That night the lone wolf, scouting along the ridge-top, stopped to sniff intelligently at the scattered, torn eagle's feathers lying about in the trampled snow, at the blood, at the one skinny, mailed, mightily taloned claw still clutching brown-black, rusty fur and red skin; at the unmistakable flat-footed trail of Gulo, the wolverine, leading away to the frowning, threatening blackness of the woods. He could understand it all, that wolf. Indeed, it was written there quite plainly for such as could read. He read, and he passed on. He did not follow Gulo's bloody trail. No—oh, dear, no! Probably, quite probably, he had met Gulo the Indomitable before, and—was not that enough?
Blackie flung himself into the fight like a fiery fiend cut from coal. He did not know what the riot was about—and cared less. He only knew that the neutrality of his kingdom was broken. Some one was fighting over his borders; and when fighting once begins, you never know where it may end! (This is an axiom.) Therefore he set himself to stop it at once, lest worse should befall.
He found two thrushes apparently in the worst stage of d.t.'s. One was on his back; the other was on the other's chest. Both were in a laurel-bush, half-way up, and apparently they kept there, and did not fall, through a special dispensation of Providence. Both fought like ten devils,and both sang. That was the stupefying part, the song. It was choked, one owns; it was inarticulate, half-strangled with rage, but still itwassong.
A cock-chaffinch and a hen-chaffinch were perched on two twigs higher up, and were peering down at the grappling maniacs. Also two blue titmice had just arrived to see what was up, and a sparrow and one great tit were hurrying to the spot—all on Blackie's "beat," on Blackie's very own hunting-ground. Apparently a trouble of that kind concerned everybody, or everybody thought it did.
Blackie arrived upon the back of the upper and, presumably, winning thrush with a bang that removed that worthy to the ground quite quickly, and in a heap. The second thrush fetched up on a lower branch, and by the time the first had ceased to see stars he had apparently regained his sanity. He beheld Blackie above him, and fled. Perhaps he had met Blackie, professionally, before, I don't know. He fled, anyway, and Blackie helped him to flee faster than he bargained for.
By the time Blackie had got back, the first thrush was sitting on a branch in a dazed and silly condition, like a fowl that has been waked up in the night. Blackie presented him with a dig gratis from his orange dagger, and he nearly fell in fluttering to another branch. And Blackie flew away, chuckling. He knew that, so far as that thrush was concerned, there would be no desire to see any more fighting for some time.
But, all the same, Blackie was not pleased. He was worked off his feet providing rations for three ugly youngsters in a magnificently designed and exquisitely worked and interwoven edifice, interlined with rigid cement of mud, which we, in an off-hand manner, simply dismiss as "A nest." The young were his children; they might have been white-feathered angels with golden wings, by the value he put on them. The thrush episode was only a portent, and not the first. He had no trouble with the other feathered people he tolerated on his beat.
Blackie went straight to the lawn. (Jet and orange against deep green was the picture.)
Now, if you and I had searched that dry lawn with magnifying-glasses, in the heat of the sun, there and then, we should not have found a single worm, not the hint or the ghost of one; yet that bird took three long, low hops, made some quick motion with his beak—I swear it never seemed to touch the ground, even, let alone dig—-executed a kind of jump in the air—some say he used his legs in the air—and there he was with a great, big, writhing horror of a worm as big as a snake (some snakes).
Thrushes bang their worms about to make them see sense and give in; they do it many times. Blackie banged his giant only a little once or twice, and then not savagely, like a thrush. Also, again, he may or may not have used his feet. Moreover, he gave up two intervals to surveying the world against any likely or unlikely stalking death. Yet that worm shut up meekly in most unworm-like fashion, and Blackie cut it up into pieces. The whole operation took nicely under sixty seconds.
Blackie gave no immediate explanation why he had reduced his worm to sections. It did not seem usual. Instead, he eyed the hedge, eyed the sky, eyed the surroundings. Nothing seemed immediately threatening, and he hopped straight away about three yards, where instantly, he conjured another and a smaller worm out of nowhere. With this unfortunate horror he hopped back to the unnice scene of the first worm's decease, and carved that second worm up in like manner. Then he peeked up all the sections of both worms, packing them into his beak somehow, and flew off. And the robin who was watching him didn't even trouble to fly down to the spot and see if he had left a joint behind. He knew his blackbird, it seemed.
Blackie flew away to his nest, but not to a nest in a hedge. To dwell in a hedge was a rule of his clan, but the devil a rule did he obey. Nests in hedges for other blackbirds, perhaps. He, or his wife, had different notions. Wherefore flew he away out into the grass field behind the garden. Men had been making excavations there, for what mad man-purpose troubled him not—digging a drain or something. No matter.
Into the excavation he slipped—-very, very secretly, so that nobody could have seen him go there—and down to the far end, where, twelve feet below the surface, on a ledge of wood, where the sides were shored with timber, his mate had her nest. Here he delivered over his carved joints to the three ugly creatures which he knew as his children and thought the world of, and appeared next flying low and quickly back to the garden. That is to say, he had contrived to slip from the nest so secretly that that was the first time he showed.
A sparrow-hawk, worried with a family of her own, took occasion to chase him as he flew, and he arrived in among the young lime-trees that backed the garden, switchbacking—that was one of his tricks of escape, made possible by a long tail—and yelling fit to raise the world. The sparrow-hawk's skinny yellow claw, thrust forward, was clutching thin air an inch behind his central tail-feathers, but that was all she got of him—just thin air. There was no crash as he hurled into the green maze; but she, failing to swerve exactly in time, made a mighty crash, and retired somewhat dazed, thankful that she retained two whole wings to fly with. There is no room for big-winged sparrow-hawks in close cover, anyway, and Blackie, who was born to the leafy green ways, knew that.
Blackie's yells had called up, as if by magic, a motley crowd of chaffinches, hedge-sparrows, wrens, robins, &c., from nowhere at all, and they could be seen whirling in skirmishing order—not too close—about the retreating foe. Blackie himself needed no more sparrow-hawk for a bit, and preferred to sit and look on. If the little fools chose to risk their lives in the excitement of mobbing, let them. His business was too urgent.
Twenty lightning glances around seemed to show that no death was on the lurk near by. Also, a quick inspection of other birds' actions—he trusted to them a good deal—appeared to confirm this.
Then he flew down to the lawn, and almost immediately had a worm by the tail. Worms object to being so treated, and this one protested vigorously. Also, when pulled, they may come in halves. So Blackie did not pulltoomuch. He jumped up, and, while he was in the air, scraped the worm up with his left foot, or it may have been both feet. The whole thing was done in the snap of a finger, however, almost too quickly to be seen.
The worm, once up, was a dead one. Blackie seemed to kill it so quickly as almost to hide the method used. In a few seconds more it was a carved worm in three or four pieces—an unnice sight, but far more amenable to reason that way.
Blackie was in rather long grass, and nerve-rackingly helpless, by the same token. He could not see anything that was coming. Wherefore every few seconds he had to stand erect and peer over the grass-tops. It made no difference to the worm, however; it was carved just the same.
Blackie now hopped farther on in search of more worms, but found a big piece of bread instead. It was really the hen-chaffinch who found the bread, and he who commandeered it from her. Now he disclosed one fact, and that was that bread would do for his children as well as worms. Anyhow, he stuffed his beak about half up with bread, returned for the pieces of worm, collected these, and retired up into the black cover of a fir-tree.
No doubt he was expected to go right home with that load, then and there. Even a cock-blackbird with young, however, must feed, and, if one judged by the excess amount of energy—if that were possible—used up, must feed more than usual. That seemed to be why he hid his whole load in the crook of a big bough, and, returning to the lawn, ate bread—he could wait to catch no worms for his own use, it appeared—as fast as he could. Three false alarms sent him precipitantly into his tree upon this occasion, and one real alarm—a passing boy—caused a fourth retreat.
These operations were not performed in a moment, and by the time he got back to his nest—mind, he had to contrive to approach it so that he was seen by nobody, and his was a conspicuous livery, too—his children appeared to be in the last stages of exhaustion. That, however, is young birds all over; they expect their parents to be mere feeding-machines, guaranteed to produce so many meals to the hour, and hang the difficulties and the risks.
There was no sign of Blackie's wife. Presumably she was working just as hard on her own "beat" as he had been on his—their hunting-grounds were separate, though they joined—and would soon be back.
Blackie did not wait. He managed again the miracle of getting away from his nest without appearing to do so, and next turned up on the summer-house roof. Fatherlike, he thought he had done enough for a bit, and would enjoy a "sunning reaction" on the summerhouse roof. It was rather a good place, a look-out tower from which he could slip over the side into the hedges, which met at the corner where it was, if trouble turned up.
Trouble did turn up, but not quite what he had expected. He had been sitting there, wing-stretching, leg-stretching, and "preening" his feathers, and had finally left off just to sit and do nothing, when—lo! his wife popped up over the side without warning, and right upon him.
She was very dark brown, not black, and had a paler throat than the palish throat of most hen blackbirds—nearly white, in fact. She said nothing. Nor did Blackie, but he looked very uncomfortable. She did more than say nothing. She went for him, beak first, and very angrily indeed; and he, not waiting to receive her, fled down to the lawn, and began worm-hunting for dear life. A whole lecture could not have said more.
Mrs. Blackie remained on the roof for about a minute, looking round, and then flew off to her own hunting-ground. She was wilder and less trusting of the world than Blackie, and did not care for his lawn in full view of the house windows. And Blackie did not even stop his work to watch her go. Apparently they had, previously in their married life, arrived at a perfect understanding.
This time, too, Blackie got a big and a small worm. The small he coiled like a rope, and held up towards the base of his beak; the big he carved up into sections, which he held more towards the tip. The large ones, it seemed, were too awkward and lively simply to carry off rolled up whole.
The journey that followed was a fearful one in Blackie's life, for he met half-way the very last foe in the world he was expecting—namely, an owl. Truly, it was a very small owl, scarce bigger than himself; but it was an owl, and, like all its tribe, armed to the teeth. Men called it a little owl. That was its name—little owl. Blackie didn't care what men called it; he knew it only as one of the hundred or so shapes that death assumed for his benefit.
Just at that time it happened to be cloudy, and little owls often hunt by day. But how was Blackie to know that, little owls being a comparatively new introduction into those parts?
Blackie screamed and fled. The owl did not scream, but fled, too—after Blackie. Blackie had no means of judging how closethatfoe was behind by the whir of its wings. Owls' wings don't talk, as a rule; they have a patent silencer, so to speak, in the fluffy-edged feathers. Therefore Blackie was forced to do his best in breaking the speed record, and trust to luck.
It was a breathless and an awful few seconds, and it seemed to him like a few hours. The owl came up behind, going like a cloud-shadow, and about as fast, and Blackie, glancing over his shoulder, I suppose, yelled afresh. The terror was so very close.
Then Blackie remembered another excavation, just like the one his nest was in, a little off his course to the left, and he tacked towards it, twisting his course wonderfully, thanks to the long tail. And the owl lost a foot on the turn. I think it was expecting Blackie to make for the hedge at all costs. But, be that as it may, that foot was never made up again, for Blackie vanished into the trench next instant, like a blown-out light, and, though the hunter searched for him carefully, he never put in an appearance again while that owl was within sight of the place.
"The owl lost a foot on the turn"[Illustration: "The owl lost a foot on the turn"]
"The owl lost a foot on the turn"[Illustration: "The owl lost a foot on the turn"]
All signs of uproar on the passing of the little owl had died down some time before Blackie turned up again, and then it was in the garden, so he must have got from the tunnel unseen.
He still hung gamely to the food for his young, and now made another attempt to deliver that food where it belonged. He was half-way there, indeed, before he saw the boys—three boys—with two rows of birds' eggs threaded on strings. They were passing so close to the trench that one nearly fell into it, and, of course, any one could see that they were bird-nesting.
Blackie swerved off sharply to the far hedge, his heart nearly bursting with anxiety, little knowing that the boys had never even thought of looking in the trench for nests. It seemed the last place in the world to find one. It may have been, moreover, that he feared that his wife was home, in which case she might have lost her head, and, dashing out with a scream, "blown the whole gaff," as they say in the vernacular.
Apparently madam was not at home, by good luck, for the boys passed, and Blackie once more executed the magic of getting into his nest without seeming to do so. And here he stayed. Dusk was setting in, and his young were fourteen days old. They showed it in their disobedience, and were not in the least inclined to keep as quiet as they should, considering their father had but just warned them, in his own way, to "lie doggo," because of the gray shape he had seen sliding out into the field, a gray shape which was a cat.
They were more like thrushes than blackbirds, those youngsters, with their speckly fawn breasts; and they were not like the adults of either in their frog-like attitudes and heavy ways. Frankly, they were not beautiful, even at that stage; and a fortnight before, when they had been larger than the eggs they had come out of, they were positively reptilian and repulsive.
Blackie said the blackbird equivalent to "Be quiet, you little fools!" as quietly and as sternly as he could three or four times, and perched on the top of a wheelbarrow to watch the gray shadow which was a cat. That sudden death, however, was more afraid of the open than Blackie, even, and, moreover, wasn't expecting blackbirds' nests in the middle of fields. It turned back; and at length Mrs. Blackie, who had been on a general survey round about to see what foes of the night were on the move—and a fine hubbub she had made in the process—came home, reporting all well.
Then they slept; at least, they ceased to be any further seen or heard. Think, however, how you would sleep if every few minutes you could hear sounds in your house one-third of which were probably the noises of a burglar. Think, also, how you would feel if you knew that that burglar was a murderer, and that that murderer was, in all likelihood, looking for you, or some one just like you. Yet those birds were happy enough, I fancy.
It was barely pale gray. It was cold and wan and washed, and wonderfully clean and sweet, and wet with dews, when a lark climbed invisibly into the sky and suddenly burst into song, next morning. There was something strange and out of place, in a way, in this song, breaking out of the night; and as it and another continued to break the utter silence for ten minutes, it seemed rather as if it were still night, and not really dawn at all. Dawn appeared to be waiting for something else to give it authority, so to speak, and at the end of ten minutes that something else came—the slim form of Blackie, streaking, phantom-like, through the mist from the trench out in the field to the summer-house in the garden. Here, mounted upon the very top, he stood for a moment, as one clearing his throat before blowing a bugle, and then, full, rich, deep, and flute-like, he lazily gave out the first bars of his song. Instantly, almost as if it had been a signal, a great tit-mouse sang out, "Tzur ping-ping! tzur ping-ping!" in metallic, ringing notes; a thrush struck in with his brassy, clarion challenge, thrush after thrush taking it up, till, with the clear warble of robin and higher, squeaking notes of hedge-sparrow and wren joining in, the wonderful first bars of the Dawn Hymn of the birds rolled away over the fields to the faraway woods, and beyond.
Blackie sang on for a bit, in spite of the fact that people said that it was not considered "the thing" for a blackbird with such domestic responsibilities to sing. And two other blackbirds helped him to break the man-made rule.
As a matter of fact, I fancy he was not taking chances upon the ground while the mist hung to cover late night prowlers, for as soon as the gay and gaudy chaffinches had stuck themselves up in the limes and the sycamores, and started their own smashing idea of song, he was down upon the lawn giving the early worm a bad time.
Then it was that he heard a rumpus that shot him erect, and sent his extraordinarily conspicuous orange dagger of a beak darting from side to side in that jerky way of listening that many birds affect.
"Twet-twet-et-et-et! twet! twet-twet-twet-et-et-twet!" came the unmistakable voice of one in a temper, scolding loudly. And he knew that scold—had heard it before, by Jove! And who should know it if not he, since it was the voice of his wife?
Perhaps he heaved a sigh as he rose from the deliciously cool, wet lawn—where it was necessary to take long, high hops if you wanted to avoid getting drenched—and winged his way towards the riot. His wife was calling him, and it came from the other side of the garden,herside, behind the house. Perhaps it was a cat, or a rat, or something. Anything, almost, would set her on like that if experience, plus the experience of blackbirds for hundreds of generations working blindly in her brain—and not the experience of books—had taught her that the precise creature whom she saw was a danger and a menace to young blackbirds.
All the same, when Blackie arrived hewassurprised, for all that he saw was a grayish bird with "two lovely black eyes," not by any means as large as a blackbird. When it flew it kept low, with a weak and peculiar flight that was deceiving; and when Mrs. Blackie, following it, and yelling like several shrews, got too close, it turned its head, and said, "Wark! wark!" in a harsh and warning way.
Blackie joined in with his deeper "Twoit-twoit-twoit!" just by way of lending official dignity to the proceedings. Whereupon his wife, feeling that he had backed her up, redoubled her excitement and shrill abuse.
And they spent two solid hours at this fool's game, helped by a robin, a blue tit, and a chaffinch or two—the chaffinch must have his finger in every pie—following that gray bird from nowhere, while it moved about the garden in its shuffling flight, or alternately sat and scowled at them. But it must be admitted that Blackie himself looked rather bored, and might have gone off for breakfast any time, if he had dared.
As a matter of fact, however, the bird did not stand upon the Register of Bad Deeds as being a terror of even the mildest kind of blackbirds. Red-backed shrike was her name, female was her sex, and from Africa had she come. Goodness knows where she was going, but not far, probably; and the largest thing in the bird line she appeared able to tackle was something of the chaffinch size. But, all the same, Mrs. Blackie seemed jolly well certain that she knew better.
Then arrived the bombshell.
One of the Blackie youngsters, stump-tailed, frog-mouthed, blundering, foolish, gawky, and squawking, landed, all of a heap, right into the very middle of the picnic-party.
Mrs. Blackie very nearly had a fit on the spot, and the shrike judged that the time had about arrived for her to quit that vicinity.
Blackie himself, to do him justice, kept cool enough to do nothing. Wives will say that he was just husband all over, but there were reasons abroad. One of them shot past Blackie, who was low down, a second later and a yard away, and had he not been absolutely still, and therefore as invisible as one of the most conspicuous of birds in the wild can be, he would have known in that instant, or the next, what lies upon the other side of death.
Another reason shot through the lower hedge, and, both together, they fell upon the young bird.
They were the cat of the house and her half-grown kitten, and they were upon the unhappy youngster before you could shout, "Murder!"
What followed was painful. Mrs. Blackie went clean demented. Blackie went—not so demented. (It always appeared to me that his was a more practical mind than his wife's, perhaps because he wore a more conspicuous livery.) Mrs. Blackie kept passing and repassing the cats' backs, flying from bough to bough, and sometimes touching and sometimes not touching them. It was useless, of course, this pathetic charging; and it was foolish.
Blackie charged, too, but not within feet.
Suddenly the old cat, who had had one eye upon Mrs. Blackie the whole time, sprang up and struck quickly twice. There was a chain of shrieks from Mrs. Blackie, and down she went in the grip of the clawed death. She never got up again.
What had happened was simple enough. One of the laborers working on the trench, knowing of the nest, had, out of curiosity, approached a little too close, when the bevy of youngsters, being ready to fly, but not knowing it before this great fright, burst apart at his approach like a silent cannon cracker. The fear showed them they could use their wings.
All three had made, flying low and weakly, for the nearest hedge, which was the garden hedge—two to the side which comprised their father's hunting-ground, and one to the side dominated by their ma. And the old cat and her kitten had seen them coming, and had given chase.
Blackie discovered his remaining progeny sitting about in bushes, squawking, a few minutes later, when he returned, somewhat agitated to his precious lawn, and there he promptly proceeded to feed them. The task was such a large one, and took so long, and so many worms had to be cut up, and so much bread, and, I may say, when all else failed, so many daisies had to be picked, before he finally silenced their ceaseless, craving remarks, that, by the time he had finished feeding himself and had a clean up, something of the pain of the tragedy had gone from him.
And fine fat blackbirds he made of those youngsters, too, in the end, I want to tell you, for he stuck to 'em like a brick.
A little past noon each day the sun covered a crack between two boards on the summer-house floor, and up through that aperture, for three days, had come a leggy, racy-looking, wolfish black spider. Each day, as it grew hotter, she extended her sphere of jerky investigation, vanishing down the crack again when the sun passed from it.
To-day she prolonged her roamings right up the wall of the summer-house and along a joist bare of all save dust, and—well, the spider walked straight on, moving with little jerks as if by intermittent clockwork, and she seemed to stroll right on top of the wasp lying curled up on her side. Only when one of the latter's delicate feelers shifted round towards her, as though in some uncanny way conscious of her approach, did she leap back as if she had touched an electric wire. Then she froze—flat. The wasp was lying curled up, as we have said, upon her side, her head tucked in, her wings drawn down, her jaws tight shut upon a splinter of wood. She had been there half-a-year, asleep, hibernating, and in that state, without any other protection than the summer-house roof and walls, had survived the frosts of winter.
The wasp did not move further.
The spider appeared to be taking things in, measuring her chances, weighing the risk against her famished hunger—possibly her late husband had been her last meal, months ago—marking the vital spot upon her prey, aiming for the shot, which must be true, for one does not miss in attacking a wasp—and live. Only, she would not have risked it at all, perhaps, if the wasp had seemed alive, or more alive, at any rate.
Then came the shot—one cannot in justice call it a spring; it was too instant to be termed that. The spider simply was upon the wasp without seeming to go there; but the wasp was not there, or, rather, her vital spot wasn't. She had kicked herself round on her side, like a cart-wheel, lying flat, with her feet, and the spider's jaws struck only hard cuirass. Before the spider, leaping back, wolf-like, could lunge in her lightning second stroke, the wasp was on her feet, a live thing, after all.
The warmth had been already soaking the message of spring into her cold-drugged brain, and now this sudden attack had finished what the warmth had begun. She was awake, on her feet, a live and dangerous proposition; groggy, it is true; dazed, half-working, so to speak; but a force to be reckoned with—after half-a-year. And one saw, too, at a glance that she was different from ordinary wasps—would make two, in fact, of any ordinary wasp; and her great jaws looked as if they could eat one and comfortably deal with more; whilst her dagger-sting, now unsheathed and ready—probably for the first time—could deliver a wound twice as deep and deadly as the ordinary wasp. She was, in short, a queen-wasp; a queen of the future, if Fate willed; a queen as yet without a kingdom, a sovereign uncrowned, but of regal proportions and queenly aspect, for all that; for in the insect world royalties are fashioned upon a super-standard that marks them off from the common herd.
The spider hesitated. She knew the danger of the stripes of yellow—the yellow flag, so to speak. The fear of it is upon every insect that lives. At the same time, the queen was undoubtedly yet numb.
Antagonists decide in the insect world like a flash of light, and quick as thought they act. The spider attacked now so quickly that she seemed to have vanished, and she met—jaws. Back she shot, circled, shot in again, and she met—sting!
It was never clear whether that sting went home. The spider did. She fell—fell plump to the floor, only not breaking what spiders have in place of a neck because of the fact that, being a spider, she never moved anywhere, not even upon a spring, without anchoring a line of web down first. Therefore, an inch from the ground, she fetched up with a jerk upon the line that she had anchored up on the joist, spun round, let herself drop the rest of the way, and ran into the crack between the boards of the floor. Goodness knows if she lived.
The wasp, with that extremely droll, lugubrious look on her long, mask-like face which makes the faces of insects so funny and uncanny, like pantomime masks, sat down as if nothing had happened, apparently to scheme out the best way to possess herself of a kingdom and become a queen in fact as well as in name. Really, she was cleaning herself—combing her antennae with her forelegs, provided with bristle hairs for the purpose, scraping and polishing her wings, as if they did not already shine like mother-o'-pearl, and washing her quaint face.
She was still rather groggy from the effects of her long sleep and the cold endured—it is a wonder how she had stood the latter at all—and when, with a subdued inward sort of hum, she finally launched herself in flight, she nearly fell to the ground before righting herself and flying in a zigzag heavily across the lawn.
A cock-chaffinch up in the limes saw her, and condescending at last to break his song, described a flashing streak of wine-red breast and white wing-bars in the sun. He appeared to recognize her sinister yellow shield in time, however, and returned to his perch with a flourish, leaving the wasp to go on and begin dancing up the wall of the house till she came to the open window. Here she vanished within.
The sunlight sat on the floor of the room inside, and the baby sat in the sunlight; and the wasp, apparently still half-awake, went, or, rather, nearly tumbled, and sat beside the baby.
They made an odd picture there—the golden sun, the sunny, golden-headed baby, and that silent, yellow she-devil, crawling, crawling, crawling, with her narrow wings gleaming like gems.
Then the child put out her chubby hand to seize that bright-yellow object—how was she to know that it was the yellow signal of danger in the insect world that she saw? And, of course, being a baby, she was going to stuff it into her mouth. But Fate had use for that wasp—perhaps for that baby. Wherefore there was a little scream, a pair of woman's arms swept down and whisked that baby into the air, and a high-heeled shoe whisked the astonished wasp into a corner. Here she swore savagely, vibrating her head with tremendous speed in the process, rose heavily and menacingly, made to fly out, hit the upper window, which was shut, and which she could not see, but felt, and fell to the floor again, where she apparently had brain-fever, buzzing round and round on her back like a top the while.
And then, rising suddenly, the queen flew away, hitting nothing in the process, but getting through the lower and open part of the window. She seemed anxious to make sure of not getting into the house again. She flew right away, rising high to top the garden hedge, and dropping low on the far side, to buzz and poke about in and out, up along the hedge-bank that bordered the hayfield.
She flew as one looking for something, and every insect in her way took jolly good care—in the shape of scintillating streaks and dashes—to get out of it. The mere sight of that yellow-banded cuirass shining in the sun was apparently quite enough for them—most of them, anyway. As a matter of fact, she was looking for a site for a city. She had ambition, and would found her a city, a city of her very own, with generous streets at right angles, on the American plan; and she would be queen of it. It was a big idea, and we should have said an impossible one, seeing that at that moment she was the city and its population and its queen all rolled into one, so to speak. Queen-wasps, however, also on the American plan, ruled the word "impossible" out of their dictionary long ago. They "attempt the end, and never stand to doubt."
The queen came to rest on a bare patch of ground an front of a hole, and a black and hairy spider, with two hindlegs missing on the offside, spun round in the entrance of that hole to face her. He had not been noticeable until he moved.
She left him in a hurry, and thereafter resumed her endless searching along the hedge-bank. A dozen times she vanished into a hole, and, after a minute or so, came out again with the air of one dissatisfied. Half-a-dozen times she came out tail first, buzzing warnings and very angry, at the invitation of a bumble-bee queen, a big, hook-jawed, carnivorous beetle in shining mail, and so forth, but she never lost her head.
Finally, she came to a mole-hole that suited her. The other burrows had all turned out to be field-mouse holes, leading ultimately into a main tunnel that ran the whole length of the hedge apparently, and was a public way for all the little whiskered ones. But this tunnel, bored by the miner mole, ran nowhither, having caved in not far from the entrance, and was very sound of construction, with a nice dry slope. She selected a wide spot where the tunnel branched, each branch forming acul-de-sac. Here she slew swiftly several suspicious-looking little tawny beetles and one field-cricket, who put up a rare good fight for it, found loafing about the place.
It pleased the queen that here, in this spot, she would found her a city. But first she must, as it were, take the latitude and the longitude of this her stronghold to be. She must know where her city was, must make absolutely dead sure, certain, of finding it again when she went out. Otherwise, if she lost it—well, there would be an end to it before it had begun, so to speak. For this purpose, therefore, she rose slowly, humming to herself some royal incantation—rose, upon a gradually widening corkscrew spiral, into the air.
She was, in point of fact, surveying the district round her capital to be, marking each point—bush, stone, grass-tuft, tree-trunk, flower-cluster, clod, branch, anything and everything, great and small—and jotting down in indelible memory fluid, upon whatever she kept for a brain, just precisely the position of every landmark. And as she rose her circles ever widened, so that at last her big compound eyes took in quite a big stretch of sunlit picture, to be photographed upon her memory, and there remain forevermore.
It took her some time, for it was some job; but once done, it was done for good.
Next, alighting with great hustle—now that the work was once begun—the queen ran into her tunnel, and made sure that nobody had "jumped her claim" in the interval. She found an ant, red and ravenous, taking too professional an interest in the place, and she abolished that ant with one nip; though, as you may be sure, the tiny insect fought like a bulldog.
Then she executed a shallow excavation upon the site of the future city itself, carrying each pellet of earth outside beyond the entrance. This also took time, though she worked at fever-pitch, almost with fury; but she managed to finish it, and fly away into the landscape in a remarkably short while, considering.
Here once again she appeared to be searching for something through the yellow sunshine and the falling blossom-petals—confetti from Spring's wedding. And presently she found it, or seemed to—an old gate, off its hinges. But the wood was rotting, and she was no fool. She knew her job—the job she had never done before, by the way—and after humming around it in a fretful, undecided sort of fashion for some while, she flew on. Apparently she was looking for wood, but notanywood. Cut wood appeared to be her desire, and that oak; at least, she put behind her a deal board lying half-overgrown, after one careful professional inspection.
Her way was through a perilous world, beset by a thousand foes, mostly in the nature of traps and lines and barbed-wire entanglements set by spiders. As a rule you didn't see these last at all—nor did she; but her yellow-and-black badge usually won her a way of respect—and hate—and she cut or struggled herself clear of such web-lines as her feelers failed to spot in time.
At last she found some real oak rails, and set to work upon them at once, planing with her sharp shear-jaws. A tiger-beetle, gaudy and hungry-eyed, sought to pounce upon her in this task. He was long-legged, and keen, and lean, and very swift; but she shot aloft just in time; and when she came down again, with a z-zzzzp, as quickly as she went up, sting first, he had wisely dodged into a cranny, where he defied her with open and jagged jaws.
Again getting to work, she planed off a pellet of good sound wood—it looked like a nail-scrape, the mark she made—and masticating it and moistening it with saliva, whirred back like a homing aeroplane to her city in the making.
There was a whir and a buzz as she passed through the portals of her main gate from the light of day, and she reappeared again, backing out, "looking daggers," as we say, and brandishing her poisoned dart—her sting, if you insist, on the end of her tail—in the air. But she still hung on to her pellet.
Presumably some unlucky visitor had called in her absence. More sounds of concentrated argument followed, and finally there fell out, rather than rushed out, a small and amazingly slender black wasp, one of those hermits who seem to consecrate their lives to lonely working for a family they never see. This unhappy one slid down the bank, curled up at the bottom, uncurled, curled up again, and—remained curled. Apparentlyherday's work was done, which comes of falling foul of the yellow flag.
Arrived inside, at her hallowed chamber, our queen carefully selected a rootlet in the roof—not just any old rootlet, mark you; never any "old" anything, you will notice, but a good, sound, well-found rootlet that you could hang five or six pounds' weight to; indeed, three rootlets before she had finished. To these rootlets she fastened—gummed would be a more correct word—her pellet of wasp-paper, in the form of a thin layer, and hurried away, singing, for more. This was, so to speak, the foundation-stone of the city, laid, be it noticed, not haphazard—our queen never did any business that way—but with mathematical regard as to what was to follow. In very fact, too, it was the foundation-stone of her city, only upside-down, though that is nothing. Wasps always do things that way, which is unlike ants, those other and greater city builders.
Back came the queen very soon with another load, and pasted that—thin—to the first layer, hurrying, bustling, humming a happy song continuously to herself. Then away again for more, and in the process to a lively battle with a robber-fly, who appeared set upon robbing her of her blood. It tried, like the beetle, to stalk her and pounce upon her back, what time she was planing out wood for paper-pulp; but her back wasn't there when it pounced, and her jaws were. It "waited on," hovering like a falcon, and twice as keen, and when she got to work again, dropped like a hurled lance-head, only to be met with jaws, wide and ready, as before.
It went away, watching from afar—far for an insect—from "the little speedwell's darling blue" upon the hedge-bank, and just as she was moistening the load, gathered ready to fly off, delivered its final ultimatum—a marvelously persistent murderer. This time it, or, rather, she, was received with the point—the poisoned point—and, turning like a spent lightning-flash to avoid it, found the queen hard on her heels, following all down the gay hedge-ditch, humming high, in nearly a shriek of rage. Finally, she turned, to do battle for her life, and the two, grappling, fell as shooting-stars fall, gleaming, athwart the sun, with a brrr-r like a fused wire, and finished the job, rolling over and over on the ground—rolling over and over among the stalks of bluebells, like the heavens "upraising from the earth."
It is written, however, that few in the insect world can withstand a queen of the yellow devils, and in a few seconds the wasp got up and flew home again, quite unperturbed. The robber-fly did not get up, and she was not quite unperturbed, but died as they die who are poisoned with formic acid, and very soon was still.
By the time the shadows crept across the entrance to the derelict mole-hole, warning the wasp back—for your true wasp is a worshiper of the sun—the queen had formed a disc of paper, and suspended there-from, in the middle, a stalk, also of paper, which widened out at its base, and became, as it were, the outlines of four six-sided cells. The cells were in the shape of a cross—that cross which you will always find at the foundation of the cities of the waspfolk, and, in a way, a sign or mark of their nationality—the cross in the market-square, so to speak, outwards from which the city grew.
The queen, satisfied apparently with her new city so far, hung up and went to sleep. When anything or anybody came to prospect for house lots, or edible victims, during the still, silent, silver night, she hummed very severely, like an electric fan, to let the intruders know who she was, and they mostly backed out again in a hurry. If they took a step nearer the hum rose an octave, and became very wicked, and that, so far as most of them were concerned, finished it.
Two, however, there were who would not take even that hint. One was a shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead, and next morning was found running about with his mouth somewhere concealed behind his ear, if one may be pardoned the expression, in consequence; and the other was a carnivorous beetle, in black, purple-shot armor, and armed with jaws toothed like lobsters' claws. The queen took some nasty scars from those same jaws before she got home with the poisoned point, a clean thrust 'twist breastplate and armlet, and the invader doubled up on the spot where he was, and had to be dragged out in the morning—not the dawning, for the sun had well stoked up before our wasp would have anything to do with him.
"A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead"[Illustration: "A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead"]
"A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead"[Illustration: "A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead"]
She found the day already in full swing when she rose, buzzing, from her front-gate, late—for wasps hate early morning chill, like Red Indians—and, circling once, swung straight away. She jumped into full hustle right off, you see. She did not merely work; she superworked. Forced to short hours by her constitution, she had to make up for it in the time she got, and she did. She allowed nothing to stop her. If anything tried to, she mostly stopped it, for there was no compromise about this nation-builder; she reached her goal every time.
It was on this journey that a spotted fly-catcher, sitting on a gatepost, made a Euclid figure at her in midair as she passed. She had not power to fight the bird's beak, and her poison-dagger was useless here; nor do fly-catchers often miss. This, however, was an occasion when one of them did—by an eighth of an inch—and only some electric-spark-like dodging on the part of the insect in the air made even that one miss possible. It was so quick, you could not see what happened.
That day the cross of cells in this budding city was developed further, and a low wall built round each cell. Moreover, more cells were built, always taking the cross as the center of all things—six-sided cells, with a low, incomplete wall, or, rather, parapet, partitioning each off, to the number of about twenty-four cells in all. Each cell was closed, of course, at the top, the top being its floor, and open at the bottom, the bottom being, if I may so put it, the top; for, as has already been said, wasp cities are built upside-down, and everybody walks and hangs on his head, being so fitted for the purpose. If you don't hang, you tumble straight down into the scooped-out cavity below; but nobody ever does that till he dies, for that cavity is at once the cemetery and the refuse-heap and the dust-bin of the city, a haunt of tiny ghouls—beetle, spider, and fly ghouls—and other loathsome horrors, the scavengers, hyenas, vultures, and jackals of the wasp world.
Now, after making the first cell, or, rather, the part cell, with its low parapet, the queen laid an egg—it was very minute, that egg—inside the cell, gumming it against the top, on the angle nearest the center of the city. It had to be cemented there; otherwise it would have fallen out.
In the next cell she laid an egg, too, cementing it up to the top in the same manner—always in the angle nearest the center of the city—and in the next another egg, and so on, up to the twenty-four or so. It is a little doubtful precisely how long she took over the process, because, for one thing, she made so many journeys backwards and forwards to get wood-pulp from the rails for paper manufacture—she used paper for everything; and, for another thing, she began to roof over the whole affair with a hanging umbrella made of layers of the finest paper that you ever did see—much finer than that made by the ordinary common or garden worker-wasp of the jam-pots and the stewed-fruit dish, for was she not a queen, and therefore not common in anything she did?—and it became, in consequence, rather hard to see what she really was "at." Most of the time that the sky remained cloudy she used up at this job, and also when there was a shower of rain, for she hated rain and all shadow and darkness.
Her purpose, in regard to this paper roofing, was to keep out any possible dripping that might come through the earth roof in wet weather, and to store up and multiply the heat from her body. Terrific heat, to be sure; nevertheless important in the scheme of things. When all was completed, this city, this mighty kingdom, measured about one and a half inches round.
When all was completed, also, the wasp flew out for a drink and a feed. But first she cleaned. The most fastidious cat was a grimy tramp in comparison to her in habits, and in all her spare time—goodness alone knows how she squeezed in any spare time at all during those hustling days!—her first, and generally her last, act was to clean. She could not afford dirt. To be dirty, with her, was to die even more quickly than she would, anyway; for, you see, she did not breathe through her mouth, but all over herself, so to speak—through her armor, or hair-like tubes in that same.
From bluebell to cowslip and lily she picked her way, sipping honey and humming a wicked little hum through her teeth, as it were, and on to where
Daisies pied, and violets blue,And cuckoo buds of yellow hue,And lady-smocks all silver white,Do paint the meadows with delight.