a direct connection
with, and a bearing upon, the little bank-vole's life, although they
may not have seemed to have at first. If the snake had not run amok
against the hedgehog, the latter slow personage would have been well
out in the meadow by that time, reducing the worm population, instead
of hanging about and coming up the ditch at that moment, with the hot
and worried air of one who is late.
What he saw was the owl on the ground, flapping her great, soft wings
about, within a foot of the nicely, neatly, nattily roofed-in nest
where he and his lifelong wedded wife thought they had hidden cunningly
their four soft-bristled, helpless babies. What he thought he saw was
the owl engaged in turning one of those same babies into nourishing
infant owls' food, or "words to that effect." And the hedgehog, like
most of the order Insectivora, is cursed with the temper of Eblis, too.
Naturally, therefore, things happened, and happened the more
hectically, perhaps, because Mrs. Hedgehog chanced at that moment to be
away--attending to the last rites--shall we say?--over the form of an
expiring young rat.
The little pig's eyes of him went red in his funny, bristle-crowned
head, and just as a clockwork toy charges, so he charged, with a quick,
grunting rustle and far greater speed than any one who knew only his
usual deliberate movements would have given him credit for.
The owl had only time to turn her cat-like face and--hiss. But though
that hiss would have been good enough as a bluff to frighten creatures
who wouldn't upset a snake for anything, she was out of her reckoning
upon this occasion. The hedgehog, who dealt in snakes as a game-warden
deals in tigers, had no nerves that way. He just sailed in under the
baffling, great, flapping wing, and, ere ever the bird of the night
could spring aloft, had struck. It was a ghastly form of warfare, this
low running in and wrenching snap. It landed right under the armpit,
so to speak, and left a nasty round hole. And it is worth noting, by
the way, that precisely the same sort of hole, and in the same spot
almost, but lower and farther back, was to be seen upon the body of the
deceased young rat that Mrs. Hedgehog was even then attending to--the
trademark of the hedgehogs, that hole.
All the immediate world of the night wild, watching from grass-tuft and
root and burrow, heard the rasping tap of the owl's beak hammering
helplessly at the spines on the back of the hedgehog, now beside
himself with rage. Not one of them, too, that did not jump with
terror--engrained by the bitter experience of hundreds of
generations--at her fiendish scream. Then, in a flash, that owl was
upon her back, wielding hooked beak and stiletto talons, as only she
knew how to use them; and the hedgehog, who had, in the blindness of
his rage, run in to finish the job, shot up clean on his hind-legs,
taking the clinging, flapping owl with him, while, for the first time
that night, he uttered a cry other than a grunt--an odd, piercing
little cry, vibrant with rage, or fear, or both. This was rather odd,
because ordinarily the hedgehog is a dumb beast, who suffers
"frightfulness" in grim silence.
The tables were turned now. The shoe was on the other foot, or, to be
precise, the foot was on the underside. That is, the owl had got the
foe where he lived, below water-line, if I may so put it, where, like a
battleship, his armor did not run, and he was soft and vulnerable as
any other beast. Moreover, he had not trained himself in the art of
throwing himself upon his back, as the owl, who was like a cat in this
particular also, had apparently done, and since he could not prance on
his hindlegs, unicorn-fashion, forever, he had to come down again,
belly and throat first, on that infernal battery of talons and beak.
And he got it all right enough. I give you my word that spiny one got
it; but, save for that one first little cry, he took his punishment in
grim and terrible silence, fighting with a blind fury that was awful to
behold. What happened to him underneath there in those few brief,
terrible seconds no one will ever know--and that, we may guess, is as
well perhaps, for there is no sense in dwelling upon horrors. What he
_did_, in the short time he was given by Fate, is a little more clear.
Butting madly down, oblivious of all things, even that unspeakable
fish-hook beak, grappling like a thing demented--and I think he was
nearly that--he bit deep, deep down, through feathers and skin and
flesh, _home_--once, twice, and again.
Then, blindly, brokenly, smothered in blood, red-visaged and horrible,
he half-rolled, half blundered free of that frightful clinch, and
instantly rolled up! 'Twas his habit, the one refuge of his life, so
long as he breathed; his last, and usually, but not always, his first,
hope.
The owl struggled somehow, in a cloud of her own feathers, to her feet.
The beautiful, fan-like, exquisitely soft wings flapped and beat
frantically. There came a peculiar musky sort of smell into the air.
She rose, all lopsidedly, perhaps two yards, flapping, flapping,
flapping with frenzied desperation, before toppling suddenly,
helplessly, pathetically, as the big pinions stopped, and she collapsed
sideways back to earth again, where, blood-smeared and glaring, lit by
the merciless, cynical moon, she crouched and coughed--as I live,
coughed and coughed and coughed, a ghastly cough like a baby's, till it
seemed as if she would cough her heart up.
Then silence--that wonderful, mysterious, waiting, echoing, listening
silence of the woods at night--shut down, and darkness swept over all.
When dawn came stealing westward silently over the still canopy of
leaves, both combatants were still there; and they were still here,
too, when the sun, silting in through a rift in the foliage, found and
bathed them. The owl was crouched as she had been when the moon left
her--crouched, and with her wings just a little open, like a bird about
to take flight; but she had already taken wing on the longest flight of
all. The hedgehog was, too, just as the moon had left him, rolled up
in a spiky ball, apparently asleep; but his sleep, also, was the
longest sleep of all. And over them both, in the heavy silence, could
be distinctly heard that horrible "brr-brr-brr" of flies that told its
own story.
Now, that was in the morning, soon after sunrise; but long before that,
indeed the moment the hedgehog had first attacked the owl and forced
her to turn her attention to him, the little female bank-vole, who by
some mischance or miscalculation, had evaded the first terrible
handshake of the owl which spells death, had rolled clear of the fight,
and dashed for her life to the nearest tussock of grass that offered
shelter; and the first thing she fell over there was our bank-vole,
"frozen" motionless. He was there because the scene of the fight was
between him and the holes in the bank, and for the life of him he could
not muster up courage to run the gauntlet past those dread, struggling
forms.
In the end, there being scarcely sufficient room in the tussock for
both to hide effectually, and there seeming to be some danger of the
combatants trampling them flat where they lay, he led the way up a
tree, whose gnarled bole took the ground barely six inches away. It
was one of those great-great-great-grandfather oaks, which, if it had
been in a more public spot, would certainly have been raised to the
dignity of one of the few hundred trees that hid Prince Charlie. It
was not, however; but it had another peculiarity, as the voles found
out later on.
Scared out of their little wits by the fury of their enemies below, and
afraid to go down and bolt across the open, even after the cessation of
hostilities, past those appallingly still, crouched bodies, who, for
all they had guarantee to the contrary, might be in fiendish, alliance
crouched there, waiting for them to descend, the two voles explored
gradually, in their own dainty, little, deprecating, creeping way,
branch after branch of the great spreading patriarch, till suddenly, at
the very tip of the longest and biggest limb of all, they
vanished--into ivy. What had happened was quite simple, however.
There was no trick in it. It was all above-board. It was simply that
the mighty tree at this spot grew close to one of those outcrops of
cliff that formed, as it were, broken-off pieces from the main cliffs
which bordered the river and the valley on one side farther up, and one
of the oak boughs had gradually been annexed by the ivy--itself of
great age--that clothed the face of the cliff.
Climbing steadily upwards through the network of ivy-stems--he had no
wish to go down now, for he could hear the river talking to itself
directly underneath him, and a false step meant a clean drop into the
swirling black depths thirty feet or so below--the bank-vole, with his
companion in close and trusting attendance, presently came out on top
of the cliff. He found himself upon a space all clothed with
vegetation, bushes, and stunted trees, some hundred yards long.
Beneath him, as he peered over, he could see the roof of the wood, all
laid out like a green tablecloth, and here and there, through gaps, the
river, now shrunk to no more than a stream, by reason of the fact that
men, for their own purposes, had dammed its waters about a mile farther
up the valley, and constructed a reservoir there.
The voles knew nothing about any dam--then. They were satisfied to
explore the cliff-top and the crevices, to discover the tiny eggs of a
coal-tit, and remark on their flavor; to nose into every crook and
corner that came in their way; to learn the excellent facilities the
place offered for setting up housekeeping; and to discover that no
other bank-voles appeared to have found their way up there.
This took time, for they naturally had to flirt in between, and so it
happened that the sun had been up some while before they finally set to
improvising a home, in a partially earth-filled rocky cleft, with their
own sturdy forepaws. They had got so far as to dig in out of sight,
turning every few seconds to push out the loose earth, when the dam up
above broke, and a few hundred, or thousand, for all I know, tons of
water dropped into the valley--crash!
And thus it happened that, when the sun set, those two little,
big-headed, blunt-nosed bank-voles, looking out upon an endless sea of
water, above which the top halves of the trees in the wood rose like
mangroves, were, save for a few that had climbed into trees and would
starve, the only bank-voles left alive, to repopulate that valley with
bank-voles, out of all the teeming thousands whose burrows had
honeycombed every bank in the vicinity. Verily, how strange is Fate,
"who makes, who mars, who ends!"
XVI
THE EAGLES OF LOCH ROYAL
He makes a solitude, and calls it--peace.--BYRON.
He comes, the false disturber of my quiet.
Now, vengeance, do thy worst.--SHERIDAN.
The rising sun came striding over the edge of the world, and presented
the mountain with a golden crown; later it turned the rolling, heaving
mystery of the mists below into a sea of pure amber. A tiny falcon--a
merlin--shot up out of the mist, hung for a moment, whilst the sun
transformed his wings to purple bronze, and fell again, vanishing
instantly. Next, a cock-grouse, somewhere below the amber sea, crowed
aloud to proclaim the day, and a raven mocked at him hoarsely.