"All allowed that he was the pluckiest beast on earth"[Illustration: "All allowed that he was the pluckiest beast on earth"]
"All allowed that he was the pluckiest beast on earth"[Illustration: "All allowed that he was the pluckiest beast on earth"]
Lions are not too patient. Also, they have fine spirit of their own. They are among the very few beasts who will hunt and attack animals as strong as, or stronger than, themselves. And this lion's patience snapped suddenly. All at once he seemed to remember that he was still a king, though a king already within the shadow of abdication. The terrible bass rumble of his growl grew, and changed tone; his tail lashed faster and faster; and then, all suddenly heralded by a couple of wicked, rasping, coughing grunts, he—charged.
The ratel moved to meet him—to meet him—and at a cool jog-trot!
What happened then was hard to follow. It looked as if the worn fangs of the lion failed to make his hold on the wonderful, leathern, loose armor of the little honey-badger, and that he bungled the stroke of his terrible paw. Be that as it may, the honey-badger certainly went straight in, right under the lion's guard, right under the lion, and rearing, he bit home, and hung like a living spanner.
And here, perhaps, it is best to draw a curtain. For one reason, I cannot describe it, and frankly confess the fact. For several other reasons, it is best not to try. The ratel died in about ten minutes, crushed, battered, smashed to death; but the chaos lasted longer than that, because, even after death, he was not done with—the passing of life had locked his amazing jaws shut forever, andthey were shut on the lion.
The end found the little ratel lying crumpled up and crimson on the trampled grass, and the lion running about like some great injured dog, squatting down every few seconds to lick furiously at his wound. Fear was in the eyes of the king of beasts, for the first, probably, and certainly for the last, time in his life, and his blood reddened the grass wherever he made his way; but the internal hemorrhage was the worst.
Then the vultures came, and that, my friends, is a signal for us humans to go. The vultures get the last word always, even in a story, and the name of that word is—FINIS.
Now, if you wore a helmet and neck armor of purple, green, and blue in metallic reflections, with scarlet cheek and eye pieces, if your uniform were of purple, brown, yellow, orange-red, green, and black, "either positive or reflected," with a long, rakish, dashing rapier-scabbard cocked jauntily out behind, wouldn'tyoufeel proud? So did he; pride and the "grand air" were written all over him. True, though, the rapier-scabbard was not a rapier-scabbard exactly—only a tail; but it looked like one, in a way. His full title wasPhasianus colchicus, but ordinary people called him just plain pheasant for short.
You would have thought, after all this, that even in the first pale light of a cold dawn he would have been easy to see. As a matter of fact, Gaiters, the head gamekeeper, one of his underlings, three dogs, and a gun passed right under his bed without seeing him. Rather, they may have unconsciously seen him, and put him down as a bundle of dead twigs and leaves caught up in a branch. This is not very complimentary, perhaps, to a gentleman attired in a gorgeous uniform as heretofore set out, but true; and lucky for him, too, to have at once a uniform of unquestioned splendor and one which would melt into its surroundings.
They, the men, did not see him; but he, the old cock-pheasant, saw them right enough. He opened one eye, and stared at them through that. Then he opened the other eye, and stared at them through that. Neither stare seemed to please him.
It was not Gaiters's way to march through the wood at that hour in the morning. What meant this unseemly disturbance ofPhasianus'sdomain? His suspicions, never long at rest, woke up. Moreover, somewhere at the back of his brain rose a memory, a little, tiny speck of a memory, which grew.
Then he stood right up.
Everywhere, here and there, in the gray cloak of the dawn-mist, he could hear the sharp "Chawk-chawk!" and the quick, flustered whir as pheasant after pheasant came down from its roosting-perch to clean and breakfast. But his suspicions held him for a few minutes longer, stretching his neck and peering about at the still-shrouded mystery of the ground below; and it was as well, perhaps.
Suddenly his head was still; a spray of a brier-bush was swaying gently. There was nothing in that, of course, if there had been any breath of wind to move it; but there wasn't. Wherefore our gallant friend did not come down to preen and breakfast like the rest, but sat motionless as a statue, while the sun rose and touched him to a winking golden and bronze wonder, and the mists began to be torn asunder. He wanted to know what moved that brier-branch, and he wasn't taking chances till he did.
Day came on apace, and all the night hunters who had remained so late had already hurried off to bed save one.Heappeared, evidently empty, certainly very angry indeed at having waited for a cock-pheasant who refused to do what he was supposed to do and come down to breakfast. Out of the brier-bush he came, a lean dog-fox, snarling horribly up at the pheasant, who calmly returned the gaze, conscious of his safety, of course, and said "Chuck it!" in a loud, harsh voice, and quite distinctly, twice.
The fox, knowing it was no good to wait any longer in the daylight, went, like a floating red shadow. The pheasant watched him go, but did not move for some time. Foxes had been known to come back again more suddenly than they went.
At last he flew to the earth, but even then he did so as silently as his noisy wings would let him; and he did not announce the fact with a half-crow, as the others had done. Very circumspectly he slipped off through the undergrowth, by a series of little crouching runs, stopping every now and then to freeze and listen.
Soon he came to one of those open, beautiful, grass-covered "rides" with which keepers intersect pheasant-coverts. He stopped dead on the edge of it, himself invisible among the drooping, leaning, old-gold bracken. The "ride" was full of wood-people, for here had been scattered that corn which Gaiters intended the pheasants to feed upon. Indeed, there were about ten pheasants, hens and young cocks of the year, doing exactly what they were intended to do. Also, there were some half-dozen softly-tinged, blue-gray wood-pigeons, and one cheeky jay—whose wing-patches rivaled the perfection of the blue sky above—doing their best in a quiet sort of way to help the pheasants, which they were not intended to do, by any manner of means.
The old cock-pheasant slid across the "ride" after a bit, low as a crouching rat. He had no business there this day. His mind was still alert with suspicion. Moreover, his father had been a cunning old cock who had managed, by ways that were dark, to keep out of the game-bag for years, too. The taint, as Gaiters would have called it, had been passed on to him.
He made for the open edge of the covert, and he was mighty careful about doing that even. He felt that air and plenty of horizon were necessary to his well-being, after the disturbing vision of Gaiters and Co., so unnaturally busy, hurrying through the dawn.
Now, it is quite remarkable how much you can see from the edge of a pheasant-covert without being seen yourself. Keepers know that, but do not give the fact away. The ground sloped away in two open grass fields, a hedge dividing them, and it was within about the longitude and the latitude of where that hedge met the covert that our old friend maneuvered.
The climate about there seemed to suit him admirably. True, good food was not strewn in plenty just where he could most easily see it. He had to look for his acorns or his beechmast by the good old domestic-fowl plan of scratching among the leaves; roots also he was forced to scratch for; and the noisy mistle-thrushes with the tempers of Eblis had to be driven off the berries he would look after in the ditch.
Also, there was a stoat. That stoat, however, tackled him just once. In the process it discovered (a) that he wore spurs not meant to be ornaments, and (b) that no one could teach him much about using those same spurs. The stoat, plus a new carmine decoration for gallantry, remembered an urgent appointment down a rat-hole, and kept it. Perhaps it was a young stoat, and had not learnt that there are at least four degrees of cock-pheasant, namely, young and brainless, adult and brave, old and brave and cunning, and old and decrepit; but the last stage is a rare bird. There is nothing of any use to the stoat in the second and third degrees of cock-pheasant—no health to the stoat, you understand.
The dawning of the morning had passed by now in gold and crimson and purple splendor; the mist-curtain had been drawn back by the fingers of the wind, the utter darkness upon everything at ground-level had begun to give way before the sun, and to leeward of most trees and bushes there was a balmy luxuriance of golden light that held one lingering.
Gnats were dancing under the low-hung boughs in still corners, as they will dance on the coldest day; song-thrushes were beginning to take life for one more day, and tack hither and yon, as if they were busy pegging the field down with an invisible "cats' cradle"; and the black rooks, shining like burnished steel shields, flashed and flashed again as they began to gather beneath the trees, where the ground thawed most and first. Though they alone seemed to have discovered it, the pigeons very quickly found that the rooks had hit something good, and you can bet one jay, at any rate, must be there, to make profit out of somebody.
It was the jester of a jay, whom, in spite of his painted plumage, no one seemed to have noticed, that first gave the alarm that carried the cock-pheasant's suspicious temperament a step farther upon the path of independent action. Up till then you will note that, though he had left the vicinity of his own people, he had not yet left the realm that was peculiarly their own—the woods.
"W-a—r-k, w-a-a-r-k!" gasped out the jay suddenly, and fled, a half-seen vision of pinkish, of black and white, upon uncertain, almost fluttering, wings.
It was like striking a gong. Instantly all motion was suspended, and dotted thrushes, clustered rooks, and deprecating pigeons remained at rigid attention. The old cock-pheasant, too, erect as an armored warrior, unseen just within the covert, stood promptly at gaze.
Then, in no more time than one would take to inhale one puff from a cigarette, the fields were empty—stark, cold, and deserted in the eye of the morning sun. The birds had not so much gone, exactly, as simply faded out—dissolved, as a picture may at a cinema-show. The cock-pheasant did not go. He was in cover, and had a good view, a strategic position of some moment.
Followed a pause. Then a man in tweeds entered one of the fields by the gate. Followed him two more, then a fourth, then two not in tweeds, then dogs, black and big, to the number of three, not to mention the bar-like gleam given off by the barrels of the guns that the first four carried. The whole procession passed silently, as they thought—but to the waiting, watching, wild-folk unpardonably noisily—diagonally across the field, and out of sight round a bend of the wood. They had an air about them. I don't know what it was exactly, but you could feel they were going to do something serious that had not been done there for a long time. Perhaps the old cock-pheasant felt it too, but—well, there now! Where had the old "varmint" gone?
Half-way down the hedge, very low and long, the cock-pheasant was sneaking. He seemed suddenly anxious to mind his own business, and that everybody else should mind theirs. He was going away from the wood, which the books tell us is the realm, the sanctuary, the all, to a pheasant, and he had no desire to answer questions by the way. For this reason, then, and a few others, he felt no special delight in sighting, about two hundred yards farther on—at a place where two stacks surrounded by rails stood and sheltered a fowlhouse—a baker's dozen of fowls sunning themselves on the hedge-bank. He held for fowls all the wild creatures' contempt for the tame or domestic. All the same, he saw no health in risking the open just then, and would not turn back, so there was nothing for it but the fowls.
Low as low he crouched, and ran very quickly, and hoped for the best; and there is no bird that can wish itself out of sight in this fashion better than friend pheasant. But he forgot the odd cockerel out. He shot right on to the wretched thing—a gawky red youth—messing about all alone in a nettle-clump, and it dashed into the field, racing on long yellow legs, and squawking fit to wake the dead.
Down clapped the pheasant as if the noise had pierced his heart, and remained stiller than the crawling roots around him, and not half so easy to see. But it was no good. Up shot the dozen heads above the herbage, and two dozen vacuous eyes regarded his vicinity with empty-headed inquisitiveness.
He almost melted into the ground, but it was useless. An old, old hen—who perhaps was ignored by the lord of the harem, and hoped for an adventure—waddled up, stood within a yard of his crouched, rounded shape without seeing him, saw him, shot straight up in the air at least one foot, screaming for help, and promptly charged blindly into the hedge, where she as promptly got held up among roots and twigs.
The old pheasant got to his feet just as the rooster who owned the outfit came racing up, panting and red. He had heard a wife scream for help. Perhaps it was the odd bird out; or, anyway, some one who had to be abolished. And he never waited to think. He saw what might have been a small cockerel (if it had been large he might have thought twice) crouching, and—he just sailed right in.
Then something happened. The two met, going up breast to breast. For a moment or two the cock-pheasant showed on or about that big rooster. Some feathers hung in the air. The rooster sat on his heels, met by a blow in the chest that seemed to take all the wind from his sails, so to speak, and would have drawn off to reconsider things if he had not promptly become more busy than ever before in his life.
It was over ere any one knew quite what was happening. The old cock-pheasant had passed through the crowd and vanished at the double down the hedge, and the big rooster was slowly subsiding into a pool of his own blood, from which he was destined never to rise again.
But those who make, instead of following, their own destiny do not get let off thus lightly in the wild. The pheasant had not gone a hundred yards, when a most intolerable blast, an almost unbearable blast, of shrill, nerve-racking noise throbbed through his head. The bird fell in his tracks where he ran, as if some one had jerked his legs from under him, and he peered out.
What he beheld was an under-keeper standing close by and blowing upon a two-note pea-whistle till there seemed some danger that he would burst his cheeks, or a blood-vessel, on the spot, and far up the field three wandering pheasants racing back to the covert, as they thought, for very life; but, as a matter of fact—and you shall see—it was to very death. The blower of whistles was stationed there to drive back into the covert any pheasants who were so misguided as to wish to roam thence into the fields and away.
Now, that old reprobate of a pheasant of ours was a pretty confirmed runner, anyway. He had trained himself to it. Yet never in all his checkered life was he conscious of a more awful desire to flee by means of the wings that God had given him. The weakness was over in a few seconds, and he crept on; but it was a near thing while it lasted. He passed, however, away from the danger zone, resisting temptation, and it was as well.
As he went there burst forth, at the opposite end of the big covert to that at which he had come out, a sudden, quick shot. It echoed away and away back among the woods, clattering and banging like great doors shutting. The old cock-pheasant stopped to listen; he cocked his green head on one side; he stood with one foot daintily uplifted: and in the same instant there burst upon the air a rending, crashing succession of shots, worse than ragged volley-firing, which almost made him jump. It had begun—the big shoot overhiscovert, the largest, the best, the richest in pheasants, which had been saved for this—"the day" had begun. When it ended very few pheasants would be left alive, for word had gone forth that it was to be thinned down, almost shot out, and that not a cock must escape.
He, our own cock-pheasant, might have chuckled—as a cock-pheasant can, and will, very low and softly to himself, if you are close enough to hear him—if something had not very suddenly and very mysteriously said "phtt!" just like that, close beside him. The old bird's head snicked round, right round, almost hindpart before; but he made no other movement. The sound was new to him, and of a strangely sinister import. Also, there was a little splayed hole in the ground, as if a walking-stick had been poked in there, close beside him, which had not been there before.
He was still staring when something, singing a little, high-pitched song in a minor key to itself, came romping through the silent air, and, with an oddly emphasized and emphatic "phtt!" landed between his feet. It bored a hole just like the first thing, and it spat dirt up into his face.
The third mystery thing clipped three feathers from his back as he ran, bolted for dear life, crouching low—even then he would not rise—for the hedge. He got there alive, if not quite whole; while a fourth nameless object cut twigs off above him. Then he kept on running, always hugging the hedges, till he was two fields away. He was upset and overstrained, for Fate had given him plenty of deaths to circumvent as it was, in the ordinary course of business, and this addition was a bit too much.
There are other forms of shooting pheasants than the orthodox one, which begins with smoking a cigarette on a comfortable shooting-seat, and ends with a wild and furious fusillade, using three guns as fast as you can. So thought the farmer's son, who took the chance to test his new American .22-bore repeating-rifle, now that all the keepers were well out of the way. And he had come mighty close to bagging the old cock-bird, too. "As near as made no odds," he said, which was true, but only the old bird himself knew quite the closeness of the call.
In the far field the bronze king of the woods found peace for a bit. The stunning reports in the covert not far away, and the thought that his companions of yesterday, his lady-loves of last spring, were even then being butchered by the hundred, made no difference to his digestion. He fed on with that imperturbability that must have come to him straight through his ancestors from the East—Kismet! It was sufficient.
He ought, of course, to have been in the covert. He was, however, here—knowingly here, cunningly here, safely—No, by Jove! Not that, by any means.
A head, clean and neat and sharp, had poked out of the long, pale grass at the edge of the hedge-ditch, and stared at him. He couldn't very well miss seeing it because of the unforgettable brightness of its beady eyes, and the absolutely spotless purity of its white shirt-front. Besides, he knew the owner—and its reputation.
He was helping the farmer to clear an oat-stubble of charlock-seeds at the moment, and bending down. That is to say, he was doing inestimable good, for which he got no credit. The next moment, and the next, and for many more, he was still bending down. In fact, from the instant he got sight of that head, it was as if a Hand had come down and turned him by magic into a big model of a bird cast in bronze. All life in him appeared to have dried up and fled. He looked as if you could have picked him up and put him upon a bracket in your drawing-room without his ever moving again. But that was only because of the head he had seen—and its reputation. Moreover, the head was not alone. At least, it had multiplied itself half-a-dozen times in less than half-a-dozen seconds, and even a stoat, which the head belonged to, cannot be in two places at once—though for sheer quickness of movement it, and far more its cousin the weasel, comes very near to it.
Just at this moment it seemed that about the roost unhealthful thing he could do would be to be seen in the air. Wherefore did this innocent and guileless old bird affect not to see the stoats, but made out that he was feeding his way along, quite and absolutely intent upon that yellow devil of a weed whose other name is charlock. He did not even hurry, and each deliberate step was taken with almost a proud daintiness. The only thing was, he never lifted his head; he was almost too obviously unwary—for him. And he gave the impression that every step would be his last out into the field; that he was always going to turn back next instant or the next, as he had done before when the stoats were not there.
On and on he kept till he had crossed the field, going faster and faster, till he ended at the far hedge with a run. And there, so far as he was concerned, was an end of the stoats. He put them aside. He forgot all about them.
They, however, had not forgotten about him.
It was half-an-hour later, and he was patiently gleaning such food as the rooks and the sparrows and the larks had left behind them, when something, he could not tell what, caused him to straighten up, with that beautiful, proud bearing that seems part of the pheasant's heritage from the gorgeous East.
And he was only just in time.
The stoat that had come up behind him, unseen, turned on its heels as it charged, changing its mind at the last moment, as if it saw he saw, and was gone again before you could click a finger, diving superbly back into long grass.
They were following him, then, those little hounds of death; tracking him; running him down. And why? He did not know, perhaps, yet—maybe he did. Blood is a dangerous thing to have on you in the wild—a flaming signal of distress for eye and nose to detect—and they are not often rescuers who hurry to the scene. He had blood on his back, that cock-pheasant, and just every now and then a single bright drop fell by the way. The .22-bore bullet had only grazed him. 'Twas nothing—but it bled more than you would expect. And that explained it. The tracking stoats thought he was wounded.
But even then the old cock-pheasant would not rise.
The firing in the covert had risen suddenly to a fierce crescendo, breaking out afresh from another quarter. Here, however, was silence—the absolute, deadly silence in which all the weasel tribe hunt. But they were there, though he could not see them. He knew that, invisible even in the sunlight—they were closing in, tracking him fast, those stoats.
Then he ran. He ran not so much for his life, but for the right to keep on the ground. If the worst came to the worst, he could always fly; but he would do anything rather than that.
He turned and ran away from the woods—raced like a fowl, but quicker, lower, much harder to see. A sudden gleam of bright-chestnut fur dead ahead, however, stopped him, and he turned back, keeping always to the hedge—towards the covert. He could hear no sound around him, only the burst and the bang of the guns in the woods, and he might have been alone; but directly he came to another hedge, and swung down to it at right angles, a furry tail with a paint-brush tip, vanishing round a holly-stem, fetching him up all standing. They were there, too, those stoats. He seemed to be surrounded on all sides save one, and that the one towards the woods. So he swung back into his original path.
Then, very soon, as he ran up the hedge-ditch, it seemed to him as if the dead leaves collected there were beginning to whisper behind him. But there was no wind to move them. Moreover, it grew closer, till it seemed at his very tail, that whisper of dead leaves.
Then, in a flash, he had stopped, spun about like a top, and struck with his spurs twice—whack, whack—more than instantly, and a long, low, brown body—close behind him, that had risen as he turned, so that its spotlessly clean shirt-front offered him a fine mark, went over sideways—with a grunt and all the wind knocked out of it, as well as an inch-and-a-half gash to remember friend pheasant by. That was one stoat; but it was not alone. He had a vision of chestnut forms sliding and rippling in and out of the shadows and the long copper gleams of the westering sun.
As he turned again, and the whispering began once more behind, the firing in front broke out afresh, and much nearer. Still he would not rise, however. It was this fact, probably, which kept the stoat-pack at his heels. They seemed convinced that he was badly wounded and unable to fly.
Then came the road. He was on it before he knew. There was the wedge-shaped, low-browed head of a stoat racing up along one side of him, with murder plainly written in the gleam of its beady eyes; there was the hot breath of another beating on his opposite flank; there was one with feet out and all brakes on, trying its best to pull out one of the feathers of his long and beautiful tail; and—there was the road dead ahead.
It was one of three—the road, the air, or death where he was. He chose the road, and crossed, like a hunted cat crossing a back-yard. His feet seemed scarcely to touch the dust as he negotiated the open, yet he had time to take in a fact or two. One was that the stoats had stopped—a little bunch of peering heads on a group of craning necks on the edge of the ditch behind him. Another was that several people and a motor-car were standing still in the road quite close, watching the shooting. I don't think any of them saw him, but he felt as if all of them did.
Arrived in the hedge on the far side of the road, he clapped down, panting. The hedge ran along the road. On the other side of it was the grass of the park-land, stretching away two hundred yards or so to the edge of the covert, which came down to a point here. He could hear the tapping of sticks in the covert—beaters' sticks. He could hear an occasional shout. Men in tweeds stood motionless on the edge of the covert, and suddenly moved.
Then came the infernal crash of the guns again, and he saw a hen-pheasant pitch sickeningly on her head from a height, and a cock-pheasant, flaming like a rocket in the sinking sun, run the gauntlet of four shots, only to turn over and slide down at a fifth.
Then—and then, he jumped.
Something had pushed past him. In the din he had not heard it. He turned as he crouched, and saw that it was a hen-pheasant, with blood on her breast and one wing trailing alongside. And in the same instant he was aware of a man—an under-keeper—crackling about in the hedge only ten yards away, looking for that hen-pheasant.
And the unwounded old cock, crouching almost till he looked like a tortoise, followed the blundering, staggering, wounded hen. It was the only thing he dared do.
It was a strange creep, and an erratic one, with many stops, those two hunted ones took together, meeting, so strangely, too—not for the first time, since she had been one of his wives in the dim peaceful past—with the guns thundering away so close, and their sons and their daughters being slain almost all around them. They had, however, little time to think about it, for they came, after about twenty yards, to a gap spanned by barbed wire, and they stopped, the cock about a foot behind the hen's tail, in cover scarcely enough to hide them.
But that was not all. Two men in fawn overcoats stood in the road by the gap, looking through it at the shooting; and a boy with a bicycle stood close to them, interested in the same thing.
It was the boy with the bicycle that did it; or, rather, it was the unhappy hen-pheasant that made him. She, beingin extremis, had made some noise among the stiff dead leaves. It was not much of a noise, but it caught the boy's young ear, and he bent forward to peer at the hedge.
One of the men saw him, said something, to which the boy nodded, jumped down into the ditch, and thrusting in a long arm, began to feel with a purposeful hand. The hen-pheasant, whose nerves were already shattered to little pieces, struggled to get out of reach, and in a second had given the whole show away.
But I like to think of what our cunning old cock-pheasant did then. He did nothing—absolutely nothing at all. Crouching as flat as an overturned saucer, just, behind the hen-pheasant's tail, he remained stiller than a bunch of dead leaves, and far more silent. And this, mark you, when the hen-pheasant was pulled out, frantically fluttering and helpless, and there and then had her neck wrung in front of his very eyes. That, my masters, needed a nerve, after all that he had gone through. What?
The two men, seeming to think that they had got enough for one quiet walk, departed, not quickly, but without unnecessary delay. The man who had been looking for the hen-pheasant, and had seen nothing of what took place at the gap, gave it up, and went away over the grass to the shooters. The shooting ended with one last double shot, at one last old cock-pheasant driven reluctantly from the last hush of the covert; the dogs were out, galloping all over the ground for the wounded and the slain; the watchers in the road departed; the shooters gradually merged into groups, and drew farther and farther away up the park; and the boy, who was shy, mounted his bicycle and rode off into the sad blue-gray of the gathering dusk.
The big day was over, and the old cock-pheasant was alone with the melancholy song of a single robin, and a chaffinch calling "Chink!" And the cold breath of the sunset wind, shuddering and sighing all to itself across the face of the empty scene, touched the feathers that were left by the hen-pheasant attached to thorns and twigs in her last struggle, so that they danced and wavered and flickered before the old cock's eyes, as a reminder of all that had been for them in the past—the past, which for him, but never for her, might be again.
That night he roosted in the covert, as usual.
THE END