The Way of the Wild Part 15

The king's son was moving about the prison now, examining what he could see--especially of the walls--with his wonderful, proud eyes, and what he could not with whiskers and nose. He made no sound, of course--not so much as a whisper; and when his sister joined him, they were simply intangible, half-guessed shapes, drifting--there is no other word for it--through the gloom.

A man, even a colored one, might look long into that inclosure and, unless he caught the sudden smolder at the back of their eyes, never tell where they were. Indeed, the inclosure was in pitch-darkness itself, by reason of its high "tin" walls; and even when a weird yellow moon came and hung itself up to add to the general uncanniness of the scene, the prison of the king's son showed only like a well of ink.

Suddenly the silence and the voices of the crickets were broken into by the sound of scramblings by night. A nightjar fled from the tree overhead to the accompaniment of strange noises; and an unseen jackal, who had crept up to the very huts pessimistically, in search of anything awful, or offal, fled with a startled scurry. Apparently something with claws was trying to sc.r.a.pe away the corrugated iron.

Came then a scrawling sc.r.a.pe, and a thump. Then silence. But after a bit the noises began again--a fresh lot, and more violent. The pariah dog, who had come to investigate with his tail in the air, went away again, and quickly, with his tail between his legs; and in the same moment the king's son's head appeared over the top of the corrugated iron wall in silhouette against the staring, surprised moon.

Of course, and quite naturally, every sentry was asleep, or else even they could not have failed to realize that the sounds of desperate scratchings that followed were no ordinary phenomena, and might bear looking into.

Presently the king's son's body followed his head, and he sat for a moment, balancing clumsily on that narrow top, before vanishing suddenly, to the accompaniment of a heavy thump that was the last sound he made in the place.

Further and even more frantic scratchings followed, and anon the king's daughter, who certainly meant to die rather than be left alone in the hands of the foe, eclipsed the moon. A pause, and she, too, vanished downwards with a thump that was the last sound she made there in that place also.

A minute later, and she had joined her brother under the th.o.r.n.y guard of a mimosa.

For a moment or two the pair stood rigid as rock carvings, looking back, crouched a little, and deadly silent. Then the king's son turned and led the way to the river at a loping trot, and his sister followed in his tracks. They shook the dust--literally and daintily as a cat shakes dew from her feet--of the hated captors' fastness from their feet in little momentary halts as they went, and the place knew them no more.

But there is one point I should like to insert here. Go and try to climb over a corrugated iron wall nine feet high, and with nothing but the bare earth to take off from, and see how you succeed. Further, when doing it, remember that these royal children were so young as to be little more than babies. Then you may tell how they accomplished the feat. I do not know exactly to this day.

It is to be hoped that by this time everybody will be aware that the king's son and the king's daughter were lion cubs, the survivors, therefore the strongest and the fittest, of three lion cubs in a litter. It required, you will admit, some resource, courage, and intelligence to do what they had already done, considering their age; but the worst was to come. Having got out of the frying-pan, they must now face the fire, and be quick about it, too, if they didn't want to be traced and recaptured at dawn.

Arrived at the river's edge, they stopped and stared out across the dark swirls and unknown, cold depths. Lion cubs, as also the young of every other African animal, must a.s.suredly be born with an instinctive and a very lively dread of all rivers and their occupants. Any horrible invention of death, they must have known, might be expected to lurk there, ready waiting for them in that underworld of dark waters; but if they felt fear, they never showed it, and the pride of their birth held true. Their hesitation was only momentary. The terror had to be faced, bravely or fearfully, as they would, but still faced, and bravely it was done.

Slowly and coolly the king's son waded out into the black, chill waters. He felt the current, which was strong, plucking like invisible great fingers at his legs; he felt the cold strike through tawny, spotted fur and skin to his belly, but he never looked back. His feet were whirled from under him; he trod upon nothing, cold, cold emptiness, and that was enough to terrify any grown beast, let alone a baby; but he struck out right manfully, and his fine eyes and face took on that regal expression of haughty determination that you see in the face only of King Leo himself and his mate, and in no other beast in the world. And the king's daughter unhesitatingly followed--a real princess, by gad, sirs!

Steadily the pair swam, heading instinctively, one presumes, up-stream, to counteract the drift of the ever-shouldering current. There was, perhaps, from two to five feet of water under their st.u.r.dy paws; but had it been twenty or thirty, I, personally, believe it would have made no difference. There were probably also other things under and around their st.u.r.dy paws--things very much worse and less innocent than any water--things they must have, dimly, at any rate, if not acutely, been aware of in an inbred sort of way; but they made no difference either.

"Make way for the king's son and the king's daughter. It is their will to cross the river. Hear, all of you loathly horrors, you lurking terrors--make way. Who dares check the will of the king's son?"

Once there came a mighty swirl on their right hand--or right paw, if you like--and the waters parted, with waves and the spouts of a geyser, to give up the monstrous nightmare head of a hippopotamus. Once something cold and leathery and ghastly touched the bottom of their padded feet; and once--but this was too awful for any expression by pen--something else, equally cold, but smooth, coiled, writhing, round the king's son's left hind-leg, but providentially slid clear again, as he kicked like a budding International.

Then came the ordeal. It arrived in the shape of two k.n.o.bs, that just were suddenly, and remained, motionless in the mocking moonlight, on the surface of the water. It might have been merely some projection from a half-sunken log. It might, but--well, there had grown in the air an unspeakable stench of musk, and that wasn't there before the k.n.o.bs showed up.

Both lion cubs saw, both little royal ones smelt, and in some dim way, warned probably by a terrible knowledge handed down to them from their ancestors, both baby swimmers knew. Terror--real terror, of the white-livered, surrender-or-stampede-blindly-at-any-price kind--could never, it seems to me, come into those fine, regal eyes; but the nearest approach that was possible occurred in that instant, and they swam. Ah, how those infant lions swam! What had gone before was mere paddling; and whether or not they had ever swum before in their short lives--and I doubt it more than a little--there could be no question about them now; they swam like practiced hands, and almost as fast.

Followed a pause, terrifying enough in all conscience, and then, slowly, silently as a submarine's conning-tower goes under, so dived those k.n.o.bs, and vanished almost, not quite, without a ripple.

The cool night-air showed the breath coming from the broad, brave, water-frilled cubs' heads in gasps. The silence gave away their frantic panting. You could literally see them straining every baby nerve and muscle, could note the jerks with which they fairly kicked themselves along. And the opposite bank, a black wall of bush and reeds, was very near now, yet far--oh, how far, to them!

Ssee-shhrr-r-rr-r-shrhh!

As a torpedo hurtles hissing along barely below the surface of the water, so hurtled the head--the head with its wicked eyes on k.n.o.bs; the head with its vast, scaly, long snout, its raised nostrils at the tip, its shuddering array of jagged teeth, its awful, armed, diabolical aspect of conscious power--straight at the king's son. Without warning had it come, and with still less had it attacked.

Swim, oh, swim, little king's son, for your very life! But the king's son did not swim--at least, not in that sense. He turned. Yes, that is right--turned; and the monstrosity of the armed snout, that same being a crocodile, of course, was upon him even as he did so. There would have been no time to turn after--no life! Still, the king's son may not have known that. Maybe he turned, as a man attacked by a dog does, because he felt, in a cold, nervy sort of spasm all up his spine, the terrible defenselessness of his hind-limbs. And as he turned, he struck--bat-bat!--struck with all his talons unsheathed; struck with every ounce and grain of power, and force of brain to back that power, in his system; struck as only a cornered cat can strike; struck like a--lion.

The result was astounding.

The crocodile had aimed, true to a hair--you bet, he being a croc.--to grab the king's son's hindlegs, and pull him under. He had not reckoned on the turn, and the turn did it. His snout struck hindlegs, which were not where they ought, by his calculations, to have been, but were four or five inches away to one side.

Quick as only a reptile can be, he canted, to remedy the error, but the impetus of his ten-foot bulk was still upon him; it carried him by.

You cannot stop ten feet of bulk and five-feet-seven of girth of flesh and bone and muscle and armor-plates, going at Old Nick may know how many knots, in half-a-yard, you know; and it was the half-a-yard that did the trick.

The king's son was aware, as he half-rose and delivered that desperate blow, of a mighty bulk shooting by, of an overpowering, sickening stench of musk, and of eyes, through the foam and the water--two little, wicked, unspeakably cruel eyes on k.n.o.bs.

_His chance_! And, quick as light, he took it. Ough!

The rest was chaos.

And that is about all, I think--unless you would like to know that their mother, the king's consort, who had been working grimly along on their trail since dusk, slid swiftly down the bank in that crisis, a fiery-eyed, long, gliding shape, and plunging into the watery inferno utterly recklessly, brought out, one by one, dripping, shivering, and by the scruff of the neck, first the king's son, then the king's daughter, and stopped not till she had placed them high up the bank, safe among the thorn-scrub, where they crouched together, side by side, listening to the cataclysmal threshings of the blind devil down in the black waters below there; and their father, the king, came up--pad-pad-pad-pad--behind them, to thunder out defiance at all the world above their st.u.r.dy, broad, intelligent heads, and purr his joy at their return. Moreover, he looked proud as he stood there in the moonlight, that royal beast; and I like to think it was not all looks either.

XI

THE HIGHWAYMAN OF THE MARSH

There was some sort of violent trouble going on down in the reeds beside the dike. The reed-buntings--some people might easily have mistaken them for sparrows, with their black heads and white mustaches--said so, swaying and balancing upon the bending reeds, and calling the makers of that trouble names in a harsh voice.

And all the rest of the reed-people were saying so, too. It was an amazing thing how full of wild-folk that apparently deserted reed-patch was. Each bit of the landscape, each typical portion, is a world of its own, with its special kind of population. This one produced unexpectedly a pair of sedge-warblers and a reed-warbler, atoms who gyrated and grated their annoyance; a willow-t.i.t, who made needle-point rebukes; a water-rail, with a long beak and long legs, running away like a long-legged pullet; a moorhen very much concerned as to her nest; a big rat very much concerned as to the moorhen's nest, too, but in a different way; a gra.s.s snake, who glistened as if newly painted in the sun; and a spotted crake, who is even more of a running winged ventriloquial mystery than the corn-crake of our childhood's hay-times.

All of them were on thorns--though on reeds, really--and evidently highly rattled and in a state of nerves over the trouble in the reeds.

And not much wonder either, for, judging by the sounds, murder was being done in there among the secret recesses of the swishing green stems--murder cruel and violent, in spite of the sunshine and the light of day.

And then, all of a sudden, in the midst of almost a gasp of silent horror, a moment of speechlessness on the part of the wild lookers-on, out came the trouble, rolling over and over and over upon the soft, short-cropped gra.s.s of the dike-bank, and--they all saw. Also, they all, except the little warblers, who were safe, more or less, and stayed to blaspheme the public nuisance, instantly and at the same moment remembered appointments elsewhere, and went to keep them with a haste that was noticeable and wonderful.

There before them was a hare. But a hare is a gentle and altogether negligible wild-person. This hare, however, was fighting, and fighting like several furies, and grunting, and making all sorts of unharelike motions and commotions against another beast; and that other beast was most emphatically not a hare.

It--or, rather, he--was big, as we count bigness among four-footed wild-folk in Britain to-day. Probably he could stretch the tape to twenty-three inches, of which about sixteen consisted of very long, low body, with st.u.r.dy, bear-like, dumpy legs, the rest being rather thick, furry tail; and, though n.o.body--without steel armor--might have cared to take on the job of weighing him alive, he would have turned the scale at about two pounds eight ounces, or perhaps a bit more. Not a big beast, you will say; but in the wild he ruled big, being snaky and of a fighting turn, so to say. He was, in fact, the very devil, and he looked it--hard as nickel-steel. A dull, tawny devil, with a peculiar purplish sheen in some lights--due to the longer hair--on his short, hard coat, turning black on his throat, legs, and tail--as if he had walked in black somewhere--and finished off with patches of creamy white on head and ears. There was an extraordinary air of hard, tough, cool, cruel, fighting-power and slow ferocity about the beast--a very natural born gladiator of the wild places.

Men called him polecat, apropos of nothing about him, apparently, for he had no connection with poles or cats; or foumart, apropos--and you wouldn't have needed to be told if you had got to leeward of him just then--of his _very_ unroselike smell--that is, fou--foul, mart--marten, his nearest relation; or, again, fitchett, as our forefathers termed him.

But never mind. What's in a name, anyway? A big sloe-hare, with a leveret or two _not_ for sale--and that doe's leverets must have been in the rushes somewhere--may, upon occasion, show unexpected fighting-powers. And this one did. The polecat was kicked in the stomach, and kicked and scratched in the ribs, and thumped on the nose, and kicked and scratched and thumped on the head, before he could get in the death-stroke, the terrible lightning-thrust at the brain's base, which, like the sword-stroke that ends the bull-fight, dropped the victim as if struck by electricity.

And then he had whirled, and darted headlong for the reeds. He galloped in an odd, jumpy, sidelong gallop, as if he were a sort of glorified wild dachshund.

It did not take him long to inspect the reed-patch, to search it from end to end with his nose. His mind was soon made up to the fact that the wretched leverets had vanished, and that no scenting of his keen nose could find them. They had gone, evidently, quitted, like the pair of obedient children that they were, while their mother was cleverly holding the foe, and making demonstrations in his front. And now the pair of them were probably far away, lost past all finding among the mazes of the fields. And there was nothing for him to do but go and dine upon the old hare, which he did, taking, according to his custom, little more than a bite and a sip before pa.s.sing on.

Then he turned and meandered off on the war-path. And this was a serious business, and a busy one. It was downright hard labor, for he worked his ground properly and for all it was worth, having a lot to kill, and not much time to kill it in.

At times he sat bolt-upright, and stared knowingly around--because his short legs gave him such a limited view otherwise. At times he climbed a mole-heap. At other times he hunted head down--and again one noticed the hound-like manner--in every possible direction, questing, casting here, casting there, working back, throwing forward, describing circles, and poking into and out of every reed-patch, bramble-heap, furze-clump, or other bit of cover that that coverless land offered.

And then suddenly he stopped. And then suddenly he ran forward. And then suddenly, the scent carrying him right smack-bang out into the open, he dropped flat and began to crawl.

He crept and he crept and he crept across that absolutely bare, flat ground, with never a tuft of fur or a feather of a single live thing upon it to be seen, till one might have thought that he had gone mad, and was stalking an illusion--as many, not beasts, have done before him; only they were men, and blew their brains out--or went bankrupt instead--afterwards.

Finally he stopped. And this was the oddest thing of all, because, if any creature could show intense excitement without showing it--that is to say, without muscle, eyelid, hair, or limb moving--that polecat did then. And yet, stare as one would upon the absolutely bare gra.s.s, dotted only here and there with a stone, or a rat's skull, or a daisy--all looking alike in their whiteness from a distance--not a living, breathing thing was to be seen.

And yet there was a living, breathing thing there. Indeed, there were several. It was only the eye that was deceived, not the nose--at least, not the polecat's nose--by motionlessness.