Cob arrived in a snowstorm of unparalleled ferocity. He came upon extended vans sixty-nine inches from tip to tip, which he seemed as if he were never going to flap. All black above, all white below, he was. The fact was worth noting, because, as seen from below, he looked neither black nor any other hue, but just indiscriminate dark, unless he swerved against the little light, and then his white "hull" shone like silver.
In his calm tacking, in his effortless play, in his superb mastery of the furious gale, one realized that here was one of Nature's masterpieces. He arrested the gaze with his serenity, and in his majesty of flight marked himself as a bird apart.
Here was a bird accustomed to power, to respect, and to wield fear, as a king might do; but he was no king, even among birds. He was a great black-backed gull, immense, austere, and cruel, with eyes as cold as the waves whose glitter they reflected, and a heart as implacable as the storm that cherished it; sea-rover, pillager, pirate, swashbuckler, son of the storm in whose fierce buffetings he rejoiced, master of the gale upon whose fury he flourished—the very spirit of the ocean's frontiers, arrayed in the spotless uniform of the sea, sailing under her bold colors.
And then, as he suddenly came, the watcher, had there been one, would have looked at him expectantly, for an eagle, bristling with weapons, so to speak, fierce-eyed, mighty, and scowling, came flapping heavily across the white-fretted bay. There is expression in birds, and most have their feelings and their character stamped upon their whole body. But there was no expression in Cob. His cold eyes continued to stare with steady stoniness, his vast vans to waft an occasional shallow, lazy quarter-flap, his spotless head to peer down at times. Once only, as the real king of the birds, on his course, drew very near, so that you could hear the deep, dry "hough! hough!" of the powerful wings, did Cob open his red-stained—as it were blood—yellow beak, and give utterance—one could call it no more—and so instantly close his beak again and revert to his absolute expressionlessness that one had a job to realize what, or who, in all that vast scene, had spoken.
"I'm-Great-Black-Back!" he said very quietly, quickly, gratingly, and tersely; and then, as if expecting an answer, added, "Eh?" in a hollow undertone.
The eagle's imperial head jerked round as he flew, and he shot a stabbing, sheathed glance at the great sea-bird, as a king might at a man in a crowd who begins to fumble at his hip-pocket. But, save for that, he took no further notice, and beat on with his terrific, piston-like, regular wing-beats; and the gull, that speckless, dazzling, hardened, hard giant, laughed—laughed, I say, softly and to himself, hoarsely and insolently: "How-how-how-how!" It was as if he laughed in derision.
And then a strange thing happened. From the opposite stupendous cliffs, draped in snow, bejeweled with icicles, frowning and desolate, an ominous black shape flung itself furiously, and made straight for the eagle, barking hoarsely with rage as it came. Another hollow bark followed, and a second evil ebony form hurled down from the tottering cliff-top, and flapped towards the eagle in the path of the first. Bark echoed bark above the deep mutter of the breakers, and the echoes along the cliffs answered both uncannily and mockingly.
They were a raven, disturbed from her wool-quilted nest, and her mate; but if they had been hobgoblins straight from an evil dream, they could not, in that immense, grim setting, have been much more impressive.
The great black-backed gull said no more, but wheeled on as if nothing had happened.
The eagle said nothing, and tried to beat on as if nothing had happened, too. He did not succeed, for the ravens who had been addressing him most particularly soon addressed themselves personally to him; and before he knew just how it all came about, they had summoned a quite amazing and unexpected aerial acrobatic power, and were shooting and diving, striking and flapping, about his regal head in a manner that evenhecould not pretend any longer to ignore. No one, not even a king of all the birds, feels comfortable under the imminent possibility of losing an eye—and such a haughty, wonderful eye, too. Nor did the eagle. And he showed it. One presumes he might have abolished the pair—one or both—but the eagle never let on what he presumed. What heknewwas that he had nothing to gain in a fight with such super-hooligans, and everything to lose, for one wound only might mean a dead eagleviâstarvation and a dead raven—what was a dead raven worth, anyway, to him, or anybody else?
Therefore the eagle changed his mind about continuing his course, which would have taken him above the ravens' nest. He did it grandly, and without giving the impression that the ravens had anything to do with it—he could have squeezed the life out of them with one awful handshake, if his heart had been as big as his claws. But they had something to do with it. And they knew it. So did Cob, who laughed again, hoarsely and as one appreciating a joke, while he wheeled and wheeled over the following waves, seeing all things and never appearing to see anything.
Then at last, when the king of all the birds had sunk, like a speck of floating burnt paper, away over the far, white-mantled hills, the ravens suddenly evaporated into nowhere. Probably no one had seen them go except Cob, and Cob was by now a lonely, dwindling speck away over the restless ocean. Then he was not. He was coming back, swinging along with great, easy, shallow half-flaps, so sublimely lazy that he seemed merely to swim through the gale. But he covered distance; there was speed as well as majesty in his flight, for all that.
In a very short time he was above the cliffs, silent, sinister, almost stealthy. One of the ravens came back suddenly, diving over the crest, half-demented with anxiety to cover her eggs from that stony stare of the sea-rover; and Cob, seeing where she had come from, surrendered himself to the gale, hurtled down-wind, veered, tacked, circled, rocking, and came down in a series of his oblique plunges—smack-bang into the middle of a gory dinner-party, consisting of the male raven, five gray or hooded crows, and one silver herring-gull, feasting upon the carcass of a dead sheep.
Every head went up, every eye blinked, every wing half-opened, every beak shut tight as Cob, whom everybody had thought to be miles away by that time, threw forward his wings, umbrella-fashion, flung them up, hat-fashion, fanning wide his tail, dropped his giant webbed feet, and came to anchor with a rush. Then he folded those wonderful pinions of his, foot by rustling foot, stared stonily at the amazed, mute company around him, and, throwing back his immaculate, smooth, low-browed, spotless head, laughed to the winds, hoarsely, loudly, wildly—a rude, baleful, transport of mirth:
"How-how-how-how-how!"
The raven did not laugh. He had to feed his sitting wife—not counting his big self—in that bitter weather, and he was pluming himself upon having turned the eagle from sight of this gift banquet from Providence as well as his nest. The gray crows saw no cause for merriment, remembering how big the great gull was, and how small are these little, long-wooled, black-faced hill sheep. Moreover, sheep do not often oblige by getting turned turtle in a cleft of rock, and being unable to right themselves before poor, starving, wild hunters—I won't swear who, but it was not the raventhistime—can come and peck their eyes out.
Cob looked at them again—all five of the gray crows sitting staring straight down their own black gouge-beaks, hunched, cold, out-at-heels, and dejected. Then he laughed again—burst into another wild, jeering fit of merriment, and fell to work.
First of all, he pointed out to the raven—his beak was the pointer—that he was sitting upon the choicest portion of that sheep, and must make way therefrominstantly. Next, he turned his head and looked—only looked—at a gray crow that had presumed, upon the turning of his broad, black back, to recommence feeding, and that hooded crow moved one yard in one second—out of reach. And next, Cob, who apparently loved discipline and cherished good manners, started his banquet, and allowed the others to start theirs.
But it was an unholy feast. Cob tugged and tore like a butcher without any knives. At times he nearly fell backwards, when the meat gave way; at times he bolted, and gulped, and choked horribly; at times he was nearly standing upon his head, and at other times upon his tail; and, in case the others should find the woolly outside, where they alone could feed, too easy, he was continually breaking off, to rush—a red-headed demon from hell now—at the raven, or glare at the crows and remove them yards, as if his eyes could kill. As for the herring-gull, he raced and danced in a crazy circle round his giant clansman, apparently smitten with delirium at the luscious titbits he was obliged to watch vanishing down Cob's bright throat.
The raven, however, was growing desperate. He was under contract to Fate to feed his wife. She would freeze there on her nest in the snow among the icicle-studded ledges else. And every time he had got hold of a big enough dainty to tug free and fly off with, Cob had cut in and collared the said morsel. As a matter of fact, friend raven was a better carver than the sea-pirate, had a beak better suited for the grisly purpose. Finally, the black one got hold of a piece of meat, and did not let go. He hung on, and, before anybody realized that he had moved, Cob's yellow-and-red-painted bill—nearly all red now—had closed upon that raven's neck. There was one wild, asthmatical croak from the raven, a whirl of sturdy black and overshadowing black-and-white wings, and the raven was jerked clean head-over-heels, where, among the heather, he lay for a brief second, kicking ignominiously, on his sable back.
Here the crows fled to strategic positions upon bowlders, waist-deep in heather, hard by, expecting a like fate, and leaving the herring-gull to gobble up what he could in the confusion, and risk his life in the process, when suddenly, above the beating of wings and the hiss of wind, all distinctly heard, and jumped at, the sound of a single, horrible, instantaneous, metallic clash.
Cob's agonized yell, the clash itself, and the whir and rush of wings, as every bird there present literally flung itself into the air, seemed really, though of course they were not, coincident—such is the quickness with which these wild creatures act. But Cob alone remained.
He stopped in mid-spring horribly, and suddenly, as if a Hand had reached up and plucked him back. For a second his wonderful wings beat and beat tremendously, frenziedly, with a noise you could hear all up the hill; then he fell back in one demented, frenzied mix up of bashing, smashing pinions, legs, tail, and whirling feathers.
That clash, which had jarred Cob's frame from head to hind-toe, was a trap,aliasa gin,aliasa clam, and the rack of man's Inquisition of the wild. He had stepped upon it; it had gone off, and caught him by the right leg, and, being anchored by a chain, had refused to let him go when he sought to remove himself, trap and all.
What followed during the next minute or two it would scarcely be fair to so fine a bird to print. Moreover, it was unnice to behold. Wild-folk have a habit often of going temporarily insane when they first find themselves trapped, because the trap represents to them the most supreme, the most unbearable, of all terrors—loss of freedom; and freedom is to them more than life, especially to birds, and more especially still to those whose lives are dedicated to the wild, free sea.
At the end of that time Cob lay exhausted upon his side, one mighty pinion pathetically trailing in the snow, his beak open, his whole jet and spotless white body shaken and convulsed with pantings that were almost sobs. He seemed in danger of dying there and then upon the spot, with sheer, sickening horror or a broken heart.
The herring-gull was a silver line—about as big as a thrip—to seaward. The gray crows climbed the heavens to landward, like flies that climb a window-pane. Only the raven had not gone, quite.
The raven was a bird, of course, and every bird has got to do its duty. There can be no shirking.Hisduty was to supply food to keep the fires of life burning in his mate as she sat upon her icy nest. His duty was to see that his eggs,theireggs, hatched out; and with him the motto was: "The end justifies the means." This bird, this sea-rover, this big pirate, alone stood between him and the discharge of duty. There was no other way, no other food; he had searched. Wherefore, the raven stayed; he knew all about traps, few better, and he stayed, waiting, if it please you, for Cob to—die!
But Cob would not oblige. He had not got a broken and crushed leg, as the raven possibly expected. He was not injured, as he should have been, according to program; only puffed. The mercy of Allah had seen to it that some teeth of that instrument of vile torture that had hold of him were broken off, and that his leg should have been caught in the gap thus formed. Moreover, the trap had not been looked after; it was rusty, and did not shut quite properly. The spring was weak, or some grit had got in, or something, and a smart rat would have got out of it easily, but a rat is not a gull, and knows too much.
Thereafter, nothing happened for a long while. Cob's first delirium seemed to have spent him, and perhaps taught him how much a leg can hurt when tugged by the full lift of sixty-nine-inch wings, especially when one tries to whirl round upon it when it cannot turn.
The raven sat on his lichen-decorated, snow-draped bowlder, hands in pockets, so to speak, abominably untidy, with a pessimistic hunch of the shoulders, but a light in his eyes, a strangely malignant, devilishly roguish leer, that belied his appearance. Perhaps he was waiting to see if Cob during his struggles obligingly touched off any further deadly surprises that might lie hidden in the vicinity. One never knows. He had seen a gray crow double-catch himself in two traps lying close to one another—once.
Nothing happening, however, that raven presently sailed in on his fine work. He broke his neutrality with a sudden dry rustle of wings, and clumsily half-hopped, half-heavily napped, down to Cob, lying there still and silent, but very much awake, upon the snow. He almost seemed to be rubbing his hands, or, rather, his claws, that ebon rascal. This was, indeed, a game after his own heart.
Cob never moved when the raven arrived. I suppose he knew all about ravens, and what one may expect from them. He only stared at him with one cold eye, a tense, lop-sided stare; and he mouthed a little—if one may be permitted the expression—with his beak, like a man moistening his lips.
The raven looked him over critically, leeringly, insolently, with a hateful air of ownership. Then the raven sharpened the gouge thing which he called his beak—wheep-wheep—upon a stone, as birds do, and tightened his feathers, as if almost visibly tucking up his sleeves for—well, for the job.
Then he tweaked Cob's tail, apparently just to see how much alive he was. But Cob did not move, beyond drawing one webbed leg—the free one—up under him.
Then the raven dug him under the wing—punched him in the ribs, so to speak. But Cob did nothing more than cringe—cringe from head to hind-toe, like a worm.
Then suddenly, startlingly suddenly, with the full stroke, the dreaded pickax blow, of all the ravens, he let drive straight at Cob's clear, shining eye—the left one, with which Cob, with his head twisted, had all along been regarding him. He had disclosed his hand, that raven. It was devil's work.
Till that moment Cob had never moved, as we have said. Save for his one eye and his quivering, one would scarcely have known that he lived. That was his game, perhaps. Who can tell? For a stolid, slow-thinking gull may have, in his way, just as deep, or low, a cunning as a brilliant-brained raven. Anyhow, in that fiftieth of a second allowed, just when it seemed as if nothing could save his eye, Cob's head snicked round and up, and he slid the enemy's beak down off his own with as neat a parry as ever you saw. And he did more. He caught hold of the said raven's beak, got a grip on beak in beak, and once having got hold, he kept hold. This was nothing new to him. It was his way—one of his ways—of fighting rival great black-backed gulls. But it was new to the raven, and he had not previously thought out any proper counter to it. (There is a counter, I think.) Result—caught raven as well as caught gull.
Then it was that raven's turn to go mad, and dance a paralytic kan-kan; but he could not get any change out of that gull. Cob hung on almost as well as the trap hung on to him, and far more twistfully. He was quite at home, of course. He had been brought up to this sort of thing. It was the official regulation gull way of fighting under set rules, but he could rarely get any other bird than a gull to fight with him like it. It was not the raven's way of fighting, though, and I think he felt himself in a trap. He certainly acted like a bird out of its senses, while the gull, flapping hugely, and forgetting, in the excitement, his own bondage, gradually forced the raven's head back and back over his back, till that raven was in the unenviable position of staring over his own back at his own tail, upon which he was ignominiously sitting. Also, his neck was half-dislocated, and he was nearly choking. And about this time it began to dawn upon him that it did not pay in the wild to monkey with great black-backed gulls, even trapped ones. He swore, as well as he could, in a gurgling croak. Then——
Clash!
Horrors upon diabolical horrors! Another trap?
The same ghastly thought flashed to both birds' brains at the same moment, and both literally sprang bodily up into the gale in one maddened leap, both forgetting all else in the panic to be gone.
Both stopped at the same instant, with a jerk that nearly unhinged every bone in their bodies. Both yelled with terror at the identical moment.
Both were released—as by the cutting of a string—at the same fraction of time, and both hurtled aloft at the same fear-blinded, rocket-like speed.
But both had not been caught by the same kind of trap.
It was the jerk that had freed Cob from the really quite light hold, as we have already explained, of the jaws of the steel trap.
And it was the jerk that had torn out some of the raven's tail-feathers, and left them in the jaws of the—gray, old, hill fox.
And it was the fox who was standing all alone, watching, with oblique eyes, the two great birds fast dissolving with every desperate, stampeding wing-beat into the hurrying cloud-wrack and the wild seascape—in opposite directions. He had made a good stalk, but had sprung a little short, had brer fox.
Upon a day, weeks later, we find the raven, whose young had left the nest, stolidly soaring over a small, flat island, golden with furze, purple with heather, pale-rose chiffon where it was covered with sea-pinks.
In addition to these, only one other hue, beside green, was there upon that island gem floating on the jade-green sea, and that was a patch of black and white! It flashed to the eye of the raiding rogue-raven, and he altered course towards it, when it turned into a female great black-backed gull, running, literally racing, to her nest, which the raven could now see, with its two big, buff, dark-splashed eggs.
Down flopped the giant gull upon her treasure, and began yelling, "How-how-how-how!" at the top of her voice.
But the island seemed empty of life, and her yelling useless.
Down dropped the raven in front of her.
Down winnowed the hen-raven at the back of her.
And, both together, they approached. And all the time the great black-backed gull continued to yell, "How-how-how-how!"
At last, when he had got close enough, the cock-raven lunged at her, or, rather, underneath her. She parried his stroke, and—the hen-raven lunged. Nothing now, she knew, could save her eggs, unless she rose to fight the cock-raven. The hen-raven then ran in. She only required a second in which to ruin each egg, but she never got it.
Nobody saw the avalanche coming, but everybody heard it arrive. It was of snow-white, and it was of jet-black, and it knocked the cock-raven one way, and sent the hen-raven, picking up her skirts, as it were, and fleeing, the other. And the name of the avalanche was Cob.
I fancy he considered that he bore a grudge against that cock bandit-raven. Perhaps in dreams he could still feel that trap on his leg. Who knows? He certainly used to wake up with outcries, and he equally certainly made that cock-raven shy of that island for evermore.
No one would have thought of looking for any living beast in the raffle of dried twigs and tamarisk "leaves" between the crawling, snake-like roots of the feathery tamarisks if it had not been for the noise. The noise was unmistakable, as the noise of a fight always is; and the only other living thing near the spot, a tiny, tip-tailed, brown wren—a little ball of feathers, dainty as you please, and all alone there, and out of place down by the terrible, snow-covered, wind-tortured estuary shore—made shift to remove herself, making remarks—wrens can't help saying what they feel—as she flitted.
Then the combatants fell out—literally. Up from the solid earth between the twisted roots they seemed to come, but that proved the art of one of them in concealing his front-door from the curious, and down the bank of the sea-wall, over and over and over, squeaking the most murderous language, and grappling like pocket-devils—tumbled a little jet-black and a little dark-brown beast.
They continued the duel upon the dry gravel below—the finest and the whitest gravel ever you did see—and they would apparently have gone on for goodness knows how long if a gray-white, thin, worn post a couple of yards away had not turned into a heron and stalked an ungainly stalk towards them.
Then they fell apart, and one of them, at any rate—the brown one—ran away in the shape of a water-vole—water-"rat," if you will—the heron making spear-lunges at him with his bill as he ungainlily skipped at the other's tail all the way up the bank. The other fighter, the black one, could not rightly be said to have turned into anything very much—at least, not anything that any one could swear to. It just seemed as if a dark blur whizzed about—more bird-like than beast-like—around the astonished and prancing heron, and then into nowhere. It was like watching a blue-bottle in a tumbler, and very extraordinary. The heron never even professed to follow it or lunge at it. He preferred the water-vole, whose agility was not too fast to see.
At the place where it had come from, the mouth of the hole, it stopped—this beast that could move quicker than eye could follow—stopped so suddenly and completely that its change from almost lightning motion to stony motionlessness in the fraction of a second was nearly as amazing as its first marvelous exhibition. It stopped, I say, and became a—a rat.
To nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand, the word "rat" conveys only one impression. This rat did not fulfill that impression. In fact, there is more than one kind of rat, and though fate and their fathers' Kismet has cursed them all with a name of shame, they are not all the kind of people that made it so. There is the foreigner, the invader, the common brown rat, who is accursed; there is the old English black rat, whom the accursed one has nearly wiped out into little more than a ghost; and there is the water-rat, who is not a rat, but a vole, and would thank you to remember the fact.
And this rat was a black rat, as black as jet, shark-jawed, star-eyed, elfin-eared, snake-tailed, lean, long-legged, and graceful—a very greyhound among the rats. He was there, in that dancing-floor of the winds by the estuary, because no common or sewer rats were there. They were anathema to him, and they were worse—death in many horrible forms. He had been there all the summer, all the autumn, and all the—— No, by whiskers! he was not going to remain there all the winter. He had his limit, and he hated cold; and here, down by the flat, sodden, mud-choked shore of the estuary, it was so cold that if you didn't jolly well mind what you were up to and keep your tummy always full, you went to sleep, and—never woke up any more.
A little pile of mussel, winkle, and shore-crab shells, and the backbone of what had been a stranded fish, close to the mouth of the hole, showed the rat's account-book to date; but there was a line to be drawn even in this trade. That dawn—if you could call the gray dark of a snowstorm dawn—he, wondrously adventurous, had gone shell-fish collecting, away out upon the freezing wet mud-ooze. He had got three mussels; a muddy face; muddier feet; nearly an eye pecked out by a mighty, great black-backed gull; three chivyings from herring-gulls; one nip from a crab who ought to have been dead; two winkles under big stones that took half-an-hour to shift; one dead pigmy shrew—length two inches—with a hole in its skull, no brains, and a horrible smell; nearly his life removed by the swoop of a kestrel falcon and the javelin-stab of a heron's beak; and twenty minutes' hard cleaning to remove the mud-stains that were not properly off—to his nice liking—yet. And, to add to that, he had no sooner finished than he found that some clumsy fool of a water-rat—vole, I mean—with a mania for mining, had run a shaft into his hole, and brought the whole roof crumbling down upon his scrupulously neat and tidy nest of fine hay and carefully shredded rush—the only approximately warm corner he possessed in all that biting cold—so that days of labor would not repair the silly damage; and he had had to enter into a free fight with and turn the fool out, nearly losing his life, for the fourth time that short, dark, bitter day, in the process. And now he had to clean himself all over again!
No wonder he was fed-up, and decided to quit. He loved the dank marsh, the brackish channels, the long, lone wind blowing through the tamarisks, and the smell—salt, seaweed, mud, and fish—of it all; but in this—weather, when the cold here, even in shelter, was greater than the cold in any other spot—and the unchecked wind cut like swords of ice—he realized that one must be an eider-duck or an Iceland gull, a northern diver or an Arctic owl, to stand it, and he was none of these. Wherefore, though the dusk had made the dull day only a little more dark as yet, and the pink, luminous frost-haze still hung in the west, he called down his hole to his wife—his one and only wife, but that was not his fault—and quitted.
Ten minutes later you behold our black rat—if you had eyes quick enough, but it was a matter of momentary glimpses, anyway—trekking up a ditch. You have pretty well got to take my word for it, because, though sometimes you saw him for the half of a second, mostly you didn't, and couldn't tell whether there was his wife only, or he only, or both. Really there were both, but our black friend with the embarrassingly, the abnormally, long tail and the genteel head—Mr.Mus rattuson Sundays, if you please, and in nowise to be confused with thatcanaille, CitizenMus decumanus, the common brown rat—had not the slightest intention that any one should see him, if he could help it. His wife might be trusted to look out for herself. And for this reason, perhaps, his march was a progress to wonder at.
Did a flock of wild-duck come over from the sea with whistling wings, he did not so much get under the over-hanging grass asbethere. Did a "gaggle" of wild-geese go by high over, clamoring like hounds, he went out like a blown candle. Did a party of teal—for it was the magic hour of "flight," when all wildfowl shift their quarters to feed, or not to feed—fairly hissing with speed, like masterless bullets, dash over, he—well, he was not before you could realize that he had moved.
Then up and flew round them a shape, and the name of that shape was death. It might have been a gull with hawk-like form. It might have been a hawk in gull-like light-gray uniform. And it might have been an owl with gull-like dress and hawk-like lines. Whatever it was, it was clipper-built, swift, and in fighting trim. As a matter of fact, it was neither gull nor hawk nor owl, but a harrier, a hen-harrier—that's its name, not its sex, for it was a cock—and the same is a half-way house, so to speak, between hawk and owl. Possibly because they are crepuscular, harriers may be thought more rare than they are. This one was "crepusculing," and—the black rat did not like it. They had met before, and Mr. Ratus had gained a lively dislike for this hawk-owl combination, greater than his respect—which itself was not small—for owl or hawk.
Seeing nowhere to go, and nothing to hide in when he got there, our Mr. Ratus shifted from one spot to the other when the harrier made his cat-like pounce—yes, he was something cat-like, too—and had the pleasure of seeing the harrier's uninviting talons grab a clawful of grass, which, by all powers of judgment, ought to have been black rat's fur.
A mere hawk, or even an owl, might have considered this rebuff enough, but not the harrier.Hewafted himself ten feet aloft on his long narrow vans, and, flapping owl-like, or almost butterfly-like, began to beat, and the beating of the harrying harrier, up and down, is one of the most trying ordeals, for the game beaten for, in the wild.
Mrs. Ratus sat where she was, he presumed, playing the same bluff.
But both were without cover, and the black rat, I fear, devoutly hoped that she would be fool enough to move and give herself away first; whilst she, on her part, was cursing him for many kinds of a fool for starting their "flitting" before it was dark.
While she sat and froze—in both senses—however, the black rat, rigid as a beast cut out of coal, with one bright, shining eye upon the harrier beating up and down, was probing the dusk with the other eye. And presently he thought he saw his chance. He would have had to move, anyway, I fancy, for the strain of sitting there bang in the open was unendurable. His nerves would have snapped. So he went to his chance—a hole in the bank of the ditch.
I say he went, but I only take it to be so because he got there. One could not actually see him go. One had only an idea, quite an uncertain idea, that something, most like a swift bird, had passed up the ditch, and one could not swear even to that. It seemed impossible that the flying something had been a four-legged animal.
It was the black rat. Nor did he go straight. He went, if I may so put it, every way at once, ending up with a merry-go-round dance with death—the harrier was pouncing savagely—round a tuft of grass, at such a speed that he looked exactly like the rim of a quickly spun bicycle-wheel—a halo, that is to say, and nothing else.
And then—he was crouched, panting, inside the hole, wondering whether his heart or his lungs would be the first to burst. And then? Oh, and then he—cleaned himself, naturally and of course. What else did you expect? He was the original black rat of Old England, and one of the cleanest animals on earth.
Mrs. Ratus, having vanished past finding while the hunt to the hole was on, presently scented her lord out, when the night had come and the harrier was gone, and together, starting like antelope at every hint of a sound, they traveled up the ditch, and up the bank of a stream that the ditch folded into.
Once an owl—the nomad, short-eared owl of the marshes—let forth a hoot that would have sent a nervous lady into "astericks," and senttheminto no-where, as if it had detonated a charge of that lively mystery called T.N.T. under their dainty feet. Once, just as they were lapping like dogs at the edge of the ice that was conspiring to span the brook, an otter shot up his head—jaws wide and dripping—almost under their long and pointed noses, and they, with one accord, and driven by their long tails acting as a spring, leapt simply into space. At any rate, they could not be followed by mortal eye, wherever they did leap to.
And once they met a wandering cat. And that cat seemed to go mad, for she shifted about the steep bank of that stream, and up, and about—here she swore because the spikes pricked her—and down a holly-bush, as if she had got a rocket tied to her tail. She had not, of course. She was hunting black rats. I suppose she saw them. If so, she was the only person who did, and I feel sure that, instant as she was, when she was up the bank or the holly-bush they were down it, and when she was down they were up. Finally, when her lost temper had completely run her out of breath, she slouched away, spitting like a worn sparking-plug, and very much disgusted. And—the black rats cleaned themselves!
That night was not a profitable one. The shell-fish of the estuary were gone, and there was little instead on the stream—only snow, and the snow fell quietly at intervals throughout the night, hiding everything. Rats, too, are creatures of warmth. They hate cold as much as the writer, and these two black rats became very miserable. They had no home, and did not know where to go; and, save for a few berries, they had nothing to eat. Mercifully, they had plenty to drink, and that is an item with rats, who die in a very few hours if they cannot get a drink.
A bitter, dull paling of the sky, which by courtesy we will call dawn, found them cleaning again, with their hand-like forepaws, exactly like cats, inside a water-vole burrow. The owner had been out, bark-chipping, all night—it was the only thing he could find to keep body and life from parting company—and was not over-pleased, on his return, to find that he had company at home. A short two-round contest ensued, during which the water-vole must have felt as if he had taken on a bit of black lightning. Then the water-vole went away, somewhat bewildered, to turn some smaller water-vole out of his winter bed; and the rats curled themselves up, heads between hindlegs, tail encircling all, with only their ever-ready, elfin ears poking out to give the alarm, and they slept. And, by the way, it was a saying in the wild that no one had ever seen them asleep, or knew if, or how, they did sleep.
Nothing came to disturb them during the day—which was a wonder, for all the wild was hungry and looking for food—and at the hour when
Night, busy with her dawn, begins it with a star,
they came out, after a prolonged, starry-eyed stare, from their fastness, and continued their journey.
Things were serious now. They had not fed, and could find nothing to feed upon but two hawthorn-berries, dropped by the wasteful fieldfares; but they drank,andcleaned, and proceeded up-stream, with that caution one only learns in a world full of enemies and empty of friends.
Another six hours of this cold on an empty stomach would send them into that sleep—the dread, drugged slumber of the cold—from which there is no awakening in this world, and they seemed to know it. They were desperate, and their eyes burnt in their sharp heads like gimlet-holes of light. Desperate they were, as the poor, little, brilliantly resplendent, and tropic-looking kingfisher had, no doubt, been, whom they found, frozen into a dried, huddled heap, under the stream-bank, and so emaciated that, after they had picked his bones, they scarcely knew that they had touched him.
But anon the face of the snow changed—meaningly for them. Whereas before they had been alone, almost, in a frozen world, scarcely crossing a trail but the quadruple track of water-voles or the chain-pattern impression of a moorhen—nor had seen a living thing but the square-ended, squat, little, black form of a water-vole out upon an alder-branch, gnawing bark—they now began to be aware of gradually increasing company. Not that the company advertised itself, mark you. Being wild company, it would not; but they knew it was there.
The chain-trail of the moorhen reduplicated itself. It was joined by that of a water-rail—they saw his ruby eyes and rat-like form in passing. The fourfold track of a rabbit led the way ahead of them, as if pointing the path, to be joined by the broken footprints of another rabbit, and then by the track made by the longer leap of a hare, fourfold also. The delicate lined marks left by a wood-mouse now kept company with the others, and anon the little fairy imprints of two field-voles—short-tailed field-mice, if you prefer. They crossed the track of another rabbit going, at right-angles, down to the water to drink, and then the little, busy tattoo of bank-voles. Another hare's trail, and more rabbits' tracks, began to meander about, but all heading more or less one way—the way they were going. And then they stopped dead at the smudged groove and ancient and fish-like scent of an otter. Moreover, they had scarcely got over that than they came upon the dog-like tracks, and the smell, like nothing else, of Reynard, the fox; and, with nerves fairly tingling now, and eyes everywhere at once, they arrived at last—as the converging trails seemed to say they would—at the towering, smudged blur against the sky, which was the farm-buildings.
The black rat peered under the lower rung of a gate into a straw-yard, and heard the rustlings of little folk—field-vole, bank-vole, and wood-mouse—who had gone before him. There was no sign of the others; but that was not strange, for the hares and the rabbits had probably gone round to the kitchen-garden, for which they were making in their extremity of hunger; and the otter and the fox were, most likely, keeping each other off the fowlhouse.
Wherefore, plucking up courage, the black rat skipped into the yard, and made straight for the manger, where, in the inky blackness under the open-sided roofs, he could hear the long-drawn blowing and sigh of fat cattle lying down.
A pale moon came out behind him, and showed him tripping lightly over a bullock's broad back. Then he was up on the manger-edge, had paused to make sure, and was down in the manger, picking up crumbs and dust of linseed-cake and chaff. Three mice were doing the same thing, but fled at his approach; but he did not trouble about that, for the cattle had not left even him and his wife a full meal, having blown what was left of the chaff away, and licked up practically all of the cake-crumbs and dust. However, it was better than nothing.
The rat's natural curiosity was awakened, and his comparative warmth in this place, out of the razor-edged wind—oh, what a relief to be out of that infernal sawing blast!—made him explore. And he ran along the edge of the manger to a hole in the wall, which led—the peculiar and indescribable smell said so—through to the pig-sties. But here he stopped, and his wife behind him stopped. Some one was coming through from the opposite side—some one who smelt very much worse than any pig.
Next instant both black rats had gone off together like sparks—if ever sparks were black—and the brown rat, coming through the hole, wondered what on earth had happened. Then he sniffed at their trail, tried, but found it impossible, to follow, and passed on. He would have felt great pleasure in slaying them if he could, and they knew that.
The black rat now essayed to cross the yard to the stable. He could not very well stop there—up among the rafters, that is—all night, so he came down, and, with his wife following him, gingerly rustled out upon the partially snow-covered straw.
Then he got a shock that turned him into a winking series of black streaks.
Then he got another shock which turned him, literally, into—well, into black lightning. You never saw anything like it in all your life. You never would have believed that any living beast could have so frantically and so furiously got itself about from place to place so instantaneously. It was—dazzling. It made you blink. It was It in the agility line, and no mistake.
Firstly, the brown rat, having hidden up in some black corner, with brown-rat cunning, came hopping out instantly—nay, charging—on the black rat's trail. And there was murder in his wicked, little, glinting eyes at he came.
Secondly, a white eider-down quilt—at least, that was what it seemed like—descended lightly as—as an eider quilt, and as soundlessly, out of the blue-black sky, and covered the brown rat up. You could hear his horrid, muffled screaming of rage and fear under the quilt; you could see the quilt—but they saw that it looked pale brown on top—lifting about, and feeling for that murder-child of a rat underneath. Then the quilt got him—you could hear the unspeakably beastly death-squeal reverberate mufflingly—and then the quilt rose, still utterly without sound, and one saw it was a big barn-owl, with a rat—a brown rat—twitching in its white-mittened claws.
But do you think that made any difference? If so, you don't know the cruel devil of perseverance that is the brown rat.
As the black rat, at the end of his amazing lightning display, reached the barn, with his mate behind him, he leapt—he could not stop—clean over the back of one great twenty-inch, glitter-eyed brown ghoul, called by the death-scream of his colleague—other rats usually answer it—coming out of a hole. The black rats dashed into the hole like flickering streaks, but the brown rat had instantly spun upon himself, and was after them.
The barn was an unfortunate choice. It seemed full of brown rats, and four of them, in the darkness, instantly took up the pursuit of the now fairly hunted black couple. Nothing but their miraculous agility saved those two from being eaten alive, but they came out of the barn on to the spotless snow on the far side, with only a foot to spare between their long tails and the mangy, scarred head of the leading brown fiend behind them.
Straight across the open, like a drawn black bar, they shot, to a towering building of wood, and along this—here they lost six inches of the precious twelve by which they led—looking for a hole. They found it, whizzed in, five brown rats close behind them, nine brown rats hard behind the five.
They discovered themselves in a great room half-filled with sacks and the sweet smell of corn, and in and out among these sacks they led their hunters such a dizzy chase as no man ever witnessed, or could witness, for the matter of that, since human eyes could not follow it. But the end seemed positive, anyway. It was only a question of tiring the black sparks out, for the four brown rats in the place, engaged upon lowering the weight of the flour in the sacks—one of those rats a dreaded cannibal of twenty-one and a half inches—joined in the mobbing, and soon the black rats found themselves in such a position that there was no escape—no escape for any but a black rat. For them there was one way. And those two living electric sparks on four feet took it. They went up the wall!
I don't know, but I guess that, as the black rats' upper jaws were longer and sharper and more shark-like than the brown rats', and their tails very much longer, they got a spring off the tail—and legs, too—and had an agility in hanging on to knots and crannies above that possessed by the brown ghouls. Be that as it may, they did it, and got a respite under the floor of the room above, before their enemies, traveling more normally, and by holes, could swarm up after them.
Then the two, cornered at last, with one last desperate rush, shot up through a hole in the boards, out into the middle of the room on the first floor, and stopped dead.
Ah! they stopped. Good reason, too. Good reason had the five brown rats, excited with blood-lust, hard on their tails, to stop also.
They found themselves suddenly revealed in the middle of a big room, furnished mainly with a few sacks, and flooded with a dazzling, blinding glare of electric light, that seemed brighter than the very sun.
There they were, all seven, black and brown, struck rigid, plain and clear for any to see. And four men and two dogs stood there seeing them. They, those men and dogs, had just come quietly for their evening rat-hunt, turning on the light suddenly, for the place was a mill as well as a farm, making—from the mill-wheel—its own electricity.
There was a strained, aching pause for about as long as a man takes to gasp. Then the dogs sprang in, and one of the men jumped to the only hole in the room they had not previously stopped up.
But the black rats! The brown rats died, at intervals, fighting horribly, as cornered brown rats do. In five minutes they were, all five, dead—that is, all that had come into the room and been cut off. The black rats, however, in five minutes, were not dead. Nobody seems to have seen them, after the hunt had once begun, till the others were killed. Even then all four men aver that they could never rightly swear that they saw them. They saw lines, and streaks, and flashes, and whirls, and halos of black, which might have been rats—and the dogs said they were—but no one could swear to it. At times these giddy phenomena were among the rafters, at other times they were on the floor, and yet again they were going up or coming down the walls; but all the while both men and dogs seemed to be everlastingly too late, and hunting them where, half-a-second before, they had been. In fact, they perpetually had been, and were always where snapping jaws and beating sticks were not.
At the end of half-an-hour the men, mopping their foreheads, even in that cold, gasped, "Lor' love yer! Did yer ever see th' like?"
At the end of three-quarters of an hour the men flung themselves, gasping, on to the sacks of flour, and the dogs, panting, on to the floor—done. And the black rat and his mate, lively as ever, perkily watched them from the rafters.
Then the men and dogs went away, the light went out, and presently great sounds of war below suggested that the brown rats on the ground-floor were having the time of their lives. So were the two black rats, but a different sort of time. They were feasting upon meal and grain. And there, so far as I know, as they were like birds, flying among the rafters like black lightning if molested, they live to this day.