The Way of the Wild Part 11

First of all, he pointed out to the raven--his beak was the pointer--that he was sitting upon the choicest portion of that sheep, and must make way therefrom _instantly_. Next, he turned his head and looked--only looked--at a gray crow that had presumed, upon the turning of his broad, black back, to recommence feeding, and that hooded crow moved one yard in one second--out of reach. And next, Cob, who apparently loved discipline and cherished good manners, started his banquet, and allowed the others to start theirs.

But it was an unholy feast. Cob tugged and tore like a butcher without any knives. At times he nearly fell backwards, when the meat gave way; at times he bolted, and gulped, and choked horribly; at times he was nearly standing upon his head, and at other times upon his tail; and, in case the others should find the woolly outside, where they alone could feed, too easy, he was continually breaking off, to rush--a red-headed demon from h.e.l.l now--at the raven, or glare at the crows and remove them yards, as if his eyes could kill. As for the herring-gull, he raced and danced in a crazy circle round his giant clansman, apparently smitten with delirium at the luscious t.i.tbits he was obliged to watch vanishing down Cob's bright throat.

The raven, however, was growing desperate. He was under contract to Fate to feed his wife. She would freeze there on her nest in the snow among the icicle-studded ledges else. And every time he had got hold of a big enough dainty to tug free and fly off with, Cob had cut in and collared the said morsel. As a matter of fact, friend raven was a better carver than the sea-pirate, had a beak better suited for the grisly purpose. Finally, the black one got hold of a piece of meat, and did not let go. He hung on, and, before anybody realized that he had moved, Cob's yellow-and-red-painted bill--nearly all red now--had closed upon that raven's neck. There was one wild, asthmatical croak from the raven, a whirl of st.u.r.dy black and overshadowing black-and-white wings, and the raven was jerked clean head-over-heels, where, among the heather, he lay for a brief second, kicking ignominiously, on his sable back.

Here the crows fled to strategic positions upon bowlders, waist-deep in heather, hard by, expecting a like fate, and leaving the herring-gull to gobble up what he could in the confusion, and risk his life in the process, when suddenly, above the beating of wings and the hiss of wind, all distinctly heard, and jumped at, the sound of a single, horrible, instantaneous, metallic clash.

Cob's agonized yell, the clash itself, and the whir and rush of wings, as every bird there present literally flung itself into the air, seemed really, though of course they were not, coincident--such is the quickness with which these wild creatures act. But Cob alone remained.

He stopped in mid-spring horribly, and suddenly, as if a Hand had reached up and plucked him back. For a second his wonderful wings beat and beat tremendously, frenziedly, with a noise you could hear all up the hill; then he fell back in one demented, frenzied mix up of bashing, smashing pinions, legs, tail, and whirling feathers.

That clash, which had jarred Cob's frame from head to hind-toe, was a trap, _alias_ a gin, _alias_ a clam, and the rack of man's Inquisition of the wild. He had stepped upon it; it had gone off, and caught him by the right leg, and, being anch.o.r.ed by a chain, had refused to let him go when he sought to remove himself, trap and all.

What followed during the next minute or two it would scarcely be fair to so fine a bird to print. Moreover, it was unnice to behold.

Wild-folk have a habit often of going temporarily insane when they first find themselves trapped, because the trap represents to them the most supreme, the most unbearable, of all terrors--loss of freedom; and freedom is to them more than life, especially to birds, and more especially still to those whose lives are dedicated to the wild, free sea.

At the end of that time Cob lay exhausted upon his side, one mighty pinion pathetically trailing in the snow, his beak open, his whole jet and spotless white body shaken and convulsed with pantings that were almost sobs. He seemed in danger of dying there and then upon the spot, with sheer, sickening horror or a broken heart.

The herring-gull was a silver line--about as big as a thrip--to seaward. The gray crows climbed the heavens to landward, like flies that climb a window-pane. Only the raven had not gone, quite.

The raven was a bird, of course, and every bird has got to do its duty.

There can be no shirking. _His_ duty was to supply food to keep the fires of life burning in his mate as she sat upon her icy nest. His duty was to see that his eggs, _their_ eggs, hatched out; and with him the motto was: "The end justifies the means." This bird, this sea-rover, this big pirate, alone stood between him and the discharge of duty. There was no other way, no other food; he had searched.

Wherefore, the raven stayed; he knew all about traps, few better, and he stayed, waiting, if it please you, for Cob to--die!

But Cob would not oblige. He had not got a broken and crushed leg, as the raven possibly expected. He was not injured, as he should have been, according to program; only puffed. The mercy of Allah had seen to it that some teeth of that instrument of vile torture that had hold of him were broken off, and that his leg should have been caught in the gap thus formed. Moreover, the trap had not been looked after; it was rusty, and did not shut quite properly. The spring was weak, or some grit had got in, or something, and a smart rat would have got out of it easily, but a rat is not a gull, and knows too much.

Thereafter, nothing happened for a long while. Cob's first delirium seemed to have spent him, and perhaps taught him how much a leg can hurt when tugged by the full lift of sixty-nine-inch wings, especially when one tries to whirl round upon it when it cannot turn.

The raven sat on his lichen-decorated, snow-draped bowlder, hands in pockets, so to speak, abominably untidy, with a pessimistic hunch of the shoulders, but a light in his eyes, a strangely malignant, devilishly roguish leer, that belied his appearance. Perhaps he was waiting to see if Cob during his struggles obligingly touched off any further deadly surprises that might lie hidden in the vicinity. One never knows. He had seen a gray crow double-catch himself in two traps lying close to one another--once.

Nothing happening, however, that raven presently sailed in on his fine work. He broke his neutrality with a sudden dry rustle of wings, and clumsily half-hopped, half-heavily napped, down to Cob, lying there still and silent, but very much awake, upon the snow. He almost seemed to be rubbing his hands, or, rather, his claws, that ebon rascal. This was, indeed, a game after his own heart.

Cob never moved when the raven arrived. I suppose he knew all about ravens, and what one may expect from them. He only stared at him with one cold eye, a tense, lop-sided stare; and he mouthed a little--if one may be permitted the expression--with his beak, like a man moistening his lips.

The raven looked him over critically, leeringly, insolently, with a hateful air of ownership. Then the raven sharpened the gouge thing which he called his beak--wheep-wheep--upon a stone, as birds do, and tightened his feathers, as if almost visibly tucking up his sleeves for--well, for the job.

Then he tweaked Cob's tail, apparently just to see how much alive he was. But Cob did not move, beyond drawing one webbed leg--the free one--up under him.

Then the raven dug him under the wing--punched him in the ribs, so to speak. But Cob did nothing more than cringe--cringe from head to hind-toe, like a worm.

Then suddenly, startlingly suddenly, with the full stroke, the dreaded pickax blow, of all the ravens, he let drive straight at Cob's clear, shining eye--the left one, with which Cob, with his head twisted, had all along been regarding him. He had disclosed his hand, that raven.

It was devil's work.

Till that moment Cob had never moved, as we have said. Save for his one eye and his quivering, one would scarcely have known that he lived.

That was his game, perhaps. Who can tell? For a stolid, slow-thinking gull may have, in his way, just as deep, or low, a cunning as a brilliant-brained raven. Anyhow, in that fiftieth of a second allowed, just when it seemed as if nothing could save his eye, Cob's head snicked round and up, and he slid the enemy's beak down off his own with as neat a parry as ever you saw. And he did more. He caught hold of the said raven's beak, got a grip on beak in beak, and once having got hold, he kept hold. This was nothing new to him. It was his way--one of his ways--of fighting rival great black-backed gulls. But it was new to the raven, and he had not previously thought out any proper counter to it. (There is a counter, I think.) Result--caught raven as well as caught gull.

Then it was that raven's turn to go mad, and dance a paralytic kan-kan; but he could not get any change out of that gull. Cob hung on almost as well as the trap hung on to him, and far more twistfully. He was quite at home, of course. He had been brought up to this sort of thing. It was the official regulation gull way of fighting under set rules, but he could rarely get any other bird than a gull to fight with him like it. It was not the raven's way of fighting, though, and I think he felt himself in a trap. He certainly acted like a bird out of its senses, while the gull, flapping hugely, and forgetting, in the excitement, his own bondage, gradually forced the raven's head back and back over his back, till that raven was in the unenviable position of staring over his own back at his own tail, upon which he was ignominiously sitting. Also, his neck was half-dislocated, and he was nearly choking. And about this time it began to dawn upon him that it did not pay in the wild to monkey with great black-backed gulls, even trapped ones. He swore, as well as he could, in a gurgling croak.

Then----

Clash!

Horrors upon diabolical horrors! Another trap?

The same ghastly thought flashed to both birds' brains at the same moment, and both literally sprang bodily up into the gale in one maddened leap, both forgetting all else in the panic to be gone.

Both stopped at the same instant, with a jerk that nearly unhinged every bone in their bodies. Both yelled with terror at the identical moment.

Both were released--as by the cutting of a string--at the same fraction of time, and both hurtled aloft at the same fear-blinded, rocket-like speed.

But both had not been caught by the same kind of trap.

It was the jerk that had freed Cob from the really quite light hold, as we have already explained, of the jaws of the steel trap.

And it was the jerk that had torn out some of the raven's tail-feathers, and left them in the jaws of the--gray, old, hill fox.

And it was the fox who was standing all alone, watching, with oblique eyes, the two great birds fast dissolving with every desperate, stampeding wing-beat into the hurrying cloud-wrack and the wild seascape--in opposite directions. He had made a good stalk, but had sprung a little short, had brer fox.

Upon a day, weeks later, we find the raven, whose young had left the nest, stolidly soaring over a small, flat island, golden with furze, purple with heather, pale-rose chiffon where it was covered with sea-pinks.

In addition to these, only one other hue, beside green, was there upon that island gem floating on the jade-green sea, and that was a patch of black and white! It flashed to the eye of the raiding rogue-raven, and he altered course towards it, when it turned into a female great black-backed gull, running, literally racing, to her nest, which the raven could now see, with its two big, buff, dark-splashed eggs.

Down flopped the giant gull upon her treasure, and began yelling, "How-how-how-how!" at the top of her voice.

But the island seemed empty of life, and her yelling useless.

Down dropped the raven in front of her.

Down winnowed the hen-raven at the back of her.

And, both together, they approached. And all the time the great black-backed gull continued to yell, "How-how-how-how!"

At last, when he had got close enough, the c.o.c.k-raven lunged at her, or, rather, underneath her. She parried his stroke, and--the hen-raven lunged. Nothing now, she knew, could save her eggs, unless she rose to fight the c.o.c.k-raven. The hen-raven then ran in. She only required a second in which to ruin each egg, but she never got it.

n.o.body saw the avalanche coming, but everybody heard it arrive. It was of snow-white, and it was of jet-black, and it knocked the c.o.c.k-raven one way, and sent the hen-raven, picking up her skirts, as it were, and fleeing, the other. And the name of the avalanche was Cob.

I fancy he considered that he bore a grudge against that c.o.c.k bandit-raven. Perhaps in dreams he could still feel that trap on his leg. Who knows? He certainly used to wake up with outcries, and he equally certainly made that c.o.c.k-raven shy of that island for evermore.

VIII

THE WHERE IS IT?

No one would have thought of looking for any living beast in the raffle of dried twigs and tamarisk "leaves" between the crawling, snake-like roots of the feathery tamarisks if it had not been for the noise. The noise was unmistakable, as the noise of a fight always is; and the only other living thing near the spot, a tiny, tip-tailed, brown wren--a little ball of feathers, dainty as you please, and all alone there, and out of place down by the terrible, snow-covered, wind-tortured estuary sh.o.r.e--made shift to remove herself, making remarks--wrens can't help saying what they feel--as she flitted.

Then the combatants fell out--literally. Up from the solid earth between the twisted roots they seemed to come, but that proved the art of one of them in concealing his front-door from the curious, and down the bank of the sea-wall, over and over and over, squeaking the most murderous language, and grappling like pocket-devils--tumbled a little jet-black and a little dark-brown beast.