Wild Folk Part 9

[Ill.u.s.tration: DEATH IN THE DARK]

For a second the young fox looked into the lidless, deadly eyes of the copperhead, with their strange oval pupils, the hall-mark of the fatal pit-vipers. All in one flash, the grim jaws of the snake gaped open, the two movable fangs of the upper jaw unfolded and thrust straight out like tiny spearheads, and the fatal crooked needles stabbed deep in the cub's soft side. Growling fiercely in his little throat, he clenched his sharp teeth through the snake's spine; but even as he closed his jaws, the fatal virus touched the tide of his life and he fell forward.

The wild folk have no tears, nor may they show their sorrow by the sobs and wailing of humankind, yet there was something in the dumb despair of the two foxes who had followed the trail of their lost cub, as they hung over the soft little body, that showed that the love of our lesser brethren for their little ones is akin to the love of humankind. Thereafter all the watchfulness and the love and the hope of the two were concentrated on the little fox with the black cross on his back. Night and day Mother Fox guarded him. Day and night Father Fox taught and trained him, until he had acquired much of the lore of fox-kind. He learned to catch birds and mice and frogs and squirrels, and even the keen-eared cottontail rabbit, whose eyes can see forward and backward equally well. He learned, too, the lessons of prudence and foresight which keep foxes alive when ice and snow have locked many of their larders. Once, when he was crossing a pasture with Father Fox, the latter stopped and stood like a pointing dog, one velvety black bent forefoot in the air, while with outstretched muzzle he sniffed the faintest of warm scents, which seemed to float from a clump of tangled dry gra.s.s. Stealing forward like a shadow, the old fox sprang at the tussock. Before he landed, a plump quail buzzed out of the cover like a bullet, to be caught by the fox in mid-air.

Underneath a fringe of dry gra.s.s was a round nest of pure white, sharp-pointed eggs--so many of them that they were heaped up in layers.

After eating the quail, the old fox carefully carried off the eggs and hid them under layers of damp moss, where they would keep indefinitely and be a resource in the famine days that were yet to come.

Another day the cub learned the advantage of teamwork. On that day the two old foxes were hunting together, and, as usual, Blackcross tagged along. Near the middle of a great field, a flock of killdeer were feeding--those loud-voiced plover, which wear two rings around their white necks. For a moment the two foxes stood motionless, staring at the distant birds. Then, without a sound, Mother Fox turned back. For a moment Blackcross could watch her as she made a wide detour around the field, and then she disappeared from sight. Father Fox lay still for several minutes, with his wise head resting on his forepaws. Then, while Blackcross stayed behind, the old fox started deliberately toward the flock of feeding birds. At times he would stop, and bound high in the air, and scurry up and down, waving his flaunting brush and cutting curious capers, moving gradually nearer and nearer to the flock.

The killdeer, which are wise birds in spite of their loud voices, moved farther and farther away toward the end of the pasture, ready to spring into the air and flash away on their long narrow wings if the fox came too near, but evidently much interested in his antics as they fed. Gradually the curveting fox edged the flock clear across the field, until they were close to a thicket that lay between the field and a patch of woods beyond. Then he redoubled his efforts, prancing and bounding and rolling over and over, while his fluffy tail showed like a plume above the long gra.s.s, and the birds stopped feeding and watched him with evident curiosity.

Suddenly, when the attention of the whole flock was fixed on the performing fox, there was a rustle in the thicket, and out flashed a tawny shape. Before the flock could spring into the air, Mother Fox had caught one bird in her teeth and beaten down another with her paws.

Another morning Blackcross learned what happens to foxes who poach on their neighbor's preserves. In the early dawn-light, he was loping along the upper end of the valley with Father Fox. Suddenly the fur bristled all along the latter's back, and he gave a little churring growl. Right ahead of him, trotting along a path made by a generation of red-fox pads, came the old gray fox who lived by Cold Spring, a dead cottontail rabbit swung over one shoulder. The poacher was caught with the game. With another growl, the old red fox sprang at the trespa.s.ser. The gray fox was a mile from his burrow, and knowing that the red fox could outpace him, decided to fight for his booty. With a quick flirt of his head, he tossed the rabbit into a near-by bush, and with bristling back awaited the attack.

Walking stiff-legged like two dogs, and growling deep in their throats, the two came together, until they stood sidewise to each other, sparring for an opening. Finally, the old red fox snapped at the other's foreleg, with a movement more like the slash of a wolf than the bite of a dog. The gray fox dropped his head, and the bared teeth of the two snicked together. Again the red fox made the same lead, and met with the same block. The third time he feinted, and as the other dropped his head, whirled and brought his brush, with a blinding, stinging swish, across the eyes of the gray fox. Before the latter could recover, the narrow jaws of the red fox had met in the soft flesh just above the gray hind leg. A wolf would have hamstrung his opponent and killed him at his leisure; but foxes rarely fight to the death. As the old gray fox felt the rending teeth tear through his soft skin, he yelped, tore himself loose, and started full-speed for his den. For two hundred yards the red fox pursued him, with such swiftness that he managed to nip his unprotected hind quarters several times. At each bite the fleeing gray fox yelped with the high, shrill, sorrowful note of a hurt little dog; and when Father Fox returned to claim the spoils of victory, all that could be seen of the other was a gray streak moving rapidly toward Cold Spring.

As the cub reached his full stature, he ranged farther and farther afield with the two old foxes. He learned all the hiding and camping places of the range, and how to sleep out in a blaze of sunlight in some deserted field, looking for all the world like a tussock of tawny blackened gra.s.s, or, if so be that he hunted by day and slept by night, he found that he wore a blanket on his back which kept him warm even during the coldest nights. As for his unprotected nose and four paddies, he wrapped them up warm in the fluffy rug of his thick soft brush. By the time frost had come, his fur had grown long and glossy and very beautiful, with the velvet cross of midnight-black bordered with old-gold, silver, and tawny-pink, his black brush waving aloft like a white-tipped plume.

Death came with the frost, in the form of traps, hounds and hunters.

Old Father Fox taught him how to escape them all. Many years ago he had lived across the hills on the lonely Barrack, where the Deans and the Blakesleys and the Howes and the Baileys and the Reeds have a far-away hill country of their own. Old Fred Dean lived there, and prided himself on both the wild and the tame crops which he raised on his hill farm. He made the whitest, sweetest maple sugar in the world, and harvested hickories, chestnuts, b.u.t.ternuts, and even hazel-nuts. It was his fur crop, however, which was the most profitable. Foxes, racc.o.o.ns, skunks, muskrat, mink--the old man knew how to trap them all.

In Father Fox's second year, he was caught in a trap which Fred had cunningly hidden in the snow among a maze of cattle tracks--the last place where a fox would suspect danger. The fox finally managed to work his imprisoned foot out of the gripping jaws; but it had cost him four toes to learn that the scent of man or iron meant death to foxes.

He never forgot, and he taught Blackcross to fear the tiniest whiff of either. As for dogs, the old fox taught his cub that no dog can overtake a fox going uphill or in the rough, and that shifting sand and running water are the fox's friends, since his scent will lie in neither. He taught him all the cut-offs, the jumps, and the run-backs of the range, and finally the cherished fortresses where, as a last resort, he might take refuge.

When it came to hunters, the young fox had to take his chances. In the last a.n.a.lysis a man's brain can outwit that of a fox. It was when the blaze and the glow of the crimson and gold frost-fires had died away to the russet of late fall that the fox family was most in danger, for the Raven Hunt Club needed a fox. Three times now the men had dressed themselves with great care, in wonderful scarlet coats and shiny top-boots, while the women wore comfortable breeches and uncomfortable collars; and they had all jumped fences and waded brooks and crashed through thickets; but never a fox could they find, so close had the dwellers in Fox Valley lain hidden. In fact, the last hunt had been a drag-hunt, and the pack had followed for hours the scent of a bag of anise which had been dragged the day before by a string, through the woods and across the fields, by a sleepy stable-boy on a broken-down hunter. But you cannot rise in your stirrups and shout "Tally-ho!" or "Stole away!" or any of the other proper hunting remarks, over a bag of anise. Then, too, the hounds have nothing to worry and kill at the end of the hunt; nor can the brush be cut off for a trophy, for an anise bag hasn't any brush.

Thanksgiving was two scant weeks away, and it was absolutely necessary for the happiness of the Hunt that a live fox be secured at once.

Accordingly the Raven Hunt Club offered fifty dollars for a live red fox. Grays were barred, because they prefer to hide in burrows and be safe rather than run and be killed. For a week all the farmers' boys for miles around Fox Valley trapped desperately, but without success.

Father Fox had not paid four toes for nothing. Then they sent for Fred Dean. Thereafter, one night Blackcross, while hunting over a hilltop pasture, noted a long, freshly turned furrow that ran straight across the field, which was filled with old chaff taken from deserted barns and smelt delightfully of mice. Along the furrow and through the litter the young fox nosed his way, ready to pounce upon the first mouse which darted out. Suddenly there was a snap, and Blackcross was caught by his slim dark muzzle. There the old trapper found him the next morning, hardly alive; and when he saw that he had secured a cross-fox, demanded a hundred from the committee instead of the offered fifty. Said committee took the fox, and advertised far and wide that the Thanksgiving Hunt would be after such a fox as had never been hunted before in the memory of man.

The holiday turned out to be one of those rare and fleeting days of Indian summer which Autumn sometimes borrows from her sister. The pack was in fine fettle. The horses and the hunters were fit, and the hunt breakfast excellent. Everybody was thankful--except the shivering little fox. For days he had been cooped in a dirty wire cage, and eaten tainted meat and drunk stale water, and he was stiff and sore from his night in the trap and from lack of exercise. Just at sunrise on Thanksgiving morning, he was crammed into a bag, and then let out two fields ahead of the pack. As he shot into the sunlight, there was a chorus of shouts, yells, and yelps, and a crowd of men, women, horses, and hounds rushed after him in a tremendous burst of speed.

The young fox's legs tottered under him as he ran. Moreover, for a mile around the country was level. As he crossed the first field, the pack was already at the farther wall, and would surely have overtaken him in the third field if it had not been for one of the old fox's lessons. The pasture sloped up to where a sand bank showed as a great crescent gash in the turf. Springing to the side of the bank, the fox clung to it like a fly, scurried along its side, cleared the stone wall beyond, and headed for the thickets of Fox Valley. The shifting sand left no track or scent, and while the pack puzzled out the trail, Blackcross won to the shelter of the nearest thicket.

Up and down the hillsides, across marshes and through tangles of underbrush, he doubled, checked, turned, and twisted. Raven Hunt, however, boasted the best pack of fox-hounds in the state, nor had Blackcross either the strength or endurance for a long run. His pace became slower and slower, while the bell-like notes of the hounds and the shouts of the hunters sounded ever nearer and louder.

Only just in time the beset fox saw looming up before him the best hidden of all the fox fortresses in the Valley. It seemed only an impenetrable tangle of greenbrier on the hillside--that vine whose stems are like slim, green wires, studded everywhere with up-curved thorns through which neither man nor beast can force a way. Through the very middle of the tangle ran the naked trunk of a fallen chestnut, showing just above the barbed vines. As the pack scrambled through the barway at the foot of the hill, the little fox ran along the log, and with all his last remaining strength sprang far out across the interlaced tangle of vine and thorn, where the smooth needles under a little white pine made a tiny island in the thicket.

From there the fox bounded over a narrow belt of greenbrier into a ma.s.s of wild honeysuckle, whose glossy green leaves and bending vine-stocks carpeted the hill at that point fully two feet deep.

Across the yielding surface he hurried, until he reached the entrance of a little tunnel beneath the vines, entirely hidden from sight by the drooping leaves. Through this he crept noiselessly, beneath the green carpet, until he reached the entrance to a burrow which led far up the hillside and had no less than three well-concealed exits.

For a long hour the pack and the hunters and the horses circled and beat and trampled back and forth through the thicket, and as far into the greenbrier tangle as they could force a way; but no one of them found the lost trail. A hundred dollars had been spent and nothing killed. Everybody agreed that it was a most unfortunate ending to a good day--everybody, that is, except the fox.

As the months wore on, Blackcross hunted more and more by himself, nor did he use any of the family dens. This was partly because snow leaves a telltale trail, which he who hunts can read, and partly because of a difference in the att.i.tude toward him of the old foxes. Among the wild folk the love and care of parents cease when their children have become full-grown. This is part of nature's plan to scatter families, and prevent the in-breeding which will weaken the stock. At last the time came when Mother Fox no longer allowed him the freedom of the den in which he had been born, and Father Fox growled in his throat when he met him carrying his kill.

Then the love-moon of the foxes in February showed in the sky, and something drove Blackcross far afield--something that called and cried, and would not let him sleep, and took away even the interest and joy of a successful hunt. Across the ridges, through Fern Valley and beyond Blacksnake Swamp he journeyed, until, far beyond them all, he found a lonely valley shut in on all four sides by steep slopes, and untenanted by any of the fox-folk. On the crest of one of the hills stood an abandoned haystack, left by some thriftless farmer years before, and so bleached and weathered by sun and storm that it was useless as hay, but an ideal place for a fox-warren. Under this Blackcross dug a home with many entrances, all of them cunningly concealed by the overhanging hay. Through the centre of the stack itself, he ran a series of tunnels and rooms, besides the safer ones far underground.

Finally, it was almost completed--almost but not quite. Night after night the young fox barked from the top of the hill with a sharp staccato screech, which could be heard a long mile away. Then came the night of the full moon. There was no snow and overhead in the crisp air wheeled Orion the Hunter, Lepus the Hare, the Great and Little Dog, and all the other mighty constellations of winter. Under the sheen and shimmer of the stars and through the still moonlight, Blackcross sent his bark echoing and ringing, until at long last it was answered by a curious, high-pitched squall which to Blackcross contained all the magic and music of sky and earth. Nearer and nearer the sound approached, until finally, in the moonlight, a slim tawny figure stole up to the stack. For a moment black muzzle and tawny touched. Then Blackcross turned and disappeared down one of the entrances to his burrow, and the stranger followed. At last, his home was complete.

X

SEA OTTER

The short Arctic summer had flung its flower fields among the glaciers of the Siberian coast, like many-colored jewels set in crystal. Flocks of skuas, jaegers, and little auks circled and screamed above the smoky green waters of the Straits; and far out from sh.o.r.e a bed of kelp writhed and tossed like a ma.s.s of golden-brown sea snakes.

There, cradled on the swaying stems, a water-baby was born. He had a funny little nose, with a padded cushion on top which made it look like the ace of spades, and his round, blunt head was of a dingy white color, while the rest of his fifteen inches was covered with a loose, kinky, gray-brown coat. Its harsh outer surface, sprinkled with long white hairs, covered a velvet-like inner fur that gave promise of the glory that was yet to be.

In spite of his insignificant appearance, the little cub was of blood royal, of the lineage of the sea otter, that king of fur-bearers, who wears a fortune on his back and is dogged by death every moment of his life. Vitus Behring and his shipwrecked crew discovered them in 1741, in the surf and shallows around a barren island, in the sea which now bears his name. When they won their way back to Asia, sly, wise Chinese merchants paid their weight in silver for the new furs, so l.u.s.trous, silky, and durable, which the sailors had been using for coats and blankets. In Russia they came to be worth their weight in gold, outranking even the royal sables, which none but the Tsar and his n.o.bles might wear. To-day the pelt of a sea otter is worth its weight in platinum or palladium.

This last-born princeling soon learned how to float on his back, with his round little head just showing above the kelp. For the most part, however, he lived clasped in his mother's arms and wrapped in the silky folds of her fur, while he nuzzled and fed against her warm breast, making happy little chirps and grunts of satisfaction, quite like a human baby.

To-day, as they rocked back and forth in the swinging water, the kelp-carpet in front of them parted, and a great, blunt, misshapen head thrust itself into the air a few yards away. It had little eyes set high in the skull, while the ears showed below the grinning mouth filled full of blunt teeth like white water-worn pebbles--the hallmark of a sea otter.

The newcomer was none other than Father Otter, come to look over his son and heir. He did not come very close to his family, for mother otters do not permit even their mates to approach too near a newborn cub. As the old dog otter stretched himself out on the kelp-raft, his cylindrical body, all gleaming ebony and silver in the sunlight, showed nearly as long as that of a man, and weighed perhaps a hundred and twenty-five pounds. It was the great otter's pelt, however, that stamped him as the sea king that he was. l.u.s.trous as light on the water, the inner fur had a close pile like velvet and, frosted with long white hairs, showed a tinge of silver-purple gleaming through its long loose folds.

For some time the old dog otter gravely surveyed his mate and his new cub, approvingly. Then he scanned sea and sky and kelp, listening the while with a pair of the sharpest ears that ever guarded the life of one of the wild folk, at the same time winnowing the air through a pair of nostrils that could smell smoke--that danger-signal to all wild people--a mile away. There was no sign of danger anywhere, and a moment later he disappeared under the water, after the food which his vibrant body unceasingly required.

For long after his disappearance the mother otter anxiously studied the horizon for the tiniest danger-signal. Convinced at last that all was well, she stretched herself out on the slow-swinging kelp, for one of those periods of quiet happiness which come even into the lives of the hunted. While her cub snuggled against her soft fur, she tossed a kelp-bulb high into the air, catching it like a ball, first in one bare little palm, then in the other, while she sang the cradle-song which all little sea otters know. High and shrill she chirped and twittered like a bird, in the midst of that lonely sea, clasping her sleepy baby closer as she sang.

There seemed no living thing near, yet death is never far from the sea otter. From mid-sky what seemed a dark wisp of cloud drifted toward the sea. Driven down by hunger from the North, an eagle owl, all buff and gray and brown, was crossing from Asia to America; for, unlike most of his fierce clan, he hunted by day. Larger than that death-in-the-dark, the great-horned owl, or that fierce white ghost of the North, the snowy owl, he skimmed down toward the kelp-bed, his round, fixed eyes gleaming red and horrible in the sunlight. m.u.f.fled by the softest of down, his great wings, although they had a spread of nearly five feet, were absolutely noiseless.

Not until the shadow of the bird, like the shadow of death itself, fell upon her cub, did the otter have the slightest warning of any danger. By that time it would have been too late for any other creature to escape. No animal, however, on land or sea can dive with the sea otter. Just as the crooked talons were closing, she slipped through the kelp into the water, without a splash, like something fluid, her cub clasped close, while overhead the baffled owl snapped its beak like a pistol shot, and flew on toward the Alaskan coast.

Down through the swaying tangles she twisted her way like an eel, until she pa.s.sed clear through the floating bed of this strange growth of the sea, which grows with its roots in the air. There the water darkened, and as she neared the bottom a shape flashed ahead of her, lighted with that phosph.o.r.escence which all dwellers in the northern seas seem to acquire. The otter recognized the glowing figure as that of a sea ba.s.s, a bronze-green fish hardly to be distinguished from the small-mouthed black ba.s.s of fresh water. The ba.s.s was no mean swimmer, but the long, oar-like, webbed hind legs of the sea otter twisted over and over each other like the screw of a propeller, and drove her through the water with such tremendous speed that, in spite of the handicap of the cub, she soon swam down the fish, following its every twist and turn, and in less than a minute had caught it in her blunt teeth. Then, with the plump fish in her jaws, she swam up again through the kelp, and fed full, never for a moment, however, loosening her grip of her cub--for the babies of the sea folk who wander only a few feet from their mothers may never return.

The meal finished, the great otter climbed out on a pinnacle of rock just showing above the kelp. Immediately from a miracle of lithe, swift grace, she changed into one of the slowest and most awkward of animals. The webbed flipper-like hind feet, which drove her with such speed through the water, were of very little use on land, and her tiny forepaws were so short that they seemed to have no wrists at all.

Slowly and painfully she waddled up on the rock, and there preened and cleaned and combed and licked every inch of her fur just as a cat would do, until it shone in the sunlight like a black opal.

As the weeks went by, the cub was trained in the lessons of the sea.

He learned to enjoy salads of kelp-sprouts, and to dive with his mother to the bottom of the shallows, and watch her grind her way through the great clams of the northwest, whose bivalves are a foot in width, or crunch with her pebble-like teeth into the white meat of the vast, armored crabs of those seas. Another one of her favorite foods was the sea urchin--that chestnut burr of the sea. Protected by a bristling hedge of steel-sharp spines, it would seem safe from any attack. Yet, just as the squirrel on land opens without injury the real chestnut burr, so the sea otter had learned the combination which unlocked this little spiked safe of the sea, and devoured with much relish every one she could find.

As the weeks went by, the larder of the kelp-bed began to empty. The clam-beds had been stripped, the sea urchins were gone, and the fish had learned to keep away. Little by little, the mother otter hunted farther and farther from the safety of the kelp; until there came a day when, driven by hunger, she followed a fleeing pollock out into the open sea. The big gleaming fish, with the black line along its silver sides, swam far and fast. Yet, if the otter had not been hampered by her clinging cub, the chase would have been a short one.

As it was, she did not overtake the fugitive until it was fully a quarter of a mile away from the kelp. In desperation it swam down into the lower depth, until the dull green of the water changed to black; but always the weasel of the sea was hard on its track, following the phosph.o.r.escent trail which the fleeing fish left behind.

Suddenly, as the pollock dived to even lower depths, in the hope that the water-pressure might drive back its pursuer, a grotesquely horrible head thrust itself up from the darkness right in its path.

Dark, and shining like wet rubber, the shape resembled nothing so much as that of a great, double-headed sledgehammer. From either of the living hammer-heads gleamed a greenish, malignant eye. Before the pollock could dart aside, the great hammer-head shark turned partly over, there was a flash of sharp teeth, and the fugitive fish disappeared.

A second later the ridged, gray, fifteen-foot body shot toward the otter, with such speed that the water fairly hissed from the scimetar-shaped side-fins. The sea otter is among the swiftest swimmers of the mammals, but no air-breathing creature can compete in speed with a shark. Almost instantly the hammerhead was upon her. The jaws of all the sharks are so undershot that, in order to grip their prey, they must perforce turn over on their sides. This peculiarity of their kind was all that saved the otter. For a second the grim head overshadowed her. Then, with a twist of its long tail, shaped like the fluke of an anchor, the shark turned over and the vast mouth swung open, armed with six rows of inch-long, steel-sharp, triangular teeth, whose edges were serrated like a saw. Each separate tooth was curved back toward the gullet, so that for any living thing caught in their dreadful grip there was no more chance of escape than there would be from the interlocking cogwheels of a stone-crusher.

As the jaws of death gaped for the sea otter, with a writhe of her swift body she flashed to one side, while the little cub whimpered in her arms and the fatal teeth of the shark just grazed her trailing, flipper-like hind legs, so close they snapped behind her. Swerving beneath the great bulk, the otter began a desperate flight for life.

Every foot of the shark's gaunt, stripped body was built for speed.

There was not a bone anywhere under his drab and livid skin--only rings and strips and columns of tough, springy cartilage, which enabled him to cut through the water like a blade of tempered gray steel. With the rush of a torpedo the grim figure shot after the fleeing otter, who had but one advantage and that was in length. It takes a six-foot body less time to turn than one that measures fifteen feet. In a straightaway race, the fish would have overtaken the mammal in a few seconds; but when it came to twisting, turning, and doubling, the sea otter had an advantage, albeit of the slightest. Again and again the desperate sea mother avoided death by an inch. More than once the ringing jaws of the great fish snapped together just behind her, and only the tiny tick of time which it took to turn over saved her. Desperately she sought to win the refuge of the kelp-bed; but always the gray shape thrust itself between her and safety.