have, and still he had not seen him. Yet, if during that time he had
risen, the Chieftain must have seen him. And the Chieftain knew that.
He knew also that a golden eagle very rarely makes a "kill" so big that
he has to remain with it two hours. The alternative, therefore, would
seem to be death or carrion; and the way in which he had circled down
would seem to suggest carrion. And it is written among the laws of the
king of birds that when carrion is about, the strict rules and
regulations as to the inviolability of the frontiers may be, in some
degree, broken.
Therefore the king unfurled his overshadowing vans, and launched himself
down the lake with mighty, slow, powerful strokes, like the steady thrust
of marine engines. He would go and see.
Five minutes later the Chieftain was as motionless as his son, perched,
like him, too, upon a rock, watching the highwaymen and footpads of the
moors squabbling over the bait--they had no eyes to see what they were
doing, for they had to keep one eye upon each eagle--and about two
hundred yards away on the other side.
This may have hurried matters somewhat, for within only about another
half-hour the Chieftain's son rose, and, with heavy wing-flaps, flew down
to the bait, sending the ravens and the crows up in a cloud, like blown
bits of burnt paper, as he came to anchor. And it was curious that, in
stooping to meanness, the royal bird's aspect was no longer grand. He
flew heavily and clumsily to the spot. He settled without grace, and
almost overbalanced on to his Grecian nose. He clutched, and tore, and
gulped, and gorged like a vulture. Thus Nature always dresses her actors
for their parts. You may have noticed it.
[Illustration: "He clutched, and tore, and gulped, and gorged"]
But Pig Head--Pig Head was chuckling. He had silently and softly removed
the clod of peat that blocked the aperture before mentioned. Running
through this aperture he had a cord whose other end was fastened to the
bait, and every time the great eagle wrenched and tore at the flesh, he
very, very gently pulled the bait towards him. He did not move when the
mighty bird had his head up, gulping, you will note; for even Pig Head
knew that an eagle nearly standing on his head and tugging, and not
feeling the difference between his own tugs and the tugs on a cord, is
not the same as an eagle with his head up and eyes stabbing everywhere at
once.
At last the victim had been drawn, upon the bait, within reach, and Pig
Head, slipping his hand through the opening, grabbed the thick, powerful
legs of the bird, and pulled. There was one mighty upheaval of vast
vans, and--no eagle! What happened down inside the hiding-place was more
or less private. There were sounds as if a young earthquake were getting
ready to be born in that place; but in the end the Chieftain's son had
his legs tied, and suffered the indignity of being ignominiously thrust
into a filthy sack. He said nothing during that argument, but his looks
were enough to kill anything with a thinner hide than Pig Head.
Immediately Pig Head got ready for the Chieftain. What's that? Yes, the
Chieftain is right. That great, haughty bird had not moved. You see,
eagles are not educated up to seeing their full-grown sons disappear into
the bowels of the earth without explanation or warning given. There is
nothing in their experience to meet the phenomenon. Consequently they
don't tumble, as a rule, and--well, listen for yourself.
In a short time--a short time for an eagle; not less than half-an-hour,
really--the Chieftain flapped heavily to the bait, and fed--beastily, if
the truth must be told.
He was bigger than his son, and heavier, and knew more about the world,
and Pig Head was longer in seeing a fair chance to make a grab at the
royal legs. At last, however, the chance came, and Pig Head grabbed.
The Chieftain naturally lost his balance, and before he knew what had
happened he was inside Pig Head's "booby-hutch."
The Chieftain, however, was not an ordinary bird, not even an ordinary
eagle. Moreover, he must have been a great age, older even than Pig
Head. Be that as it may, the Chieftain believed mightily in the wild
maxim which says, "They should take who have the power, and they should
keep who can."
And upon that he acted.
It all happened in a flash. Like lightning his right wing came round
with a terrific flail-stroke, and hit Pig Head in the face at the precise
instant that the surgical instrument he carried as his beak sank deep
into one of Pig Head's calves. The Chieftain was upside-down at the
moment, and his legs were tied together, but that made no difference to
the savagery of the blow.
Pig Head uttered one howl of agony, and tumbled backwards, and his devil
saw to it that he should tumble backwards upon the very sack wherein lay
the Chieftain's son, squirming with rage. The Chieftain's son was a son
of his father, and hearing the young hurricane of his father's wings, and
feeling the intolerable weight of Pig Head sitting involuntarily down
upon him, struck for the cause like a good un--struck, with his cruel,
hooked bill, through sack, through trousers, through pants, and home
through flesh, and Pig Head rebounded into the air considerably quicker
than he had gone down, hitting his head against the roof, a resounding
whack, and yelling fit to awake all the devils in cinders. And he did
not go alone. Upon one calf, and upon--another portion of him, the
Chieftain and the Chieftain's son went with him.
Very few men have ever left a powder-magazine on fire in quicker time
than did Pig Head leave his hiding-place, and none could have made more
noise in the process. The Chieftain stuck to him lovingly, and the
Chieftain's son, sack and all, seemed determined never to leave him; and
Pig Head was nearly demented with pain as he leapt out, caracoling
wildly, into the light of day, and into the arms of--only the laird, the
head stalker, four gillies, and two collies.
They had come to find him, these stern-faced, long, lean men, on account
of "information received." And they had found him. But they did not
speak. They were Scotch. Nor did they screw out a smile among them.
They were Jocks! They acted--being Highlanders.
Four hands like iron claws seized Pig Head, and tipped him on end, even
as he had tipped the eagles. Two knives went "snick" as they opened,
then "wheep-wheep" as they cut. Several pieces of cord and bits of
sacking flew into the air. There was one colossal upheaval of wings, a
feathered whirlwind hurling everybody every way--and the Chieftain and
his son, released and scandalized, offended and enraged beyond the rage
of kings, rose swiftly into the air with mighty, threshing strokes that
simply hurled them aloft like powerful projectiles--into the heavens, as
it were terrible avenging spirits of the tempest. A chaos, a rush, a
mighty blast of air, and--they were gone!
Then the laird turned to Pig Head, and, "Mon, ye dinna ken th' laird. If
ye did--w-e-e-l, Ah'm thinkin' ye'd understand."
XVII
RATEL, V.C.
Between the clumps of the stunted acacias the sun beat down with the
pitilessness of a battleship's furnace, and it was not much better in the
acacias themselves. Save for a lizard here and there, motionless as a
bronze fibula, or a snake asleep with eyes wide open, or the flash of a
"pinging" fly, all Nature seemed to have fled from that intolerable
white-hot glare and gone to sleep.
But the hour of emancipation was at hand, and the dim caverns of
shade--what there was of it--stirred strangely. A hundred yards away a
blotch of shadow beneath a group of stunted trees swayed and broke up
into several zebra moving off to water. Fifty yards distant the inky
shade that carpeted the earth under a bare outcrop of rock gave up a
single gnu antelope bull and a Grant's gazelle whose lyrate horns were as
wonderful as his consummate grace.
Thereafter came sound. Till then there had been only heat, the first
hints at movement, and the terrifying silence of the wilderness. Even
the birds had been dumb. Now came "a feathered denizen of the grove"
with a peculiarly arresting, grating chatter, a noise no one could
overlook, and few could help investigating. And finally, brazenly,
impudently, excitedly flitting from branch to branch, the chatterer
evolved slowly out of the ragged bush-choked landscape, a dusky little
bird, seemingly a bird of no importance, scarce larger than a lark.
Putting personal appearance aside, however, this feathered one, who dared
to shatter the slumber of the everlasting wilderness, seemed to be under
the impression that he was of vast importance. Moreover, his business
appeared to be pressing and urgent, so that he could neither brook delay
nor take "No" for an answer. It was as though he was under a desperate
need to take you somewhere or show you something, and YOU must follow
him--_must_; there was nothing else for it.
But nobody cared. The zebra trooped off without turning their striped
heads; the gazelle, weighted under his horns, and the gnu bull stalked
away unattending; the lizards remained fixed in a permanent attitude of
attention; and the snakes continued to stare at nothing. No one took the
slightest notice.
Then came the reply.
It was as if a person or a thing, deep down in the bowels of the earth,
hearing the bird, stirred in its sleep, and shouted up, "I come." And it
came.
Heralded by a peculiar, quaint, little, chatty, sibilant, hissing,
whistling chuckle, there emerged from a regular cave that he, or an
ant-bear, or some other burrower had constructed under an ancient bush, a
beast--a most remarkable beast.
It was long--about three feet. It was low; it was stumpy, clumpy,
sturdy, bear-like, and altogether odd. It had no ears that any one could
find, and it rattled the most murderous armament of claws that you ever
guessed at. But that was not all; not by any means. It, or, rather, he,
had really been colored grayish white in the first place; but Nature had
thoughtlessly dropped him into a vat of black paint on his "tummy," flat,
and left him there to swim about, so that by the time he got out he was
one half, including chin, black, and the other and upper half, including
top of head and back and top of tail, grayish white. And then, for a
joke, it seemed, Nature had painted a white band round where black and
grayish white met, a sort of water-line, so to speak, and let the poor
little beggar go--go, mark you, into a wild where self-advertisement is
something more than unhealthful for the smaller folks. Afterwards,
however, Nature--who is all a woman--had repented, seemingly, and being
unable to undo her own jest, had given to the little, slow, conspicuous
beast, as compensation, a courage surpassing the courage of any other
beast on earth. The result was rather curious--it was also the ratel, or
honey-badger, who had nothing at all to do with rats, but everything to
do with honey, and was self-evidently more than three-parts badger.
"Kru-tshee! Kru-tshee-chlk! Krue-tshee-chlk-chlk, whee-tshee-tse-tse,
tse-i-who-o-o!" he whistled, and chuckled, and muttered, and fairly sang
to himself as he came trotting along towards the cheeky little bird, like
a dog that answers a whistle. His gait was all his own, as he, too, was
all his own original self, being unlike anything else, although he bore
the stamp of the badger people upon him.
With a calm, rolling trot, head down, tail up, back a fraction arched,
with something like the slouch of his distant relation, the wolverine, he
proceeded, preceded always by that dusky phantom bird that flitted and
perched ahead of him, like a yellow-hammer down a country lane--calling,
calling, calling. And he, lifting his odd, flat, "earless," sleek head
to it, would whistle and chuckle in reply. They had, it seemed, arrived
at a perfect understanding, these two, during the centuries. "Lead on,
Macduff!" he seemed to say.
They passed antelopes anchored in the shade; hartebeest, impala, and roan
after their kind. They heard the click of horn and the stamp of hoof,
but troubled not. They passed the place where a leopard lay asleep up a
tree, and saw a devil's whip of a ten-foot mamba snake--and the bite of
that same is a sixty-second short cut to the grave--flee before them as
if they, and not it, were death incarnate. Once a serval cat, all legs
and ears and agility, stood in their path to listen to the funny
chuckling, whistling noises, but fled when it saw the little, low ratel
as if it had seen a ghost.
But always undeterred by anything in the way, engrossed utterly on the
task in view, the dusky bird flew ahead, calling the ratel on with its
harsh cry; and always the ratel, unhurried and cool, jogged along in its
wake, answering, and whistling, and chuckling away to it, as if convulsed
with inward merriment. Perhaps he was. It was a strange procession,
anyway, and one you don't look for every day in the week, even in Africa,
the land of mysteries and surprises.
Finally, the bird stopped; and the ratel looked, and saw that it was
flitting round the base of a big mimosa. Enough! He hurried a little at
last. Next moment he was nearly hidden under a continuous stream of
earth and dust flying back from his amazing foreclaws, and a whirling,
whirring vortex of perfectly demented bees, whose nest, that had been
weeks in the building, was dissolving in seconds under the trowel-like
scoopings of those fearful claws.
Honey! Honey! Honey!
That was it. That was the magic word the bird, who was a honey-guide by
name, had shouted to the ratel, who was a honey-badger, you remember; and
honey-bees they were that made the air delirious.
The bird, with the quick eye of a detective, had located the hole of the
nest, but having no trowel, forthwith fetched the ratel, who had, and
together they fed, the beast on honey, and the bird on the grubs in the
combs.
And the bees? Oh, they don't count! At least, they might have been
house-flies for all the notice the ratel took of them, save now and then
to bunch a dozen or so off his cowled head carelessly. Yet they would
probably have nearly killed _us_.
It was about this time that the bull-gnu appeared, tramping steadily
towards them; a rugged, rough renegade of the wilderness; a ruffian
kicked--or, rather, horned--out of some herd forever, and, for his sins,
doomed always to face the risks of life alone, or in the companionship of
other male outlaws of soured temper like himself--almost always male; the
female wild seems guiltless of law-breaking, or is under a banner of
protection if it is not. Such "rogues," as men call them, are not
gentlemanly, as a rule. And, by the way, you know the gnu, of course,
_alias_ wildebeest? The head of a very shaggy buffalo, the horsy mane,
the delicate, strong, sloping antelope body, the long, mustang-like tail,
and the strange, twisted, unconventional character, half-fierce,
half-inquisitive.
He--that lonely one--was going to drink, and he may have been doing it
early because he had only his two eyes and ears, and his one nose, to
warn him of the dozen or two forms of death that awaited him at the
drinking-place, instead of the eyes and ears and noses of all the herd.
The gnu saw neither honey-bird nor badger till he was within a yard of
them. Then he stopped as instantly still as if he had been electrocuted.
The ratel, who had himself to feed, and a wounded wife and two young whom
he would lead to that honey-feast anon, looked calmly over his shoulder
at the form of the antelope towering above him. There was no sign of
fear in his straight stare at the shaggy, ferocious-looking horned head.
He had no business with it, and would thank it to mind its own affairs.
And the honey-bird didn't care much, either, she having no young to feed,
because, cuckoo-like, she left other birds--woodpeckers, for choice--to
see to that.
Wherefore, for as long as a man would take to select a cigarette with
care and light it, there was dead silence and stillness, broken only by
the distant, deep "Hoo-hoo, hoo! hoo-hoo, hoo!" of a party of ground
hornbills.
Then that devil of meddlesome curiosity which is the curse of the
wildebeests fell upon that gnu, and sanity left him.
"Kwank!" neighed he. And again, "Kwank!"
Next instant he had spun, top-fashion, on all four feet at once, and
jumped in the same manner, and was gone, whirling round them, with great
shaggy head down, and in a halo of his own swishing tail, at the rate of
knots.
It was nothing to be wondered at in that strange antelope that he should
then sink from wild motion to absolute, fixed rigidity, broken only by
the restless, horse-like swishing of the long tail, staring hard at the
ratel.
Perhaps it was the bees that did it, or perhaps the ratel stood in the
gnu's very own path, or in the way of his private dusting-hole. I know
not; neither did the ratel--nor care much, for the matter of that. But
when the gnu went off again, circling with hoarse snorts, and shying and
swerving furiously and wonderfully at top speed, he sat up on his
hindlegs, the better to get a view of the strange sight. Perhaps he
thought a lion was lying somewhere near that he could not see from his
lowly, natural position.
Again the gnu stopped as utterly instantly as if he had run into a brick
wall, pawed, stamped, snorted, and went off once more into furiously
insane caperings--a new set--all the time circling, with the little,
black-and-gray, erect figure of the surprised ratel as a pivot.
And then, in a flash, before any one had a second's warning to grasp the
truth or prepare, with head down, eyes burning in the down-dropped,
shaggy head, and upcurved horn-points gleaming in the afternoon sun, he
charged, hurling himself, a living, reckless, furious battering-ram,
straight at the little ratel.
Did that ratel quit quick? Do ratels ever quit an unbeaten foe? I don't
know. They may, once in the proverbial blue moon; but I haven't seen
'em. This one didn't. He seemed to know that it is held to be a sound
military maxim to meet an attack by counter-attack, and he did, though he
had only the fifth of a second to do it in. Ah, but it was good to see
that odd little beast trotting out coolly, head low, tail high, singing
his war-song as he rolled along to meet the charging foe so many, many
times his own size.
Next moment there was a thud--somewhat as if some one had punched a
pillow--and the ratel was flying through the air, high and fine, in a
graceful and generous curve. A thorn-bush--what matter the precise name?
there are so many in those parts, all execrable--acknowledged receipt of
his carcass with a crash, and for a few seconds he hung, like a sack on a
nail, spitted cleanly by at least one thorn, far thornier than anything
we know here, before the thing gave way, and he fell, still limply, this
way and that, hesitatingly, as it were, as each point lovingly sought to
retain him, to a fork near the bottom, where he stayed.
At last he picked himself out of the fork, and--oh my!--with a whistling
grunt of rage, coolly, calmly, clumsily if you like, but grandly all the
same, trotted forth into the open to look for that bull-gnu again. And
that, sirs, was the sort, of animal _he_ was.
The bull-gnu, however, who was not previously acquainted with small
beasts that would face his charge--and an aerial journey, _and_ the
thorns--and come back for more, had fetched a curve at full gallop, and
loped off into the landscape. For the first time since the herds
outlawed him, I fancy, he seemed to be quite pleased with himself, and
soon, antelope-like, put the ratel from him placidly, and forgot. But he
was reckoning without his host. If he had done with the ratel, the ratel
had not done with him. No, by thunder--not by a good bit!
Finding no bull-gnu, the slow little black and grayish-white fighter from
Fightersville returned at a walk, still whistling with rage, to the
unearthed bees'-nest, which looked like a town after a bad air-raid. And
the first thing he did was to patter almost on top of a cobra, a
five-footer, who, having narrowly escaped death by the gnu's flying
hoofs, was what one might call considerably "het" up, or "off the
handle," so to say.
The servant of the Devil sat up, blew out its beastly hood, and shot
forth a hiss that seemed to run all up and down one's spine, like
lightning on an elm-tree.
The robber of honey sat up, said "Tchik!" and turned a somersault.
What's that? Yes, somersault is right.
Followed instantly two thin jets of liquid, as much as anything I can
think of like those lines called "trajectory curves" which ballisticians
do so love to draw in books on rifle-shooting; only, these curved lines
began at the hollow point of Mr. Cobra's poison-fangs, and were meant to
end in Mr. Ratel's eyes. They didn't. Old man ratel, he was standing on
his hind-legs, with his sturdy paws in front of his eyes--like a man who
looks across a sunny land--and seemed just about to turn a somersault
again. He changed his mind, though, when the poison, that would have
blinded him for life--and that life wouldn't have been long in that wild
_then_, I want to tell you--stopped, and he went in at that black-necked,
legless, soulless servant of Satan, utterly and amazingly unafraid. It
was fine.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you that when Nature repented, and gave
the ratel a courage surpassing the courage of any other beast on earth,
she also gave him a skin tough as a pachyderm's, and loose, as if it were
two sizes too large; and that is why that black-necked cobra died quite
quickly, and the ratel didn't, even slowly. Even if the snake's fangs
had got through, which was not in the least likely, that did not mean to
say they would touch Mr. Ratel's person inside. This, by the way, may
explain why being spitted on thorns, like a beetle on a pin, when the
bull-gnu charged, did not seem to worry him much, either.
The moon was up when the wounded mother ratel, on guard at the mouth of
her burrow, looked up sharply. A side-striped jackal, who kidded himself
she had not seen him lying in wait to find out, when she went hunting,
what she hid in that den, suddenly bolted with a yap; and a hyena,
represented by two burning eyes, who appeared, by some magic of his own,
to guess she was wounded, jumped up and made way for something that
approached. It was her husband and the cobra, the latter trailing along
limply behind, who came that way; and even the hyena had retired, with an
audible sigh--at least, it wasn't a moan quite--when he claimed the path.
After all, there is no sense, if you are the most cowardly beast for your
power on earth, in getting up against the pluckiest thing in creation in
full possession of life and liberty.
Later our ratel sallied forth to "face the world" again. His wife had
recovered from her wounds--the result, these, of refusing to believe she
was not so good as a twelve-foot python, and a bit better--sufficiently
to walk slowly; but that was not enough to face that wild where
die-quicks, from lions, down through leopards, hyenas, wild-dogs,
jackals, and the rest, are forever hiding, on the lookout for unfortunate
ones flying an S.O.S. signal. No, he must go and do the provisioning
alone, and alone he went.
For a peaceful beast, one only too pleased to mind his own business and
thank other folks to mind theirs, his subsequent doings were rather
astonishing. This was because he cared for neither man nor beast nor
devil, in the first place, and because the night produced all three, in
the second.
He got man in the form of the smell of meat--well-seasoned meat, even for
Africa!--what time he was testing a native village, by scent and on the
downwind side of him--and that showed his pluck, my word!--for honey or
fowl. He detected neither out of the few dozen unspeakable stenches, but
struck meat, and following it up-wind, arrived at a piece--a good big
piece--on the ground among grass.
A civet cat--who is more civet than cat, by the way--a small spotted
genet--who looked like an exaggerated ferret in the uncertain gloom--and
the inevitable black-backed jackal--who must not be confused with him of
the side-stripes--faded out at his approach like steam in a dry
atmosphere. He might have felt proud of this silent respect, if it were
not a fact that these gentry, these village frontier haunters, scenting
danger, thought it a fine "kink" to let the brave one test it first.
And he did.
To be exact, that ratel touched off the tooth-jawed trap that was the
reason for that free meal of high and valuable meat in that place, and
when he jumped he didn't get anywhere. Also, it hurt his leg abominably.