Something of the same spell came over Chippy as, for the first time, he faced the demon of his tribe. Yet he kept his head enough to realize that his only hope was aloft, and instantly whisked back up the great trunk. Unfortunately for him the versatile weasel is at home on, under, and above ground. The chipmunk had hardly reached the topmost branch, when he felt it sway under the quick, darting motions of his pursuer. Up and up he went, until he clung to the tiny swaying twigs at the very spire and summit of the elm, seventy-five feet from the ground.
In a moment, the bloody muzzle of his pursuer wassniffing along his trail. Hunting by scent, like all of its kind, the weasel wound his way up through the twigs, nearer and nearer to the trembling chipmunk. Twelve inches away, the weasel stopped and, thrusting out its long neck, seemed for the first time to see the little animal just above. A green gleam showed in the depths of the malignant eyes.
As it shifted its weight on the swaying twigs preparatory to the lightning-like pounce which would end the chase, the chipmunk, with a little wailing cry, let go his hold and fell like a stone down through the green screen of leaves and twigs that stretched between him and the ground far below. Even as he whirled through space, his little brain was alert to seize upon every chance for life. As he struck twig after twig, he clutched at them with his forepaws but could get no firm hand-hold. Fifty feet down, he managed to hook both of his little arms across a twig about the size of a man’s thumb. A cross-twig kept his hold from slipping off, and swinging back and forth like a pendulum, he at last managed to clamber up into a crotch of this outer branch and crouched there, panting.
In a moment there was a scratching noise along the tree trunk, and the weasel came down in long spirals instead of climbing straight down as would a squirrel. The branch at the end of which the chipmunk was perched ran out from the main trunk, then turned at right angles and grew down almost perpendicularly, making a sharp elbow. The weasel descended, weaving his broad, triangular head back and forth,with little looping movements of his long neck, and sniffing the air as he came. When he reached the branch where the chipmunk was, he stopped and crept along the limb to the elbow. This was too much for him, skillful climber as he was. The perpendicular drop of the branch, its small size and smooth bark, all combined against him. Three times he tried to follow it down. Each time he slipped so that it became evident to him that another step would break his hold and send him crashing to the ground.
All this time the chipmunk was in full sight, yet the bloodshot eyes of his enemy seemed to overlook him entirely. Again and again the weasel sniffed the air, and repeatedly returned to the limb, evidently convinced that his intended prey was there.
Throughout, the chipmunk clung to the branch, silent and motionless. Only the throbbing of his silky white breast showed how his heart pounded as he watched the trailing death approaching. At last, the weasel seemed to give up the hunt and reluctantly wound his way down the main trunk and disappeared behind the tree.
For a full half-hour the chipmunk clung to his refuge without the slightest movement. Finally, when it seemed as if his pursuer were gone for good, the little animal moved cautiously up the branch, and managed to negotiate the elbow which had baffled his heavier pursuer. With the same caution he crept down the trunk and, after looking all around, finally leaped to the turf beyond. As he struck the ground, there was a rustle from the depths of athicket a few rods away, and out darted the weasel, which, with the fierce patience of his kind, had been lurking there and came between the chipmunk and the scattered homes of the colony.
Over the hilltop was the only way of escape. There lay a patch of deep woods, where the trees grew thick and dark over a ledge of rock which stretched up to the very summit. There, too, was hidden some mystery as black as the shade above that lonely ledge. Often there had been no return for chipmunks crossing that dark crest. Instinctively the fugitive avoided the woods and circled the hill hoping to find some refuge on the farther side.
Long ago, the weasel-folk have learned that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Wherefore to-day the hunter followed the diameter of the circle that the chipmunk was making around the wooded hilltop. Like a flash, with tail up and head down, the weasel wound his way among the rocks and crowded trees which covered the hill’s crest. As his triangular head thrust itself beyond a pointed rock which jutted out from the ledge, his quick nostrils caught a sinister, sickly scent, and he checked in his stride but—too late. His flaming red eyes looked directly into the fixed glare of two other eyes, black, lidless, with strange oval pupils, and set deep in a cruel heart-shaped head, which showed a curious hole between eye and nostril, the hall-mark of the fatal family of pit-vipers to which the rattlesnake, copperhead, and moccasin belong.
For a second the fierce beast and the grim snakefaced each other. The eyes of none of the mammals have a fiercer, more compelling gaze than those of the weasel-folk when red with the rage of slaughter. Yet no beast can outstare that grim ruler of the dark places of the forest, the timber rattlesnake, and in a moment the weasel started to dodge back. Not even his flashing speed, however, availed against the stroke of the snake. Faster than any eye could follow, the flat head shot forward, gaping horribly, while two keen movable fangs were thrust straight out like spear-points. They looked like crooked white needles, each with a hole in the side below the point, from which oozed the yellow venom. Before the darting weasel had time to gain the shelter of the rock, both fangs had pierced his side, and the great snake was back again in coil. Tottering as the deadly virus touched the tide of his fierce blood, and knowing that his life was numbered by seconds, the weasel yet sprang forward to die at death-grips with his foe. As he came, the great snake struck again, but as it snapped back into coil, the needle-like teeth of the other met in its brain. The great reptile thrashed and rattled, but the grip of the red killer remained unbroken long after both were still and stark.
Beyond the black circle of the woods, away from the fatal ledge and through the sunlight, the chipmunk sped, expecting every minute to hear the fierce patter of his pursuer close behind. Little by little he circled, until at last, hardly able to believe in his own escape, he found himself once more in the depths of his own burrow.
As the spring lengthened into summer, Chippy found himself strangely interested in another burrow which had been dug near to his own. So, too, were half a dozen other gay young bucks of the colony, who, with tails erect and with sleek and well-groomed fur, frequently tried to visit the owner of said burrow. She treated them all alike. Every chipmunk who passed her front door received such a succession of nips and scratches that he was only too glad to back out again in a hurry.
As time went by, with every new experience and with every new escape, Chippy grew larger and wiser and stronger. Then came the glittering summer afternoon when he won the right to rank with the bravest and best of the colony. The heat eddied across the hill in shimmering waves as he started home from where he had been foraging, his cheek-pockets full of samples for his storehouse. As he neared his front door by the stone wall he saw Death itself entering his little neighbor’s burrow. Black, sinuous, terrible, a giant blacksnake over six feet in length had found its way from its den on the other side of the hill to the chipmunk colony. Its smooth scales showed an absolute black in the sunlight, and made a crisp, rustling noise as it streamed over the dry leaves and grass of the hillside. Except for that sound, there was silence. At times the great snake would stop and, raising its head two feet from the ground and swaying back and forth, would stare here and there with fixed lidless eyes while the white patch on its lower jaw gleamed in the sun, and itslong, black forked tongue played in and out like the flicker of a flame.
Suddenly the snake shot into Chippy’s burrow. Over a third of its length had disappeared from sight when Chippy showed a flash of that instantaneous, unreckoning courage which carries man or beast into the front ranks of his kind. Perhaps what he did was to save himself from future danger. Yet who can say that it was not a spark of the same divine fire which glows in the heart of man that made him risk his life for another? As he saw the fatal head disappear down the burrow, with a lightning-like spring he leaped upon the disappearing body, casting out his cherished nuts from his cheeks in mid-air. Opening his wide-set jaws, he clamped them shut where the supple, flexible spine of the snake ridged the smooth skin. The back of a blacksnake is a mass of tough muscles, and its spine has the strength of a steel spring. Yet the tremendous jaw-muscles of the chipmunk drove the needle-pointed teeth deep into the twisted, over-lapping fibres.
The black column stiffened like an iron bar. Bracing his paws against the sides of the hole, the chipmunk gnawed away desperately. Suddenly the keen teeth grated, and then locked in the sinuous spine itself. As they met, the great body surged forward and dragged the chipmunk into the burrow. Once deep underground, there was danger that the snake might find space to double back on its length and gain a fatal head-hold with its sharp slanting teeth. Yet Chippy never loosed his grip for aninstant. Dragging back with all his strength, he forced his clamped teeth deeper and deeper into the twisting spine. At last through the cold, bubbling blood, he felt the fibres of the vertebrae slowly give, until with a final rending tug he bit clear through the spinal cord.
By this time he was well below ground, and only the snake’s tail thrashed and writhed ineffectually on the surface. Suddenly, as Chippy still gnawed and tugged, the lashings of the tail lessened, and through his clenched teeth he could feel something tugging and biting at it. Little by little the struggles of the snake became fainter, and Chippy no longer felt himself dragged forward. When at last they had died down to convulsive twists and shudders, which would last for hours, the battling chipmunk unlocked his jaws and backed out of the burrow. Bloody, bruised and exhausted he found himself once more safe in the sunlight.
Right in front of him was Nippy, worrying the wriggling tail with her sharp teeth like a little terrier. Aroused far underground by the sounds of the struggle she had rushed up toward the entrance. While still a long distance from it, her quick little ears caught the fierce hiss that the great snake gave at the first pang from the piercing teeth; and though this was her first year alone in the world, she knew that the sound meant death. Turning like a flash, she slipped into a by-passage and escaped to the upper air by an emergency exit concealed under a huckleberry bush. At her front door she found thetail of the crippled snake thrashing back and forth, and pouncing upon it, she helped her unseen ally by biting through the spine in two places at its narrowest point. When Chippy appeared, she let go, and by degrees the writhing body disappeared from the sight of the sun. Then, while Chippy lay and panted, the little owner of the burrow began to seal up the entrance of the haunted home in token that it was hers no longer. The front door once shut and locked, she moved slowly toward the top of the hill and—looked back.
Then was the time for Chippy to follow. Instead, he stiffly and haltingly betook himself to his own burrow. When, two days later, he came out, there was no trace of the fair and fleeting Nippy. For weeks he sought her everywhere, in the woods and pastures, and even to the shore of the little lake that cupped the farther side of the hill.
Then came a happening which drove all thoughts of anything but life and death from the minds of all the dwellers on the hillside. The doom which always hangs over the Little People fell upon them. In the gray hour just before the dawn, one fatal day, what looked like a brown squirrel, with a white throat and paws and a short tail, came to the chipmunk colony. Yet no squirrel ever had such bloodred eyes, such a serpent-like head, or a body so lithe and sinuous. The deadly visitor was none other than the lesser, or short-tailed, weasel, far more dangerous to the Little People than his larger kinsman, since he was small enough to enter their burrows.
To-day he slipped like a shadow into the first burrow he found. It happened to be the very one of which the stranger chipmunk had dispossessed Chippy months before. This morning he had just waked up in his round sleeping-room when he heard the patter of the weasel down the long entrance tunnel. Out of one of his many exits the chipmunk dashed, but as he came above ground, the weasel was hard on his heels, and he turned to do battle for his life. As he was nearly as large as the weasel, the fight did not seem an unequal one; yet the chipmunk never had a chance. For a second the two faced each other, the chipmunk crouched low, the weasel with its swaying head raised high. Then the chipmunk lunged forward, desperately hoping to gain a grip with its two keen gnawing teeth. With a curve of its supple body, the weasel slipped the other’s lead, and with almost the same motion gave that fatal counter which no animal has yet learned to parry. With a snap of the triangular muzzle, three of the long fighting teeth of the killer pierced with diabolical accuracy the chipmunk’s skull at the exact point where it was thinnest, and crashed deep into its brain.
Stopping only to lap a little of the warm blood of its victim, the weasel flashed into the next burrow, where a mother chipmunk slept with her five babies, all rolled up in a round warm ball. To them all, death came mercifully swift. Then into the next burrow and the next this Death-in-the-dark hastened. None of the Little People he met escaped. Some fought, others fled, but neither courage nor fleetnessavailed. When, at last, the brown killer approached the burrow where Chippy lived, it had left behind it a trail of nearly a score of dead and dying victims, and yet was as tireless and terrible as ever. Each time that it slaked its vampire-thirst with fresh blood, it seemed to gain new strength and speed.
As the sun showed over Prindle Hill, Chippy started out of his front door. Even as he thrust his head into the open, he caught the sound of a faint squeal from a near-by burrow and saw the blood-stained muzzle of the weasel show in the early sunlight. As he dived back, his instantaneous brain seized upon the one way of escape remaining. The weasel could outrun him, and with his unerring nose unravel any tangle of tunnels. Yet the underground people have one last resource of their own, which a million years of being hunted to the death have taught them. To make use of this defense, however, the pursued must have a substantial start over the hunter, and to-day Chippy had but a few scant seconds, since the weasel had glimpsed the whisk of his tail as he plunged headlong down his front entrance, and had instantly started for his burrow.
With back humped high at every pattering plunge of its short legs, the weasel looked like a great inch-worm measuring its way toward its prey. Yet, clumsy as its gait appeared, it was scarcely an instant before the bloody muzzle and red glaring eyes were thrust into the hole down which the chipmunk had disappeared. Much can be done, however, even in seconds, with a hair-trigger brain and nerves andmuscles tensed by the fear of death. Like a flash, Chippy traversed the main passage of his burrow, dashed into a tunnel that forked off to the right, and then dived into a smaller branch, which angled off sharply from the larger tube. Then he suddenly doubled on his tracks, and popped into another passage, which ran in a long slant up to within a few inches of the surface of the hillside.
Once beyond the entrance to this last tunnel, the chipmunk dug for his very life’s sake. With flashing strokes of his forepaws, he dislodged the soft earth at the sides of the passage, sweeping it back with his hind feet; and, even as the weasel writhed his way along the main passage, Chippy had sealed the doorway to the last tube which he had entered, so carefully that the blocked entrance could not be told from the rest of the surface of the passage-wall. Then he hurried swiftly and silently toward the surface.
Even as he dug his way up through the tough grass-roots, his fierce pursuer flashed into the tube from which the walled-up doorway led. With nose close to the ground, the weasel had followed the chipmunk’s trail at full speed, nor had the branching and intersecting passages slowed his speed even for a moment. Only when he came to the spot where the chipmunk had doubled back to the sealed-up doorway, was he checked. Even his keen nostrils could not follow the trail through four inches of fresh earth.
As he came to a standstill, his microphonic ears caught the sound of distant digging far above him. Instantly, without wasting any time in hunting forthe sealed tunnel, he turned and raced back to the entrance-hole, with such speed that, just as the chipmunk pushed his way to the surface well up the hillside, the weasel burst out of the main entrance below and dashed after him.
If the weasel’s speed had not been slowed by slaughter, the chase would have been a short one. As it was, the chipmunk went over the crest of the hill a few rods ahead; but the gap lessened as his pursuer struck his gait and shot forward like an uncoiling spring. This time it seemed as if the chipmunk’s last chance for life were gone. Above ground he was out-paced. To go underground again meant certain death. A miracle had saved him before from the other weasel—but nature seldom deals in miracles twice. Yet the little animal never weakened. A rabbit so close to death would have quit and cowered down, crying piteously until the weasel’s teeth were in its throat. A rat would have lost its head and, running itself to a standstill, met its death frothing and squealing in mortal terror.
Chippy, however, concealed under his gentle, sprightly exterior a cool little brain, nor did ever a braver heart beat than throbbed under his white waistcoat. Although he seemed to be running at full speed, he was really holding something in reserve and already his flash-like mind had seized upon the one chance of life that was left. Earth and air had betrayed him. Perhaps water would be kinder. Straight toward the little lake he headed. Little by little the space between him and the killer behindlessened. By the time he had reached the roots of a black willow tree which stretched far out over the water, the snake-head of the weasel was not six feet behind the fluffy tail which Chippy still flaunted, the unlowered banner of his courage. Out upon the tree trunk he rushed, until he reached the farthest fork. Then, gathering himself together, he sprang from all four feet as if driven by a released spring and struck far out in the still water.
The sound of his splash had hardly died away before his brown pursuer launched himself into the air with a sort of double jump, starting with a spring from his short forelegs and ending with a tremendous drive from his squat hind legs. In spite of this clumsy take-off, the fierce force that shows in everything a weasel does, drove him a foot ahead of the chipmunk’s mark. Followed a desperate race. Swimming high with jerky, uneven, rapid strokes, the weasel rushed through the water and foot by foot cut down the chipmunk’s lead, until his teeth gnashed a scant yard back of the other’s shoulder. There however the weasel hung. Swimming deeper, and with slower and more powerful strokes, the chipmunk refused to break his stroke by looking back. Only when the recurring ripples warned him that his pursuer was closing in on him did he put more power into the deep, regular beat of his strong little legs.
Slowly, very slowly, the better stroke began to tell. At first the weasel only stopped gaining. Then, little by little, the gap between the twowidened. When it had stretched out to ten feet, the chipmunk shot ahead as if the other were anchored. The weasel’s strokes became slower, and at last stopped. Flesh and blood, however fierce, has its limitations. The weasel had risked everything on his first desperate sprint. That failing, his reserves were gone, and he turned and slowly and pantingly swam back to the shore and passed out of Chippy’s life forever.
Strongly and steadily the chipmunk swam on, until the farther shore, a quarter of a mile away, was reached. Wearily Chippy dragged himself up the beach to the dry hillside, staggering from exhaustion. There was no stone wall near, nor had he the strength to dig even the beginning of a burrow. Unprotected, in the open, he must take his chances until his strength came back. Then it was that nature relented, and once more another miracle was wrought for one of her loved Little People. Out of a hole on the hillside half-hidden by the pink blossoms of a steeple-bush, popped a small head, and for a golden moment Chippy gazed long and long into the eyes of Nippy. Then she turned back into her burrow, with a look that drew him totteringly after her. At the flood-tide of their lives they had met to become the founders of another colony, and to pass on undimmed the divine spark of courage and endurance and love.
Deacon Jimmy Wadsworth was probably the most upright man in Cornwall. It was he who drove five miles one bitter winter night and woke up Silas Smith, who kept the store at Cornwall Bridge, to give him back three cents over-change. Silas’s language, as he went back to bed, almost brought on a thaw.
The Deacon lived on the tiptop of the Cobble, one of the twenty-seven named hills of Cornwall, with Aunt Maria his wife, Hen Root his hired man, Nip Root his yellow dog and—the Ducks. The Deacon had rumpled white hair and a serene clear-cut face, and even when working, always wore a clean white shirt with a stiff bosom and no collar.
Aunt Maria was of the salt of the earth. She was spry and short, with a little face all wrinkled with good-will and good works, and had twinkling eyes of horizon-blue. If anyone was sick, or had unexpected company, or a baby, or was getting married or buried, Aunt Maria was always on hand, helping.
As for Hen, he cared more for his dog than he did for any human. When a drive for the Liberty Loan was started in Cornwall, he bought a bond for himselfand one for Nip, and had the latter wear a Liberty Loan button in his collar.
Of course, the farm was cluttered up with horses, cows, chickens, and similar bric-a-brac, but the Ducks were part of the household. It came about this way: Rashe Howe, who hunted everything except work, had given the Deacon a tamed decoy duck, who seemed to have passed her usefulness as a lure. It was evident, however, that she had been trifling with Rashe, for before she had been on the farm a month, somewhere in sky or stream she found a mate. Later, down by the ice-pond, she stole a nest—a beautiful basin made of leaves and edged with soft down from her black-and-buff breast. There she laid ten blunt-ended, brown eggs, which she brooded until she was carried off one night by a wandering fox. Her mate went back to the wilds, and Aunt Maria put the eggs under a big clucking Brahma hen, who hatched out six soft yellow ducklings.
They had no more than come out of the shell when, with faint little quackings, they paddled out of the barnyard and started in single file for the pond. Although just hatched, each little duck knew its place in the line, and from that day on, the order never changed. The old hen, clucking frantically, tried again and again to turn them back. Each time they scattered and, waddling past her, fell into line once more. When at last they reached the bank, their foster-mother scurried back and forth squawking warnings at the top of her voice; but, one after another, each disobedient duckling plunged in witha bob of its turned-up tail, and the procession swam around and around the pond as if it would never stop.
This was too much for the old hen. She stood for a long minute, watching the ungrateful brood, and then turned away and evidently disinherited them upon the spot. From that moment she gave up the duties of motherhood, stopped setting and clucking, and never again recognized her foster-children, as they found out to their sorrow after their swim. All the rest of that day they plopped sadly after her, only to be received with pecks whenever they came too near. She would neither feed nor brood them, and when night came, they had to huddle in their deserted coop in a soft little heap, shivering and quacking beseechingly until daylight.
The next day Aunt Maria was moved by the sight of the six, weary but still pursuing the indifferent hen, keeping up the while a chorus of soft sorrowful little quackings, which ought to have touched her heart—but didn’t. By this time they were so weak that, if Aunt Maria had not taken them into the kitchen and fed them and covered them up in a basket of flannel, they would never have lived through the second night.
Thereafter the old kitchen became a nursery. Six human babies could hardly have called for more attention, or have made more trouble, or have been better loved than those six fuzzy, soft, yellow ducklings. In a few days, the whole home-life on top of the Cobble centred around them. They needed so much nursing and petting and soothing, that italmost seemed to Aunt Maria as if a half-century had rolled back, and she was once more looking after babies long, long lost to her. Even old Hen became attached to them enough to cuff Nip violently when that pampered animal growled at the newcomers, and showed signs of abolishing them. From that moment Nip joined the Brahma hen in ignoring the ducklings completely. If any attention was shown them in his presence, he would stalk away majestically, as if overcome with astonishment that humans would spend their time over six yellow ducks instead of one yellow dog.
During the ducks’ first days in the kitchen, someone had to be with them constantly. Otherwise all six of them would go “Yip, yip, yip,” at the top of their voices. As soon as any one came to their cradle, or even spoke to them, they would snuggle down contentedly under the flannel, and sing like a lot of little tea-kettles, making the same kind of a sleepy hum that a flock of wild mallards gives when they are sleeping far out on the water. They liked the Deacon and Hen, but they loved Aunt Maria. In a few days they followed her everywhere around the house, and even out on the farm, paddling along just behind her, in single file, and quacking vigorously if she walked too fast.
One day she tried to slip out and go down to the sewing-circle at Mrs. Miner Rogers’s at the foot of the hill; but they were on her trail before she had taken ten steps. They followed her all the way down, and stood with their beaks pressed againstthe bay-window, watching her as she sat in Mrs. Rogers’s parlor. When they made up their minds that she had called long enough, they set up such a chorus of quackings that Aunt Maria had to come.
“Those pesky ducks will quack their heads off if I don’t leave,” she explained shamefacedly.
The road up-hill was a long, long trail for the ducklings. Every now and then they would stop and cry with their pathetic little yipping note, and lie down flat on their backs, and hold their soft little paddles straight up in the air, to show how sore they were. The last half of the journey they made in Aunt Maria’s apron, singing away contentedly as she plodded up the hill.
As they grew older, they took an interest in everyone who came; and if they did not approve of the visitor, would quack deafeningly until he went. Once Aunt Maria happened to step suddenly around the corner of the house as a load of hay went past. Finding her gone, the ducks started solemnly down the road, following the hay-wagon, evidently convinced that she was hidden somewhere beneath the load. They were almost out of sight when Aunt Maria called to them. At the first sound of her voice, they turned and hurried back, flapping their wings and paddling with all their might, quacking joyously as they came.
Aunt Maria and the flock had various little private games of their own. Whenever she sat down, they would tug at the neatly tied bows of her shoelaces, until they had loosened them; whereupon shewould jump up and rush at them, pretending great wrath; whereupon they would scatter on all sides, quacking delightedly. When she turned back, they would form a circle around her, snuggling their soft necks against her gown until she scratched each uplifted head softly. If she wore button-shoes they would pry away at the loose buttons and attempt to swallow them. When she was working in her flower-garden, they would bother her by swallowing some of the smallest bulbs, and snatching up and running away with larger ones. At other times they would hide in dark corners and rush out at her with loud and terrifying quacks, at which Aunt Martha would pretend to be much frightened and scuttle away, pursued by the six.
All three of the family were forever grumbling about the flock. To hear them, one would suppose that their whole lives were embittered by the trouble and expense of caring for a lot of useless, greedy ducks. Yet when Hen suggested roast duck for Thanksgiving, Deacon Jimmy and Aunt Maria lectured him so severely for his cruelty, that he was glad to explain that he was only joking. Once, when the ducks were sick, he dug angleworms for them all one winter afternoon, in the corner of the pigpen where the ground still remained unfrozen; and Deacon Jimmy nearly bankrupted himself buying pickled oysters, which he fed them as a tonic.
It was not long before they outgrew their baby clothes, and wore the mottled brown of the mallard duck, with a dark steel-blue bar edged with white oneither wing. The leader evidently had a strain of black duck in her blood. She was larger, and lacked the trim bearing of the aristocratic mallard. On the other hand, Blackie had all the wariness and sagacity of the black duck, than whom there is no wiser bird. As the winter came on, a coop was fixed up for them not far from the kitchen, where they slept on warm straw in the coldest weather, with their heads tucked under their soft, down-lined wings up to their round, bright eyes. The first November snowstorm covered their coop out of sight; but when Aunt Maria called, they quacked a cheery answer back from under the drift.
Then came the drake, a gorgeous mallard with a head of emerald-green and a snow-white collar, and with black, white, gray, and violet wings, in all the pride and beauty of his prime. A few days and nights before he had been a part of the North. Beyond the haunts of men, beyond the farthest forests, where the sullen green of the pines gleamed against a silver sky, a great waste-land stretched clear to the tundras, beyond which is the ice of the Arctic. In this wilderness, where long leagues of rushes hissed and whispered to the wind, the drake had dwelt. Here and there were pools of green-gray water, and beyond the rushes stretched the bleached brown reeds, deepening in the distance to a dark tan. In the summer a heavy, sweet scent had hung over the marshland, like the breath of a herd of sleeping cattle. Here had lived uncounted multitudes of waterfowl.
As the summer passed, a bitter wind howled like awolf from the North with the hiss of snow in its wings. Sometimes by day, when little flurries of snow whirled over the waving rushes; sometimes by night, when a misty moon struggled through a gray wrack of cloud, long lines and crowded masses of water-birds sprang into the air, and started on the far journey southward. There were gaggles of wild geese flying in long wedges, with the strongest and the wisest gander leading the converging lines; wisps of snipe, and badlings of duck of many kinds. The widgeons flew with whistling wings, in long black streamers. The scaup came down the sky in dark masses, giving a rippling purr as they flew. Here and there scattered couples of blue-winged teal shot past groups of the slower ducks. Then down the sky, in a whizzing parallelogram, came a band of canvasbacks, with long red heads and necks and gray-white backs. Moving at the rate of a hundred and sixty feet a second, they passed pintails, black duck, and mergansers as if they had been anchored, grunting as they flew.
When the rest of his folk sprang into the air, the mallard drake had refused to leave the cold pools and the whispering rushes. Late that season he had lost his mate, and, lonely without her and hoping still for her return, he lingered among the last to leave. As the nights went by, the marshes became more and more deserted. Then there dawned a cold, turquoise day. The winding streams showed sheets of sapphire and pools of molten silver. That afternoon the sun, a vast globe of molten red, sank through an old-rose sky, which slowly changed to a faint golden green.For a moment it hung on the knife-edge of the world, and then dipped down and was gone.
Through the violet twilight five gleaming, misty-white birds of an unearthly beauty, glorious trumpeter swans, flew across the western sky in strong, swift, majestic flight. As the shadows darkened like spilt ink, their clanging notes came down to the lonely drake. When the swans start south, it is no time for lesser folk to linger. The night was aflame with its million candles as he sprang into the air, circled once and again, and followed southward the moon path which lay like a long streamer of gold across the waste-lands. Night and day and day and night and night and day again he flew, until, as he passed over the northwestern corner of Connecticut, that strange food sense which a migrating bird has, brought him down from the upper sky into the one stretch of marshland that showed for miles around. It chanced to be close to the base of the Cobble.
All night long he fed full among the pools. Just as the first faint light showed in the eastern sky, he climbed upon the top of an old muskrat house that showed above the reeds. At the first step, there was a sharp click, the fierce grip of steel, and he was fast in one of Hen’s traps. There the old man found him at sunrise, and brought him home wrapped up in his coat, quacking, flapping, and fighting every foot of the way. An examination showed his leg to be unbroken, and Hen held him while Aunt Maria with a pair of long shears clipped his beautiful wings. Then, all gleaming green and violet, he was set down amongthe six ducks, who had been watching him admiringly.
The second he was loosed, he gave his strong wings a flap that should have lifted him high above the hateful earth, where tame folk set traps for wild folk. Instead of swooping toward the clouds, the clipped wings beat the air impotently, and did not even raise his orange, webbed feet from the ground. Again and again the drake tried to fly, only to realize at last that he was clipped and shamed and earthbound. Then for the first time he seemed to notice the six who stood by, watching him in silence. To them he quacked, and quacked, and quacked fiercely, and Aunt Maria had an uneasy feeling that she and her shears were the subject of his remarks. Suddenly he stopped, and all seven started toward their winter quarters; and lo and behold! at the head of the procession marched the gleaming drake, with the deposed Blackie trailing meekly in second place.
From that day forth he was their leader; nor did he forget his wrongs. The sight of Aunt Maria was always a signal for a burst of impassioned quackings. Soon it became evident that the ducks were reluctantly convinced that the gentle little woman had been guilty of a great crime, and more and more they began to shun her. There were no more games and walks and caressings. Instead the six followed the drake’s lead in avoiding as far as possible humans who trapped and clipped the people of the air.
At first the Deacon put the whole flock in a great pen where the young calves were kept in spring, fearing lest the drake might wander away. This,of course, was no imprisonment to the ducks, who could fly over the highest fence. The first morning, after they had been penned, the ducks sprang over the fence and started for the pond, quacking to the drake to follow. When he quacked back that he could not, the flock returned and showed him again and again how easy it was to fly over the fence. At last he evidently made them understand that for him flying was impossible. Several times they started for the pond, but each time at a quack from the drake they came back. It was Blackie who finally solved the difficulty. Flying back over the fence, she found a place where a box stood near one of the sides of the pen. Climbing up on top of this, she fluttered to the top rail. The drake clambered up on the box, and tried to follow. As he was scrambling up the fence, with desperate flappings of his disabled wings, Blackie and the others, who had joined her on the top rail, reached down and pulled him upward with tremendous tugs from their flat bills, until he finally scrambled to the top and was safely over. For several days this went on, and the flock would help him out of and into the pen every day, as they went to and from the pond. When at last Aunt Maria saw this experiment in prison-breaking, she threw open the gate wide, and thereafter the drake had the freedom of the farm with the others. As the days went by, he seemed to become more reconciled to his fate and at times would even take food from Aunt Maria’s hand; yet certain reserves and withdrawings on the part of the whole flock were always apparent, to vex her.
At last and at last, just when it seemed as if winter would never go, spring came. There were flocks of wild geese beating, beating, beating up the sky, never soaring, never resting, thrusting their way north in a great black-and-white wedge, outflying spring, and often finding lakes and marshes still locked against them. Then came the strange, wild call from the sky of the killdeer, who wears two black rings around his white breast; and the air was full of robin notes and bluebird calls and the shrill high notes of the hylas. On the sides of the Cobble the bloodroot bloomed, with its snowy petals and heart of gold and root dripping with burning, bitter blood—frail flowers which the wind kisses and kills. Then the beech trees turned all lavender-brown and silver, and the fields of April wheat made patches of brilliant velvet green.
At last there came a day blurred with glory, when the grass was a green blaze, and the woods dripped green, and the new leaves of the apple trees were like tiny jets of green flame among the pink and white blossoms. The sky was full of waterfowl going north. All that day the drake had been uneasy. One by one he had moulted his clipped wing-feathers, and the long curved quills which had been his glory had come back again. Late in the afternoon, as he was leading his flock toward the kitchen, a great hubbub of calls and cries floated down from the afternoon sky. The whole upper air was black with ducks. There were teal, wood-ducks, baldpates, black duck, pintails, little bluebills, whistlers, and suddenly a great mass of mallards, the green heads of the drakesgleaming against the sky. As they flew they quacked down to the little earthbound group below.
Suddenly the great drake seemed to realize that his power was upon him once more. With a great sweep of his lustrous wings, he launched himself forth into the air in a long arrowy curve, and shot up through the sky toward the disappearing company—and not alone. Even as he left the ground, before Aunt Maria’s astonished eyes, faithful, clumsy, wary Blackie sprang into the air after him, and with the strong awkward flight of the black duck, which ploughs its way through the air by main strength, she overtook her leader, and the two were lost in the distant sky.
Aunt Maria took what comfort she could out of the five who remained, but only now that they had gone, did she realize how dear to her was Greentop, the beautiful, wild, resentful drake, and Blackie, awkward, wise, resourceful Blackie. The flock too was lost without them, and took chances and overlooked dangers which they never would have been allowed to do under the reign of their lost king and queen. At last fate overtook them one dark night when they were sleeping out. That vampire of the darkness, a wandering mink, came upon them. With their passing went something of love and hope, which left the Cobble a very lonely place for the three old people.
As the nights grew longer, Aunt Maria would often dream that she heard the happy little flock singing like teakettles in their basket, or that she heard them quack from their coop, and would call out to comfortthem. Yet always it was only a dream. Then the cold came, and one night a great storm of snow and sleet broke over the Cobble, and the wind howled as it did the night before the drake was found. Suddenly Aunt Maria started out of her warm bed, and listened. When she was sure she was not dreaming, she awakened the Deacon, and through the darkness they hurried down to the door, from the other side of which sounded tumultuous and familiar quackings.
With trembling hands she lighted the lamp, and as they threw open the door, in marched a procession. It was headed by Greentop, resentful no more, but quacking joyously at the sight of light and shelter. Back of him Blackie’s soft, dark head rubbed lovingly against Aunt Maria’s trembling knees, with the little caressing, crooning noise which Blackie always made when she wanted to be petted. Back of her, quacking embarrassedly, waddled four more ducks who showed their youth by their size and the newness of their feathering. Greentop and Blackie had come back, bringing their family with them.
The tumult and the shouting aroused old Hen, who hurried down in his night clothes. These, by the way, were the same as his day clothes except for the shoes; for, as Hen said, he could not be bothered with dressing and undressing except during the bathing season, which was long past.
“Durned if it ain’t them pesky ducks again,” he said, grinning happily.
“That’s what it be,” responded Deacon Jimmy, “I don’t suppose now we’ll have a moment’s peace.”
“Yes, it’s them good-for-nothin’—” began Aunt Maria; but she gulped and something warm and wet trickled down her wrinkled cheeks, as she stopped and pulled two dear-loved heads, one green and the other black, into her arms.
Above the afterglow gleamed a patch of beryl-green. Etched against the color was the faintest, finest, and newest of crescent moons. It seemed almost as if a puff of wind would blow it, like a cobweb, out of the sky. As the shifting tints deepened into the unvarying peacock-blue of a Northern night, the evening star flared like a lamp hung low in the west while the dark strode across the shadows of the forest, cobalt-blue against the drifted snow. As the winter stars flamed into the darkening sky, a tide of night-life flowed and throbbed under the silent trees. One by one the wild folk came forth, to live and love and die in this their day, even as we humans in ours.
Long after the twilight had dimmed into the jeweled darkness, opalescent with the changing colors of the Northern Lights, from the inner depths of the woods there came a threat to the life of nearly everyone of the forest folk. Yet it seemed but the mournful wail of a little child. Only to the moose, the blackbear and the wolverine was it other than the very voice of Death.
Fifty feet above the ground, from a blasted and hollow white pine, the plaintive sound againshuddered down the wind. From a hollow under an overhanging bough, a brownish-black animal moved slowly down the tree trunk, headfirst, which position marked him as a past-master among the tree folk. Only those climbers who are absolutely at home aloft go forward down a perpendicular tree trunk. As the beast came out of the shadow it resembled nothing so much as a big black cat, with a bushy tail and a round, grayish head. Because of this appearance the trappers had named it the blackcat. Others call it the fisher, although it never fishes, while to the Indians it is thepekan—the killer-in-the-dark. In spite of its rounded head and mild doggy face, the fisher belongs to those killers, the weasels. Next to the wolverine, he is the most powerful of his family, and he is far and away the most versatile.
To-night, on reaching the ground, the pekan followed one of the many runways he had discovered in the ten-mile beat that formed his hunting-ground. Like most of the weasels, he lived alone. His brief and dangerous family life lasted but a few days in the fall of every year. When his mate tried to kill him unawares, the blackcat knew that his honeymoon was over, and departed again to his hollow tree, many miles from Mrs. Blackcat. To-night, as he moved at a leisurely pace across the snow, in a series of easy bounds, his lithe black body looped itself along like a hunting snake, while his broad forehead gave him an innocent, open look. If in the tree he had resembled a cat, on the ground he looked more like a dog.
There was one animal who was not misled by the frank openness of the fisher’s face. That one was a hunting pine marten, who had just come across a red squirrel’s nest made of woven sticks thatched with leaves, and set in the fork of a moose-wood sapling some thirty feet from the ground. Cocking his head on one side, the marten regarded the swaying nest critically out of his bright black eyes. Convinced that it was occupied, with a dart he dashed up the slender trunk, which bent and shook under his rush.
But Chickaree had craftily chosen a tree that would bend under the lightest weight, and signal the approach of any unwelcome visitor. Before the marten had covered half the distance, four squirrels boiled out of the nest and, darting to the end of the farthest twigs, leaped to the nearest trees and scurried off into the darkness. The marten had poised himself for a spring when he saw the fisher gazing up at him. Straightway he forgot that there were squirrels in the world. With a tremendous spring, he landed on the trunk of a near-by hemlock and slipped around it like a shadow.
It was too late. With a couple of effortless bounds, the blackcat reached the trunk and slipped up it with the ease and speed of a blacksnake. The marten doubled and twisted and turned on his trail, and launched himself surely and swiftly from dizzy heights at arrowy speed. Yet, spring and dash as he would, there was always a pattering rush just behind him. Before the branches, which crackled and bent under the lithe golden-brown body, had stoppedwaving, they would crash and sag under the black weight of the fisher. With every easy bound the black came nearer to the gold. The pine marten is the swiftest tree-climber in the world, bar one. The blackcat is that one. As the two great weasels flashed through the trees, they seemed to be running tandem. Every twist and turn of the golden leader was followed automatically by the black wheeler, as if the two were connected by an invisible, but unbreakable bond.
Under the strain it was the nerves of the marten which gave way first. Not that he stopped, and cowered, helpless and shaking, like the rabbit-folk, nor ran frothing and amuck as do rat-kind when too hardly pressed. No weasel, while he lives, ever loses his head completely. Only now the marten ran more and more wildly, relying on straight speed and overlooking many a chance for a puzzling double, which would have given him a breathing-space. The imperturbable blackcat noted this, and began to take short cuts, which might have lost him his prey at the beginning of the hunt.
At last, the long and circling chase brought them both near an enormous white pine, which towered some forty feet away from the nearest tree. A bent spruce leaned out toward the lone pine. With a flying leap, the marten reached the spruce and flashed up the trunk, with never a look behind. His crafty pursuer saw his chance. Landing in a lower crotch of the spruce, with a flying take-off he launched himself outward and downward into mid-air, with everyounce and atom of spring that his steel-wire muscles held. It seemed impossible that anything without wings could cover the great gap between the two trees; but the blackcat knew to an inch what he could do, and almost to an inch did the distance tax his powers. In a wide parabola his black body whizzed through the air half a hundred feet above the ground, beginning as a round ball of fur, which stretched out until the fisher hung full length at the crest of his spring. If the tree had been a scant six inches farther away, the blackcat would never have made it. As it was, the huge clutching, horn-colored claws of his forepaws just caught, and held long enough to allow him to clamp down his hold with his hind paws.
The marten, who had started fifty feet ahead of the blackcat and had lost his distance by having to climb up, jump, and then climb down, passed along the trunk of the pine on his way to the ground just as the blackcat landed, his lead cut down to a scant ten feet. Without a pause, the pekan deliberately sprang out into the air and disappeared in a snow bank full forty feet below. Not many animals, even with a snow buffer, could stand a drop of that distance, but the great black weasel burst out of the snow, his steel-bound frame apparently unjarred, and stood at the foot of the tree.
As the marten reached the ground and saw what was awaiting him, his playful face seemed to turn into a mask of rage and despair. The round black eyes flamed red, the lips curved back from the sharp teeth in a horrible grin, and with a shrieking snarl and alightning-like snap he tried for the favorite throat-hold of the weasel-folk. He was battling, however, with one quite as quick and immeasurably more powerful. With a little bob the blackcat slipped the lead of his adversary, and the flashing teeth of the marten closed only on the loose tough skin of the fisher’s shoulder. Before he could strike again the blackcat had the smaller animal clutched in its fierce claws, with no play to parry the counter-thrust of the black muzzle. In another second, the golden throat was dabbled with blood, which the fisher drank in great gulps like the weasel that he was. According to human notions, the dreadful and uncanny part of the contest was that, throughout the whole fight and the blood-stained finish, the blackcat’s face was the mild, reflective, round face of a gentle dog.
His first blood-thirst slaked, the fisher slung the limp body of the marten over his shoulder with a single flirt of his black head, and winding his way up the tree trunk, cached it for a time in a convenient crotch, feeling sure that no prowler would meddle with a prey which bore upon its pelt the scent and seal of the blackcat.
All through a two-day snowstorm, the fisher had kept to his tree, and his first kill that night only sharpened the blood-lust which swept raging through his tense body. Following the nearest runway, he came to the shore of a wide, rapid, little forest river, which at this point had a fall which insured current enough to keep it from freezing. Near its bank, the ranging blackcat came upon a fresh track in thesoft snow. First there were five marks—one small, two large, and two small. The next track showed only four marks with the order reversed, the larger marks being in front, instead of behind the smaller. A little way farther on, and the smaller marks, instead of being side by side, showed one behind the other.
The blackcat read this snow-riddle at a glance. The five marks showed where a northern hare, or snowshoe rabbit, had been sitting; the fifth mark being where its bobbed tail had touched the snow. The larger marks had been the marks of the fur snowshoes, which it wears in winter on its big hopping hind-legs, and the smaller the mark of the little forepaws which, when he was sitting, naturally touched the ground in front of the hind paws. When the hare hopped the position was reversed, as the big hind paws, with every hop, struck the ground in front of the others, the hare traveling in the direction of the larger marks. The last tracks showed that the hare had either scented or seen its pursuer; for a hare’s eyes are so placed that it can see either forward or backward as it hops. As the little forelegs touched the ground, they were twisted one behind the other so as to secure the greatest leverage possible.
The blackcat settled doggedly down to the chase. Although far slower in a straightaway run than either the hare or the fox, it can and will run down either in a long chase, although it may take a day to do it. To-night the chase came to a sudden and unexpected end. The hare described a great circle nearly half a mile in diameter, at full speed, and then, whiter thanthe snow itself, squatted down to watch his back trail and determine whether his pursuer was really intending to follow him to a finish. Before long, the squatting hare saw a black form on the other side of the circle, with humped back looping its way along. At such a sight the smaller cottontail rabbit would have run a short distance, and would then have crouched in the snow, squealing in fear of its approaching death. The hare is made of sterner stuff. Moreover, this one was a patriarch fully seven years old—a great age for any hare to have accomplished in a world full of foes.
Wabasso, as Hiawatha named him, had not attained to this length of years without encountering blackcats. In some unknown way, probably by a happy accident, he had learned the one defense which a hare may interpose to the attack of a fisher, and live. Reaching full speed almost immediately, he cleared the snow in ten-foot bounds, four to the second, while the wide, hairy snowshoes, which nature fits to his white feet every winter, kept him from sinking much below the surface.
The keen eyes of the blackcat caught sight of the hare’s first bound in spite of his protective coloration, and he at once cut across the diameter of the circle. In spite of this short cut, the hare reached the bank of the open river many yards ahead. Well out in the midst of the rushing icy water lay a sand bar, now covered with snow. To the blackcat’s amazement and disgust, and contrary to every tradition of the chase, this unconventional hare plunged with a desperatebound fully ten feet out into the icy water. Wabasso was no swimmer, and had evidently elected to travel by water in the same way which he had found successful by land. Kicking mightily with his hind legs he hopped his way through the water, raising himself bodily at every kick, only to sink back until but the top of his white nose showed. Nevertheless, in a wonderfully short time he had won his way through the wan water, and lay panting and safe on the sand bank. If pursued, he could take to the water again and hop his way to either shore, along which he could run and take to the water whenever it was necessary.
To-night no such tactics were needed. The fisher, in spite of his name, hates water. He can swim, albeit slowly and clumsily, in the summer time. As for leaping into a raging torrent of ice-cold water—it was not to be considered. The blackcat raced up and down the bank furiously, and not until convinced that the rabbit was on that snow bank for the night, did he give up the hunt and go bounding along the bank of the river after other and easier prey. For the first time that night the mildness of his face was marred by a snarling curl of the lips, showing the full set of cruel fighting teeth with which every weasel, large or small, is equipped.
As the blackcat followed the line of the river, his sharp ear caught a steady and monotonous sound, like someone using a peculiarly dull saw. Around a bend the still water was frozen. Against the side of the bank an empty pork-keg had drifted down from some lumberman’s camp, and frozen into the ice. In front of the shattered keg crouched a large, blackish, hairy animal, gnawing as if paid by the hour. It was none other than the Canada porcupine—“Old Man Quillpig,” as he is called by the lumberjacks, who hate him because he gnaws to sawdust every scrap of wood that has ever touched salt. The porcupine saw the blackcat, but never ceased gnawing. Many and many an animal has thought that he could kill sluggish, stupid Quillpig. The wolf, the lynx, the panther, and the wildcat all have tried—and died. So to-night the porcupine kept on with his gnawing, under the star-shine, convinced that no animal that lived could solve his defense.