He makes a solitude, and calls it—peace.—BYRON.
He comes, the false disturber of my quiet.Now, vengeance, do thy worst.—SHERIDAN.
The rising sun came striding over the edge of the world, and presented the mountain with a golden crown; later it turned the rolling, heaving mystery of the mists below into a sea of pure amber. A tiny falcon—a merlin—shot up out of the mist, hung for a moment, whilst the sun transformed his wings to purple bronze, and fell again, vanishing instantly. Next, a cock-grouse, somewhere below the amber sea, crowed aloud to proclaim the day, and a raven mocked at him hoarsely.
Then, and not till then, the Chieftain awoke. The Chieftain showed as a chocolate, golden-brown, wedge-shaped mass of feathers, perched on a lonely pinnacle of rock, and, his appalling, razor-edged claws being hidden under the overhanging feathers of his legs, he was scarcely striking. Next moment he opened his eyes, and was no longer mean, for he was a golden eagle, and the eyes of a golden eagle are terrible. In them are written hauteur, pride, and arrogant fierceness beyond anything on this earth; there is also contempt that has no expression in speech. He shot out his neck, clapped his talon-like beak, and gazed out, over the mist that hid Loch Royal, to the south shore of the loch, where lived his son. The loch was, as it were, their frontier, the boundary-line that divided the hunting-grounds of father and son, and it was seldom crossed by either bird.
A little wind rose somewhere in a mountain gorge, and went shrieking down, rending the mist asunder, as a man rends carded wool. And behind the wind slid Chieftain, who know the value of a hidden descent. He shot through the rent, racing down with the sun's rays to earth, and surprised a cock-grouse at his breakfast, nipping off the tender heather-shoots daintily one by one. So swiftly did Chieftain fall that the grouse never knew what had killed him; he was dead—in a flash. The great eagle swept on with the grouse in his claws, and, without stopping, beat upwards again.
Suddenly, without any warning, a bullet came singing over the rolling heather, and passed, with a whine, close to Chieftain's head. Later came the blasting report of a rifle. As for Chieftain, he gave one amazed scream of outraged and startled dignity, dropped his grouse, and went; and when an eagle goes in that way, it is like the passing of a rocket.
A few minutes later Chieftain was whirling round high up among the crags, calling imperiously for his wife, as a king might call. And she came, she came, that huge, fierce bird, with a trickle of blood dripping down her neck, and a fire in her eye that was unpleasant to behold. She, too, had been fired upon and grazed by a bullet, and she said so in no measured tones. Now, the laird of Loch Royal deer forests had never allowed his eagles to be fired at or killed. They were part of the family possessions, as it were—always had been for generation upon generation; and, moreover, they kept down the grouse on the deer forests—which was useful, since the grouse is the red deer's unpaid sentinel, and give him warning of the crawling, creeping stalker.
Wonderfully the two eagles circled round one another in mighty, still-winged glidings, effortless, majestic, masterly, sometimes together, sometimes apart, drawing ever away northward with scarcely a wing-flap, without, it seemed, any visible force to drive them, till they swam, like specks on the eye-ball, miles away and upwards round the white-mantled peaks.
Here, so easily can birds pass from scene to scene, they were in another world, an Arctic land, silent as the Arctic, bare as the Arctic, cold as the Arctic, and, at first sight, desolate and uninhabited as the Arctic appears to be. But this was only an example of Nature's wonderful magic. Desolate it was. Uninhabited—no.
So far as the eagles could see, there was only a raven, cursed with a far-advertising blackness, who sat upon a splintered fang of rock and mocked them hollowly. But he was not the only creature there.
Sweeping down with a hissing rush over a giddy slope of shale that looked perpetually upon the brink of a general slide downen masse, with their immense shadows underrunning them, the eagles startled suddenly by their unexpectedness a great red beast into motion. There was a clatter of antlers, a click of hoofs, a little shower of stones, and away went a superb stag, a "royal," a "twelve-pointer," lordly and supercilious, picking his way without a slip on that awful incline. But until he moved, even he had been quite invisible, bang in the open though he was.
The eagles, following him and swooping at him with imperious savagery, because they were still angry and upset, though never really coming near him, bustled him into taking that awful path at a loose hand canter, not so much, I think, because he, the king of the forest—and this, this lost, lone scene, was part of the local conception of the word "forest"—cared the sweep of a "brow-tine" for the eagles, as because he was startled and uncertain as to what was supposed to be happening. And the stones spurned by his neat hoofs—he seemed to kick most of them down behind him as he finished with them, each making for itself its own miniature avalanche—helped to add to the sudden confusion.
Then it was as if a shell burst in front of him—right under his haughty nose—and he moved exactly eight feet one inch without touching the ground; also, in doing it, he cleared a five-foot-seven-inch bowlder, so absolutely without the slightest sign of an effort that he seemed to have been blown upwards. It is worth noting, because twenty seconds before he had been too lazy to clear a four-foot heather-bush, and had gonethroughit.
The "shell" had been a party of ptarmigan very much flustered and upset by being all but galloped over; not the white and frozen ptarmigan of the cheap poultry warehouse, but the "live" proposition of that name in their gray, or usual, disguise, posing as stones among many thousand that lay around the summits.
Wild horses would not have put the ptarmigan on wing in face of those terrible, sliding, underrunning shadows of death—indeed, one had been lying within two yards of the Chieftain, as he slid back low to ground after stooping at the lordly stag—but this crashing avalanche of shale with the king of the forest atop was too much for them, and they went down the "hill" into the nothing and the far distance that lay, so to speak, almost at one's feet, like a spatter of shrapnel.
At the same instant two gray shadows evolved themselves out of the very ground, and slid away, swift as scudding clouds, up the slope; and a third gray form, also apparently sprung from nowhere, rose from before them, and dropped like a spent projectile into the low-lands. They were two mountain hares and an old sinner of a gray crow; but the thing that caught the Chieftain's stabbing eye most was none of these.
Both eagles had, with half-shut wings, dropped like mighty barbs towards the dim, blue distance of the vale, after the hurtling ptarmigan; but in an instant their great vans respread, their big, wedged tails swiftly fanned, and with every available brake on, as it were, they fetched up almost short. Then they both described a single, gliding, calm, lazy-looking half-circle, and settled upon a turret rock that shot fifteen feet up from the mountain's shoulder.
Above them, the snow shimmered and glistened blindingly. Below, the warm mists of the dales steamed off under the beating sun. Loch Royal lay like a mighty, burnished shield to the southward; and northward, peak rose behind peak in everlasting grand perspective.
Near them was only the lonely slope, bare now, it seemed, of all life. But they thought otherwise. Their unspeakably fierce gaze was focused upon what looked like a grained slab, like any other grained slab, if it had not all at once begun to twitch, and so—even then one could only make out the faint outline of a body—turn gradually into a wild cat asleep on his side. The twitching was not the result of a fit, but of dreams. Probably he had not meant to go to sleep at all—in a land of golden eagles! He had merely meant to bask in the sun, within instant spring of a handy hole between the stones if anything in the enemy line turned up. That very sun, however, had conspired with drowsiness to betray him, and—something in the enemy linehadturned up.
Even so, I doubt if the golden eagles, with all their wonderful prismatic binocular vision, made out the cat, as man could. Birds have not that power, as man has. The twitching they were instant to see. The cause of it they must have, equally instantly, suspected. Certainly, however, was a long time coming to them. Precisely when it did, no man knoweth. They remained like carvings or very fine figures cast in bronze, and as immovable as the same, for the best part of an hour, if you please; and during that time all the sign of life that either of them gave was to wink a yellow eyelid, as quickly as an instantaneous shutter winks, several times.
At the end of that period a rain-squall came racing and howling round the summit. It passed in a few seconds, and left mist—cloud, if you like—damp, dank, and chilly, and a dead calm, in its wake, and—the Chieftain had vanished (I told you he knew the value of a hidden descent). But goodness and his own arrogant self alone knew when or where; in the squall, most likely. But he had certainly vanished.
The Chieftain's mate sat on, as stolid, and as solid, and as statuesque as ever. She had not moved when he evaporated, or given any sign whatever.
With the coming of the mist, the cat woke up. The cold probably awoke him. He was not pleased. He had come to get warm, not cold. He arose and stretched himself, baring all his claws and fangs with lazy insolence, for any whom it might concern to see.
Then—he collapsed, falling as if the slab on which he stood had slidden from under him, and remained—flattened tense, wide-eyed, and dangerous.
The Chieftain's wife had jerked her head and sneezed. At least, she had yanked her cranium quick as quick, and made a noise. It seemed like a sneeze. For the rest, she remained as motionless and expressionless as bronze Buddha, her wonderful orbs scowling at the wild cat.
Then that cat got off that slab of rock. I say got off, but it would be more correct to say that he slid off sideways on his tummy—flat. One had difficulty in seeing that he moved. His inscrutable, wide, sinister, yellow-green eyes were fixed upon the Chieftain's wife. The whole of his attention was fastened, focused, concentrated upon the Chieftain's wife. And there he made his mistake. He forgot about the Chieftain himself, but the Chieftain had not forgotten about him. In fact, the Chieftain was there, on the spot, or over it, rather, exactly above the wild cat's head, five hundred feet above, and very slowly revolving upon wide, outstretched pinions, as if hung by invisible, slowly swung wire from heaven.
If the cat had looked up! But, then, the cat would not have been a wild four-footed animal if he had. In all the aeons four-footed wild-folk never seem to have learnt to look up, and, for the omission, die some painful deaths that might otherwise be avoided. I do not say that none of themeverlook up—they do, but it is seldom.
Indeed, finally this wild cat did look up; he could not well help it. There was a sound like the swift descent of a smiting sword above him. But he was seconds too late.
Seconds before, the Chieftain had vanished again. Nay, he had changed. His wings had shut, and—he had turned into a line, a dark streak drawn, almost as lightning draws itself, from heaven to earth, thus—wh-r-r-r-ssss-sh!
It was then that the cat looked up—just in time to receive the Chieftain's black tiger-talons, upon brilliant yellow claws, clashing against his own ivory fangs, and—well, in his eyes.
The Chieftain's wife flung from her strange self her immobility, flung out a scream, flung open her pinions, and—shifted. She could not have arrived upon the scene more than three seconds after her lord—but not by any means master. She was certainly not half that time getting to work.
I am not going to describe the struggle that followed, in deference to certain good, kind, and well-meaning people who are unable to face the stern realities of life, or—to save their country. Such things, however, must be; and they would not happen if it were not for a hard, though very sound, purpose, among beasts as among men. Nature is far-seeing and very wise. Moreover, she hates hypocrisy, and—well, we may not all be butchers, but most of us eat meat.
It was certainly a very great confloption, for, of course, that wild cat fought like a—like a wild cat, which is like a Welshman, and I cannot say more than that. And in the end the whole inferno, being upon a very sharp slope, began to slide, and slid, dragging a welter of dust and raw earth and feathers and fur after it, in an avalanche of its own, till it fetched up in a tangle of mountain-ash roots and furze two hundred feet below, where it furiously and fearfully, in one wild, awful, whirling flurry, ended.
After that the Chieftain dragged what was left of that wild cat out of the bushes, where he had tried to jamb and crawl and burrow himself, out into the open—well into the open—so that the eagles could look all round, which they like to do, being birds of high degree—also vermin, or counted as such by gamekeepers of low degree.
The pair—Heaven and the laird alone know how long they had been good and faithful partners in life—thereupon set to hooking at one another with their horny, dragon-like beaks, gripping with black-taloned yellow claws that even a Hercules would shake hands with just once, beating with monster wings that would knock you or me silly, snapping horny, resounding snaps, and generally "not 'arf a-carryin' on" in the approved and correct modern matrimonial manner. So it appeared, at least; but among eagles—within the royal circle, that is to say—such things might be their way of paying compliments, for you cannot expect feathered couples of the royal blood to behave like a pair of mere love-birds.
Then came the bullet.
It was a neat, long, nickel-jacketed, lead-nosed bullet of some .300-caliber, and its own report was chasing it. It sang a high-pitched, plaintive little song all alone to itself as it traveled along through the fine, champagne-like mountain air, at about thirteen hundred feet per second, and it was aimed to hit the Chieftain exactly in the full of the chest. That was why, I suppose, it hit the wild cat smack in the backbone, and killed that poor beast all over again. But you can never tell with bullets.
It might be mentioned here that just as turtle-soup is to their worships, so is wild cat to golden eagles—abonne bouche par excellence, so to say. They do not get it every day, or every month, for the matter of that—at least, not in these islands of enlightenment, for the wild cat shares with them the honor of being a martyr of Fate, and it is on theindex expurgatoriusof the gamekeeper also.
But, I give you my word, those two mighty birds left that wild cat uneaten. I say "left" him advisedly, for it was rather a matter that they had left him than that they did leave him. Anyway, they were not near him, not anywhere near him, and I suppose they went. There had arisen a noise as if all Regent Street had at that moment rustled its combined "silk foundations," and—there were our eagles far, far away, and in opposite directions, melting quicker than real sugar-knobs in hot grog into the haze of the distant sky.
And after that the Chieftain and his wife glided up into the setting sun till it swallowed them in a red glory, and when the sun had burnt itself out, swam—swam stupendously and wonderfully—through ether down to bed. Bed with them that night consisted in sitting, regally enthroned among clouds, upon a black, rock bastion exactly above a clean drop of not much more than six hundred feet, and rocked by "the wracked wind-eddies" of the mountain-tops. The good God who made all things—even the animal that had fired at them—alone knows what they dreamt about, that superb, intolerant, fierce, haughty, implacable couple.
Now, the man, the—er—lord of creation, who had fired that shot—in fact, all those shots that day—was Pig Head, the back-to-the-lander from the South. Pig Head argued that deer forests are farms lying idle. And the laird had offered to rent him a farm at one-and-nothing-three the acre to disprove it. Pig Head had taken the offer. He disapproved of lairds as unrevolutionaries. He hated red deer because they were too smart for him to kill wholesale, and he loathed golden eagles because they were the pride of the "hills." But he kept his opinions to himself, because he valued his neck. The People of the Hills would have stretched it very much longer than his own long tongue if he hadn't. In his heart he also hated the "oppressed" People of the Hills for that they loved their laird, regarded deer-stalking as a religious rite, and—wore kilts!
As a matter of fact, Pig Head's farm never grew anything more than some clinging heather, a little cross-leaved heath, patches of furze, a clump of storm-bent Scotch firs or so, and rock—mostly rock.
Pig Head had only been able to get what he thought was his own back upon that day by firing at the eagles, because the laird and the stalkers, the gillies, the keepers, and the People of the Hills, were away, all away, at a sheep-dog trial, or a clan meeting, or something. After that he had to work in silence, and he did.
There are always people who will buy a golden eagle "British caught," and those who don't want live ones will take 'em dead, and have them stuffed. They like to be able to set 'em up in the hall among other stuffed birds, and boast that they shot 'em. Other people of it like decayed mind come and look at them, and offer money for them at sales out of jealousy. That's collecting.
Now, somewhere, somehow, sometime during his checkered career, Pig Head had heard, or read, of a way of catching golden eagles. He proceeded.
Upon an unholy and cold shaly slope well up among the clouds, the mist, and the ptarmigan, Pig Head had hollowed him out a hollow, roomy enough for himself to crouch in. He was the sort of man that crouched—and "grouched." Over the top he put a nice big slab; the walls were of piled stones, and at one end was an aperture eight inches or so long by about one foot. Being made of its surroundings, the hiding-place did not look at all suspicious—from a bird's point of view.
Finally, upon the morning after the unsuccessful shooting, and before it was light—this was necessary, for there is no knowing how far the eyes of eagles can see—Pig Head ensconced himself in this hiding-place. It was perishing cold, and Pig Head, who did not smoke, and never drank whisky—only gin—was blue of nose and numb of hand. A good plaid would have helped him, but he abhorred plaids.
The dawn came up over the mountains, the mists sank down to the vales, and the dawn wind, lean and searching, went whispering over the hills.
Then a speck grew out of the heights, out of the west and the dark, and growing and growing momentarily, became a rustling, sinister, untidy, heavy shape, which anon settled upon a rock, and croaked, "Glock! glock!" twice, almost like a bark, in a deep and sepulchral voice. To it was added another sable form, coming down from the lonely stony heights, and the two sat together, remarking, as they looked—but their wonderful eyes must have seen it very far away—at the bait. It was the wild cat turned inside-out, and other things, on a slab outside the aperture before mentioned, that was at one end of Pig Head's hiding-place. And the black specters were ravens.
"Ou!" they said; then "Aw!" then again "Ou!" One remarked "Augh!" and the other agreed—or, it may have been, disagreed—with an "Au!"
Evidently the wild cat, in a disguise in which he would not have known even his own self, looked very enticing, and he and the situation generally were being discussed from all points of view.
I say from all points of view advisedly, because, although the ravens discoursed much over their council of war, they would not come within a hundred yards, and it was a voice from the semi-dark, or western, side which finally stayed them in the very act of unfolding their big, rounded wings to fly away.
"Krar-krar-krar!" rasped the voice; and the ravens folded their wings again to wait and see!
It was a gray crow, and the ravens knew that never was gray crow an innocent lost in the wilderness.
If the gray, or hoodie, crow—always remembering that crows, gray or black, are servants of the Devil, just as ravens are, and very cunning—if the crow, I say, thought that here was food without some horrible form of hidden death lurking behind it, then the chances were the gray crow was right. They knew "hoodie," you see. Anyway, if they let him go first, and he was wrong, then it would behisfuneral, not theirs.
Wherefore the gray crow went first to the bait, and Pig Head, half-dead with cold and peering out of a tiny peep-hole, called down blessings of a weak and watery nature upon his black head. And well he might, for if the gray crow had shied at the bait, then everybody else would have taken his tip.
They took his tip now, for in a few minutes there was a "hurrr-hrrr-hrrr" of wings, and, one after the other, down came the ravens.
Anon the ravens were joined by a third, volplaning from some cloud-covered peak, where he must have been watching all the time; and the crow was joined by four accomplices, who just drifted up from nowhere special, as gray crows have a habit of doing when there is carrion afoot.
But Pig Head had not come there to entertain ravens, nor was he at that moment laying up a store of lumbago for the purpose of gratuitously feeding disreputable gray crows. He had other quarry in view. The gray crows, however, were his best asset. They quarreled, and were loquacious, and, in fact, they made a most infernal noise; and he had stated that the noise was necessary to his success. This would seem as if eagles hunt by sound as well as by sight. Pig Head was the first person I ever heard that suggested so. But, be that as it may, the racket increased as the sun, robed in purple, gold, and crimson splendor, rose over the mountain-tops; and with the sun came the only bird, so the ancients tell us, who can look the sun full in the face without blinking—Aquila, the eagle.
But—make no mistake about this point—he who came then, grandly, proudly sweeping over the blue, dim ridges, was not the Chieftain himself, for this was not the Chieftain's territory, but the Chieftain's son; he who lived, as you will remember, upon the other, or south, side of Loch Royal.
Haughtily, statelily, as a king might go to his throne, so did the Chieftain's son let himself down, in stupendous hundred-foot spirals, to a pinnacle of rock, jagged, saw-edged, and perpendicular, about two hundred yards away; and the ravens and the gray crows, who saw him coming, made great and sudden hostile outcry at first, and then, as he folded, foot by foot, his immense pinions about him, and sat there erect, with his piercing, scowling gaze bent uponthem, they were dumb.
And Pig Head, aching with cramp and cold in his hiding-place, knew thatthequarry was at hand. But if you think, because the eagle was at hand, that the time was at hand too, you don't know eagles. They may be, upon occasion, as quick as the spring of death, but they can also be as slow as the wrath of Heaven. And that bird there, the great, grand, haughty, unbendingAquila chrysoetus, that golden eagle, sat. I say, he sat. And there, so far as he was concerned, appeared to be an end of it. He might have been a carven copestone of the very granite fang he sat upon, for all the appearance of life he gave, except that occasionally—say at fifteen-minute intervals—he winked a yellow-lidded wink. And the wink was almost as unlifelike and uncanny as the bird.
And the gray crows and the ravens gulped and quarreled, with one eye upon the eagle and one upon their job; and Pig Head—Pig Head sat and cursed that eagle, from his horny beak to his barred tail, through chattering—and aching—teeth. But the eagle never moved a feather.
We are told that Alexander sighed for other worlds to conquer. So it was with the Chieftain, who was not Alexander.
After his wife had gone a-hunting eastward—a wonderful and gigantic silhouette floating and dwindling into the furnace of the rising sun—the Chieftain sat upon his ledge of rock, staring across the gleaming, painted, glassy expanse of Loch Royal, southward, to the dominions of his son.
He had seen his son, a speck in the dawnlight, invisible to our eyes, sailing from peak to upflung peak. He had seen him suddenly check and circle downwards. And then—he had not seen him.
He had waited two hours, with that patience which birds and reptiles have, and still he had not seen him. Yet, if during that time he had risen, the Chieftain must have seen him. And the Chieftain knew that. He knew also that a golden eagle very rarely makes a "kill" so big that he has to remain with it two hours. The alternative, therefore, would seem to be death or carrion; and the way in which he had circled down would seem to suggest carrion. And it is written among the laws of the king of birds that when carrion is about, the strict rules and regulations as to the inviolability of the frontiers may be, in some degree, broken.
Therefore the king unfurled his overshadowing vans, and launched himself down the lake with mighty, slow, powerful strokes, like the steady thrust of marine engines. He would go and see.
Five minutes later the Chieftain was as motionless as his son, perched, like him, too, upon a rock, watching the highwaymen and footpads of the moors squabbling over the bait—they had no eyes to see what they were doing, for they had to keep one eye upon each eagle—and about two hundred yards away on the other side.
This may have hurried matters somewhat, for within only about another half-hour the Chieftain's son rose, and, with heavy wing-flaps, flew down to the bait, sending the ravens and the crows up in a cloud, like blown bits of burnt paper, as he came to anchor. And it was curious that, in stooping to meanness, the royal bird's aspect was no longer grand. He flew heavily and clumsily to the spot. He settled without grace, and almost overbalanced on to his Grecian nose. He clutched, and tore, and gulped, and gorged like a vulture. Thus Nature always dresses her actors for their parts. You may have noticed it.
"He clutched, and tore, and gulped, and gorged"[Illustration: "He clutched, and tore, and gulped, and gorged"]
"He clutched, and tore, and gulped, and gorged"[Illustration: "He clutched, and tore, and gulped, and gorged"]
But Pig Head—Pig Head was chuckling. He had silently and softly removed the clod of peat that blocked the aperture before mentioned. Running through this aperture he had a cord whose other end was fastened to the bait, and every time the great eagle wrenched and tore at the flesh, he very, very gently pulled the bait towards him. He did not move when the mighty bird had his head up, gulping, you will note; for even Pig Head knew that an eagle nearly standing on his head and tugging, and not feeling the difference between his own tugs and the tugs on a cord, is not the same as an eagle with his head up and eyes stabbing everywhere at once.
At last the victim had been drawn, upon the bait, within reach, and Pig Head, slipping his hand through the opening, grabbed the thick, powerful legs of the bird, and pulled. There was one mighty upheaval of vast vans, and—no eagle! What happened down inside the hiding-place was more or less private. There were sounds as if a young earthquake were getting ready to be born in that place; but in the end the Chieftain's son had his legs tied, and suffered the indignity of being ignominiously thrust into a filthy sack. He said nothing during that argument, but his looks were enough to kill anything with a thinner hide than Pig Head.
Immediately Pig Head got ready for the Chieftain. What's that? Yes, the Chieftain is right. That great, haughty bird had not moved. You see, eagles are not educated up to seeing their full-grown sons disappear into the bowels of the earth without explanation or warning given. There is nothing in their experience to meet the phenomenon. Consequently they don't tumble, as a rule, and—well, listen for yourself.
In a short time—a short time for an eagle; not less than half-an-hour, really—the Chieftain flapped heavily to the bait, and fed—beastily, if the truth must be told.
He was bigger than his son, and heavier, and knew more about the world, and Pig Head was longer in seeing a fair chance to make a grab at the royal legs. At last, however, the chance came, and Pig Head grabbed. The Chieftain naturally lost his balance, and before he knew what had happened he was inside Pig Head's "booby-hutch."
The Chieftain, however, was not an ordinary bird, not even an ordinary eagle. Moreover, he must have been a great age, older even than Pig Head. Be that as it may, the Chieftain believed mightily in the wild maxim which says, "They should take who have the power, and they should keep who can."
And upon that he acted.
It all happened in a flash. Like lightning his right wing came round with a terrific flail-stroke, and hit Pig Head in the face at the precise instant that the surgical instrument he carried as his beak sank deep into one of Pig Head's calves. The Chieftain was upside-down at the moment, and his legs were tied together, but that made no difference to the savagery of the blow.
Pig Head uttered one howl of agony, and tumbled backwards, and his devil saw to it that he should tumble backwards upon the very sack wherein lay the Chieftain's son, squirming with rage. The Chieftain's son was a son of his father, and hearing the young hurricane of his father's wings, and feeling the intolerable weight of Pig Head sitting involuntarily down upon him, struck for the cause like a good un—struck, with his cruel, hooked bill, through sack, through trousers, through pants, and home through flesh, and Pig Head rebounded into the air considerably quicker than he had gone down, hitting his head against the roof, a resounding whack, and yelling fit to awake all the devils in cinders. And he did not go alone. Upon one calf, and upon—another portion of him, the Chieftain and the Chieftain's son went with him.
Very few men have ever left a powder-magazine on fire in quicker time than did Pig Head leave his hiding-place, and none could have made more noise in the process. The Chieftain stuck to him lovingly, and the Chieftain's son, sack and all, seemed determined never to leave him; and Pig Head was nearly demented with pain as he leapt out, caracoling wildly, into the light of day, and into the arms of—only the laird, the head stalker, four gillies, and two collies.
They had come to find him, these stern-faced, long, lean men, on account of "information received." And they had found him. But they did not speak. They were Scotch. Nor did they screw out a smile among them. They were Jocks! They acted—being Highlanders.
Four hands like iron claws seized Pig Head, and tipped him on end, even as he had tipped the eagles. Two knives went "snick" as they opened, then "wheep-wheep" as they cut. Several pieces of cord and bits of sacking flew into the air. There was one colossal upheaval of wings, a feathered whirlwind hurling everybody every way—and the Chieftain and his son, released and scandalized, offended and enraged beyond the rage of kings, rose swiftly into the air with mighty, threshing strokes that simply hurled them aloft like powerful projectiles—into the heavens, as it were terrible avenging spirits of the tempest. A chaos, a rush, a mighty blast of air, and—they were gone!
Then the laird turned to Pig Head, and, "Mon, ye dinna ken th' laird. If ye did—w-e-e-l, Ah'm thinkin' ye'd understand."
Between the clumps of the stunted acacias the sun beat down with the pitilessness of a battleship's furnace, and it was not much better in the acacias themselves. Save for a lizard here and there, motionless as a bronze fibula, or a snake asleep with eyes wide open, or the flash of a "pinging" fly, all Nature seemed to have fled from that intolerable white-hot glare and gone to sleep.
But the hour of emancipation was at hand, and the dim caverns of shade—what there was of it—stirred strangely. A hundred yards away a blotch of shadow beneath a group of stunted trees swayed and broke up into several zebra moving off to water. Fifty yards distant the inky shade that carpeted the earth under a bare outcrop of rock gave up a single gnu antelope bull and a Grant's gazelle whose lyrate horns were as wonderful as his consummate grace.
Thereafter came sound. Till then there had been only heat, the first hints at movement, and the terrifying silence of the wilderness. Even the birds had been dumb. Now came "a feathered denizen of the grove" with a peculiarly arresting, grating chatter, a noise no one could overlook, and few could help investigating. And finally, brazenly, impudently, excitedly flitting from branch to branch, the chatterer evolved slowly out of the ragged bush-choked landscape, a dusky little bird, seemingly a bird of no importance, scarce larger than a lark.
Putting personal appearance aside, however, this feathered one, who dared to shatter the slumber of the everlasting wilderness, seemed to be under the impression that he was of vast importance. Moreover, his business appeared to be pressing and urgent, so that he could neither brook delay nor take "No" for an answer. It was as though he was under a desperate need to take you somewhere or show you something, and YOU must follow him—must; there was nothing else for it.
But nobody cared. The zebra trooped off without turning their striped heads; the gazelle, weighted under his horns, and the gnu bull stalked away unattending; the lizards remained fixed in a permanent attitude of attention; and the snakes continued to stare at nothing. No one took the slightest notice.
Then came the reply.
It was as if a person or a thing, deep down in the bowels of the earth, hearing the bird, stirred in its sleep, and shouted up, "I come." And it came.
Heralded by a peculiar, quaint, little, chatty, sibilant, hissing, whistling chuckle, there emerged from a regular cave that he, or an ant-bear, or some other burrower had constructed under an ancient bush, a beast—a most remarkable beast.
It was long—about three feet. It was low; it was stumpy, clumpy, sturdy, bear-like, and altogether odd. It had no ears that any one could find, and it rattled the most murderous armament of claws that you ever guessed at. But that was not all; not by any means. It, or, rather, he, had really been colored grayish white in the first place; but Nature had thoughtlessly dropped him into a vat of black paint on his "tummy," flat, and left him there to swim about, so that by the time he got out he was one half, including chin, black, and the other and upper half, including top of head and back and top of tail, grayish white. And then, for a joke, it seemed, Nature had painted a white band round where black and grayish white met, a sort of water-line, so to speak, and let the poor little beggar go—go, mark you, into a wild where self-advertisement is something more than unhealthful for the smaller folks. Afterwards, however, Nature—who is all a woman—had repented, seemingly, and being unable to undo her own jest, had given to the little, slow, conspicuous beast, as compensation, a courage surpassing the courage of any other beast on earth. The result was rather curious—it was also the ratel, or honey-badger, who had nothing at all to do with rats, but everything to do with honey, and was self-evidently more than three-parts badger.
"Kru-tshee! Kru-tshee-chlk! Krue-tshee-chlk-chlk, whee-tshee-tse-tse, tse-i-who-o-o!" he whistled, and chuckled, and muttered, and fairly sang to himself as he came trotting along towards the cheeky little bird, like a dog that answers a whistle. His gait was all his own, as he, too, was all his own original self, being unlike anything else, although he bore the stamp of the badger people upon him.
With a calm, rolling trot, head down, tail up, back a fraction arched, with something like the slouch of his distant relation, the wolverine, he proceeded, preceded always by that dusky phantom bird that flitted and perched ahead of him, like a yellow-hammer down a country lane—calling, calling, calling. And he, lifting his odd, flat, "earless," sleek head to it, would whistle and chuckle in reply. They had, it seemed, arrived at a perfect understanding, these two, during the centuries. "Lead on, Macduff!" he seemed to say.
They passed antelopes anchored in the shade; hartebeest, impala, and roan after their kind. They heard the click of horn and the stamp of hoof, but troubled not. They passed the place where a leopard lay asleep up a tree, and saw a devil's whip of a ten-foot mamba snake—and the bite of that same is a sixty-second short cut to the grave—flee before them as if they, and not it, were death incarnate. Once a serval cat, all legs and ears and agility, stood in their path to listen to the funny chuckling, whistling noises, but fled when it saw the little, low ratel as if it had seen a ghost.
But always undeterred by anything in the way, engrossed utterly on the task in view, the dusky bird flew ahead, calling the ratel on with its harsh cry; and always the ratel, unhurried and cool, jogged along in its wake, answering, and whistling, and chuckling away to it, as if convulsed with inward merriment. Perhaps he was. It was a strange procession, anyway, and one you don't look for every day in the week, even in Africa, the land of mysteries and surprises.
Finally, the bird stopped; and the ratel looked, and saw that it was flitting round the base of a big mimosa. Enough! He hurried a little at last. Next moment he was nearly hidden under a continuous stream of earth and dust flying back from his amazing foreclaws, and a whirling, whirring vortex of perfectly demented bees, whose nest, that had been weeks in the building, was dissolving in seconds under the trowel-like scoopings of those fearful claws.
Honey! Honey! Honey!
That was it. That was the magic word the bird, who was a honey-guide by name, had shouted to the ratel, who was a honey-badger, you remember; and honey-bees they were that made the air delirious.
The bird, with the quick eye of a detective, had located the hole of the nest, but having no trowel, forthwith fetched the ratel, who had, and together they fed, the beast on honey, and the bird on the grubs in the combs.
And the bees? Oh, they don't count! At least, they might have been house-flies for all the notice the ratel took of them, save now and then to bunch a dozen or so off his cowled head carelessly. Yet they would probably have nearly killedus.
It was about this time that the bull-gnu appeared, tramping steadily towards them; a rugged, rough renegade of the wilderness; a ruffian kicked—or, rather, horned—out of some herd forever, and, for his sins, doomed always to face the risks of life alone, or in the companionship of other male outlaws of soured temper like himself—almost always male; the female wild seems guiltless of law-breaking, or is under a banner of protection if it is not. Such "rogues," as men call them, are not gentlemanly, as a rule. And, by the way, you know the gnu, of course,aliaswildebeest? The head of a very shaggy buffalo, the horsy mane, the delicate, strong, sloping antelope body, the long, mustang-like tail, and the strange, twisted, unconventional character, half-fierce, half-inquisitive.
He—that lonely one—was going to drink, and he may have been doing it early because he had only his two eyes and ears, and his one nose, to warn him of the dozen or two forms of death that awaited him at the drinking-place, instead of the eyes and ears and noses of all the herd.
The gnu saw neither honey-bird nor badger till he was within a yard of them. Then he stopped as instantly still as if he had been electrocuted.
The ratel, who had himself to feed, and a wounded wife and two young whom he would lead to that honey-feast anon, looked calmly over his shoulder at the form of the antelope towering above him. There was no sign of fear in his straight stare at the shaggy, ferocious-looking horned head. He had no business with it, and would thank it to mind its own affairs. And the honey-bird didn't care much, either, she having no young to feed, because, cuckoo-like, she left other birds—woodpeckers, for choice—to see to that.
Wherefore, for as long as a man would take to select a cigarette with care and light it, there was dead silence and stillness, broken only by the distant, deep "Hoo-hoo, hoo! hoo-hoo, hoo!" of a party of ground hornbills.
Then that devil of meddlesome curiosity which is the curse of the wildebeests fell upon that gnu, and sanity left him.
"Kwank!" neighed he. And again, "Kwank!"
Next instant he had spun, top-fashion, on all four feet at once, and jumped in the same manner, and was gone, whirling round them, with great shaggy head down, and in a halo of his own swishing tail, at the rate of knots.
It was nothing to be wondered at in that strange antelope that he should then sink from wild motion to absolute, fixed rigidity, broken only by the restless, horse-like swishing of the long tail, staring hard at the ratel.
Perhaps it was the bees that did it, or perhaps the ratel stood in the gnu's very own path, or in the way of his private dusting-hole. I know not; neither did the ratel—nor care much, for the matter of that. But when the gnu went off again, circling with hoarse snorts, and shying and swerving furiously and wonderfully at top speed, he sat up on his hindlegs, the better to get a view of the strange sight. Perhaps he thought a lion was lying somewhere near that he could not see from his lowly, natural position.
Again the gnu stopped as utterly instantly as if he had run into a brick wall, pawed, stamped, snorted, and went off once more into furiously insane caperings—a new set—all the time circling, with the little, black-and-gray, erect figure of the surprised ratel as a pivot.
And then, in a flash, before any one had a second's warning to grasp the truth or prepare, with head down, eyes burning in the down-dropped, shaggy head, and upcurved horn-points gleaming in the afternoon sun, he charged, hurling himself, a living, reckless, furious battering-ram, straight at the little ratel.
Did that ratel quit quick? Do ratels ever quit an unbeaten foe? I don't know. They may, once in the proverbial blue moon; but I haven't seen 'em. This one didn't. He seemed to know that it is held to be a sound military maxim to meet an attack by counter-attack, and he did, though he had only the fifth of a second to do it in. Ah, but it was good to see that odd little beast trotting out coolly, head low, tail high, singing his war-song as he rolled along to meet the charging foe so many, many times his own size.
Next moment there was a thud—somewhat as if some one had punched a pillow—and the ratel was flying through the air, high and fine, in a graceful and generous curve. A thorn-bush—what matter the precise name? there are so many in those parts, all execrable—acknowledged receipt of his carcass with a crash, and for a few seconds he hung, like a sack on a nail, spitted cleanly by at least one thorn, far thornier than anything we know here, before the thing gave way, and he fell, still limply, this way and that, hesitatingly, as it were, as each point lovingly sought to retain him, to a fork near the bottom, where he stayed.
At last he picked himself out of the fork, and—oh my!—with a whistling grunt of rage, coolly, calmly, clumsily if you like, but grandly all the same, trotted forth into the open to look for that bull-gnu again. And that, sirs, was the sort, of animalhewas.
The bull-gnu, however, who was not previously acquainted with small beasts that would face his charge—and an aerial journey,andthe thorns—and come back for more, had fetched a curve at full gallop, and loped off into the landscape. For the first time since the herds outlawed him, I fancy, he seemed to be quite pleased with himself, and soon, antelope-like, put the ratel from him placidly, and forgot. But he was reckoning without his host. If he had done with the ratel, the ratel had not done with him. No, by thunder—not by a good bit!
Finding no bull-gnu, the slow little black and grayish-white fighter from Fightersville returned at a walk, still whistling with rage, to the unearthed bees'-nest, which looked like a town after a bad air-raid. And the first thing he did was to patter almost on top of a cobra, a five-footer, who, having narrowly escaped death by the gnu's flying hoofs, was what one might call considerably "het" up, or "off the handle," so to say.
The servant of the Devil sat up, blew out its beastly hood, and shot forth a hiss that seemed to run all up and down one's spine, like lightning on an elm-tree.
The robber of honey sat up, said "Tchik!" and turned a somersault. What's that? Yes, somersault is right.
Followed instantly two thin jets of liquid, as much as anything I can think of like those lines called "trajectory curves" which ballisticians do so love to draw in books on rifle-shooting; only, these curved lines began at the hollow point of Mr. Cobra's poison-fangs, and were meant to end in Mr. Ratel's eyes. They didn't. Old man ratel, he was standing on his hind-legs, with his sturdy paws in front of his eyes—like a man who looks across a sunny land—and seemed just about to turn a somersault again. He changed his mind, though, when the poison, that would have blinded him for life—and that life wouldn't have been long in that wildthen, I want to tell you—stopped, and he went in at that black-necked, legless, soulless servant of Satan, utterly and amazingly unafraid. It was fine.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you that when Nature repented, and gave the ratel a courage surpassing the courage of any other beast on earth, she also gave him a skin tough as a pachyderm's, and loose, as if it were two sizes too large; and that is why that black-necked cobra died quite quickly, and the ratel didn't, even slowly. Even if the snake's fangs had got through, which was not in the least likely, that did not mean to say they would touch Mr. Ratel's person inside. This, by the way, may explain why being spitted on thorns, like a beetle on a pin, when the bull-gnu charged, did not seem to worry him much, either.
The moon was up when the wounded mother ratel, on guard at the mouth of her burrow, looked up sharply. A side-striped jackal, who kidded himself she had not seen him lying in wait to find out, when she went hunting, what she hid in that den, suddenly bolted with a yap; and a hyena, represented by two burning eyes, who appeared, by some magic of his own, to guess she was wounded, jumped up and made way for something that approached. It was her husband and the cobra, the latter trailing along limply behind, who came that way; and even the hyena had retired, with an audible sigh—at least, it wasn't a moan quite—when he claimed the path. After all, there is no sense, if you are the most cowardly beast for your power on earth, in getting up against the pluckiest thing in creation in full possession of life and liberty.
Later our ratel sallied forth to "face the world" again. His wife had recovered from her wounds—the result, these, of refusing to believe she was not so good as a twelve-foot python, and a bit better—sufficiently to walk slowly; but that was not enough to face that wild where die-quicks, from lions, down through leopards, hyenas, wild-dogs, jackals, and the rest, are forever hiding, on the lookout for unfortunate ones flying an S.O.S. signal. No, he must go and do the provisioning alone, and alone he went.
For a peaceful beast, one only too pleased to mind his own business and thank other folks to mind theirs, his subsequent doings were rather astonishing. This was because he cared for neither man nor beast nor devil, in the first place, and because the night produced all three, in the second.
He got man in the form of the smell of meat—well-seasoned meat, even for Africa!—what time he was testing a native village, by scent and on the downwind side of him—and that showed his pluck, my word!—for honey or fowl. He detected neither out of the few dozen unspeakable stenches, but struck meat, and following it up-wind, arrived at a piece—a good big piece—on the ground among grass.
A civet cat—who is more civet than cat, by the way—a small spotted genet—who looked like an exaggerated ferret in the uncertain gloom—and the inevitable black-backed jackal—who must not be confused with him of the side-stripes—faded out at his approach like steam in a dry atmosphere. He might have felt proud of this silent respect, if it were not a fact that these gentry, these village frontier haunters, scenting danger, thought it a fine "kink" to let the brave one test it first.
And he did.
To be exact, that ratel touched off the tooth-jawed trap that was the reason for that free meal of high and valuable meat in that place, and when he jumped he didn't get anywhere. Also, it hurt his leg abominably.
Then the others reincarnated themselves out of the shadows—especially the jackal, who shouted "Yaaaa-ya-ya-ya!" and called a friend—and waited for things to happen. They were confident things would happen, for Africa is not a good place wherein to get caught in a trap—there is too much likelihood of being mistaken for the bait!
But they might as well have seen a thunder "portent" captured by the tail as this ratel by the leg; for, instead of instantly and foolishly abandoning himself to the frenzy of unthinkable fear—the fear of being trapped is the greatest of all to a free, wild thing—as practically all others would have done, he said nothing at all; he failed to lose his head; and, to crown all, he instantly, coolly, slowly, viciously, and doggedly set himself to struggle, with a grim persistence that was amazing. And, moreover, from that instant he never left off.
A striped hyena, seemingly in lifelong terror of his own shadow, turned up by magic—or perhaps he heard the snap of the trap. Seven times he bolted, for no earthly reason that one could see, before finally gaining courage to snap at the ratel at the very end of his reach. It was the kind of snap that would take half a man's face away, and not nice to meet when you are trapped. The ratel, however, came calmly at the hyena, trap and all, and so nearly got his own trap-jaws locked home on the unclean one that the hyena was glad to go away.
In the end, thanks to the amazing toughness of his skin, and its looseness, the ratel managed to, as it were, slide the bone of his leg between the jaws of the trap, leaving the skin and fur in, and the rest was mainly determined tugging and strong fang-work.
Then he coolly ate the real bait, and—the onlookers remembered appointments elsewhere. None of them, it seemed, was tickled to meet the ratel when he had finished. He was sure to be crusty; and, anyway, he had bitterly disappointed them all—he had achieved the apparently impossible, and, worst part of the lot, was not dead.
Now, a ratel will do almost as much for honey as a bear for pork, a leopard for little "bow-wows," or a man for diamonds. This will explain why he was foolish enough to follow, some hours later, the trail of some natives who had been out collecting honey from a camp the day before; or perhaps he knew nothing about the honey till, not too scientifically, he got into the camp. Anyway, the honey was very good.
There are, however, from a wilding's point of view, camps and camps. Most of the inhabitants of the wild, including the lion, who are not born with a pluck considerably above proof, can discriminate the difference. The ratel either could not or would not.
Then the knowledge was driven home. Driven home in the shape of a big, loose-limbed, deep-jowled brute of a dog, as unlike the ordinary native curs as it well could be. It did not come silently, or suddenly, for it growled full warning in a terrible bass; but the ratel showed contempt, and teeth that glistened beautifully in the red light of the dying fire the sleeping sentry ought to have seen to, but had not. Moreover, it did not come alone, for the camp was a white hunter's camp. The dog gave a thunderous baying rally-call, and almost before that sentry had leapt to his feet, the ratel vanished tumultuously and suddenly from the public gaze, under a perfect cloud of dogs. He was, ere any one knew what the riot might be, literally smothered under dogs—dogs, too, most of 'em who held up the deadly leopard, and hounded the tyrannical lion, habitually and for a pastime, mark you.
Then his devil prompted one of the black sentries to rush up and fire his rifle. Probably he did not know what was under those dogs; certainly he thought it would keep there. In any case, he nearly killed a dog, and the cause of the trouble did not keep there. He came out, miraculously alive, still more miraculously cool and unhurried. He broke away from the dogs as if they were little puppies, and, still quite coolly and slowly, he charged that man.
The yell that followed could have been heard quite a long distance through the cloaked night. And, in truth, one cannot wonder, for you may take it from me that the jaws of a ratel fast home on the calf of your leg, as our ratel's jaws were on that native's leg, form something to remember in dreams.
But it was that very native who saved our ratel's life, all the same; for his gymnastic display during the few seconds that followed was so energetic that the pink pyjamas and a revolver, that represented the white hunter fresh from sleep, had no chance at all of doing any damage except to the dancing native—which they nearly did; and the dogs, once more piling themselves on to the ratel, broke his hold, and the whole fight rolled and raged away into the darkness and the thorn-scrub, out of sight.
Later, one by one, those dogs came back, dead-beat most of them, with tongues lolling and sides pumping. Some limped, and some turned away every few yards feverishly to lick a wound. All were blood-stained, but not a drop of it—not one drop—belonged to friend ratel. He, that superb warrior, was at that moment trotting along, quite unconcernedly, through the bush about a quarter of a mile away. There was blood upon him, too—not his, the dogs'—and no other mark; and though he was pretty sore and sick from internal bruising, his skin, his wonderful loose skin, was whole, and unpierced by a single fang. He had, however, the decency to go home and fling himself into a stupor-like sleep, just to prove that he was a real, live beast of this earth, and not merely a phantom from other worlds.
The next afternoon was closing in dull and cloudy, and there were signs of a dark and bad night to come—just the sort of day wild hunters come out early in. This was why the grunt sounded then that heralded the appearance of our ratel above-ground, and he himself appeared, emerging at his very own slow trot from his hole. For a moment he paused, looking round, with his funny, "earless," flat head in the air, as if he expected, or listened for, the honey-guide; but the honeyguide was half a mile away, leading some natives—who, by the way, were endeavoring to copy the crooning, whistling replies of a ratel—to honey.
No honey-guide? Then he must go and search for himself. And he did, returning, in fifty minutes, for his wife, who, now much recovered—as only a ratel can recover from the very jaws of death—followed him with her young to the hole he had torn in a rotten tree-trunk where the bees were nesting.
They had proceeded perhaps three hundred yards, when, turning a bush carelessly, as no other creature would dare to do, the ratel fell almost on to the back of the bull-gnu.
There is no need to be surprised that they should meet. The wild is not an aimless mix-up in that way. Each creature has its beat, temporarily or permanently, nor seeks to deviate. You may look for the same herd of antelope, feeding near the same place, about the same hour each day; the same lion stumping the same beat, as regular as a policeman, most nights; the same hyena uttering horrible nothings within hearing of the same hills, any time after the setting of each sun, just as surely as the same cock-robin asks you for crumbs, the same blackbird awakens you with inimitable fluting, and the same black cat seeks for both in the same vicinity each dusk.
The surprise was in what followed. Perhaps the bull-gnu kicked our ratel badly as he lurched to his feet, jerked from half-sleep into violent collision with he knew not what. Perhaps the ratel had a memory. Perhaps the presence of his family weighed with him. Whatever the cause, the result was decided enough. He reared and hit deep, and fixed home a very living vise, where he bit.
Then things happened, but that which immediately followed was not a fight; it was not even a spar. The ratel never moved, although he was moved—astoundingly. The gnu bull did the moving, and produced the most amazing bit of violent activity one could dream of. It was quite indescribable. A buck-jumping mustang of the most hustling kind would have been as a gentle lamb to it. The ground all about looked as if herds had jumped upon it—bushes, grass, flowers, and all were trampled down flat. But it did not do what it was designed to do—it did not break the ratel's hold. Bruised, assuredly, shaken so that he ought to have fallen to hits, dizzy and blind, he did not let go, and in the position he held he could not be hammered off. He just glued where he was, saying nothing at all, till the end—till that grand old bull sank and was still, exhausted, by loss of blood, and with one great hopeless sigh his life departed from him, and he died.
The ratel did not leave go for some little time. He seemed to suspect that the gnu bull was bluffing, or perhaps he was himself half-stunned.
It was the sudden and peculiar growling hiss from his wife—sounding all a-magnified in that wilderness silence after the battle—that made him look up, at her first, and then almost instantly atsomething else. His wife was backing slowly towards the "bush," every hair on her body sticking straight out at right angles, her eyes fixed strangely upon that something else. His young had taken to cover, not, it seemed, too readily, but by their parent's order.
A lion was standing, still as a carved beast, at the far end of that little clearing—hewas the something else. Goodness and his kingly self alone knew how long he had been there, that great, heavy-jowled, deep-bellied, haughty-eyed brute. He may have been present from the first, or the middle, or only at that moment. Being a lion, he was just there, suddenly, without any visible effect of having got there, a presence of dread, created apparently out of thin air at the moment, in that spot, and with less sound than a blown leaf.
This power of being, without seeming to come, of evolving from nowhere, is one of the lion's most highly perfected tricks; for King Leo believes in all the ritual of his craft, and is great on effects, even down to the minor details. Power, grim and terrible, he has, without shadow of doubt; but he never forgets to impress that fact—and more—upon the world, and every action is carefully studied to advertise, not himself, but his "frightfulness." A very fine play-actor is the king of all the beasts.
But the ratel did not move. He had met his Napoleon, and was not—so far as the watcher could see—afraid.
Motionless, scowling, with head down, and shrewd, proud eyes smoldering, the lion stood there like an apparition of doom. He was, I fully suspect, letting the effect sink in deliberately. He knew his game. Also, he had a reason. Surely a great poker-player was lost in the lion.
But the little ratel met that regal stare squarely and unmoved. He whose proud boast it was that he feared nothing that walked or crawled, or swam or flew, could not be frightened now. And he who came to terrify was perhaps all but ten feet long, and he whom he sought to terrify was barely three feet. It was a comparison to make you gasp.
Now, that lion did not want the ratel at all, or his wife, or his family, or anything that was his. He wanted the gnu, and would be very pleased if the ratel would go away and leave it to him.
The ratel, moreover, did not want the gnu, being an eater of honey, locusts, and generally badger-like fare for the most part; and if the lion had only had the sense to wait a few minutes longer behind the scenes, the ratel would have gone away and left the gnu. But he would not be driven;thatwas the rub. Attacking nobody unprovoked, he was a grim beast to attack, and gave way before none. Hence the trouble.
Finding that the bluff of the impressive tableau did not work, the lion tried a fresh one. Still staring at the ratel, he sank his head to the ground, so that his great mane hung to the earth all about him. His forelegs and his shoulders crouched, but his hindlegs and his back were held at their highest, and his tail began to lash behind. Then he began to growl tremendously and nerve-shatteringly, and as he did so he curled his upper lips up and back, till the whole ghastly array of his teeth was laid bare to view. In this position he looked like a gigantic grinning mask, with blind eye-sockets where the wrinkles were on the sloping forehead, his eyes nearly invisible below, and a tail lashing far up atop. It was a horrible sight, and one calculated to stampede the pluckiest animal.
It was, of course, also a deliberate piece of mesmeric bluff, the reason for which was not made clear till one noticed, what the ratel probably could not, that the great leonine tusks, the terrible fangs, were yellow and worn, as were the rest of the teeth. This was an old lion, a king on a throne already tottering, a monarch of yesterday.
That lion, however, might have turned into Satan himself, for all the ratel cared. He was threatened, attacked, bullied, forced. His blood was up, and had not all who ever fought him allowed that he was the pluckiest beast on earth? Enough! Come lion! come devil! he would give ground to none.