Wood Folk at School Part 5

With a sharp screech the black-cat leaped away and whirled towards me blindly. One eye was gone; an angry red welt showed just over the other, telling how narrowly the second thrust had missed its mark.

A shiver ran over me as I remembered how nearly I had once come myself to the black-cat's condition, and from the same keen weapon. I was a small boy at the time, following a big, good-natured hunter that I met in the woods, one day, from pure love of the wilds and for the glory of carrying the game bag. He shot a great blue heron, which fell with a broken wing into some soft mud and water gra.s.s. Carelessly he sent me to fetch it, not caring to wet his own feet. As I ran up, the heron lay resting quietly, his neck drawn back, his long keen bill pointing always straight at my face. I had never seen so big a bird before, and bent over him wondering at his long bill, admiring his intensely bright eye.

I did not know then--what I have since learned well--that you can always tell when the rush or spring or blow of any beast or bird--or of any man, for that matter--will surely come by watching the eye closely.

There is a fire that blazes in the eye before the blow comes, before ever a muscle has stirred to do the brain's quick bidding. As I bent over, fascinated by the keen, bright look of the wounded bird, and reached down my hand to pick him up, there was a flash deep in the eye, like the glint of sunshine from a mirror, and I dodged instinctively.

Well for me that I did so. Something shot by my face like lightning, opening up a long red gash across my left temple from eye-brow to ear.

As I jumped I heard a careless laugh. "Look out, Sonny, he may bite you--Gosh! what a close call!" And with a white, scared face, as he saw the ugly wound that the heron's beak had opened, he dragged me away as if there had been a bear in the water gra.s.s.

The black-cat had not yet received punishment enough. He is one of the largest of the weasel family, and has a double measure of the weasel's savageness and tenacity. He darted about the heron in a quick, nervous, jumping circle, looking for an opening behind; while Quoskh lifted her great torn wings as a shield and turned slowly on the defensive, so as always to face the danger. A dozen times the fisher jumped, filling the air with feathers; a dozen times the stiffened wings struck down to intercept his spring, and every blow was followed by a swift javelin thrust. Then, as the fisher crouched snarling in the gra.s.s, off his guard for an instant, I saw Mother Quoskh take a sudden step forward, her first offensive move--just as I had seen her twenty times at the finish of a frog stalk--and her bill shot down with the whole power of her long neck behind it. A harsh screech of pain followed the swift blow; then the fisher wobbled away with blind, uncertain jumps towards the shelter of the woods.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A DOZEN TIMES THE FISHER JUMPED, FILLING THE AIR WITH FEATHERS"]

And now, with her savage enemy in full flight, a fierce, hot anger seemed to flare within the mother heron, burning out all the previous cool, calculating defense. Her wings heaved aloft, as the soldiers of old threw up their shields in the moment of victory; while her whole frame seemed to swell with power, like a hero whose fight is won. She darted after the fisher, first on the run, then with heavy wing beats, till she headed him and with savage blows of pinion and beak drove him back, seeing nothing, guided only by fear and instinct, towards the water. For five minutes more she chevied him hither and yon through the trampled gra.s.s, driving him from water to bush and back again, jabbing him at every turn; till a rustle of leaves invited him, and he dashed blindly into thick underbrush, where her broad wings could not follow.

Then with marvelous watchfulness she saw me standing near in my canoe; and without a thought, apparently, for the young heron lying so still in the gra.s.s close beside her, she spread her torn wings and flapped away heavily in the path of her more fortunate younglings.

I followed the fisher's trail into the woods and found him curled up in a hollow stump. He made slight resistance as I pulled him out. All his ferocity was already lulled to sleep in the vague, dreamy numbness which Nature always sends to her stricken creatures. He suffered nothing, apparently, though he was fearfully wounded; he just wanted to be let alone. Both eyes were gone, and there was nothing left for me except to finish mercifully what little Quoskh had left undone.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

When September came, and family cares were over, the colony beyond the beaver pond scattered widely, returning each one to the shy, wild, solitary life that Quoskh likes best. Almost anywhere, in the loneliest places, I might come upon a solitary heron stalking frogs, or chumming little fish, or treading the soft mud expectantly, like a clam digger, to find where the mussels were hidden by means of his long toes; or just standing still to enjoy the sleepy sunshine till the late afternoon came, when he likes best to go abroad.

They slept no more on the big nest, standing like sentinels against the twilight glow and the setting moon; but each one picked out a good spot on the sh.o.r.e and slept as best he could on one leg, waiting for the early fishing. It was astonishing how carefully even the young birds picked out a safe position. By day they would stand like statues in the shade of a bank or among the tall gra.s.ses, where they were almost invisible by reason of their soft colors, and wait for hours for fish and frogs to come to them. By night each one picked out a spot on the clean open sh.o.r.e, off a point, generally, where he could see up and down, where there was no gra.s.s to hide an enemy, and where the bushes on the bank were far enough away so that he could hear the slight rustle of leaves before the creature that made it was within springing distance.

And there he would sleep safe through the long night, unless disturbed by my canoe or by some other prowler. Herons see almost as well by night as by day, and their ears are keen as a weasel's; so I could never get near enough to surprise them, however silently I paddled. I would hear only a startled rush of wings, and then a questioning call as they sailed over me before winging away to quieter beaches.

If I were jacking, with a light blazing brightly before me in my canoe, to see what night folk I might surprise on the sh.o.r.e, Quoskh was the only one for whom my jack had no fascination. Deer and moose, foxes and wild ducks, frogs and fish,--all seemed equally charmed by the great wonder of a light shining silently out of the vast darkness. I saw them all, at different times, and glided almost up to them before timidity drove them away from the strange bright marvel. But Quoskh was not to be watched in that way, nor to be caught by any such trick. I would see a vague form on the far edge of the light's pathway; catch the bright flash of either eye as he swung his weather-vane head; then the vague form would slide into the upper darkness. A moment's waiting; then, above me and behind, where the light did not dazzle his eyes, I would hear his night cry--with more of anger than of questioning in it--and as I turned the jack upward I would catch a single glimpse of his broad wings sailing over the lake. Nor would he ever come back, like the fox on the bank, for a second look to be quite sure what I was.

When the bright, moonlit nights came, there was uneasiness in Quoskh's wild breast. The solitary life that he loves best claimed him by day; but at night the old gregarious instinct drew him again to his fellows.

Once, when drifting over the beaver pond through the delicate witchery of the moonlight, I heard five or six of the great birds croaking excitedly at the heronry, which they had deserted weeks before. The lake, and especially the lonely little pond at the end of the trail, was lovelier than ever before; but something in the south was calling him away. I think that Quoskh was also moonstruck, as so many wild creatures are; for, instead of sleeping quietly on the sh.o.r.e, he spent his time circling aimlessly over the lake and woods, crying his name aloud, or calling wildly to his fellows.

At midnight of the day before I broke camp, I was out on the lake for a last paddle in the moonlight. The night was perfect,--clear, cool, intensely still. Not a ripple broke the great burnished surface of the lake; a silver pathway stretched away and away over the bow of my gliding canoe, leading me on to where the great forest stood, silent, awake, expectant, and flooded through all its dim, mysterious arches with marvelous light. The wilderness never sleeps. If it grow silent, it is to listen. To-night the woods were tense as a waiting fox, watching to see what new thing would come out of the lake, or what strange mystery would be born under their own soft shadows.

Quoskh was abroad too, bewitched by the moonlight. I heard him calling and paddled down. He knew me long before he was anything more to me than a voice of the night, and swept up to meet me. For the first time after darkness fell I saw him--just a vague, gray shadow with edges touched softly with silver light, which whirled once over my canoe and looked down into it. Then he vanished; and from far over on the edge of the waiting woods, where the mystery was deepest, came a cry, a challenge, a riddle, the night's wild question which no man has ever yet answered--_Quoskh? quoskh?_

[Ill.u.s.tration]

UNK WUNK THE PORCUPINE

[Ill.u.s.tration]

A rustling in the brakes just outside my little tent roused me from a light slumber. There it was again! the push of some heavy animal trying to move noiselessly through the tangle close at hand; while from the old lumber camp in the midst of the clearing a low gnawing sound floated up through the still night. I sat up quickly to listen; but at the slight movement all was quiet again. The night prowlers had heard me and were on their guard.

One need have no fear of things that come round in the night. They are much shyer than you are, and can see you better; so that, if you blunder towards them, they mistake your blindness for courage, and take to their heels promptly. As I stepped out there was a double rush in some bushes behind my tent, and by the light of a half-moon I caught one glimpse of a bear and her cub jumping away for the shelter of the woods.

The gnawing still went on behind the old shanty by the river. "Another cub!" I thought--for I was new to the big woods--and stole down to peek by the corner of the camp, in whose yard I had pitched my tent the first night out in the wilderness.

There was an old mola.s.ses hogshead lying just beyond the log camp, its mouth looking black as ink in the moonlight, and the scratching-gnawing sounds went on steadily within its shadow. "He's inside," I thought with elation, "sc.r.a.ping off the crusted sugar. Now to catch him!"

I stole round the camp, so as to bring the closed end of the hogshead between me and the prize, crept up breathlessly, and with a quick jerk hove the old tub up on end, trapping the creature inside. There was a thump, a startled scratching and rustling, a violent rocking of the hogshead, which I tried to hold down; then all was silent in the trap.

"I've got him!" I thought, forgetting all about the old she-bear, and shouted for Simmo to wake up and bring the ax.

We drove a ring of stakes close about the hogshead, weighted it down with heavy logs, and turned in to sleep. In the morning, with cooler judgment, we decided that a bear cub was too troublesome a pet to keep in a tent; so I stood by with a rifle while Simmo hove off the logs and cut the stakes, keeping a wary eye on me, meanwhile, to see how far he might trust his life to my nerve in case the cub should be big and troublesome; for an Indian takes no chances. A stake fell; the hogshead toppled over by a push from within; Simmo sprang away with a yell; and out wobbled a big porcupine, the biggest I ever saw, and tumbled away straight towards my tent. After him went the Indian, making sweeping cuts at the stupid thing with his ax, and grunting his derision at my bear cub.

Halfway to the tent Unk Wunk stumbled across a bit of pork rind, and stopped to nose it daintily. I caught Simmo's arm and stayed the blow that would have made an end of my catch. Then, between us, Unk Wunk sat up on his haunches, took the pork in his fore paws and sucked the salt out of it, as if he had never a concern and never an enemy in the wide world. A half hour later he loafed into my tent, where I sat repairing a favorite salmon fly that some hungry sea-trout had torn to tatters, and drove me unceremoniously out of my own bailiwick in his search for more salt.

Such a philosopher, whom no prison can dispossess of his peace of mind, and whom no danger can deprive of his simple pleasures, deserves more consideration than the naturalists have ever given him. I resolved on the spot to study him more carefully. As if to discourage all such attempts and make himself a target for my rifle, he nearly spoiled my canoe the next night by gnawing a hole through the bark and ribs for some suggestion of salt that only his greedy nose could possibly have found.

Once I found him on the trail, some distance from camp, and, having nothing better to do, I attempted to drive him home. My intention was to share hospitality; to give him a bit of bacon, and then study him as I ate my own dinner. He turned at the first suggestion of being driven, came straight at my legs, and by a vicious slap of his tail left some of his quills in me before I could escape. Then I drove him in the opposite direction, whereupon he turned and bolted past me; and when I arrived at camp he was busily engaged in gnawing the end from Simmo's ax handle.

However you take him, Unk Wunk is one of the mysteries. He is a perpetual question scrawled across the forest floor, which n.o.body pretends to answer; a problem that grows only more puzzling as you study to solve it.

Of all the wild creatures he is the only one that has no intelligent fear of man, and that never learns, either by instinct or experience, to avoid man's presence. He is everywhere in the wilderness, until he changes what he would call his mind; and then he is nowhere, and you cannot find him. He delights in solitude, and cares not for his own kind; yet now and then you will stumble upon a whole convention of porcupines at the base of some rocky hill, each one loafing around, rattling his quills, grunting his name _Unk Wunk! Unk Wunk!_ and doing nothing else all day long.

You meet him to-day, and he is timid as a rabbit; to-morrow he comes boldly into your tent and drives you out, if you happen to be caught without a club handy. He never has anything definite to do, nor any place to go to; yet stop him at any moment and he will risk his life to go just a foot farther. Now try to drive or lead him another foot in the same direction, and he will bolt back, as full of contrariness as two pigs on a road, and let himself be killed rather than go where he was heading a moment before. He is perfectly harmless to every creature; yet he lies still and kills the savage fisher that attacks him, or even the big Canada lynx, that no other creature in the woods would dare to tackle.

Above all these puzzling contradictions is the prime question of how Nature ever produced such a creature, and what she intended doing with him; for he seems to have no place nor use in the natural economy of things. Recently the Maine legislature has pa.s.sed a bill forbidding the shooting of porcupines, on the curious ground that he is the only wild animal that can easily be caught and killed without a gun; so that a man lost in the woods need not starve to death but may feed on porcupine, as the Indians sometimes do. This is the only suggestion thus far, from a purely utilitarian standpoint, that Unk Wunk is no mistake, but may have his uses.

Once, to test the law and to provide for possible future contingencies, I added Unk Wunk to my bill of fare--a vile, malodorous suffix that might delight a lover of strong cheese. It is undoubtedly a good law; but I cannot now imagine any one being grateful for it, unless the stern alternative were death or porcupine.

The prowlers of the woods would eat him gladly enough, but that they are sternly forbidden. They cannot even touch him without suffering the consequences. It would seem as if Nature, when she made this block of stupidity in a world of wits, provided for him tenderly, as she would for a half-witted or idiot child. He is the only wild creature for whom starvation has no terrors. All the forest is his storehouse. Buds and tender shoots delight him in their season; and when the cold becomes bitter in its intensity, and the snow packs deep, and all other creatures grow gaunt and savage in their hunger, Unk Wunk has only to climb the nearest tree, chisel off the rough, outer sh.e.l.l with his powerful teeth, and then feed full on the soft inner layer of bark, which satisfies him perfectly and leaves him as fat as an alderman.

Of hungry beasts Unk Wunk has no fear whatever. Generally they let him severely alone, knowing that to touch him would be more foolish than to mouth a sunfish or to bite a Peter-grunter. If, driven by hunger in the killing March days, they approach him savagely, he simply rolls up and lies still, protected by an armor that only a steel glove might safely explore, and that has no joint anywhere visible to the keenest eye.

Now and then some cunning lynx or weasel, wise from experience but desperate with hunger, throws himself flat on the ground, close by Unk Wunk, and works his nose cautiously under the terrible bur, searching for the neck or the underside of the body, where there are no quills.

One grip of the powerful jaws, one taste of blood in the famished throat of the prowler--and that is the end of both animals. For Unk Wunk has a weapon that no prowler of the woods ever calculates upon. His broad, heavy tail is armed with hundreds of barbs, smaller but more deadly than those on his back; and he swings this weapon with the vicious sweep of a rattlesnake. It is probably this power of driving his barbs home by a lightning blow of his tail that has given rise to the curious delusion that Unk Wunk can shoot his quills at a distance, as if he were filled with compressed air--which is, of course, a harmless absurdity that keeps people from meddling with him too closely.

Sometimes, when attacked, Unk Wunk covers his face with this weapon.

More often he sticks his head under a root or into a hollow log, leaving his tail out ready for action. At the first touch of his enemy the tail snaps right and left quicker than thought, driving the hostile head and sides full of the deadly quills, from which there is no escape; for every effort, every rub and writhe of pain, only drives them deeper and deeper, till they rest in heart or brain and finish their work.

Mooween the bear is the only one of the wood folk who has learned the trick of attacking Unk Wunk without injury to himself. If, when very hungry, he finds a porcupine, he never attacks him directly,--he knows too well the deadly sting of the barbs for that,--but bothers and irritates the porcupine by flipping earth at him, until at last Unk Wunk rolls all his quills outward and lies still. Then Mooween, with immense caution, slides one paw under him and with a quick flip hurls him against the nearest tree, and knocks the life out of him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "BOTHERS AND IRRITATES THE PORCUPINE BY FLIPPING EARTH AT HIM"]

If he find Unk Wunk in a tree, he will sometimes climb after him and, standing as near as the upper limbs allow, will push and tug mightily to shake him off. That is usually a vain attempt; for the creature that sleeps sound and secure through a gale in the tree-tops has no concern for the ponderous shakings of a bear. In that case Mooween, if he can get near enough without risking a fall from too delicate branches, will wrench off the limb on which Unk Wunk is sleeping and throw it to the ground. That also is usually a vain proceeding; for before Mooween can scramble down after his game, Unk Wunk is already up another tree and sleeping, as if nothing had happened, on another branch.

Other prowlers, with less strength and cunning than Mooween, fare badly when driven by famine to attack this useless creature of the woods, for whom Nature nevertheless cares so tenderly. Trappers have told me that in the late winter, when hunger is sharpest, they sometimes catch a wild-cat or lynx or fisher in their traps with his mouth and sides full of porcupine quills, showing to what straits he had been driven for food. These rare trapped animals are but an indication of many a silent struggle that only the trees and stars are witnesses of; and the trapper's deadfall, with its quick, sure blow, is only a merciful ending to what else had been a long, slow, painful trail, ending at last under a hemlock tip with the snow for a covering.

Last summer, in a little glade in the wilderness, I found two skeletons, one of a porcupine, the other of a large lynx, lying side by side. In the latter three quills lay where the throat had once been; the shaft of another stood firmly out of an empty eye orbit; a dozen more lay about in such a way that one could not tell by what path they had entered the body. It needed no great help of imagination to read the story here of a starving lynx, too famished to remember caution, and of a dinner that cost a life.

Once also I saw a curious bit of animal education in connection with Unk Wunk. Two young owls had begun hunting, under direction of the mother bird, along the foot of a ridge in the early twilight. From my canoe I saw one of the young birds swoop downward at something in the bushes on the sh.o.r.e. An instant later the big mother owl followed with a sharp, angry _hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!_ of warning. The youngster dropped into the bushes; but the mother fairly knocked him away from his game in her fierce rush, and led him away silently into the woods. I went over on the instant, and found a young porcupine in the bushes where the owl had swooped, while two more were eating lily stems farther along the sh.o.r.e.

Evidently Kookooskoos, who swoops by instinct at everything that moves, must be taught by wiser heads the wisdom of letting certain things severely alone.

That he needs this lesson was clearly shown by an owl that my friend once shot at twilight. There was a porcupine quill imbedded for nearly its entire length in his leg. Two more were slowly working their way into his body; and the shaft of another projected from the corner of his mouth like a toothpick. Whether he were a young owl and untaught, or whether, driven by hunger, he had thrown counsel to the winds and swooped at Unk Wunk, will never be known. That he should attack so large an animal as the porcupine would seem to indicate that, like the lynx, hunger had probably driven him beyond all consideration for his mother's teaching.

Unk Wunk, on his part, knows so very little that it may fairly be doubted whether he ever had the discipline of the school of the woods.