"Wee Tim'rous Beasties" Part 13

He was being watched. Before he was back in his corner, three of the enemy were through the breach. Five more followed. Then in quick confusion a dozen. Then a dozen more. The Hanoverian army was spreading its wings.

Their actual number he never knew. Perhaps, for the credit of his family, it was as well. Reflection would a.s.suredly have put resistance, and even hope, out of the question. As it was, he came forward with absolute indifference. His breeding again stood him in good stead. Of all the host he was the least uneasy. In the middle of the floor he stopped abruptly, confronting the situation. Fifty rats were in the cellar now, and there was not a rustle among them.

He had calculated exactly where to stop. It was a foot beyond the normal take-off of the grown rat. He flung his head round, put all the force he possessed into his hind legs, and leapt, upwards and backwards, towards the shelf. He caught it with his fore-paws, scrambled on to it, and, for the moment, was safe. He was only just quick enough. As his eyes turned, the brown rats had rushed forward, and, even as he clutched the ledge, he heard them pattering against the wall.

The floor below was a raging sea of rats; rats leaping over one another, jostling, biting, tearing. To the silence of a moment before had succeeded a babel of shrieks and hisses. But there were no jumpers among them like himself. He pa.s.sed quietly along the ledge above them, through the entrance of the run, and up to its blocked extremity. There he braced his back against the concrete and waited.

He waited for three days, his muzzle grounded, his eyes peering into the darkness, his every sense alert. He ate nothing, he drank nothing--to all appearance he never slept.

On the fourth day, he crept feebly halfway towards the cellar. Privation was beginning to tell on him. His only hope was that the invaders might have retired.

For the first few yards it almost seemed as if it was so. Neither in the air nor on the ground could he detect the slightest vibration; but, as he turned a sharp corner, the hope was dispelled. The whole run quivered with the stealthy whisper of rats' footsteps. Faint squeaks and whimperings echoed along it. The cellar was evidently still occupied in force; he was cornered between starvation and insuperable odds. Yet there might be a sc.r.a.p of food this side of the cellar. He stole forward until another turn revealed the ledge. In the centre of the ledge were three brown rats. The farther one was cleaning itself, but the other two were feeding, and, at the sight of the food, he lost all prudence. He was upon them before he was perceived. The two dropped their provender, leapt blindly forward, and fell clumsily to the floor below, but the third slid down the junction of the walls.

The black rat realized what that meant. As he turned his head, he saw his retreat cut off. Two more had scaled the corner behind him. He swung about to face them, girded himself to charge, and, instead of charging, stopped dead.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FARTHER ONE WAS CLEANING ITSELF.]

For the first time in his life he knew what fear was. Before him were his immediate adversaries; his quick ears caught the crumbling of plaster behind him. Rats were mounting that corner also.

Five feet below lay the floor. Its surface glistened with shifting beads of light--light from rats' eyes.

He was between the devil and the deep sea--the floor was the sea, and the devil was a.s.suredly advancing towards him. Never before had he set eyes on such a beast--ten inches from head to tail, brawny, misshapen, mangy, a veritable Caliban of rats.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A VERITABLE CALIBAN OF RATS.]

The position was hopeless. All he could do was to die game. Caliban had crept within a foot of him, and was pulling himself into position. But he was too slow. Before he had raised his clumsy fore-paws from the ground, the black rat's teeth had met in his throat. His huge frame quivered for a moment, staggered, and lurched heavily off the shelf. He carried his comrade with him.

First blood! what matter whose? Caliban lay where he fell, his eyes slowly glazing. The eyes round him caught the reflection from his throat. He was the hero of a hundred fights, and the puniest ratling had its share. The floor was for the moment the centre of attraction.

Had it not been for the chieftain, the black rat might have regained the run. But the chieftain had foreseen events. As Caliban fell he had clambered up, and was now blocking the entrance.

He was grounded on his haunches, with uplifted paws, ready for anything.

The black rat drove at him, and was hurled backwards. Among rats the chieftain is, of necessity, pluperfect master of defence. Again and again he parried the attack, until Caliban was disposed of.

Then, in the middle of his rush, the black rat heard once more the stealthy footstep in his rear, paused, half turned, missed his footing, and fell.

Yet he accounted for four of those below, which made five altogether.

"THE FOX'S TRICKS ARE MANY; ONE IS ENOUGH FOR THE URCHIN"

(_Old Greek Proverb_).

Rain, and rain, and rain. For three days in succession the sun had defaulted. Yet he had been doing his best behind the storm-clouds. That very morning he had forced one straggling beam well through. It had been completely thrown away, for every living thing was snugly tucked up under cover. Now, as his time was getting short, he made one last despairing effort.

Westward, the sky was banked with purple nimbus, towering in gloomy magnificence aloft, but fined to nothingness on the horizon. The sun saw his chance, and took it. As the storm-cloud was borne a trifle upwards, he flashed his dying radiance beneath it.

At first the brightness was intolerable. The rain-drenched leaves were bathed in liquid fire; the river surface gleamed like molten metal; the undergrowth that fringed the bank became a tangled web of dazzling light-points.

The effort was of short duration, yet, before the sun had sunk, the things that loved the river had caught his message.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WATER-RAT CAME FROM A HOLE FIVE FEET ABOVE THE RIVER-LEVEL.]

The cloud-bank lifted sullenly, and dispersed. Out of the east came a soft summer breeze, stealing silently across the valley, and tilting the balance of each dripping leaf. So the great drops of moisture slipped off them to swell the river, and the drying of the earth commenced.

That is what brought them all out together.

The water-rat came from a hole five feet above the river-level. An overhanging gra.s.s-tuft masked her exit. As a rule, she used the back way--a gently sloping tunnel which led from nest to stream. But to-night it was very still. She padded quietly to the water's edge, slid through the reeds that bordered it, and sat upon a silted crescent of mud that lay on their far side. She always sat there to commence with. From the bank she was invisible; up stream and down she could see for fifty yards, and the pith of the reed-stem, of all things in her menu most charming, lay ready to her orange-tinted teeth.

The noctules came from the hollow in the old chestnut. Twenty of them lived there together, because it was a convenient, roomy hollow. No one knows how it started--perhaps the wood-p.e.c.k.e.rs could tell you--but rain had certainly finished its excavation. The entrance was some thirty feet above the ground--dank, noisome, and forbidding; the end was near the roots.

Of course the old chestnut was dying; but that did not concern the noctules. Each evening they crawled up to prove the weather; each evening, of late, they had shambled back again into the gloomy depths, cannoning awkwardly against each other, snarling and grumbling. The temper of bats is uncertain, and hunger does not improve it.

But to-night it was better. One by one the ghoulish muzzles emerged, peered into the darkness, and were satisfied; then the clumsy, ill-balanced bodies, entangled in loose-folded leathern cerements--the noctule's wing-spread measures a full foot; lastly, the webbed curving triangle of feet and tail.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NOCTULES CAME FROM THE HOLLOW OF THE OLD CHESTNUT.]

Each, as it blundered free, clung, for a s.p.a.ce, head downwards to the bark, then slacked the grip of its ten toes, unhooked its thumbs, dropped, and flew. Never was flight more graceful, never more perfectly controlled. For fear of the swallows, the summer beetles fly by choice at twilight; even then they must needs fly low, for the noctule never misses, and the crunch of his teeth in a beetle's h.o.r.n.y back is all he knows of music.

The stoat came from a tree which was even more decrepit than the chestnut.

It had been an elm once. For four centuries it had defied the elements, towering full fifty feet in rugged, imperial grandeur. The elements had outstayed it. All that remained was a caverned stump, whose jagged summit pointed, like an accusing finger, to the sky.

But, from a stoat standpoint, the stump was unsurpa.s.sable. There were three exits from the hollow base. Up the shaft there was yet another.

Thick brambles fringed it on every side, and in those brambles were many birds' nests. The stump was an ideal nursery; as such the stoat had employed it. He had left to its friendly protection his family of six, with a young rabbit to keep them occupied. He, himself, was now in quest of frogs.

The hedgehog bore on his back clear tokens of his last retreat. A dozen withered leaves were clinging to his spines. The nearest pile of such lay heaped against the hen-house. The hedgehog footed through the knotgra.s.s slowly, grubbing with his snout to right and left of him. Sometimes, when cover failed, he broke into a bow-legged run.

The squirrel came from high up in the beech tree--the second fork from the top. There he had built what he called a nest, but what humans, with greater nicety of diction, call a drey. Speak not of squirrel's "nest" to sportsmen; to speak of fox's "burrow" were hardly less heinous. The drey was eminently satisfactory, for, in the summer months, it was completely hidden. Yet three days inside it had been more than sufficient for the squirrel. He was cold, hungry, and cramped in every limb. To quicken the blood within him, he flung himself at lightning speed from bough to bough, from tree to tree, up and down the branches, in and out the maze of dripping foliage, until his every hair was tipped with a raindrop, and he was almost weary. Then he paused a moment for breath and shook himself, dog-fashion.

The mole's uneasy, crimson-pointed muzzle came from a hole right on the water's edge. He was feeling for the water. Last night the swollen river had forced its way a yard into his run, and he had blundered headlong into it. Swimming is easy to the mole, but swimming in an inch-wide tube is risky. So, to-night, he was cautious. It might have been fine all day, or it might have been wet, for all he knew.

The gra.s.s-snake seemed to come up from the river bottom. His head suddenly parted the water beneath the old pollard, and he swam slowly across the stream, craning his neck before him. The pollard was inwardly rotten to the core--a snug retreat for snakes, to which the only entrance was a water-way.

The dormouse came from halfway up the hazel, and the wood-mouse came from its roots. They, too, had been three days weather bound; but they were not hungry. Each had its winter store to draw upon.

The moths and caterpillars and beetles, came from everywhere--crannies in the brickwork, joints in the palings, crevices in the bark, from neat-rolled envelope of leaf, from hollowed shelter of reed-stem, from pigmy burrows in the ground.

It was the hedgehog who started it. The hedgehog has a keen sense of humour, and, for that reason, he loves an argument.

"I will back my spines," said he, "against any means of defence in the country." He curled himself into a forbidding spiky ball, and rolled slowly down the bank towards the water. On the very brink he stopped and uncurled himself. "Or any means of offence," he added.

This was too much.