The Way of the Wild Part 22

Also, vipers know all about voles, field and bank; they specialize in 'em!

But our bank-vole knew all about the "freezing" game, too, and he "froze." My word, how that little beggar was still, so utterly bereft of movement that a fly settled upon him--about the first and the last that would, I should judge! And if a learned native had come along the road at that moment--on tiptoe, of course--he would have said the viper had hypnotized friend vole with fear. Hypnotize your grandmother! But you may take it from me that serpent thing was playing his game, too.

He was "freezing" to induce the quarry to move and give himself away, because, since the vole was motionless, he had no idea where the little fellow was, although he seemed to be looking straight at him--in that execrable way snakes have of seeming to look straight at everything.

You think it was a battle of patience? W-e-ll, maybe. Maybe, too, it was a battle of nerves. I like to think so, anyway, for that snake-servant of the Devil had none, and the bank-vole had; and the bank-voices broke under the awful tension--or seemed to--and the bank-vole broke the terrifying spell. Also, he broke the silence.

Away down the ditch he went, bouncing like a tiny ball of dark thistle-down, all in and out among the vegetation, which, worse luck for him, the ditch being under the accursed shadow of the firs, was scanty. And as he galloped he squeaked three times--like a little needle stabbing the late afternoon silence, it was.

His removal was one kind of quick dodge in the art of quitting; that of the viper another, and a very beastly one. The crawling thing was not much more than one-tenth of a second after the poor bank-vole in getting under way, and the rest was a--was a--oh, anything you please!

I call it a sliding flicker that you rather "felt" than saw. Also, the thing rustled horribly, and Fact can say what she likes. I swear it shot along quite flat, crawling, not undulating; but, ough! what a lightning, footless, legless crawl! No wonder the poor little devil of a bank-vole squeaked! The wonder was he didn't faint on the spot, for he knew what was coming.

Up the bank he pattered, and into that, to him, great subterranean highway which seems to be conjointly kept up and used by all the mysterious little four-footed tribes of the field, and which runs the length of practically every bank and hedgerow. The place was dark and cool and echoing, and bare as the palm of your hand, and far cleaner than many palms. It might have been cleaned out that very day by a fairy vacuum-cleaner; but it hadn't. It was always like that, clean as the proverbial new pin. Heaven alone knows who did the "charing"

there, but those little furry tribes might have given lessons on health in trench warfare, I reckon, at a guinea a time--and cheap at that.

They had found out that dirt meant disease, you bet.

Down that tunnel drummed the bank-vole, seeking to foul his trail with just any other creature; and, the highway being, as I have said, a sort of public affair, he met first a mouse gone astray, then a mole asleep, then a long-tailed wood-mouse, then a short-tailed field-vole, then a shrew about as big as your little finger. But they must have heard the sc.r.a.pe of the snake's scales down that echoing tunnel following hard behind, for they avoided our bank-vole like the plague, and dived up one or other of the thousand and one side-tunnels, which opened on to the main one, too quickly for the viper to catch them.

Then the poor, little, panting bank-vole found himself once more in the open. His beady eyes shone like microscopic stars as lie paused in a copper bar of setting sunlight and looked about for a refuge. It seemed, by the piston-like throb of the whole body, that his heart would burst and slay him out of hand before the hated snake could, if he did not jolly soon find one.

Then a hedge caught his eye, and he climbed it, being a good acrobat in his spare time. Beyond, however, bringing down upon himself the pecks of several birds, he did no good, for it seemed that, whithersoever he could go, the snake could follow, and--help!--the flat, terrible head was not a yard from him now.

Worse was to follow, though. He dropped to earth again, already a beaten beast; and, to complete the catastrophe, by a miracle he had landed where there was not a mouse or mole or vole hole, or any other cover, within reach. Only one big clod of earth there was, and round that he flung himself, with that stub, scaly snout weaving at his very tail, and rolled over and over and over--done, too utterly spent even to squeak.

Then Fate lifted her finger, and things happened. All that had gone before didn't count, it seemed.

The little bank-vole was dimly aware of rolling under a big, warm, live shape. He was also aware of a funny little fussy grunt in his ear, and that a set of very white and business-like teeth flashed for an instant in the sun, as they chopped surprisedly at him going under them, and missed. Thereafter the shape sat down, nearly stifling him; and in the same instant the whole air seemed to fill with the sudden, long-drawn, venomous, terrifying hiss of the viper close at hand. Evidently the limbless death had come round the corner too quickly, and had all but rammed the shape that grunted.

I can give you my word, though, that the vole was not happy one bit.

He appeared to be between the Devil and the deep sea. He had no confidence in the deep sea, or any other thing that he could think of in his world. Moreover, the deep sea, besides keeping all the air off, was most horribly bristly, even on the belly. Wherefore that vole made haste to quit station, so to speak. But in a second, it seemed, before he could clear himself, that unspeakable serpent's hiss appeared to sound in his very ear, and the deep sea, folding upon itself, made the poor vole yell as if he had touched off a live-wire. He had not, of course; but it was like being struck with a dozen pins at once. He would have got out if he could, but to move was to discover more pins, and he just had to keep where he was, squealing fit to burst.

And that saved the vole, probably.

Not that there was any magic or rubbish of that kind, of course. It was simply that the viper, shooting his every inch round the corner in the effort to grab the vole's hindlegs then or never, had hit, full pelt and nose first, the nice little array of pointed arguments carried on the back of the neck of a hedgehog, snuffing under the clod, pig-fashion, for spiders. The hedgehog, whose phlegmatic disposition and special armament allowed him the luxury of never being surprised at anything, promptly and literally shut up, so that long before the viper thing had unhooked his nose and was waving his forward part about over the hedgehog, with murder in his eye and death behind his flickering tongue, looking for a place to strike home, old hedgehog was rolled up, and snuffling and snoring away inside there, like an old man chuckling when he has just cried "Mate!" at chess.

This trying position continued for perhaps five minutes. It seemed like five days to the wretched bank-vole.

Then the slow temper of the funny old hedgepig smoldered gradually alight. His eyes grew red in the foxy head of him, his snout "worked,"

and he snuffled and grunted faster and faster. He made up his mind to fight. And the extraordinary combat began. Lit by the blood rays of a setting sun, from a sky all raw and red, backed by the blue-gray haze of the watching woods, the silence broken only by the ghostly whisper of the snake's scales and the tiny pig-like grunting of the hundred-spiked hedgehog, that duel started.

Peering out of a peep-hole in himself, the hedgehog waited for an opening. It was no blunderer's game, this. Death was the price of a slip. He knew, however, and accepted the risks deliberately--a plucky enough act, when you come to think of it, for a beast no more than a foot long and one and a half pounds heavy.

The opening came. Quicker than you could realize, the hedgehog half unrolled, and side-chopped with his glistening teeth. Quick, too, and quicker, the venomous, flat serpent head writhed aloft and back-lashed, swift as a released spring; but the hedgehog had ducked, or tucked if you like, more than instantly back into himself. Followed an infernal, ghastly writhing and squirming of the long, unprotected mottled serpent body as it struck--too late to stop itself--simply spines, spines only, that tore and lacerated maddeningly. Whip, whip, whip! flashed the deadly reptilian head, pecking, quicker than light flickers, at the impa.s.sive round _cheval-de-frise_ that was the hedgehog, in a blind access of fury terrible to see; and each time the soft throat of the horror only tore and tore worse, in a ghastly manner, on those spines that showed no life and said no word, and defied all. It was a siege of the wild, and a terrible one.

Probably this was the first time in his life that anything had dared to stand up to that viper. He acted as if it was, anyway. Usually his malignant hiss, so full of hateful cruelty, was enough of a warning.

And those who ignored that did not generally live to repeat the omission. He seemed utterly unable to understand that anything could face his fangs of concentrated death and not go out in contortions.

And there were no contortions about this p.r.i.c.kly foe, only an impa.s.sable front, or, if you love exactness, back.

Wild things, unlike man, are rarely given to lose their tempers. It isn't healthy--in the wild. But if ever a creature appeared to human eyes to do so, it was that snake. He struck and he struck and he struck, impaling himself ghastlily each time, and using up his small immediate magazineful of venom uselessly on--uncompromising spikes!

At last he drew back, a horrible affront to the fairy scene, and, in the snap of a finger, the hedgehog had unpacked himself, run forward--a funny little patter it was, much faster than you would expect--slashed with his dagger fangs, and repacked himself again in an instant.

The snake, writhing afresh under the punishment, threw himself once more upon the impa.s.sive "monkey-puzzle" on four legs, but beyond tearing himself into an even more ghastly apparition than before, he accomplished nothing. Finally he broke away, and slid off, a rustling, half-guessed, fleeting vision, and there was fear at last in those awful eyes, that could never close, as he went.

Then it was that the quiet, un.o.bstrusive, retiring, self-effacing hedgehog threw off the mask, and hoisted his true colors. And yet, if one came to think of it, there was no cause for surprise, for was he not a member of the strange, the mysterious, the great Order of Insectivora, which includes among its members probably the most pugnacious, the most implacable, the most furiously pa.s.sionate fighters in all the wild? He fairly flung himself, unrolled, and running with an absurdly clock work-toy-like gait, whose speed checked the laugh that it caused, was after that viper in considerably less than half-a-second, his eyes red as the sun they glinted in, his fangs bared for action, his swinish snout uplifted at the tip in a wicked grin. No beast to bandy words with, this. It was a fight to a finish, with no surrender save to death.

The bank-vole had already fled; but it was in the direction that the fight finally veered that he had gone, and so, peeping from between the weed-stems at the mouth of a hole, he saw all. He saw the viper, his head swaying to and fro, come sliding along, making for that very hole; he heard the sudden quick rustle in the gra.s.s behind that followed, beheld the dusky, squat form that it heralded pounce. He watched the snake's head whip round, and drive with all its power in one last desperate stroke; watched it straighten out suddenly, and recoil in an awful quivering spasm, like a severed telegraph-wire, as the hedgehog's razor-sharp teeth cut through skin and flesh and backbone; and, trembling from head to foot, he witnessed, half-fascinated, I think, the awful last threshing flurry of the viper that followed.

Later, when the moon peeped out of a hole in the clouds, and the bank-vole peeped out of one in the bank, together--and his beady eyes were not much behind the moon for brightness--when the tiny, long-eared bats were imitating black lightning overhead, and a single owl was hooting like a lost soul seeking a home, away in the black heart of the woods, the bank-vole witnessed the burial of that hated viper. It was not a big affair. Only one person--the hedgehog--took part in it, and he was singularly unhurried, for he ate that poisonous fiend all up, beginning at the tail, and thoughtfully chewing on from side to side to the head--twenty inches of snake--as if he, the hedgehog, had been inoculated in infancy, and was poison-proof.

Then, still grunting, he went away, slowly, nosing here and there, rustling loudly in that stillness, an odd, squat figure in the moonlight; and the bank-vole thought he had seen the last of him, and came out to pa.s.s about his "lawful occasions," as per custom.

Now, if you or I had taken our meals after the fashion of that "wee, timorous beastie," we should probably have departed this life from indigestion or nervous prostration inside a month.

He came very cautiously from his hole, and the first thing his fine long whiskers telegraphed him the presence of was an oak-gall--one of those round k.n.o.bs that grow upon twigs like nuts, you know, but have a fat grub inside instead of a kernel. At the same instant a leaf rustled, and--flp!--there was no bank-vole.

Allowing one minute for the pa.s.sing of whoever rustled that leaf, and a cloud-shadow, and there he was again, back at the gall, his shining eyes, that mirrored the moon, being the only visible part of him. He rolled the gall over and sniffed, and--that was quite enough, thank you. No nut there, and he knew it--by scent, I fancy. In that moment something trod softly, ever so softly, somewhere, and a spray of laced bracken swayed one quarter of an inch, and--the bank-vole was not.

Again about a minute's pause, and three bank-voles came out together.

Our friend was the last, and another was the first, to discover a little h.o.a.rd of seeds that some other tiny beastie--not a bank-vole--must have collected and forgotten all about, or been killed in the interval.

In the wild, it is the law that "they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can." It isn't a bad law, because it has much to do with that other law called the "survival of the fittest," but it is apt to come expensive if persisted in.

Our vole hopped promptly towards the other vole, and made out that the seeds were his; but before any kind of ultimatum could be delivered, a twig fell, as twigs will sometimes, for no special reason that one can see. The noise it made in that stilly wood was astonishing, and ere the twig had reached the earth there wasn't a bank-vole above ground.

And yet so astonishingly quick and evasive are these little creatures that in less than thirty seconds there were the two disputants, each erect upon his haunches, with little hand-like forepaws held up and joined under the chin--as if they were actresses having their photographs taken--fighting, like little blunt-headed furies, for possession of those seeds--so it seemed. I say "so it seemed"

advisedly, since close by, and almost invisible because sitting quite still, was another bank-vole, who looked as if she were waiting for something; which she probably was--a lover.

It was, however, death that came, and he is a too attentive lover. The battle had been going on some seconds without apparent result, possibly because the voles had to bite upwards, shark-fashion, owing to the fact that their fighting-teeth are wedge-shaped incisors, instead of stabbing fangs, when there was a hrrr! That is all, just like that--hrrr!

Then there were no voles; but there seemed to have been no going of the voles, either. They just were, fighting and watching the fight--then they just were not. Instead of them, on the very spot where they had been, a sheeted ghost, with wings that flapped and flapped, and never made any noise, with the face of a cat, and big round eyes that gleamed, and a snore most horrible, had simply been evolved from nowhere, and under its claws was the little red-backed lady who waited for a lover.

Now, the coming of that apparition, whose wings did not say "Hough-hough!" or "Whew-whew!" like other birds' wings do when they fly, thus proving itself, or rather herself, to be an owl, and the fight of Mr. Hedgehog and the poisoned death, had a direct connection with, and a bearing upon, the little bank-vole's life, although they may not have seemed to have at first. If the snake had not run amok against the hedgehog, the latter slow personage would have been well out in the meadow by that time, reducing the worm population, instead of hanging about and coming up the ditch at that moment, with the hot and worried air of one who is late.

What he saw was the owl on the ground, flapping her great, soft wings about, within a foot of the nicely, neatly, nattily roofed-in nest where he and his lifelong wedded wife thought they had hidden cunningly their four soft-bristled, helpless babies. What he thought he saw was the owl engaged in turning one of those same babies into nourishing infant owls' food, or "words to that effect." And the hedgehog, like most of the order Insectivora, is cursed with the temper of Eblis, too.

Naturally, therefore, things happened, and happened the more hectically, perhaps, because Mrs. Hedgehog chanced at that moment to be away--attending to the last rites--shall we say?--over the form of an expiring young rat.

The little pig's eyes of him went red in his funny, bristle-crowned head, and just as a clockwork toy charges, so he charged, with a quick, grunting rustle and far greater speed than any one who knew only his usual deliberate movements would have given him credit for.

The owl had only time to turn her cat-like face and--hiss. But though that hiss would have been good enough as a bluff to frighten creatures who wouldn't upset a snake for anything, she was out of her reckoning upon this occasion. The hedgehog, who dealt in snakes as a game-warden deals in tigers, had no nerves that way. He just sailed in under the baffling, great, flapping wing, and, ere ever the bird of the night could spring aloft, had struck. It was a ghastly form of warfare, this low running in and wrenching snap. It landed right under the armpit, so to speak, and left a nasty round hole. And it is worth noting, by the way, that precisely the same sort of hole, and in the same spot almost, but lower and farther back, was to be seen upon the body of the deceased young rat that Mrs. Hedgehog was even then attending to--the trademark of the hedgehogs, that hole.

All the immediate world of the night wild, watching from gra.s.s-tuft and root and burrow, heard the rasping tap of the owl's beak hammering helplessly at the spines on the back of the hedgehog, now beside himself with rage. Not one of them, too, that did not jump with terror--engrained by the bitter experience of hundreds of generations--at her fiendish scream. Then, in a flash, that owl was upon her back, wielding hooked beak and stiletto talons, as only she knew how to use them; and the hedgehog, who had, in the blindness of his rage, run in to finish the job, shot up clean on his hind-legs, taking the clinging, flapping owl with him, while, for the first time that night, he uttered a cry other than a grunt--an odd, piercing little cry, vibrant with rage, or fear, or both. This was rather odd, because ordinarily the hedgehog is a dumb beast, who suffers "frightfulness" in grim silence.

The tables were turned now. The shoe was on the other foot, or, to be precise, the foot was on the underside. That is, the owl had got the foe where he lived, below water-line, if I may so put it, where, like a battleship, his armor did not run, and he was soft and vulnerable as any other beast. Moreover, he had not trained himself in the art of throwing himself upon his back, as the owl, who was like a cat in this particular also, had apparently done, and since he could not prance on his hindlegs, unicorn-fashion, forever, he had to come down again, belly and throat first, on that infernal battery of talons and beak.

And he got it all right enough. I give you my word that spiny one got it; but, save for that one first little cry, he took his punishment in grim and terrible silence, fighting with a blind fury that was awful to behold. What happened to him underneath there in those few brief, terrible seconds no one will ever know--and that, we may guess, is as well perhaps, for there is no sense in dwelling upon horrors. What he _did_, in the short time he was given by Fate, is a little more clear.

b.u.t.ting madly down, oblivious of all things, even that unspeakable fish-hook beak, grappling like a thing demented--and I think he was nearly that--he bit deep, deep down, through feathers and skin and flesh, _home_--once, twice, and again.

Then, blindly, brokenly, smothered in blood, red-visaged and horrible, he half-rolled, half blundered free of that frightful clinch, and instantly rolled up! 'Twas his habit, the one refuge of his life, so long as he breathed; his last, and usually, but not always, his first, hope.

The owl struggled somehow, in a cloud of her own feathers, to her feet.