THE SAFE RABBIT
THE SAFE RABBIT
But the blackcat is one of two animals which have no fear of the quillpig. Blackbear is the other. With its swift, sinuous gait, the pekan came closer, whereupon Quillpig unwillingly stopped his sawing and thrust his head under the broken, frozen staves of the barrel. His belly hugged the ground, and in an instant he seemed to swell to double his normal size as he erected his quills and lashed this way and that with his spiked tail. Pure white, with dark tips, the quills were thickly barbed down to the extreme point, which is smooth and keen. The barbs are envenomed, and wherever they touch living flesh cause it to rankle, swell, and fester for all save the pekan, whose flesh is immune to the virus.
To-night the blackcat wasted no time. Disregarding the bristling quills and the lashing tail, the crafty weasel suddenly inserted a quick paw beneath the gnawer, and with a tremendous jerk tipped him overon his bristling back. Before the quillpig could right himself, the fisher had torn open his unguarded belly, and proceeded to eat the quivering, flabby meat as if from the shell of an oyster, or to be more accurate, a sea urchin. Throughout these proceedings he disregarded the quills entirely. Many of them pierced his skin. Others were swallowed along with the mouthfuls of warm flesh, which he tore out and greedily devoured. By reason of some unknown charm, the barbed quills work out of a blackcat without harm, and pass through his intestines in clusters, like packages of needles, without any inconvenience, although in any other animal save the bear they would inevitably cause death.
As the pekan ate and ate, the stars began to dim in the blue-black sky, and a faint flush in the east announced the end of his hunting day. With a farewell mouthful, he started back through the snow for his hollow tree, making a long detour, to bring in the cached marten. As he approached the tree from whose crotch the slim golden body dangled, his leisurely lope changed into a series of swift bounds. For the first time, a snarl came from behind the pekan’s mask. The dead marten was gone from the tree. In an open space which the wind had swept nearly clear of snow, it lay under the huge paws of a shadowy gray animal, with luminous pale yellow eyes, a curious bob of a tail, and black tufted ears. For all the world, it looked like a gray cat, but such a cat as never lived in a house. Three feet long, and forty pounds in weight, the Canada lynx is surpassed in size only among its NorthAmerican relatives by that huger yellow cat, the puma or panther.
At the snarl of the fisher, the cat looked up, and at the sight of the gliding black figure gave a low spitting growl and contemptuously dropped his great head to the marten’s bloody throat. For a moment the big black weasel and the big gray cat faced each other. At first sight, it did not seem possible that the smaller animal would attack the larger, or that, if he did, he would last long. The fisher was less than half the size and weight of the lynx, who also outwardly seemed to have more of a fighting disposition. The tufted ears alert, the eyes gleaming like green fire, and the bristling hair and arched back, contrasted formidably with the broad forehead and round, honest face of the fisher.
So, at least, it seemed to young Jim Linklater, who, with his uncle Dave, the trapper, lay crouched close in a hemlock copse. Long before daylight, the two had traveled on silent snowshoes up the river bank, laying a trap-line, carrying nothing but a back-load of steel traps. At the rasping growl of the lynx, they peered out of their covert only to find themselves not thirty feet away from the little arena.
“That old lucifee’ll rip that poor, little, black innocent to pieces in jig-time,” whispered young Jim.
Old Dave shook his grizzled head. He pulled his nephew’s ample ear firmly and painfully close to his mouth.
“Son,” he hissed, “you and that lucifee are both goin’ to have the surprise of your lives.”
Unwitting of his audience, the weasel approached the cat swiftly. Suddenly with a hoarse screech, the lynx sprang, hoping to land with all his weight on the humped-up black back, and then bring into play his ripping curved claws, while he sank his teeth deep into his opponent’s spine.
It was at once evident that lynx tactics have not yet been adapted to blackcat service. Without a sound, the pekan swerved like a shadow to one side, and almost before the lynx had touched the ground, the fisher’s fierce cutting teeth had severed the tendon of a hind leg, while its curved claws slashed deep into the soft inner flank.
The great cat screeched with rage and pain and sheer astonishment. As he landed, the crippled leg bent under him. Even yet he had one advantage which no amount of courage or speed on the part of the pekan could have overcome. If only the lynx had gripped the dead marten, and sprung out into the deep snow, the fisher would have had to fight a losing fight. Like the hare, the lynx is shod with snowshoes in the winter, on which he can pad along on snow in which a fisher would sink deep at every step. In spite of his formidable appearance, however, the lynx has a plentiful lack of brains. As his leg doubled under his weight, this one in a panic threw himself on his back, the traditional cat attitude of defense, ready to bring into action all four of his sets of ripping claws, with his teeth in reserve.
Against another of the cat tribe such a defense would have been good. Against the pekan it wasfatal. No battler in the world is a better in-fighter than the blackcat, and any antagonist near his size, who invites a clinch, rarely comes out of it alive. The pekan first circled the spinning, yowling, slashing lynx more and more rapidly, until there came a time when the side of the gray throat lay before him for a second unguarded. It was enough. With a pounce like the stroke of a coiled rattler, the pekan sprang, and a double set of the most effective fighting teeth known among mammals met deep in the lynx’s throat. With all of his sharp eviscerating claws, the great cat raked his opponent. But the blackcat, protected by his thick pelt and tough muscles, was content to exchange any number of surface slashes for the throat-hold. Deeper and deeper the crooked teeth dug; and then with a burst of bright blood, they pierced the jugular vein itself. The struggles of the lynx became weaker and weaker, until, with a last convulsive shudder, the gray body stretched out stark in the snow. The weasel lay panting and lapping at the hot, welling blood, while his own ran down his black fur in unconsidered streams.
It was young Jim who first broke the silence.
“Those pelt’ll bring all of twenty-five dollars,” he remarked, stepping forward.
“Help yourself,” suggested old Dave, not stirring, however, from where he stood.
At the voices the black weasel sprang up like a flash. With one paw on the dead lynx and another on the marten, he faced the two men in absolute silence.The eyes under the mild forehead flamed red and horrible and the dripping body quivered for another throat-hold.
“Seems like Mr. Blackcat wants ’em both,” murmured the old man, discreetly withdrawing from the farther side of the copse. Jim gazed into the flaming eyes a moment longer and then followed his uncle.
“He don’t look so blame innocent after all,” he observed.
For three long months the blue-white snow had lain over the gold-white sand among the dark-green pitch pines standing like trees from a Noah’s Ark. To-day the woods were a vast sea of green, lapping at the white sand-land that had been thrust up, a wedge from the South, into the very heart of the North. A crooked stream had cut its course deep through the forest. On its high bank the ghost-like glory of a mountain laurel overhung the dark water. Close to the water’s edge were clumps of the hollow, crimson-streaked leaves of the pitcher plant, lined with thousands of tiny teeth all pointing downward, traps for unwary insects. All the winter these pitchers had been filled with clear cone-shaped lumps of ice; but to-day, above the fatal leaves, on long stems, swung great blossoms, wine-red, crimson, aquamarine, pearl-white, and pale gold.
From overhead came the trilling song of the pine warbler, like a chipping sparrow lost in the woods; and here and there could be caught glimpses of his pale yellow breast and white wing-bars. Below, among the tangled scrub oaks, flitted the brilliant yellow-and-black prairie warbler, while everywherethe chewinks called “Drink your tea,” and the Maryland yellow-throat sang “Witchery, witchery, witchery,” while jays squalled in the distance, and crimson-crested cardinals whistled from the thickets. In the sky, like grim black aeroplanes, wheeled the turkey buzzards, sailing in circles without ever a wing stroke. Gray pine-swifts, with brilliant blue patches on their sides, scurried up and down tree trunks and along fallen logs, and brown cottontail rabbits hopped across the paths, showing their white powder puffs at each jump. A huge, umber-brown-and-white pine snake, with a strange pointed head, crawled slowly through the brush while rows of painted turtles dotted the snags which thrust out here and there above the stream.
Earth, air, and water, all swarmed with life at this dawn of the year. The underground folk were awake, too. Down below the surface, the industrious mole, with his plush fur and spade-like hands, dug incessantly his hunting-tunnels for earthworms. Above him, in wet places, his cousin, the star-nosed mole, whose nose has twenty-two little fingers, drove passages through the lowest part of the moss beds and the soft upper mould.
Still nearer the surface, just under the leaf-carpet, sometimes digging his own way, sometimes using the tunnels of the meadow-mice and deer-mice, and occasionally flashing out into the open air, lived the smallest mammal. Of all the tribes of earth, of all the bat-folk who fly the air, or the water-people who swim the seas and rivers and lakes, no mammalis so little. From the tip of his wee pointed muzzle to the base of his tiny tail, he was just about the length of a man’s little finger, or about two and a half inches. Nature had handicapped her smallest child heavily. Blind, earless, and tiny, yet every twenty-four hours he must kill and eat his own weight in flesh and blood; for so fiercely swift are the functions of his strange, wee body, that, lacking food for even six hours, the blind killer starves and dies.
To-day, near the edge of the stream, in the soft, white sand, his trail showed. It looked like a string of tiny exclamation points. Suddenly, from a patch of dry leaves there sounded a long rustling, like the crawling of a snake. Nothing could be seen, yet the leaves heaved and moved here and there, as something pushed its way under the surface of the leaf-carpet. Then, the masked shrew—for so we humans have named this escape from Lilliput—flashed out into the open. His glossy, silky fur was brown above and whitish-gray underneath; and between the hidden, unseeing eyes and the holes which took the place of ears was a dark smoky-gray mark, like a mask. His head angled into a long whiskered snout, so pointed that from above the shrew looked like a big pen. This flexible muzzle he twisted here and there, sniffing uncertainly, for the shrew has but little sense of smell. In fact, he seems to have traded the greater part of his other senses for a double portion of two—touch and hearing. Not even the long-eared rabbit can detect the faintest shade of a sound quicker than the shrew, and only the bat equals his sense of touch.Like that flyer, the shrew can detect an obstacle in time to avoid it, even when running at full speed, by becoming conscious of some subtle change in the air-pressure.
Among the great throng of little wild folk playing at hide-and-seek with death among the fallen logs, and in the labyrinth of passageways in the beds of sand and moss and fern, no one was swifter than this one, the smallest of them all. A flash here, a glimpse farther on, and he was gone, too fast to be followed by human eyes. In one of his rare pauses he might have been mistaken for a tiny mouse by reason of his general coloration; yet the shrew is as different from the mouse as a lynx from a wolf. No mouse has long, crooked, crocodile jaws, filled with perhaps the fiercest fighting teeth of any mammal; nor does any mouse have the tremendous jaw muscles which stood out under the soft fur of this beastling.
To-day, as the shrew sniffed here and there, trying to locate trails which a weasel or a dog could have followed instantly, his quick ear caught some tiny sound from the near-by burrow of a meadow-mouse. With a curious pattering, burrowing run, unlike the leaps and bounds of the mice-people, he started unerringly toward a narrow opening almost hidden under an overhanging patch of yellow-green sphagnum moss. Disappearing down the tunnel, he dashed along furiously, while his long widespread whiskers gave him instant notice of the turns and twists of the tunnel, which he threaded at full speed.
Ahead of him fled a young meadow-mouse, on his way to join other members of the family who were having a light lunch on what was left in the storehouse of their winter’s supplies. Hearing the rapid pattering and sniffing behind him, the mouse made the fatal mistake of keeping on to the storeroom—a large chamber underground, where three grown mice were feasting. Confident in the fighting ability of his family, he had yet to learn that odds are nothing to a shrew. In spite of his speed, the mouse dashed into the round room only a little ahead of his pursuer. The storehouse was large enough to make a good battleground, but, unfortunately for the mice, contained only one entrance.
Then followed a battle great and grim. The mice were on their own ground, four against one and that one only a tiny blind beastling less than half the size and weight of any one of them. It did not seem as if the shrew had a chance against the burly, round-headed meadow-voles, who are the best fighters of all the mice-folk. Yet the issue was never in doubt. The shrew attacked with incredible swiftness. No one of his four foes could make a motion that his quick ear and uncanny sense of touch did not at once detect. Moreover, throughout the whole fight, he never for an instant left the exit-tunnel unguarded. Time and again, from out of the whirling mass of entangled bodies, a meadow-mouse would spring to the door to escape. Always it ran against the fell jaws of the little blind death, and bounded back from the latter’s rigid steel-like body. Again and again the miceleaped high, and like little boxers thrust the shrew away from them by quick motions of their forepaws. At times they would jump clear over him, slashing and snapping as they went, with their two pairs of long curved sharp teeth. The shrew’s snout, however, was of tough leathery cartilage. Its tiny hidden and unseeing eyes needed no protection, while its thick fur and tough skin could be pierced only by a long grip, which he prevented by his tactics. Never using his forefeet like the mice, he stood with feet outspread and firmly braced, head and snout pointing up, and constantly darted his jaws forward and downward with fierce tearing bites. With each one he brought no less than six pointed fighting teeth into play. These, driven by the great muscles of the shrew’s neck and jaws, made ghastly ripping cuts through the thin skins of the mice. The latter kept up a continual squeaking as they moved, but the little killer fought in absolute silence. His wee body seemed to have an inexhaustible store of fierce strength and endurance, and throughout the battle it was always the shrew who attacked and the mice who retreated. Like the raccoon, the shrew is perfectly balanced on all four feet, and can move forward, backward, or sidewise with equal readiness. With swift little springs this one constantly tried for a throat-hold; yet amid the tangle and confusion of the struggle, never once did he fail to guard the one way out.
Round and round the storehouse the battle surged for a long half hour, with the shrew always between the doorway and his struggling, leaping opponents.The grain-fed mice lacked the blood-bought endurance of their opponent. The young mouse who had led the shrew to the storehouse was the first to go. In the very middle of a leap, he staggered and fell at the feet of his enemy. Instantly the long curved jaws closed on his head, and the fierce teeth of the shrew crunched into his brain.
It was the beginning of the end. One by one the others fell before the automatic rushes and slashes of the little fighting-machine, until only one was left, a scarred, skilled veteran, who had held his own in many a fight. As he felt his strength ebbing, with a last desperate effort the mouse dodged one of the shrew’s rushes, and managed to sink his two pairs of curved teeth into the tough muscles of the other’s neck. Then a horrifying thing happened. Without even trying to break the mouse’s grip, the shrew bent nearly double, and buried his pointed muzzle deep into the soft flesh below the other’s foreleg. Driven by the cruel hunger which ruled his life, he ate like fire through skin and flesh and bone. The mouse fought, the shrew ate, and the outcome was certain, as it must be when a fighter who depends on four teeth dares the clinch with one who uses twelve. Even as the mouse unlocked his jaws for a better hold he tottered and fell dead under the feet of the other.
For long days and nights the shrew stayed in the storeroom, until all that remained of the meadow-mice were four pelts neatly folded and four skeletons picked bare of even a shred of flesh. Moreover, the store of seeds left by the mice was gone, too.
Finally, one morning, as the sun came up over the pines, the little masked death flashed out of the burrow with the same pattering rush with which he had entered, and hurried toward a near-by brook, to quench an overpowering thirst. As he approached the bank, he passed one of his larger brethren, the blarina, or mole shrew, whose track in the sand was like an uncovered tunnel filled with zigzag paw-prints. Although both were blind, each felt the other’s presence, and it was fortunate for the smaller of the two that the blarina had also just fed, since shrews allow no ties of blood to interfere with their eminently practical appetites.
Just before the little blind runner reached the bank, he encountered another wanderer, whom few of the smaller animals meet and live. It was that demon of the woods, the short-tailed weasel, going to and fro in the earth, seeking whom he might devour. Behind him, as always, was a trail of dead and dying animals. Into every hole large enough to admit his slim body, he wormed his way like a hunting snake, and passed, swift and silent as death itself, through brush-piles, hollow logs, and up and down trees, to peer into the round window of a woodpecker’s home or a squirrel’s nest. Meadow-mice, deer-mice, chipmunks, rats, rabbits, and even squirrels in their trees the slayer ran down to their death; for, unlike the shrews, a weasel kills from blood-lust and not from hunger.
Like some great inch-worm, the weasel looped its way along, until its path crossed that of the shrew pattering toward the brook. Even in the face ofthis incarnate terror of the wild folk the little shrew showed all the stubborn courage of his race and, refusing to turn aside, passed within an inch of the deadly jaws of the red killer. Nothing in nature, save the stab of one of the coiled pit-vipers, is swifter than the pounce of the weasel. In his grip the shrew, despite all of his fierce courage, would have had no more chance than a man ground by the frightful teeth of a killer whale. Against the larger mammals, however, this fierce fragment of flesh and blood has one last defense, which saved him that day.
As the weasel caught a whiff of the pungent, evil odor of the shrew’s fur, he drew aside, his lips curled back over his sharp teeth in a grimace of disgust, and the masked beastling passed unscathed. At a little cove by the edge of a stump, the shrew drank deep. The pointed snout had just come to the surface, when his quick hearing caught from overhead a tiny flutter of sound. Long ages of sudden death from the air for the shrew-folk made the next movement of this one automatic. As if this sound-wave from overhead had touched some reflex, he dived into the water at the first vibration, like a frog, and swam deep down under the overhanging bank. A fraction of a second later a pair of sharp, cramped talons sank deep into the bank where he had stood, printing in the sand the “K” signature of the hawk-folk, and a buff-waistcoated sparrow hawk swooped into the air again, with a shrill disappointed, “killi, killi, killi!”
As the little fugitive swam along the bank somethinglong and sinuous passed him like a flash in the golden water. For a land animal a shrew is no mean swimmer; but the banded watersnake outswims the fish on which it feeds. This one went past the speeding mammal so fast, that it showed only a blur of dingy brown markings on its back and a gleam of marbled red blotches on its belly, as it disappeared in a hole which sloped under the bank. Although not venomous, the banded watersnake has within its flat triangular head a mouthful of sharp teeth which it is always willing to use, and is an exceptionally active, powerful serpent. Even one of the larger mammals might well have hesitated before attacking one in its own den.
THE KILLERS
THE KILLERS
Not so the shrew. By the swirl and suction of the water, he knew that something large and living had gone by. That was enough. Food meant everything, size and odds nothing, in his life. The snake had scarcely time to turn around in its dark burrow, before its cold unwinking eyes saw a dark little figure come out of the water and rush up the long slope that led to the hollow under the bank. Although less than two feet long, the watersnake was more than ten times the size of the shrew, and it seemed as unequal a combat as would be one between a man and any of the vast monsters spawned of the primeval ooze. The serpent threw itself into the figure-of-eight coil from which it fights, and to the advantages of size, weight, and strength added that of position, since the shrew had to fight uphill. Yet, like the meadow-voles, the snake never had a chance. As the wide-open jawstouched the whiskered muzzle, the shrew swerved, and escaped the snapping teeth by the width of a hair, while the crooked crocodile jaws clinched in the large muscles at the angle of the snake’s jaw. The barred serpent hissed fiercely, throwing off the sickening effluvium like decayed fruit, which is one of the defenses of a fighting watersnake, and threw its thick body into swift changing loops and coils, hurling the shrew back and forth. The little animal held on with its death grip, and the crooked jaws burrowed deeper and deeper, bringing into play the long rows of sharp cutting teeth.
A watersnake is not a constrictor, and the sandy sides of the den were too soft and narrow to enable it to dislodge the shrew’s grip by battering the animal against the walls of the burrow; but again and again it tried to throw its coils over its opponent’s rigid body, so as to afford leverage enough to tear the punishing jaws loose. Each time, by a swift movement, the shrew would escape the changing loops, and never for an instant ceased to drive its teeth deeper, until they cut clear through the snake’s temporal muscles, and its lower jaw dangled limp and useless. Freed then from any fear of attack, the shrew sank his long curved teeth deliberately into the reptile’s brain, and although the snake still struggled, the battle was over.
Once more the ever-hungry little mammal claimed the spoils of victory. Only when there was nothing left of the snake but a well-picked skeleton, did he leave the den. Then again he drank deeply, plunged up through the water, and landed after dark on thesame little beach from which he had dived days before. As he scurried across an open space in the woods, a dark shadow drifted down from the tree tops and two great wings hovered over him, so muffled by soft feathers that not even the shrew heard a single beat or flutter from them. A second longer above ground, and all his fierceness and courage and swiftness would have availed him nothing against the winged death that overshadowed him.
At that instant, far and faint came a little twittering note from under the leaf carpet. It was only the shadow of a sound, but in a wink the shrew was gone, following the love call of his mate underground. Overhead sounded the deep and dreadful voice of a barred owl, as it floated back to its tree top, disappointed for once of its prey.
At midnight Ben Gunnison, the peddler, reached the little glade where the shrew had disappeared. Trying for a short cut through the Barrens, Ben had followed the old cattle-trail from Perth Ambov, unused for more than a century. At first it stretched straight and plain through the pitch-pine woods. Beyond Double Trouble and Mount Misery, it began to wind, and by the time he had reached Four Mile he was lost. For long he staggered under his heavy pack through thickets of scrub oak, white-cedar swamps, and tangles of greenthorn. By the time he had reached the little opening, he was exhausted, and putting his pack under his head for a pillow, lay down under a great sweet-gum tree to sleep out the night.
Just before dawn he was awakened by high-pitched, trilling, elfin music. Opening his eyes, he saw in the light of the setting moon two tiny things chasing each other round and round his pack, singing as they ran. Even as he listened, he heard from overhead an ominous cracking noise, and leaped to his feet just as a decayed stub whizzed down, landing with a crash on his pack. As long as he lives, Ben will believe that two fairies saved his life.
“Don’t tell me,” he would say. “Isaw’em. Little weeny fellows half the size of a mouse callin’ me to get up. An’ I got up. That’s the reason I’m here to-day, bless ’em.”
After running twenty miles, old Raven Road stopped to rest under a vast black-oak tree. Beyond its sentinel bulk was Wild-Folk Land. Where hidden springs had kept the wet grass green all winter, the first flower of the year had forced its way through the cold ground. Smooth as ivory, all crimson-lake and gold-green on the outside, the curved hollow showed a rich crimson within. Cursed with an ill name and an evil savor, yet the skunk cabbage leads the year’s procession of flowers.
Among the dry leaves of the thickets showed the porcelain petals of a colony of hepatica, snow-white, pale pink, violet, deep purple, pure blue, lilac, and lavender. Beyond them was a patch of spice-bush, whose black fragrant branches snapped brittle as glass, and whose golden blossoms appear before the leaves. At the foot of a bank, hidden by the scented boughs, bubbled a deep unfailing spring, and from it a little trickle of water wound through the thicket into the swale beyond. Growing wider and deeper with every rod, it ran through a little valley hidden between two round, green hills, which widened into a stretch of marshland filled with reeds and thickets ofwild rose, elderberry, and buttonbush, laced and interlaced with the choking orange strands of that parasite, the dodder.
Beside the stream, and at times crossing it, a path, trodden deep, twisted in and out of the marsh. It was too narrow to have been made by human feet, nor could any man have found and followed so unerringly the little ridges of dry going hidden away between the bogs and under the lush growth. Packed hard by long years of use, nowhere in the path’s whole length did any paw-print show. Only in snow-time was the white page printed deep with tracks like those of a dog, but cleaner cut and running in a straight line instead of spraddling to one side. Nor was there ever in these trails the little furrow which a dragging paw makes. Only a fox could have made that long straight line, where every paw-print was stamped in the soft snow as if with a die. From Cold Spring to Darby Creek the long narrow valley belonged to the fox-folk.
Close beside the spring itself, at the very edge of its fringe of bushes, was a deep burrow that ran out into the open field, and yet was so cunningly hidden by a rock and masked by bushes and long grass that few humans ever suspected that a sly, old, gray fox had lived there for a fox-lifetime, or nearly ten years. His range extended to the swamp on the south, and up through the tangle of little wooded hills and valleys to the north known throughout the countryside as the Ridge.
The other end of Fox Valley, and all the DarbyCreek country from Fern Valley to Blacksnake Swamp was owned by a red-fox family. They were larger than the gray foxes and the blood of long-ago English foxes, brought over by fox-hunting colonial governors, ran in their veins. To the strength and size of the American fox they added the craft of a thousand generations of hunted foxes on English soil.
Both fox families kept, for the most part, strictly to their own range, for poaching in a fox country always means trouble. Both ranges were well stocked with rabbits, three varieties of mice, birds, frogs, and the other small deer on which foxes live. Occasionally the hunters of both families would make a foray on some far-away farm and bring back a plump hen, a pigeon, or sometimes a tame duck. Never did the hunter rob a near-by farm, or go twice in succession to the same place; for it is a foolish fox who will make enemies for himself on his own home ranges—and foolish foxes are about as common as white crows.
The red-fox range included a number of well-hidden homes. Rarely did they occupy the same house two seasons in succession, for experience has taught foxes that long leases are neither sanitary nor safe. This year they were living on the slope of a dry hillside in the very heart of a beech wood. Long years before they had fashioned their very first home, and during every succeeding year of occupancy had added improvements and repairs, until it was as complete a residence as any fox family could wish. The first burrow, which was some nine inches in diameter, ranstraight into the hillside for about three feet; then it angled sharply along the side of a hidden rock, and ran back some twenty feet more. From off the main shaft branched different galleries. One led to a storehouse, and another to a chamber where the garbage of the den was buried; for there are no better housekeepers among the wild folk than the foxes. Last and best hidden of all was the sleeping-room, fully twelve inches across, and carefully lined with soft, dry grass.
The perpendicular air shaft ran from the deepest part of the tunnel to the centre of a dense thicket on the hillside. In an irregular curve of some twenty feet, two more entrances were dug. Both of these joined the main shaft after describing an angle. Last of all was the emergency exit, the final touch which makes a fox home complete. It is always concealed carefully, and is never used except in times of great danger. This one was dug down through a decayed chestnut stump some two feet high, hidden in a fringe of bushes some distance up the hillside, and wound itself among the roots, and connected with the sleeping-chamber. Back of the main entrance lay a chestnut log fully three feet through, and screened from the hilltop by a thicket interlaced with greenbrier. This was the watchtower and sun-parlor of the fox family. From it they could survey the whole valley, while one bound would bring them to any one of the regular entrances.
On a day in early April, full of sunshine and showers blowing across a soft spring sky, the old dogfox approached the den, carrying a cottontail rabbit slung over one shoulder. As he came to the main entrance, he suddenly stopped and, with one foot raised, stood motionless, sniffing a faint scent from the depths of the burrow. Without entering, he laid the rabbit down at the lip of the opening and withdrew; for no dog fox may enter his burrow after the cubs arrive. There were three of them—blind, lead-colored little kittens, who nuzzled and whimpered against Mother Fox’s warm body and fed frantically every hour or so during the first days of their new life. For the next three weeks Father Fox hunted for five. Squirrels, red and gray, chipmunks, birds, rabbits, and scores and scores of mice, found their way into the den.
The ninth day of the cubs’ life on earth marked an event more important to Mother Fox than the Declaration of Independence, or the promulgation of the Suffrage Amendment. On that date, all three of her cubs opened their eyes! Twelve nights later, when the May moonlight made a new heaven and a new earth, they took their first journey. It was only twenty feet, but it covered the distance from one world to another. For a moment three sharp little noses peered out wonderingly at the new world. It was roofed with a shimmering sky instead of damp earth, and was big and boundless and very, very beautiful. Altogether the newcomers approved of it highly, although there did seem to be a great waste of air, and it was not so warm and cozy as the world underground.
THE FOX FAMILY
THE FOX FAMILY
Then the trio of little heads disappeared, and Mother Fox came out and winnowed the air through the marvelous mesh of her nostrils. Convinced that all was safe, she called her cubs out with one of those wild-folk signals pitched below the range of human ears. A moment later, the cubs were out and about in the dangerous, delightful world of out-of-doors. With their long, sprawly legs and heads too big for their bodies, they had something of the lumbering, appealing looks that puppies have. Their broad foreheads and pricked-up ears seemed enormous compared with their little faces. Each one in turn put his head to one side and looked engagingly at the new world. With their soft woolly backs and round little stomachs, they seemed made to be patted and cuddled. Yet, playful and confiding as they appeared, a profound wisdom and craft looked out from their young eyes, which is never seen in those of any other animal.
Mother Fox watched them with much pride. Forgotten were the nine cubs of the year before, and the quartettes and sextettes of many a yesteryear. Never before, in her opinion, had there ever been three cubs so wise and beautiful and remarkable as these. Suddenly she raised her voice in the squalling screech of a vixen. Again and again the fierce uncanny sound shuddered away over the hills, and a pair of newly arrived summer boarders, who were strolling along Raven Road in the moonlight, returned with exceeding haste to old Mose Butler’s farmhouse, and reported to their grinning host that they had heard the scream of a panther.
From far down Darby Creek came the answering bark of the old fox. Only the sudden explosive quality of the sound made it resemble in any way the bark of a dog. A curious screeching quality of tone ran through it, and it sounded as if made by some animal who was trying to bark but had never really learned how. Then, with the disconcerting suddenness of a fox, Father Fox stood before his new family for the first time. From his narrow jaws swung a fringe of plump mice, with their tails ingeniously crossed so that they could all be carried by one grip of the narrow jaws. Dropping them, the old fox stared solemnly at his family grouped in the moonlight, and then growled deep and approvingly in his throat. Two of the cubs wore the usual clouded pale yellow of a young red fox. The third, however, showed, faintly outlined, a velvety black face, ears, muzzle, and legs, with a silky black streak down his back, crossed at the shoulders by a similar stripe shading into reddish and silver-gray, while his little black tail had the silver tip which is the hall-mark of the rare cross-fox, which is sometimes born into a red-fox family.
From that night the training of the little fox family began. Father Fox no longer brought his kill directly to the den. Instead, he hid it not too carefully some fifty yards away, and the cubs learned to know the scent of food—flesh or fowl—and to dig it out from under piles of leaves or brush, or even from under an inch or so of freshly dug earth. Then, with tiny growls, they would crouch and steal forward and pounce upon the defenseless kill, withtremendous exhibitions of craft and ferocity. They went out on little hunting-trips by night, with Mother Fox, to lonely hillside pastures, where she taught them to hunt field-mice in the withered grass. In the starlight, they would steal up to some promising clump, and rising on their hind legs peer far forward, with ears pricked up to catch the faintest squeak and eyes alert to note the tiniest movement in the grass. They learned to spring and pounce like lightning, with outspread paws, just ahead of where the grass stirred ever so slightly. If successful, they would kill with one nip a plump, round-headed, short-tailed meadow-mouse. Every night they went farther and farther, until at last with Mother Fox they covered the whole range, at the brisk walk which is the usual hunting-gait of a fox, with frequent pauses and sniffings and listenings.
It was Father Fox who first took them into the sunlight, which was as strange and unnatural to fox children as midnight out-of-doors would be to a human child. He it was who taught them, when in danger, to stand still and keep on standing still—one of the most difficult courses in the wild-folk curriculum. Sometimes they met man, whose approach through the woods or across the fields sounded as loud to the fox children as the rumble of an auto-truck would sound to the human child. Crouched in the bleached tawny grass, absolutely immovable, the foxes looked so much like tussocks that it would have taken a trained eye indeed to have discovered them.
Just as the cubs had grown old and wise enough tobe left in and about the burrows alone, the Sword fell. That night both of the old foxes were abroad on a hunt too long for the untrained muscles of the cubs. Awaiting their return, the little foxes were playing and frolicking silently around the den. They had learned that the scent of man or dog means death to foxes, and to seek safety in their burrow at any strange sound. No one of them knew that a shadow in the air, which drifted silently nearer to the den, might conceal any danger. Suddenly the shadow fell, and seemed to blot out the little straw-colored cub farthest from the burrow. He had but time for a terrified whicker, when a double set of steel-like talons clamped through his soft fur clear to his heart, and in a second the little body shot up through the air and disappeared in the darkness. A few moments later, from a far-away clump of trees, sounded the deep sinister “Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo” of the great horned owl.
Once having found the fox family, Death followed fast on its trail. One morning the largest cub awoke, and decided to take a stroll by himself in the sunlight, without waiting for Father Fox to come, and without waking the rest of the family, who slept curled up together in the sleeping-room of the den. Stealing out of the main burrow, the little cub sniffed the air wisely, and examined the landscape from under wrinkled brows with an air of profound consideration. At first he followed a winding path which ran through a bit of woodland where Mother Fox had taken him once before by night. Finding no trace of game there, he left the path and climbed up a rocky hillside halfcovered with brush and trees. Just as he was turning a corner of a little rocky ledge which jutted out in front of him, he heard a low thick hiss. Directly in front of him, in an irregular loop, lay a hazel-brown snake, dappled with blunt Y’s of a rich chestnut color, its head and neck being the color of rusty copper.
DEATH IN THE DARK
DEATH IN THE DARK
For a second the young fox looked into the lidless, deadly eyes of the copperhead, with their strange oval pupils, the hall-mark of the fatal pit-vipers. All in one flash, the grim jaws of the snake gaped open, the two movable fangs of the upper jaw unfolded and thrust straight out like tiny spearheads, and the fatal crooked needles stabbed deep in the cub’s soft side. Growling fiercely in his little throat, he clenched his sharp teeth through the snake’s spine; but even as he closed his jaws, the fatal virus touched the tide of his life and he fell forward.
The wild folk have no tears, nor may they show their sorrow by the sobs and wailing of humankind, yet there was something in the dumb despair of the two foxes who had followed the trail of their lost cub, as they hung over the soft little body, that showed that the love of our lesser brethren for their little ones is akin to the love of humankind. Thereafter all the watchfulness and the love and the hope of the two were concentrated on the little fox with the black cross on his back. Night and day Mother Fox guarded him. Day and night Father Fox taught and trained him, until he had acquired much of the lore of fox-kind. He learned to catch birds and mice andfrogs and squirrels, and even the keen-eared cottontail rabbit, whose eyes can see forward and backward equally well. He learned, too, the lessons of prudence and foresight which keep foxes alive when ice and snow have locked many of their larders. Once, when he was crossing a pasture with Father Fox, the latter stopped and stood like a pointing dog, one velvety black bent forefoot in the air, while with outstretched muzzle he sniffed the faintest of warm scents, which seemed to float from a clump of tangled dry grass. Stealing forward like a shadow, the old fox sprang at the tussock. Before he landed, a plump quail buzzed out of the cover like a bullet, to be caught by the fox in mid-air. Underneath a fringe of dry grass was a round nest of pure white, sharp-pointed eggs—so many of them that they were heaped up in layers.
After eating the quail, the old fox carefully carried off the eggs and hid them under layers of damp moss, where they would keep indefinitely and be a resource in the famine days that were yet to come.
Another day the cub learned the advantage of teamwork. On that day the two old foxes were hunting together, and, as usual, Blackcross tagged along. Near the middle of a great field, a flock of killdeer were feeding—those loud-voiced plover, which wear two rings around their white necks. For a moment the two foxes stood motionless, staring at the distant birds. Then, without a sound, Mother Fox turned back. For a moment Blackcross could watch her as she made a wide detour around the field, and thenshe disappeared from sight. Father Fox lay still for several minutes, with his wise head resting on his forepaws. Then, while Blackcross stayed behind, the old fox started deliberately toward the flock of feeding birds. At times he would stop, and bound high in the air, and scurry up and down, waving his flaunting brush and cutting curious capers, moving gradually nearer and nearer to the flock.
The killdeer, which are wise birds in spite of their loud voices, moved farther and farther away toward the end of the pasture, ready to spring into the air and flash away on their long narrow wings if the fox came too near, but evidently much interested in his antics as they fed. Gradually the curveting fox edged the flock clear across the field, until they were close to a thicket that lay between the field and a patch of woods beyond. Then he redoubled his efforts, prancing and bounding and rolling over and over, while his fluffy tail showed like a plume above the long grass, and the birds stopped feeding and watched him with evident curiosity.
Suddenly, when the attention of the whole flock was fixed on the performing fox, there was a rustle in the thicket, and out flashed a tawny shape. Before the flock could spring into the air, Mother Fox had caught one bird in her teeth and beaten down another with her paws.
Another morning Blackcross learned what happens to foxes who poach on their neighbor’s preserves. In the early dawn-light, he was loping along the upper end of the valley with Father Fox. Suddenly the furbristled all along the latter’s back, and he gave a little churring growl. Right ahead of him, trotting along a path made by a generation of red-fox pads, came the old gray fox who lived by Cold Spring, a dead cottontail rabbit swung over one shoulder. The poacher was caught with the game. With another growl, the old red fox sprang at the trespasser. The gray fox was a mile from his burrow, and knowing that the red fox could outpace him, decided to fight for his booty. With a quick flirt of his head, he tossed the rabbit into a near-by bush, and with bristling back awaited the attack.
Walking stiff-legged like two dogs, and growling deep in their throats, the two came together, until they stood sidewise to each other, sparring for an opening. Finally, the old red fox snapped at the other’s foreleg, with a movement more like the slash of a wolf than the bite of a dog. The gray fox dropped his head, and the bared teeth of the two snicked together. Again the red fox made the same lead, and met with the same block. The third time he feinted, and as the other dropped his head, whirled and brought his brush, with a blinding, stinging swish, across the eyes of the gray fox. Before the latter could recover, the narrow jaws of the red fox had met in the soft flesh just above the gray hind leg. A wolf would have hamstrung his opponent and killed him at his leisure; but foxes rarely fight to the death. As the old gray fox felt the rending teeth tear through his soft skin, he yelped, tore himself loose, and started full-speed for his den. For two hundred yards thered fox pursued him, with such swiftness that he managed to nip his unprotected hind quarters several times. At each bite the fleeing gray fox yelped with the high, shrill, sorrowful note of a hurt little dog; and when Father Fox returned to claim the spoils of victory, all that could be seen of the other was a gray streak moving rapidly toward Cold Spring.
As the cub reached his full stature, he ranged farther and farther afield with the two old foxes. He learned all the hiding and camping places of the range, and how to sleep out in a blaze of sunlight in some deserted field, looking for all the world like a tussock of tawny blackened grass, or, if so be that he hunted by day and slept by night, he found that he wore a blanket on his back which kept him warm even during the coldest nights. As for his unprotected nose and four paddies, he wrapped them up warm in the fluffy rug of his thick soft brush. By the time frost had come, his fur had grown long and glossy and very beautiful, with the velvet cross of midnight-black bordered with old-gold, silver, and tawny-pink, his black brush waving aloft like a white-tipped plume.
Death came with the frost, in the form of traps, hounds and hunters. Old Father Fox taught him how to escape them all. Many years ago he had lived across the hills on the lonely Barrack, where the Deans and the Blakesleys and the Howes and the Baileys and the Reeds have a far-away hill country of their own. Old Fred Dean lived there, and prided himself on both the wild and the tame crops which he raised on his hill farm. He made the whitest,sweetest maple sugar in the world, and harvested hickories, chestnuts, butternuts, and even hazel-nuts. It was his fur crop, however, which was the most profitable. Foxes, raccoons, skunks, muskrat, mink—the old man knew how to trap them all.
In Father Fox’s second year, he was caught in a trap which Fred had cunningly hidden in the snow among a maze of cattle tracks—the last place where a fox would suspect danger. The fox finally managed to work his imprisoned foot out of the gripping jaws; but it had cost him four toes to learn that the scent of man or iron meant death to foxes. He never forgot, and he taught Blackcross to fear the tiniest whiff of either. As for dogs, the old fox taught his cub that no dog can overtake a fox going uphill or in the rough, and that shifting sand and running water are the fox’s friends, since his scent will lie in neither. He taught him all the cut-offs, the jumps, and the run-backs of the range, and finally the cherished fortresses where, as a last resort, he might take refuge.
When it came to hunters, the young fox had to take his chances. In the last analysis a man’s brain can outwit that of a fox. It was when the blaze and the glow of the crimson and gold frost-fires had died away to the russet of late fall that the fox family was most in danger, for the Raven Hunt Club needed a fox. Three times now the men had dressed themselves with great care, in wonderful scarlet coats and shiny top-boots, while the women wore comfortable breeches and uncomfortable collars; and they hadall jumped fences and waded brooks and crashed through thickets; but never a fox could they find, so close had the dwellers in Fox Valley lain hidden. In fact, the last hunt had been a drag-hunt, and the pack had followed for hours the scent of a bag of anise which had been dragged the day before by a string, through the woods and across the fields, by a sleepy stable-boy on a broken-down hunter. But you cannot rise in your stirrups and shout “Tally-ho!” or “Stole away!” or any of the other proper hunting remarks, over a bag of anise. Then, too, the hounds have nothing to worry and kill at the end of the hunt; nor can the brush be cut off for a trophy, for an anise bag hasn’t any brush.
Thanksgiving was two scant weeks away, and it was absolutely necessary for the happiness of the Hunt that a live fox be secured at once. Accordingly the Raven Hunt Club offered fifty dollars for a live red fox. Grays were barred, because they prefer to hide in burrows and be safe rather than run and be killed. For a week all the farmers’ boys for miles around Fox Valley trapped desperately, but without success. Father Fox had not paid four toes for nothing. Then they sent for Fred Dean. Thereafter, one night Blackcross, while hunting over a hilltop pasture, noted a long, freshly turned furrow that ran straight across the field, which was filled with old chaff taken from deserted barns and smelt delightfully of mice. Along the furrow and through the litter the young fox nosed his way, ready to pounce upon the first mouse which darted out. Suddenlythere was a snap, and Blackcross was caught by his slim dark muzzle. There the old trapper found him the next morning, hardly alive; and when he saw that he had secured a cross-fox, demanded a hundred from the committee instead of the offered fifty. Said committee took the fox, and advertised far and wide that the Thanksgiving Hunt would be after such a fox as had never been hunted before in the memory of man.
The holiday turned out to be one of those rare and fleeting days of Indian summer which Autumn sometimes borrows from her sister. The pack was in fine fettle. The horses and the hunters were fit, and the hunt breakfast excellent. Everybody was thankful—except the shivering little fox. For days he had been cooped in a dirty wire cage, and eaten tainted meat and drunk stale water, and he was stiff and sore from his night in the trap and from lack of exercise. Just at sunrise on Thanksgiving morning, he was crammed into a bag, and then let out two fields ahead of the pack. As he shot into the sunlight, there was a chorus of shouts, yells, and yelps, and a crowd of men, women, horses, and hounds rushed after him in a tremendous burst of speed.
The young fox’s legs tottered under him as he ran. Moreover, for a mile around the country was level. As he crossed the first field, the pack was already at the farther wall, and would surely have overtaken him in the third field if it had not been for one of the old fox’s lessons. The pasture sloped up to where a sand bank showed as a great crescent gash in theturf. Springing to the side of the bank, the fox clung to it like a fly, scurried along its side, cleared the stone wall beyond, and headed for the thickets of Fox Valley. The shifting sand left no track or scent, and while the pack puzzled out the trail, Blackcross won to the shelter of the nearest thicket.
Up and down the hillsides, across marshes and through tangles of underbrush, he doubled, checked, turned, and twisted. Raven Hunt, however, boasted the best pack of fox-hounds in the state, nor had Blackcross either the strength or endurance for a long run. His pace became slower and slower, while the bell-like notes of the hounds and the shouts of the hunters sounded ever nearer and louder.
Only just in time the beset fox saw looming up before him the best hidden of all the fox fortresses in the Valley. It seemed only an impenetrable tangle of greenbrier on the hillside—that vine whose stems are like slim, green wires, studded everywhere with up-curved thorns through which neither man nor beast can force a way. Through the very middle of the tangle ran the naked trunk of a fallen chestnut, showing just above the barbed vines. As the pack scrambled through the barway at the foot of the hill, the little fox ran along the log, and with all his last remaining strength sprang far out across the interlaced tangle of vine and thorn, where the smooth needles under a little white pine made a tiny island in the thicket. From there the fox bounded over a narrow belt of greenbrier into a mass of wild honeysuckle, whose glossy green leaves and bendingvine-stocks carpeted the hill at that point fully two feet deep. Across the yielding surface he hurried, until he reached the entrance of a little tunnel beneath the vines, entirely hidden from sight by the drooping leaves. Through this he crept noiselessly, beneath the green carpet, until he reached the entrance to a burrow which led far up the hillside and had no less than three well-concealed exits.
For a long hour the pack and the hunters and the horses circled and beat and trampled back and forth through the thicket, and as far into the greenbrier tangle as they could force a way; but no one of them found the lost trail. A hundred dollars had been spent and nothing killed. Everybody agreed that it was a most unfortunate ending to a good day—everybody, that is, except the fox.
As the months wore on, Blackcross hunted more and more by himself, nor did he use any of the family dens. This was partly because snow leaves a telltale trail, which he who hunts can read, and partly because of a difference in the attitude toward him of the old foxes. Among the wild folk the love and care of parents cease when their children have become full-grown. This is part of nature’s plan to scatter families, and prevent the in-breeding which will weaken the stock. At last the time came when Mother Fox no longer allowed him the freedom of the den in which he had been born, and Father Fox growled in his throat when he met him carrying his kill.
Then the love-moon of the foxes in Februaryshowed in the sky, and something drove Blackcross far afield—something that called and cried, and would not let him sleep, and took away even the interest and joy of a successful hunt. Across the ridges, through Fern Valley and beyond Blacksnake Swamp he journeyed, until, far beyond them all, he found a lonely valley shut in on all four sides by steep slopes, and untenanted by any of the fox-folk. On the crest of one of the hills stood an abandoned haystack, left by some thriftless farmer years before, and so bleached and weathered by sun and storm that it was useless as hay, but an ideal place for a fox-warren. Under this Blackcross dug a home with many entrances, all of them cunningly concealed by the overhanging hay. Through the centre of the stack itself, he ran a series of tunnels and rooms, besides the safer ones far underground.
Finally, it was almost completed—almost but not quite. Night after night the young fox barked from the top of the hill with a sharp staccato screech, which could be heard a long mile away. Then came the night of the full moon. There was no snow and overhead in the crisp air wheeled Orion the Hunter, Lepus the Hare, the Great and Little Dog, and all the other mighty constellations of winter. Under the sheen and shimmer of the stars and through the still moonlight, Blackcross sent his bark echoing and ringing, until at long last it was answered by a curious, high-pitched squall which to Blackcross contained all the magic and music of sky and earth. Nearer and nearer the sound approached, untilfinally, in the moonlight, a slim tawny figure stole up to the stack. For a moment black muzzle and tawny touched. Then Blackcross turned and disappeared down one of the entrances to his burrow, and the stranger followed. At last, his home was complete.
The short Arctic summer had flung its flower fields among the glaciers of the Siberian coast, like many-colored jewels set in crystal. Flocks of skuas, jaegers, and little auks circled and screamed above the smoky green waters of the Straits; and far out from shore a bed of kelp writhed and tossed like a mass of golden-brown sea snakes.
There, cradled on the swaying stems, a water-baby was born. He had a funny little nose, with a padded cushion on top which made it look like the ace of spades, and his round, blunt head was of a dingy white color, while the rest of his fifteen inches was covered with a loose, kinky, gray-brown coat. Its harsh outer surface, sprinkled with long white hairs, covered a velvet-like inner fur that gave promise of the glory that was yet to be.
In spite of his insignificant appearance, the little cub was of blood royal, of the lineage of the sea otter, that king of fur-bearers, who wears a fortune on his back and is dogged by death every moment of his life. Vitus Behring and his shipwrecked crew discovered them in 1741, in the surf and shallows around a barren island, in the sea which now bears his name. Whenthey won their way back to Asia, sly, wise Chinese merchants paid their weight in silver for the new furs, so lustrous, silky, and durable, which the sailors had been using for coats and blankets. In Russia they came to be worth their weight in gold, outranking even the royal sables, which none but the Tsar and his nobles might wear. To-day the pelt of a sea otter is worth its weight in platinum or palladium.
This last-born princeling soon learned how to float on his back, with his round little head just showing above the kelp. For the most part, however, he lived clasped in his mother’s arms and wrapped in the silky folds of her fur, while he nuzzled and fed against her warm breast, making happy little chirps and grunts of satisfaction, quite like a human baby.
To-day, as they rocked back and forth in the swinging water, the kelp-carpet in front of them parted, and a great, blunt, misshapen head thrust itself into the air a few yards away. It had little eyes set high in the skull, while the ears showed below the grinning mouth filled full of blunt teeth like white water-worn pebbles—the hallmark of a sea otter.
The newcomer was none other than Father Otter, come to look over his son and heir. He did not come very close to his family, for mother otters do not permit even their mates to approach too near a newborn cub. As the old dog otter stretched himself out on the kelp-raft, his cylindrical body, all gleaming ebony and silver in the sunlight, showed nearly as long as that of a man, and weighed perhaps a hundred and twenty-five pounds. It was the great otter’spelt, however, that stamped him as the sea king that he was. Lustrous as light on the water, the inner fur had a close pile like velvet and, frosted with long white hairs, showed a tinge of silver-purple gleaming through its long loose folds.
For some time the old dog otter gravely surveyed his mate and his new cub, approvingly. Then he scanned sea and sky and kelp, listening the while with a pair of the sharpest ears that ever guarded the life of one of the wild folk, at the same time winnowing the air through a pair of nostrils that could smell smoke—that danger-signal to all wild people—a mile away. There was no sign of danger anywhere, and a moment later he disappeared under the water, after the food which his vibrant body unceasingly required.
For long after his disappearance the mother otter anxiously studied the horizon for the tiniest danger-signal. Convinced at last that all was well, she stretched herself out on the slow-swinging kelp, for one of those periods of quiet happiness which come even into the lives of the hunted. While her cub snuggled against her soft fur, she tossed a kelp-bulb high into the air, catching it like a ball, first in one bare little palm, then in the other, while she sang the cradle-song which all little sea otters know. High and shrill she chirped and twittered like a bird, in the midst of that lonely sea, clasping her sleepy baby closer as she sang.
There seemed no living thing near, yet death is never far from the sea otter. From mid-sky whatseemed a dark wisp of cloud drifted toward the sea. Driven down by hunger from the North, an eagle owl, all buff and gray and brown, was crossing from Asia to America; for, unlike most of his fierce clan, he hunted by day. Larger than that death-in-the-dark, the great-horned owl, or that fierce white ghost of the North, the snowy owl, he skimmed down toward the kelp-bed, his round, fixed eyes gleaming red and horrible in the sunlight. Muffled by the softest of down, his great wings, although they had a spread of nearly five feet, were absolutely noiseless.
Not until the shadow of the bird, like the shadow of death itself, fell upon her cub, did the otter have the slightest warning of any danger. By that time it would have been too late for any other creature to escape. No animal, however, on land or sea can dive with the sea otter. Just as the crooked talons were closing, she slipped through the kelp into the water, without a splash, like something fluid, her cub clasped close, while overhead the baffled owl snapped its beak like a pistol shot, and flew on toward the Alaskan coast.
Down through the swaying tangles she twisted her way like an eel, until she passed clear through the floating bed of this strange growth of the sea, which grows with its roots in the air. There the water darkened, and as she neared the bottom a shape flashed ahead of her, lighted with that phosphorescence which all dwellers in the northern seas seem to acquire. The otter recognized the glowing figure as that of a sea bass, a bronze-green fish hardly to bedistinguished from the small-mouthed black bass of fresh water. The bass was no mean swimmer, but the long, oar-like, webbed hind legs of the sea otter twisted over and over each other like the screw of a propeller, and drove her through the water with such tremendous speed that, in spite of the handicap of the cub, she soon swam down the fish, following its every twist and turn, and in less than a minute had caught it in her blunt teeth. Then, with the plump fish in her jaws, she swam up again through the kelp, and fed full, never for a moment, however, loosening her grip of her cub—for the babies of the sea folk who wander only a few feet from their mothers may never return.
The meal finished, the great otter climbed out on a pinnacle of rock just showing above the kelp. Immediately from a miracle of lithe, swift grace, she changed into one of the slowest and most awkward of animals. The webbed flipper-like hind feet, which drove her with such speed through the water, were of very little use on land, and her tiny forepaws were so short that they seemed to have no wrists at all. Slowly and painfully she waddled up on the rock, and there preened and cleaned and combed and licked every inch of her fur just as a cat would do, until it shone in the sunlight like a black opal.
As the weeks went by, the cub was trained in the lessons of the sea. He learned to enjoy salads of kelp-sprouts, and to dive with his mother to the bottom of the shallows, and watch her grind her way through the great clams of the northwest, whose bivalves area foot in width, or crunch with her pebble-like teeth into the white meat of the vast, armored crabs of those seas. Another one of her favorite foods was the sea urchin—that chestnut burr of the sea. Protected by a bristling hedge of steel-sharp spines, it would seem safe from any attack. Yet, just as the squirrel on land opens without injury the real chestnut burr, so the sea otter had learned the combination which unlocked this little spiked safe of the sea, and devoured with much relish every one she could find.
As the weeks went by, the larder of the kelp-bed began to empty. The clam-beds had been stripped, the sea urchins were gone, and the fish had learned to keep away. Little by little, the mother otter hunted farther and farther from the safety of the kelp; until there came a day when, driven by hunger, she followed a fleeing pollock out into the open sea. The big gleaming fish, with the black line along its silver sides, swam far and fast. Yet, if the otter had not been hampered by her clinging cub, the chase would have been a short one. As it was, she did not overtake the fugitive until it was fully a quarter of a mile away from the kelp. In desperation it swam down into the lower depth, until the dull green of the water changed to black; but always the weasel of the sea was hard on its track, following the phosphorescent trail which the fleeing fish left behind.
Suddenly, as the pollock dived to even lower depths, in the hope that the water-pressure might drive back its pursuer, a grotesquely horrible head thrust itselfup from the darkness right in its path. Dark, and shining like wet rubber, the shape resembled nothing so much as that of a great, double-headed sledgehammer. From either of the living hammer-heads gleamed a greenish, malignant eye. Before the pollock could dart aside, the great hammer-head shark turned partly over, there was a flash of sharp teeth, and the fugitive fish disappeared.
A second later the ridged, gray, fifteen-foot body shot toward the otter, with such speed that the water fairly hissed from the scimetar-shaped side-fins. The sea otter is among the swiftest swimmers of the mammals, but no air-breathing creature can compete in speed with a shark. Almost instantly the hammerhead was upon her. The jaws of all the sharks are so undershot that, in order to grip their prey, they must perforce turn over on their sides. This peculiarity of their kind was all that saved the otter. For a second the grim head overshadowed her. Then, with a twist of its long tail, shaped like the fluke of an anchor, the shark turned over and the vast mouth swung open, armed with six rows of inch-long, steel-sharp, triangular teeth, whose edges were serrated like a saw. Each separate tooth was curved back toward the gullet, so that for any living thing caught in their dreadful grip there was no more chance of escape than there would be from the interlocking cogwheels of a stone-crusher.
As the jaws of death gaped for the sea otter, with a writhe of her swift body she flashed to one side, while the little cub whimpered in her arms and the fatalteeth of the shark just grazed her trailing, flipper-like hind legs, so close they snapped behind her. Swerving beneath the great bulk, the otter began a desperate flight for life. Every foot of the shark’s gaunt, stripped body was built for speed. There was not a bone anywhere under his drab and livid skin—only rings and strips and columns of tough, springy cartilage, which enabled him to cut through the water like a blade of tempered gray steel. With the rush of a torpedo the grim figure shot after the fleeing otter, who had but one advantage and that was in length. It takes a six-foot body less time to turn than one that measures fifteen feet. In a straightaway race, the fish would have overtaken the mammal in a few seconds; but when it came to twisting, turning, and doubling, the sea otter had an advantage, albeit of the slightest. Again and again the desperate sea mother avoided death by an inch. More than once the ringing jaws of the great fish snapped together just behind her, and only the tiny tick of time which it took to turn over saved her. Desperately she sought to win the refuge of the kelp-bed; but always the gray shape thrust itself between her and safety.
At last an ally of the sea folk joined in the hunt. Water was claiming her toll of oxygen from the alien within her depths. A sea otter can stay under for half an hour at a pinch—but not when swimming at full speed, with the laboring heart pumping blood at capacity; and this one realized despairingly that soon she must breathe or die. Little by little she shaped her course toward the surface, dreadfullyfearing lest the second she must spend in drawing one deep breath would be her last. She flashed upward through a whole gamut of greens—chrome, cedar, jasper, myrtle, malachite, emerald, ending with the pulsing, golden sap-green of the surface. Swim as she would, however, the monstrous head was always just at her flank, and the slightest pause would give those fatal teeth their grip. Once again she avoided by a hair’s breadth a snap of the deadly jaws, and struggled despairingly toward the upper air.
As the great fish turned to follow, out from the sunlight, through the gleaming water, shot a long dark body. Away from the safety of the kelp to the head of horror with its implacable eyes came the old dog otter, for the creed of the sea otter is unchanging—one mate for life and death. With his round misshapen head bristling and his snaky black eyes gleaming like fire, this one crossed the vast back of the shark like a shadow. As the great fish turned to follow the fleeing mother, the blunt pebble-teeth of the dog otter, which can grind the flintiest shells to powder, fastened themselves with a bull-dog grip just behind the last fin of the shark, where its long, sinuous tail joined the body. With all the force of his tremendous jaws, the great sea otter clamped his teeth through the masses of muscles, deep into the cartilage column, crushing one of its ball-and-socket joints.