She rolled over and regained her feet in a flash, to find herself facing a dark beast, with a huge, bushy, white tail, held up straight like a pleased cat's—but this was a sign of warning, not pleasure—that shone ghostily in the gloom of the mysterious, dread thorn-scrub. And the face of the beast was the face of a black and grinning devil, and its eyes shone red.
She stood there, shivering a little, with the tiny young thing crawling weakly away from almost under her feet, and the long, vivid, raw gash that the white-tailed beast, coming from nowhere special out of the night, had set upon her shoulder—a murderess caught in the act.
On three legs—her left hindleg had been bitten off by a trap set for a hyena—emaciated, with all her natural buoyant courage gone out of her, her wonderful agility gone too, she felt instantly in her heart that she could neither face this diabolical-faced foe, nor yet get away from it. This same crippled condition had spoilt her hunting forays, and, driven by hunger, had made her nose into other people's nurseries, and be caught just on the point of slaying somebody else's baby, when the owner had come home, like a streak out of the night.
But that was not the worst of it, for she was longer than the enemy, a bit, and might have put up a good fight—she had fought for her life, as a matter of course, ever since she left her mother's side—if the enemy had not brought with her an ally. It was not visible to the eye, that ally, but it was to the nose—a most distinct and appalling stink, and it could be felt, for it made her nostrils smart. Apparently, then, that white tail was intentional, was as a red flag, insolently displayed, warning all to beware of the stink. Well, there is more than one way of holding your own in the wild, and a most unholy smell is not such a bad way, either, when you come to think about it.
The owner of that nameless odor was a polecat—not our polecat; worse than that—and—well, you know the breed. Fear they know not; neither is pity with them a weakness, especially where the lives of their young are concerned. This one did not wait. She attacked quicker than you could cry "Knife," taking off with all four feet together, in a peculiar and patent way of her own.
The would-be murderess, who was long, and absurdly short in the leg, too, just like her opponent, only with a more graceful and not such a thick-set body, turned on herself in a snaky fashion, and her neck, that the fangs had aimed at, was not there when the polecat arrived, but her teeth were, and they closed on the polecat's cheek.
The latter gibbered horribly at the spark of pain, and set herself really down to fight.
The intending murderess said nothing at all, but, unbalanced with her game hindleg, having no force to push or spring with, and being very weak, she knew she was done for directly they closed to the clinch.
In a few seconds the polecat had her down, and only an awful, mad, desperate clashing of fang against fang kept the attacker off her throat. It could not last.
Then it was, at that moment, that a sharp little, gray little, dark-spotted, clean-cut, close-cropped, intelligent head, on a snaky, long neck, peeped out of the shadows, and peered about, as if to see what in whiskers all the pother was about. The head might have been there by chance, but it wasn't. Its owner had been running her trail for hours, and looking for it for days, and didn't mean to let her go, now that he had finally come up with her, polecats or no polecats, smells or not. But he was not a fool. He knew the game, the bitter, cruel game of death, as it is played throughout the wild. With man the inexorable law is, "Get on or get out." In the wild they phrase it another way: "Kill or be killed." Man puts it more politely, perhaps, but it's all the same old natural law, I guess.
The head and snaky neck developed a long, creamy, tawny-spotted body, and the body a long, banded, tapering tail—all set on legs so short, they scarcely kept the owner off the ground; and the name of that beast was genet. The same are a sort of distant relation of the cats, a fourth cousin once removed; but it is necessary to tell you, because you might think they were beautiful weasels, otherwise.And she was a genet, too—the murderess that might have been.
Then the new-comer moved. Then he began to move, and—here! It was just like the buzzing of a fly in a tumbler. Certainly you could say that he was still there, but you could not swear that you actually saw him.
The first that the polecat knew of him was that red-hot fork-like feeling that means fangs in the back of your neck. The polecat spun on herself, and bit, quick as an electric needle, at the spotted thing, that promptly ceased to be there, and, to use the professional term, she "made the stink" for all she was worth. She forgot all about the long female would-be slayer of her children, and the genet was mightily thankful to drag herself clear, but she would not have been she if she had failed to get her fangs home, as a parting shot, before she went.
Then, I fancy, she was ill; and, upon my soul, I don't wonder. It was enough to asphyxiate a whale-factory hand. But the male genet was not ill, or, if he was, he was moving from place to place too quickly to give the fact away; and by the time he shot up a tree, like a long, rippling, cream and tawny-dappled, banded line, he left that polecat considerably redder than when he found her, and weak, as if she had been bitten by leeches. The polecat had certainly saved her young, or thought she had, although I cannot swear that the female genet had really meant them harm; but she did not look as if she had saved much else. However, she held the field of battle, and the foe had fled, and that is supposed to be the sign of victory; but that had been done by her "gassing" methods, so to speak, not by fighting alone.
Rippling about among the branches, an incarnation of grace personified, and hunting for her by nose alone, for in the moonlight her exquisite creamy, dappled coat was invisible—a real piece of magic, this—the male genet quickly found her for whom he sought. She remained low, lying along a bough, line for line, shadow-patch for shadow-patch, flat as the very bark, and as undulating, until she felt sure that he would run over her; then she rose, spitting and snarling in his face, cat-like and vicious.
It was a poor kind of thanks for having saved her life, perhaps, but it was her way—then. And, anyway, who can blame her? She had never met any living creature that was not a foe or an armed "unbenevolent" neutral in all her life, and she did not know that any other category or creature existed, the recent fight notwithstanding.
But the male genet neither ran nor fought. He dodged her snap, by a tenth of an inch, almost without seeming to move, and there he stood looking at her meekly. She leapt to him, and he shot off, as she arrived upon, the place where he had been. Perhaps she knew that only a genet, or a mongoose, could do that trick in a manner at once so machine-like and precise; and after that she merely sat, bent in a curve, with her lips up. But her spring had given her away, and he saw that she was lame. Perhaps he saw, too, the gleam of hunger, the wild, cruel gleam that forgets all else, in her eyes; but who am I to say whether he understood it?
Be that as it may, the male vanished suddenly and without explanation, doubling on his trail and going out like a snuffed candle. He was in view, as a matter of fact, several times during the next few minutes, climbing quietly; but the dark blotches of the leaf-shadows magicked him into invisibility, and no one could tell where he was, till suddenly the silence was smitten by one piercing squawk somewhere among the greenery above. Then a crash, wild flutterings, a hectic commotion, and he and a terrified guinea-fowl came down together, more nearly falling than he liked. Indeed, he must have let it fall, or gone himself with it, as he slid past, grabbing for holds, if she had not dropped quickly to the next bough and taken a hold, too. Then, side by side, they hauled the warm, feathery, fluttering thing up, and he slew swiftly, in order to silence the noisy prey, who foolishly kicked up such a noise, as if maliciously; for he knew—and perhaps the gleany (guinea-fowl) did, too—how quickly a crowd may gather to interfere in an advertised "killing" in that wild.
The female genet, however, was past caring about risks. She had reached a stage of hunger when no risks can overshadow the risk of starvation, and she had the guinea-fowl by the throat, and was sucking its blood before the other had time to realize what she was at. Then, with fine discrimination, she ate the breast and thigh, and later might, or might not, have let him have a look in, if some blotched shape had not slid up, without sound, across the blue black night sky, and, halting in the tree, begun, apparently, to crack nuts very sharply and very quickly. Whereupon, without saying anything, the genets faded out.
It was nothing much, really—only the noise she makes when the giant eagle-owl is angry; but when you are a genet, with a body under two feet long, you may find it rather a bore, if nothing else, to remain cheek by jowl with an angry eagle-owl three feet or so across the wings, with the feline temper of an owl, and armed, owl-like, to the teeth, if I may so put it.
"An angry eagle-owl"[Illustration: "An angry eagle-owl"]
"An angry eagle-owl"[Illustration: "An angry eagle-owl"]
Now the question came as the two genets arrived at the ground—would she follow him, or would he have to follow her? He was determined, anyway, that nothing short of calamity should part them. Yet I don't see, since he never uttered a sound, how she understood him to say that if she would follow him he would find her food, even though she was still hungry, for she had not yet got to trusting him much more than she trusted any other beast, and seemed to think that he was half as likely to eat her as to get her something to eat. Such a thing as another creature finding her food for only just friendliness—love was out of the question yet, or out of her question—was an idea her suspicious nature could not yet grasp. However, she followed.
Twining and twisting, turning and tripping, in and out among the bush and the tree-trunks, soundless, and quite invisible, except when they crossed a moonbeam—and then nearly so, because the moon has a trick of, as it were, dissolving the colors of even fairly conspicuous creatures—they crept on their low way. There was not a sound that they did not crouch for, often flat as a whip-lash—and that wild is full of sounds by night, too—not a puff of air that they did not throw up their sharp little muzzles to test, not a movement or the hint of a movement which their eyes did not fix with a suspicious stare.
They passed a hippopotamus feeding—a sheaf at a mouthful—upon long grass; they came upon three wild dogs eating an antelope and gibbering like gnomes; they beheld two striped zebras stampeding from a lion; they got into the middle of a herd of elephants—but what must those giants have seemed to them, almost at ground-level?—and did not know it, so silent can the mighty ones be, till they heard the unmistakable digestive rumblings; they happened on the tail of a leopard, observing a young waterbuck antelope, and retired therefrom without his suspecting them; they watched some bush-pigs rooting in a clearing, hoping they might turn up some insects worth eating; they heard a mother-lion grunting among some reeds, and were nearly run over by the stampede of zebras that followed; they chased a rat that ran into a hole in which was a snake, and it never came out again; they went up a tree after a weaver-bird's nest, but, from the way the bottle-shaped structure was hung, could not get at it; they investigated a hare's hole, and found a six-foot mamba snake, with four-minute death-fangs, in possession; they risked the thousand spikes of a thorn-bush to get at a red-necked pheasant roosting, only to find the branch he was on too slender to hold their weight; they were stalked by a wild cat, and hid in a hollow tree; and were pounced upon by a civet cat—who was their big cousin—and dodged him most wonderfully; and were chased by a jackal, whose nose they bit when it followed them into a hollow log. Finally, they came to the wall, and stopped.
Their noses told them it was not the wall of a native village, for no one, not even a man, could possibly make any mistake aboutthat. Also, their noses may have told them other things. Anyway, the moon saw them, in the form of two gray lines, slide over the wall and drop silently into the shadow on the far side.
A wild cat was courting a domestic cat of the bungalow close by, at the corner of the compound, but, flat as strips of tawny-spotted cloth, they got past him all right.
A black-backed jackal was gnawing a bit of old hide at the angle of the wall, and they were forced to make a detour up to the veranda of the bungalow to avoid that sharp-eared, sharp-eyed one.
Here, on the veranda, they discovered a chair, and the male genet, standing on hindlegs to see what was in the chair, found himself looking straight into the electric-blue, purplish balls of light that betokened another cat, which had been asleep, but was now very wide awake.
He went round that chair in the form of a hazy, wavy, streak, as the cat shot out of it. The female genet faded from publicity behind a palm in a pot. But the genet's tail was so long that, with the cat and himself going round and round that chair like a living Catherine-wheel—both he and the cat spitting no end—the cat was touching his tail, while he was snapping at the cat's. Wherefore he moved across the veranda as an arrow flies, and round the corner, and as he turned the corner he—leapt.
It was a beautiful leap, and it cleared the danger that he seemed bound to run into, as it lifted in his path, by about an inch. As he sprang he heard the cat's claws scraping loudly, as she madly endeavored to stop—too late.
Then the head of the eight-foot python that had been creeping up round that corner in the process of stalking that cat whizzed by beneath him like a hurled poleax.
As he landed the genet heard the cat make one sound—only one—and it was indescribable, and he dropped off the veranda into the shadow of a bush, where the female genet presently joined him.
There was a small mongoose (my! what a lot of hunters do collect about the bungalows at night, to be sure!) under the bush, engaged in eating that precise reptilian form of poisoned death known as a night adder, which it had just killed. But the genets had other and private business, and they parted from the mongoose with no more than a snarl, the two genets to appear next—or, rather, to be no more than guessed at—crossing the last stretch of moonlight between them and the fowlhouse.
As they did so, a blurred, vast-winged, silent, dark shadow passed overhead, and a peculiarly piercing whistle stabbed dagger-like through the waiting, listening silence. Both genets jumped, as if the whistle had really been a dagger and had stabbed them, and vanished into hiding before the sound had ceased, almost. They knew that shadow—the owner of the whistle; they had met her earlier that night—the giant eagle-owl. But what the fangs and claws was she doing here? After rats, perhaps. They hoped so, and tried to think she was not after them.
The people who are condemned to live in those parts know that deaths, many and mysterious, go about there in the night, seeking victims, and that fowls must, in consequence, be well penned. Yet they die; and it has been said that where a snake can squeeze into a fowl-house, there a genet can follow—perhaps dealing with the snake first, and the fowls afterwards. Certainly, there seems to be no longer, and narrower, and lower, and more sinuous little beast on this earth than the genet.
The male genet took the problem upon himself as his own special province to find entrance into places; and the female, her suspicions of him oozing away more and more every minute, "kept cave." And he found an entrance, that little, long, low beggar; he found an entrance, a hole up under the roof, that appeared small enough, in all conscience, to be overlooked by anybody.
The moon knows how they climbed to it—I don't. And as the male genet dropped down inside, the female took his place. But even as he landed he wished he had not. Fear was there before him.
In the smelly, stifling, heated pitch-darkness a fowl squawked with pain, and others burst into noise above his head.
Then he made a blunder. Surprised certainly, and angry perhaps, he growled.
Instantly the confusion ceased and hushed to silence; and instantly, too, round, large, amber-gold balls of light like lamps, to the number of two, were switched on—fixed upon him, staring, so that he "froze" in his tracks where he stood, and her crest stood up on the female genet, as it does on a cat, as she peered through the hole. They had disturbed something at its killing.
Very few graven images move less than those two pretty but small hunters did in the nest half-minute, while the fowls settled down again, and the genets tried—mainly with their noses—to find out what, in the wilderness or out of it, they had run up against this time.
At the end of that period there fell upon their stupefied ears the sound as if some one unseen were cracking nuts—nut after nut, very quickly—in the blackness, and both genets very nearly had a fit—a motionless one—on the spot.
Then they knew, most entirely did they know, and the knowledge gave them no end of a fright. It was the giant eagle-owl. She—it was a she—had beaten the robbers in hole-creeping, had outburgled the burglars, and outcrept the creepers, though goodness alone knows how.
The only difficulty was, who was going out first, and who alive, and who dead?
The male genet apparently knew about owls, and nothing of what he knew had shown that they were cowards. Nor was he a coward; but the wild hunters we not out to win the V.C., as a rule, I guess; and, if they were, he was not one of them. He was out to feed, not fight.
Possibly, while he was considering this, standing there with arched back—by reason of his long body and apologies for legs—in the darkness, the owl was considering the same thing. Anyway, both seemed to make up their minds in the same instant, and to act on it. Wherefore they arrived at the hole under the roof in the same instant, too; and you can take it from me that there are very few creatures indeed who can go into a hole, or come out of it, with such an amazing rush as the genet.
The result naturally was war, and red-hot at that.
Grappling, spitting, hissing, growling, snorting, coughing, the two fell in a heap to the ground—and an owl on the ground is one degree more of a spiked handful than an owl in the air—where they continued the discussion in a young whirlwind of their own, much to the perturbation of the roosting fowls, who woke up and added to the riot.
The female genet had gone out of the other end of the hole, like a cork out of a bottle, taking a scratch on the nose from the owl with her; but, finding nothing further happen, she now crept back and peered in. What she discovered did not give her any comfort, for, although upon her back, it looked as if that she-owl had been specially designed to fight that way. She had one fiend's claw gripped well home on the male genet's shoulder, and another doing its best to skin him alive; while her beak was hammering the gray top of his weasely-looking head. True, the male genet's fangs were buried up to the socket in the owl's throat, but that was no proof that he had found either her windpipe or the equally useful jugular vein, and, if he did not pretty quick, it looked as if it would never matter, so far as he was concerned.
I like to think of what that little, long, crippled female genet did then, in that well-like blackness and that smelly heat, with the chance of retreat open to her, and no one to say her nay. Without hesitation, she dropped to the ground beside the scuffle, and flung herself into it—into the winnowing, slapping radius of big pinions, that beat and beat and beat, smothering all with feathers and dust. One wing caught her squarely, and she fetched up against the wall, winded and dazed; but she was back again in a flash, dancing on her toes, and, suddenly flattening, shot in, level with the ground, like a snake.
She arrived. She felt feathers against her nose—she could not see. The wings pounded her flatter. She laid hold, biting in as deep and as far as she could get.
As a matter of fact, she had got the owl by the neck, but one would have thought she had turned on a young volcano by the confusion that followed. Both genets shut their precious eyes, and hung on, while that owl beat herself round and round in one last wild flurry, coughing horribly and humanly the while, and cracking nuts. Finally she collapsed as suddenly as a pricked bladder, and lay still—a great, mixed-up feathery heap, limp and pathetic, with her vast flung-out wings.
The two genets backed away, glad enough to be done with such a fiery, feathered fury. The male genet stumbled a little, and sat down. He was nearly as red as the sun on a stormy dawn, but all the blood was not his.
They did not seem to trouble further about the great foe lying beside them. Certainly she pervaded the air with a musty smell that was not attractive, or, at least, not attractive when fowls were by; and it was to the fowls they turned, the female first, the male later, after he had done some very necessary licking.
I fancy that, though dizzy, the male genet was rather proud of himself. He had brought his lady-love to such a feast as she may have dreamed of, and she had saved his life. That gave them a fellow-feeling that looked well for his prospects in love. But I do not think he had quite realized how hungry that beautiful velvet-skinned damsel of his choice was till that minute, and then he was given no time to think about it.
The dark over his head burst like a mine, and feathers and noise enveloped him whirling. That represented the female genet coming down, fixed to the throat of a hapless fowl. She sucked the blood, and flew at another. Ordinarily she would have removed that one and found it enough; but men who have been "broke," when they got suddenly rich, seem to go temporarily mad with the lust of spending, and so it was with her; only, her madness was the lust of killing.
She killed, leaping and wrenching at the poor, screaming birds' throats, blinded to the world with excitement, drunk with blood. That is an awful intoxication, and makes even men, let alone wild, carnivorous beasts, do unmentionable things. Also, the smell of blood was too much for the male genet, and he presently rushed, with flying tail, into the crimson orgy too.
They were some time at this craziness; and when they had finished, they and the fowls that were still alive could only lie and pant together among the contorted slain, the blood—you would never believe how a cockerel will bleed—and the carmine-tinted feathers. You might not believe me if I told you how many fowls they had killed, but it was a most disgraceful number, and quite inexcusable.
And then, even as they lay there, dead-beat, they started suddenly and together, for, almost like a blow, the fact dawned upon them that it was day. Night had stolen away, and dawn discovered them at the killing; and goodness alone knows how long they had been at it—ten minutes or hours. Anyway, here it was, and they leapt to their feet together.
As they hurried out they had to pass the place where the carcass of the owlhad been! It was gone—mysteriously sauntered as a corpse into nowhere. Owls are uncanny creatures at any time, but moving about when dead is not usually a recognized habit of theirs. The genets sniffed anxiously, and ran the trail to the hole under the roof, since it happened to be on their way. Through the hole it went, and into the air—literally into the air. In other words, that owl had simply "bluffed" death when she realized that she was near death. The bluff had come off; and at a later, and what she judged a proper, time, she had just, and of course silently, flown off by the way she had come; and—as I live!—a fowl had gone with her.
One minute later an unsuspected martial hawk-eagle precipitated himself out of a big, hoary, old fig-tree, a hundred yards away from the fowlhouse, on to one of the genets' disappearing tails. This is the world's most general view of a genet, by the way—its disappearing tail; and it is given to very few to see the beautiful, dark-blotched, creamy, little, lithe, long beast that the ringed tail belongs to. Of course, the eagle was too late.
Two minutes later, a late leopard, returning to his lair after a blank night's hunt, saw the tail of the female genet, who was leading, disappear into a hollow tree. The male had not time to get in as the leopard sprang, so he shot up another tree close by, disturbing a mamba cobra, whose color was green, and whose bite was death, as it lay asleep among the twined vines. The legless terror fell to the ground and streaked for its hole, and the following leopard only just managed to bound out of its way as it did so.
Then, leaping light as thistle-down, coughing harshly, the leopard went up the tree after the male genet, and appeared to have cut him off from life and liberty for ever.
The genet climbed beautifully, and dodged round the tree-bole, and in and out among the trails and the leaf-bunches of matted creepers, with amazing speed; but the whole time the leopard's paw, all hooked claws bared, was whip-whip-whipping the air, only just behind that lovely, long, ringed tail of the genet, and more than once touched it.
Finally, hard driven, panting, at the end of his tether, it seemed, the genet was forced out upon a branch, farther and farther, slowly and more-slowly, the leopard creep, creep, creeping, almost flat, well spread and craftily, his paw, well out in front, hooking at the luckless little genet, till the twigs began to bend under the poor hunted creature, and all hope seemed gone from him, for the ground was sixteen feet below, and there was nothing between. And then—ah! but it was a fine effort!—just when it seemed that he could go no farther, and that the next terrible hooking round-arm stroke of the leopard must fish him into the annihilating scrunch of the terrible jaws, whose foul, hot breath already played upon him, the genet sprang.
It was a wonderful spring; the little beast had gathered every last ounce of his strength for it, and he literally seemed to sail out upon the air. Sixteen feet to the ground he bounded, and twenty-two feet out from the bole of the tree he landed, and—well, what d'you think of that?
Quick was the leopard—to our eyes he seemed to come down almost on the heels of the genet—but not quick enough, for he had first to gather himself on an uncertain, swaying footing. Wherefore, by the time he got to the ground, bounding like some great rubber ball, he had the pleasure of seeing the male genet's tail vanishing also into the small hole in the hollow tree.
And there he left them, because perforce he could do nothing else. And there, too, we leave them, curled up side by side in the darkness and safety, reconciled, and a happy couple at last.
They found the king's son lying in a bed of reeds with his sister, the king's daughter, and although the prince and princess fought royally, as befitted their rank, they were smothered up roughly in sacks and carried speedily—the queen might return at any moment and want the captors—to the Governor of all the Provinces, and the Governor spake thus:
"Oho! A royal pair, eh? They shall be sent to the capital, but first we must put them in an inclosure while we knock up some kind of a cage."
And into "an inclosure" were they, therefore, cast, and it was small and bare, but for one box with dried grass in it; and the walls of the place were of corrugated iron nine feet high, so that escape looked impossible. Ransom was out of the question, and rescue a wild, but still faintly possible, dream—they could even then hear their father speaking in a mighty voice very far away, but their mother, they knew, would be following their trail in terrible silence.
Meantime they were king's children, and it behooved them to carry themselves as such in the presence of the enemy. Wherefore did they neither cry nor grieve (outwardly), nor sulk, nor cast themselves down or about with despair or rage. They just sat down side by side, and put their heads together, and stared with haughty insolence at the common crowd, "the lesser breeds without the law," who gathered to inspect them. It is not every day men get a chance to spit at and make mock of a king's son, whose father, as like as not, killed one's mother or little brother with no more thought than you or I would kill a rabbit, and the crowd made the most of that chance.
But luckily night, who was their godfather, came stalking swiftly westward, as he does in those wild parts, and flung his protecting cloak over them, and the crowd melted to its fleshpots, and the magic of the dark settled down over all.
One by one the little lights twinkled out in the huts and tents of their captors, and the deep bass drone of men's voices within mingled with the shrill cackle of women, and the high song of the mosquitoes without; and the smell of cooking and tobacco together came to them, so that they sniffed aloofly and stirred from their places.
A pariah dog, lean and yellow, came to eye them furtively through the chinks of the corrugated iron, and the horses snorted and stamped in their pickets, as the night breeze carried to them their scent.
Time passed, and the shrill voices of the women-folk ceased, the deep mutter of the men died gradually down, the lights faded, the scene was lit up only here and there by the sudden glow of a fire kicked into blaze by a sentry, but the song of the mosquitoes never ceased.
Then arose and uprose the strange, uncanny voices of the night, which, taken together, made up a background to the great silence which they seemed to accentuate. And the king's son bounded again. They were to him as a mighty call, those voices, from his own land—the land of the wilderness.
The rumbling thunder of his father's rage, breathing of death and destruction, had ceased now; but there were plenty more sounds, and the king's son, listening, knew them all. The distant "Qua-ha-ha!" of a troop of zebras going to drink; the peculiar snort of an impala antelope, scenting danger; the far-away drumming of hoofs of a startled herd of hartebeests; the bleat of an eland calf, pulled down by who knows what; the "Hoot-toot!" of a hippopotamus, going out to grass; the sudden shrill "Ya-ya-ya-ya!" of a black-backed jackal close at hand; the yarly, snarly whines of a hunting leopard; the snap of a crocodile's jaws, somewhere down in the nearby river; and, last, but by no means least in ghostliness, the awful rising "Who-oo!" followed by a sudden mad chorus of maniacal laughter, which told that somewhere a gathering of hyenas were—at their work!
The king's son was moving about the prison now, examining what he could see—especially of the walls—with his wonderful, proud eyes, and what he could not with whiskers and nose. He made no sound, of course—not so much as a whisper; and when his sister joined him, they were simply intangible, half-guessed shapes, drifting—there is no other word for it—through the gloom.
A man, even a colored one, might look long into that inclosure and, unless he caught the sudden smolder at the back of their eyes, never tell where they were. Indeed, the inclosure was in pitch-darkness itself, by reason of its high "tin" walls; and even when a weird yellow moon came and hung itself up to add to the general uncanniness of the scene, the prison of the king's son showed only like a well of ink.
Suddenly the silence and the voices of the crickets were broken into by the sound of scramblings by night. A nightjar fled from the tree overhead to the accompaniment of strange noises; and an unseen jackal, who had crept up to the very huts pessimistically, in search of anything awful, or offal, fled with a startled scurry. Apparently something with claws was trying to scrape away the corrugated iron.
Came then a scrawling scrape, and a thump. Then silence. But after a bit the noises began again—a fresh lot, and more violent. The pariah dog, who had come to investigate with his tail in the air, went away again, and quickly, with his tail between his legs; and in the same moment the king's son's head appeared over the top of the corrugated iron wall in silhouette against the staring, surprised moon.
Of course, and quite naturally, every sentry was asleep, or else even they could not have failed to realize that the sounds of desperate scratchings that followed were no ordinary phenomena, and might bear looking into.
Presently the king's son's body followed his head, and he sat for a moment, balancing clumsily on that narrow top, before vanishing suddenly, to the accompaniment of a heavy thump that was the last sound he made in the place.
Further and even more frantic scratchings followed, and anon the king's daughter, who certainly meant to die rather than be left alone in the hands of the foe, eclipsed the moon. A pause, and she, too, vanished downwards with a thump that was the last sound she made there in that place also.
A minute later, and she had joined her brother under the thorny guard of a mimosa.
For a moment or two the pair stood rigid as rock carvings, looking back, crouched a little, and deadly silent. Then the king's son turned and led the way to the river at a loping trot, and his sister followed in his tracks. They shook the dust—literally and daintily as a cat shakes dew from her feet—of the hated captors' fastness from their feet in little momentary halts as they went, and the place knew them no more.
But there is one point I should like to insert here. Go and try to climb over a corrugated iron wall nine feet high, and with nothing but the bare earth to take off from, and see how you succeed. Further, when doing it, remember that these royal children were so young as to be little more than babies. Then you may tell how they accomplished the feat. I do not know exactly to this day.
It is to be hoped that by this time everybody will be aware that the king's son and the king's daughter were lion cubs, the survivors, therefore the strongest and the fittest, of three lion cubs in a litter. It required, you will admit, some resource, courage, and intelligence to do what they had already done, considering their age; but the worst was to come. Having got out of the frying-pan, they must now face the fire, and be quick about it, too, if they didn't want to be traced and recaptured at dawn.
Arrived at the river's edge, they stopped and stared out across the dark swirls and unknown, cold depths. Lion cubs, as also the young of every other African animal, must assuredly be born with an instinctive and a very lively dread of all rivers and their occupants. Any horrible invention of death, they must have known, might be expected to lurk there, ready waiting for them in that underworld of dark waters; but if they felt fear, they never showed it, and the pride of their birth held true. Their hesitation was only momentary. The terror had to be faced, bravely or fearfully, as they would, but still faced, and bravely it was done.
Slowly and coolly the king's son waded out into the black, chill waters. He felt the current, which was strong, plucking like invisible great fingers at his legs; he felt the cold strike through tawny, spotted fur and skin to his belly, but he never looked back. His feet were whirled from under him; he trod upon nothing, cold, cold emptiness, and that was enough to terrify any grown beast, let alone a baby; but he struck out right manfully, and his fine eyes and face took on that regal expression of haughty determination that you see in the face only of King Leo himself and his mate, and in no other beast in the world. And the king's daughter unhesitatingly followed—a real princess, by gad, sirs!
Steadily the pair swam, heading instinctively, one presumes, up-stream, to counteract the drift of the ever-shouldering current. There was, perhaps, from two to five feet of water under their sturdy paws; but had it been twenty or thirty, I, personally, believe it would have made no difference. There were probably also other things under and around their sturdy paws—things very much worse and less innocent than any water—things they must have, dimly, at any rate, if not acutely, been aware of in an inbred sort of way; but they made no difference either.
"Make way for the king's son and the king's daughter. It is their will to cross the river. Hear, all of you loathly horrors, you lurking terrors—make way. Who dares check the will of the king's son?"
Once there came a mighty swirl on their right hand—or right paw, if you like—and the waters parted, with waves and the spouts of a geyser, to give up the monstrous nightmare head of a hippopotamus. Once something cold and leathery and ghastly touched the bottom of their padded feet; and once—but this was too awful for any expression by pen—something else, equally cold, but smooth, coiled, writhing, round the king's son's left hind-leg, but providentially slid clear again, as he kicked like a budding International.
Then came the ordeal. It arrived in the shape of two knobs, that just were suddenly, and remained, motionless in the mocking moonlight, on the surface of the water. It might have been merely some projection from a half-sunken log. It might, but—well, there had grown in the air an unspeakable stench of musk, and that wasn't there before the knobs showed up.
Both lion cubs saw, both little royal ones smelt, and in some dim way, warned probably by a terrible knowledge handed down to them from their ancestors, both baby swimmers knew. Terror—real terror, of the white-livered, surrender-or-stampede-blindly-at-any-price kind—could never, it seems to me, come into those fine, regal eyes; but the nearest approach that was possible occurred in that instant, and they swam. Ah, how those infant lions swam! What had gone before was mere paddling; and whether or not they had ever swum before in their short lives—and I doubt it more than a little—there could be no question about them now; they swam like practiced hands, and almost as fast.
Followed a pause, terrifying enough in all conscience, and then, slowly, silently as a submarine's conning-tower goes under, so dived those knobs, and vanished almost, not quite, without a ripple.
The cool night-air showed the breath coming from the broad, brave, water-frilled cubs' heads in gasps. The silence gave away their frantic panting. You could literally see them straining every baby nerve and muscle, could note the jerks with which they fairly kicked themselves along. And the opposite bank, a black wall of bush and reeds, was very near now, yet far—oh, how far, to them!
Ssee-shhrr-r-rr-r-shrhh!
As a torpedo hurtles hissing along barely below the surface of the water, so hurtled the head—the head with its wicked eyes on knobs; the head with its vast, scaly, long snout, its raised nostrils at the tip, its shuddering array of jagged teeth, its awful, armed, diabolical aspect of conscious power—straight at the king's son. Without warning had it come, and with still less had it attacked.
Swim, oh, swim, little king's son, for your very life! But the king's son did not swim—at least, not in that sense. He turned. Yes, that is right—turned; and the monstrosity of the armed snout, that same being a crocodile, of course, was upon him even as he did so. There would have been no time to turn after—no life! Still, the king's son may not have known that. Maybe he turned, as a man attacked by a dog does, because he felt, in a cold, nervy sort of spasm all up his spine, the terrible defenselessness of his hind-limbs. And as he turned, he struck—bat-bat!—struck with all his talons unsheathed; struck with every ounce and grain of power, and force of brain to back that power, in his system; struck as only a cornered cat can strike; struck like a—lion.
The result was astounding.
The crocodile had aimed, true to a hair—you bet, he being a croc.—to grab the king's son's hindlegs, and pull him under. He had not reckoned on the turn, and the turn did it. His snout struck hindlegs, which were not where they ought, by his calculations, to have been, but were four or five inches away to one side.
Quick as only a reptile can be, he canted, to remedy the error, but the impetus of his ten-foot bulk was still upon him; it carried him by. You cannot stop ten feet of bulk and five-feet-seven of girth of flesh and bone and muscle and armor-plates, going at Old Nick may know how many knots, in half-a-yard, you know; and it was the half-a-yard that did the trick.
The king's son was aware, as he half-rose and delivered that desperate blow, of a mighty bulk shooting by, of an overpowering, sickening stench of musk, and of eyes, through the foam and the water—two little, wicked, unspeakably cruel eyes on knobs.
His chance! And, quick as light, he took it. Ough!
The rest was chaos.
And that is about all, I think—unless you would like to know that their mother, the king's consort, who had been working grimly along on their trail since dusk, slid swiftly down the bank in that crisis, a fiery-eyed, long, gliding shape, and plunging into the watery inferno utterly recklessly, brought out, one by one, dripping, shivering, and by the scruff of the neck, first the king's son, then the king's daughter, and stopped not till she had placed them high up the bank, safe among the thorn-scrub, where they crouched together, side by side, listening to the cataclysmal threshings of the blind devil down in the black waters below there; and their father, the king, came up—pad-pad-pad-pad—behind them, to thunder out defiance at all the world above their sturdy, broad, intelligent heads, and purr his joy at their return. Moreover, he looked proud as he stood there in the moonlight, that royal beast; and I like to think it was not all looks either.
There was some sort of violent trouble going on down in the reeds beside the dike. The reed-buntings—some people might easily have mistaken them for sparrows, with their black heads and white mustaches—said so, swaying and balancing upon the bending reeds, and calling the makers of that trouble names in a harsh voice.
And all the rest of the reed-people were saying so, too. It was an amazing thing how full of wild-folk that apparently deserted reed-patch was. Each bit of the landscape, each typical portion, is a world of its own, with its special kind of population. This one produced unexpectedly a pair of sedge-warblers and a reed-warbler, atoms who gyrated and grated their annoyance; a willow-tit, who made needle-point rebukes; a water-rail, with a long beak and long legs, running away like a long-legged pullet; a moorhen very much concerned as to her nest; a big rat very much concerned as to the moorhen's nest, too, but in a different way; a grass snake, who glistened as if newly painted in the sun; and a spotted crake, who is even more of a running winged ventriloquial mystery than the corn-crake of our childhood's hay-times.
All of them were on thorns—though on reeds, really—and evidently highly rattled and in a state of nerves over the trouble in the reeds. And not much wonder either, for, judging by the sounds, murder was being done in there among the secret recesses of the swishing green stems—murder cruel and violent, in spite of the sunshine and the light of day.
And then, all of a sudden, in the midst of almost a gasp of silent horror, a moment of speechlessness on the part of the wild lookers-on, out came the trouble, rolling over and over and over upon the soft, short-cropped grass of the dike-bank, and—they all saw. Also, they all, except the little warblers, who were safe, more or less, and stayed to blaspheme the public nuisance, instantly and at the same moment remembered appointments elsewhere, and went to keep them with a haste that was noticeable and wonderful.
There before them was a hare. But a hare is a gentle and altogether negligible wild-person. This hare, however, was fighting, and fighting like several furies, and grunting, and making all sorts of unharelike motions and commotions against another beast; and that other beast was most emphatically not a hare.
It—or, rather, he—was big, as we count bigness among four-footed wild-folk in Britain to-day. Probably he could stretch the tape to twenty-three inches, of which about sixteen consisted of very long, low body, with sturdy, bear-like, dumpy legs, the rest being rather thick, furry tail; and, though nobody—without steel armor—might have cared to take on the job of weighing him alive, he would have turned the scale at about two pounds eight ounces, or perhaps a bit more. Not a big beast, you will say; but in the wild he ruled big, being snaky and of a fighting turn, so to say. He was, in fact, the very devil, and he looked it—hard as nickel-steel. A dull, tawny devil, with a peculiar purplish sheen in some lights—due to the longer hair—on his short, hard coat, turning black on his throat, legs, and tail—as if he had walked in black somewhere—and finished off with patches of creamy white on head and ears. There was an extraordinary air of hard, tough, cool, cruel, fighting-power and slow ferocity about the beast—a very natural born gladiator of the wild places.
Men called him polecat, apropos of nothing about him, apparently, for he had no connection with poles or cats; or foumart, apropos—and you wouldn't have needed to be told if you had got to leeward of him just then—of hisveryunroselike smell—that is, fou—foul, mart—marten, his nearest relation; or, again, fitchett, as our forefathers termed him.
But never mind. What's in a name, anyway? A big sloe-hare, with a leveret or twonotfor sale—and that doe's leverets must have been in the rushes somewhere—may, upon occasion, show unexpected fighting-powers. And this one did. The polecat was kicked in the stomach, and kicked and scratched in the ribs, and thumped on the nose, and kicked and scratched and thumped on the head, before he could get in the death-stroke, the terrible lightning-thrust at the brain's base, which, like the sword-stroke that ends the bull-fight, dropped the victim as if struck by electricity.
And then he had whirled, and darted headlong for the reeds. He galloped in an odd, jumpy, sidelong gallop, as if he were a sort of glorified wild dachshund.
It did not take him long to inspect the reed-patch, to search it from end to end with his nose. His mind was soon made up to the fact that the wretched leverets had vanished, and that no scenting of his keen nose could find them. They had gone, evidently, quitted, like the pair of obedient children that they were, while their mother was cleverly holding the foe, and making demonstrations in his front. And now the pair of them were probably far away, lost past all finding among the mazes of the fields. And there was nothing for him to do but go and dine upon the old hare, which he did, taking, according to his custom, little more than a bite and a sip before passing on.
Then he turned and meandered off on the war-path. And this was a serious business, and a busy one. It was downright hard labor, for he worked his ground properly and for all it was worth, having a lot to kill, and not much time to kill it in.
At times he sat bolt-upright, and stared knowingly around—because his short legs gave him such a limited view otherwise. At times he climbed a mole-heap. At other times he hunted head down—and again one noticed the hound-like manner—in every possible direction, questing, casting here, casting there, working back, throwing forward, describing circles, and poking into and out of every reed-patch, bramble-heap, furze-clump, or other bit of cover that that coverless land offered.
And then suddenly he stopped. And then suddenly he ran forward. And then suddenly, the scent carrying him right smack-bang out into the open, he dropped flat and began to crawl.
He crept and he crept and he crept across that absolutely bare, flat ground, with never a tuft of fur or a feather of a single live thing upon it to be seen, till one might have thought that he had gone mad, and was stalking an illusion—as many, not beasts, have done before him; only they were men, and blew their brains out—or went bankrupt instead—afterwards.
Finally he stopped. And this was the oddest thing of all, because, if any creature could show intense excitement without showing it—that is to say, without muscle, eyelid, hair, or limb moving—that polecat did then. And yet, stare as one would upon the absolutely bare grass, dotted only here and there with a stone, or a rat's skull, or a daisy—all looking alike in their whiteness from a distance—not a living, breathing thing was to be seen.
And yet there was a living, breathing thing there. Indeed, there were several. It was only the eye that was deceived, not the nose—at least, not the polecat's nose—by motionlessness.
Right in front of the polecat, within spring, still as the very ground, the huffish, whitish check of a peewit, lap-wing, or green plover would have been mistaken for one of the many stones; the thin, curving top-knot for a stem of the thin, harsh grass: the low curve of the dark back, with its light reflections in green, for no more than the natural curve of the close-cropped turf. And she was on her nest, which was no nest, but a scrape, backing her natural assimilation with her surroundings to see her through.
And the polecat knew she was there, and he knew she was on her nest—she would not have been fool enough to keep there otherwise. His nose told him—not his eyes, I think, for that was nearly impossible. The thing was, he wanted her to move. That was what he was waiting for. No more than the twitch of an eyelid would do to show which end was head and which tail; for he could only smell her, and, in a manner, would have to pounce blind if she did not move.
She did not move, however, and in the end he had to pounce blind, anyhow, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, when it did come, shifting like a streak, that there seemed to have been no time to shout even, or gasp.
Yet that peewit found time in that fraction of a second to rise, open her wings, and get two feet into the air. And then the polecat took her, leaping with unexpected agility, and pulling her down out of limitless freedom and safety. There was just a rush, a snap, a wild-bird squawk, and down the pair went, to the accompaniment of furiously fluttering wings and in a cloud of feathers.
She had made a slight mistake in her calculations, that peewit, a matter of perhaps a quarter of a second, but enough. Nature has not got much room for those who commit slight mistakes in the wild, I guess; they mostly quit the stage before passing that habit on, or soon after.
For a moment there was a horrible, strenuous jumble of fur and feathers on the ground, and then the polecat's flat head rose up on his long neck out of the jumble, his eyes alight with a new look, and his lifted upper lip stained with a single little bright carmine spot. The peewit was dead.
He pivoted upon his shanks and examined the nest. It was empty.
He got to his feet with rapidity, and, in great excitement, dropped his head and began hunting. In a minute a mottled pebble seemed to get up under his nose and run. He snapped at it, and it fell upon the grass, stretching out slowly in death—a baby peewit.
He circled rapidly, stopped, swerved, and, at the canter, took up another scent. Suddenly, in a tussock of marram, his nose and he stopped dead. Nothing moved. Then he bit, and a second buff-and-black-mottled soft body stretched slowly out into the open as death took it—a second baby peewit. He circled again, fairly racing now, and so nearly fell over a third pebble come to life that it scuttled back between his legs; but he spun upon himself like a snake, and caught it ere it had gone a yard. He snapped again, held it, dropped it, and another downy, soft, warm chick thing straightened, horribly and pathetically, in the unpitying sun, and was still—a third baby peewit.
But there were no more. He hunted around and around for the next ten minutes, but never struck a trail. Evidently there had been only three. And all the time father-peewit, who had just come back from dinner, swooped, and stooped, and dived, and rocketed, and shot down and around, his wings humming through the still air above as he went clean mad, and seemed like to break his neck and the polecat's back in any and every one of his demented abysmal plunges, but somehow never did quite.
And all the time, also, the polecat, without seeming to take the slightest notice of him, was watching him out of the corner of his eye, waiting, hoping for a chance while he hunted.
But this was not intended as an exhibition of "frightfulness," though the beast had slain far more innocents than he could eat. It was part of his duty; and though men have accused his kind of being possessed of a joy of killing, the accusation is by no means proven. And, in any case, the accused might reply to civilization, "Same to you, sir, and many hundreds of times more so."
Anyway, he now picked up a young peewit and made for the nearest dike; then along this, and presently into the water and across to the other side, swimming strongly and well; then along a smaller dike, hugging the reeds as much as possible, and pursued by a running fire of abuse from the sedge and marsh and grasshopper warblers, from wagtails, meadow-pipits, reed-buntings, larks, and all the small-bird population of those parts, till he came to the sea-bank, called by the natives "sea-wall." This was a high, grass-bearded bank designed to constrain the waters of the estuary, and there, in a hole, curtained by a dandelion and guarded by the stiff spears of the coarse marram grass, he stuffed his victim.
The burrow was not empty when he came to it, for it already contained two moorhens' eggs; but there was still room for more, and one by one he fetched the remainder of his victims, mother and all, that way, and stuffed them into the burrow, with a plodding, steady, exact doggedness of purpose that was rather surprising in a mere wild beast who, if seen casually, would have appeared to the ordinary man to be merely aimlessly wandering about the landscape. And, mind you, this was not quite such a simple and "soft" job as it looked. Grit was needed to accomplish it, even.
There was, for instance, the sudden, far too suggestive, swirl in the water as he crossed the dike for the third time, loaded, that gave more than a hint of some unknown—and therefore the more sinister—haunter of those muddied depths of pollution, who took a more than passing interest in the smell of blood, and must, to judge by the swirl, have been too big to be safe. And that was probably a giant female eel, as dangerous a foe as any swimmer of his size—though he ate eels—might care to face. Then there was the marsh-harrier—and the same might have been a kind of owl if it wasn't a sort of hawk—who flapped up like some gigantic moth, and dogged his steps, only waiting—he felt sure of it—for the polecat to slip, or meet a foe, or have an accident, or something, before breaking its own avine neutrality. Then, too, there was the stoat, or, rather, not the stoat only, but the stoat and his wife, who would have murdered him if they had dared, and took to shadowing and watching him from cover in the most meaning sort of way. And, finally, there was the lean, nosing, sneaking dog, the egg-thief, who had no business there with his yolk-spattered, slobbering jaws, plundering the homes of the wild feathered ones—he who was only a tame slave, and a bad one at that. But the dog followed the polecat into a jungle-like reed fastness, and—almost never came out again! When he did, it was to the accompaniment of varied and assorted howls, and at about the biggest thing in the speed line he had ever evolved. He was no end glad to get out, and the distant haze swallowed him wonderfully quickly, still howling every yard of the way—for, mark you, that polecat's teeth, once felt, wore nothing to laugh at or forget.
These things he accomplished as the night was beginning to fall, and the solemn eye of the setting sun—such an eye of such a setting sun as the estuary alone knows; bloodshot, and in a sky asmoke as of cities burning—regarded him as he finished and stood back outside as one who considers. He was a grim figure of outlawry and rapine, alone there in that lonely place, amidst the gathering, dank gray of the marsh mists, the red rays touching his coat and turning it to deep purple, and his eyes to dull ruby flame; a beast, once seen, you would not forget, and could never mistake.
But his work was not yet done. He was hungry again, but for him there could be no more food yet, and he turned with the same immutable and dumbly dogged air that characterized so many of his actions, and made off down the "sea-bank." Once he hid—vanished utterly would better express it—to avoid the passage of an eel-spearer, an inhabitant of the estuary almost as amphibious and mysterious as himself. Once he very nearly caught a low-flying snipe as he leapt up at it while cutting low over the top of the "bank"; and once—here he sprang aside with a half-stifled snarl and every bristle erect—he was very nearly caught by a horrible steel-toothed trap, set there to entertain that same dog we have already met, by reason of the small matter of a late lamb or two that had suddenly developed bites, obviously not self-inflicted, in the night. Then he crossed the dike at the foot of the sea-wall, shook himself, sat down to scratch, and straightway hurled himself backwards and to one side, as something that resembled a javelin whizzed out of six straggling, upright, faded, tawny reeds at the water's edge, by which he had sat down. The javelin struck deep into the little circle of lightly-pressed-down grass where his haunches had rested, and he caught a glimpse, or only a half-glimpse, of weird onyx eyes, and heard strange and shuddery reptilian hissings. Eyes and noises might have belonged to a crocodile, or some huge lizard thing, or snapping turtle, but the javelin was clearly the property of no such horror, and was very obviously a beak—now, by the way, withdrawn.
Followed the harsh rattle and the swish of big feathers and vast wings—he felt the draught of them—the dim outline, as it were, of a ghost, of some great shape rising into the gloom, and as instantly vanishing over the sea-"wall," and he was alone,and—there were now three upright and faded reeds in the clump near which he had sat him down by the water's edge to scratch,notsix. The Thing, the portent, the apparition, or whatever you like to call it, had been theotherthree; yet you could have sworn to the six reeds before it moved. And the worst of it was that he did not know from frogs and fresh water what the Thing was. He had never glimpsed such a sudden death before, and had no burning desire to do so again, for he was shrewd enough to know that, but for that fling-back of his, the javelin would have struck him, and struck him like a stuck pig, perhaps through the skull! Oh, polecat! The bird was a bittern, relation of the herons, only brown, and if not quite so long, made up for it in strength and fiery, highly developed courage.
Caution is not the polecat's trump card, as it is the cat's, but if ever he trod carefully, it was thence onwards, as he threaded the dike-cut and pool-dotted gloom. He came upon a lone bull bellowing, and gave him room. He came upon something unknown, but certainly not a lone bull, bellowing too; it was the bittern, and he gave that plenty of room. He came upon two moorhens, fighting as if to the death, buthewas the death; and slew one of them from behind neatly, and had to go back with it, past both bellowings, to a second burrow in the sea-bank, where he put it; and later he came upon only seven great, mangy, old, stump-tailed, scarred, horrible ghouls of shore rats, all mobbing a wounded seagull—a herring-gull—with a broken wing.
The gull lived, but that was no fault of the polecat's, for she managed to run off into the surrounding darkness what time he was dealing warily but effectively with one of those yellow-toothed devils of murderous rats—whose bite is poison—in what dear, kind-hearted people might have said was a most praiseworthy rescue of the poor, dear, beautiful bird. (The poor, dear, beautiful bird, be it whispered, had herself swallowed a fat-cheeked and innocent-eyed baby rabbit whole that very day, before she was wounded; but never mind.)
The polecat, after one wary sniff, did not seem to think the rat worthy of a journey to the sea-bank and decent burial, and passed on, the richer for a drink of rat's blood, perhaps, but very hungry. He came upon a redshank's nest in a tuft of grass.
The redshank, who has much the cut of a snipe, plus red-orange legs, must have heard or seen him coming in the new, thin moonlight, and told all the marsh about it with a shrieking whistled, "Tyop! tyop!" But the nest contained four eggs, which the polecat took in lieu of anything bigger, carrying two—one journey for each—all the way to the sea-bank, to yet another hole he had previously scraped, or found, therein. One of the other two eggs he consumed himself, and was just making off with number four, when something came galloping over the marsh in the moonlight, splashing through the pools, and making, in that silence, no end of a row for a wild creature.
The polecat stood quite still, with his long back arched, his sturdy, short forepaws anchored tense, and his short, rounded ears alert, and watched it come, not because he wanted to, but because there did not happen to be any cover thereabouts, and to move might give him away.
When he saw that the beast was long and low, and short-legged and flat-beaded, his long outer fur began to bristle. Those outlines were the trade-marks of his own tribe—not his own species only—and were, he knew, more likely to mean tough trouble than anything else. Then he realized that the path of the new arrival would take it right towards him, and that was bad, because to move now and get out of the way was hopeless. Also, he could see the size of the beast now, and that was worse than bad—some ten inches to a foot worse.
The beast held a wild-duckling in its jaws, and the little body, with its stuck-out webbed feet, flapped and flopped dismally from side to side, as the animal cantered along with a somewhat shuffling, undulating gait. And then the polecat became transfixed. He had recognized the new-comer. He knew the breed, and would have given a lot not to have molested that redshank's abode and be found there.
The strange beast—palpably a large, sinuous, and wicked proposition—came right up to the polecat, standing there rigid, erect, motionless, and alone in the moonlight, with the fourth egg between his paws, and then stopped dead, almost touching him. Apparently, it saw him for the first time. Certainly it was not pleased; it said so under its breath, in a low growl.
The polecat said nothing, perhaps because he had nothing to say.
The beast was an otter, and an old one. Also, it appeared to be suffering from a "grouch."
The polecat felt uncomfortable. He was eyeing the other's throat, and marking just the place where he meant to take hold, if things came to the worst; but he knew all the time that the otter, although its eyes had never been removed for a fraction of a second off his face, was really watching the egg. The otter was a female; probably she had young to feed; the presence of the duckling darkly hinted at it. If so, so much the worse for the polecat.
Then the otter put down her duckling, and growled again; but the polecat might have been carved in unbarked oak for all the sign of life that he gave. Then—she sailed in.
It was really very neatly and prettily done, for, as an exponent of lithesome agility, the otter is—when the pine-marten is not by—certainly quite It. The polecat seemed to side-twist double, making some sort of lightning-play with his long neck and body as she came, and—he got his hold. Yes, he got his hold all right. The only thing was to stay there; for, as he was a polecat and a member of the great, the famous, weasel tribe, part of his fighting creed was tostay there.
When, however, hounds fail to puncture an otter's hide, any beast might be pardoned for losing its grip; but he did not. Between the tame hounds' fangs and his smaller wild ones was some difference—about the difference between our teeth and a savage's, multiplied once or twice; and the old she-otter, who had felt hounds' teeth in her life, realized the difference. Also, it hurt, and the polecat did not lose his hold.
Then, maddened, wild with rage, the rage of one who expects a walk-over and receives a bad jolt instead, that old she-otter really got to work. She recoiled like a coiled snake, and the polecat felt fire in one loin.
It looked like the contortions of one big, furry beast twisted with cramp, by the moonlight. You could not possibly separate the combatants, or tell that there were two. But the polecat only fought because he dared not expose his flank with the foe facing him. Now, however, as they both rolled he—
Hi! It was done in an instant. At a moment when the roll brought him on top, and when the otter was shifting her own hold for another, and more deadly, which might have "put him to sleep" forever, he miraculously twisted and writhed, eel-fashion, and with one mighty wrench—a good strip of his skin and fur had to go in that pull, but it couldn't be helped—he had broken the other's hold, leapt clear of the clinch, and was gone.
The otter was up before you could guess what had happened, and was drumming away on his heels; but she soon pulled up, realizing that a polecat may be slow in the books, but not so slow in real life, with her to assist speed. Anyway, she seemed slower; and, in any case, she could not hope to follow him in the intricacy of holes and cover he was sure to take to, like a fish to water. Moreover, she was spitting up blood, result of friend polecat's neat and natty strangle-hold on her throat, and felt more in need of the egg—which she had won, at any rate—than a wild-goose chase.
Like a thin, wavy line through the night, friend polecat betook himself to the sea-bank, to a hole in the sea-bank, to the very depths of that hole; and there, in the shape of two angrily smoldering, luminous orbs shining steadily through the pit-like dark, he stayed. Most of the time, I fancy, he used up in licking his wounds. They needed it, for, though clean, the punctures from the otter's canines had gone deep, and a red trail of drops marked the polecat's route to his lair—one of his lairs.
Not, be it noted, that he was entirely ignored. Blood-trails are always items of interest in the wild, especially in the dark hours while man sleeps. Thus there once came to the mouth of the hole scufflings, and the noise as of an eager, inquisitive crowd—rats, who hoped for a chance to get their own back on a detested foe. But one evil snarl from the wounded beast removed them, convinced that the time was not yet.
Once, also, something sniffed out of the stilly night, and that was a fox; but one snap from within, a perfectly abominable smell, and the narrowness of the accommodation proved too much for brer fox, and he, with an insolent cock of the brush, retired.
Then, too, there was a rabbit, not looking where he was going, who got half-way down the burrow before he realized the awful truth, and went out backwards, like a cat with a salmon-tin on its head.
But along towards dawn there came an altogether different sort of sound, somehow—a sort of a little chuckling sound; and the polecat, answering it, came out. He looked rather less awful now than when he had gone in. A form was standing outside—a dark, low, long form, like himself; and, like himself, you could easily become aware of it without seeing it, even with your handkerchief to your nose.
It was his wife, smaller, but no less dangerous, than he. She was carrying an old hen-redshank in her jaws, its long beak and one of its wings clearly silhouetted against the moon. And apparently she would be very pleased if her husband would come out of the hole and make room for her to stuff the redshank into it.
Then, together, they moved at their indescribable, undulating gait—they looked like a snake between them in the moonlight—along the sea-bank, till they came, with caution and many clever tricks of vanishing, in case anybody might be watching, to yet another burrow, screened completely and very neatly guarded by the splayed leaves of a bunch of frosted sea-holly.
Both beasts went into the burrow, at the end of which was a nest containing live things, which squirmed and made little, tiny, infant noises in the darkness. They were the polecats' children, four of them, all quite young, and all very hungry and very lively indeed; and they explained a good deal of the reason for the stores of food set by in other burrows in the "sea-wall."
But they did not explain quite all, for, unless Mrs. Polecat liked her dinner high—and there was nothing I could find in her methods to show that she did—or unless Mr. Polecat had got a craze for collecting specimens and eggs, or forgot where half of his trophies were hidden as a natural habit of absent-mindedness, one cannot quite see the reason for hiding so much so soon, before the young could feed upon the "specimens."
However, I suppose the two beasts knew their own business best. The old male polecat seemed to, anyway, for just as the first flicker of dawn was paling the eastern sky he went off down to the mist-hidden dike, and, in no more than ten short minutes, returned with an eel, protesting violently in that horrible way eels have, which he promptly proceeded to decapitate and eat.
The afternoon had still some little time to run, when the waving grass down the side of the sea-bank and the half of a glimpse of dull tawny gave away the male polecat leaving his "earth" for the war-path once more. Was he ever anything else than on the war-path if he moved abroad at all?
That, even from above, was, I swear, all the indication he gave of his exit. Now, although it is a rule in the wild that self-advertisement is most unhealthful, there may be times when a beast like the polecat may not advertise itself enough. And this was one of those times.