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 grass 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 sturdy, bear-like, dumpy legs, the rest being rather thick, furry tail; and, though nobody—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 passing 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 grass, 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.

Right in front of the polecat, within spring, still as the very ground, the huffish, whitish check of a peewit, lap-wing, or green plover would have been mistaken for one of the many stones; the thin, curving top-knot for a stem of the thin, harsh grass: the low curve of the dark back, with its light reflections in green, for no more than the natural curve of the close-cropped turf. And she was on her nest, which was no nest, but a scrape, backing her natural assimilation with her surroundings to see her through.

And the polecat knew she was there, and he knew she was on her nest—she would not have been fool enough to keep there otherwise. His nose told him—not his eyes, I think, for that was nearly impossible. The thing was, he wanted her to move. That was what he was waiting for. No more than the twitch of an eyelid would do to show which end was head and which tail; for he could only smell her, and, in a manner, would have to pounce blind if she did not move.

She did not move, however, and in the end he had to pounce blind, anyhow, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, when it did come, shifting like a streak, that there seemed to have been no time to shout even, or gasp.

Yet that peewit found time in that fraction of a second to rise, open her wings, and get two feet into the air. And then the polecat took her, leaping with unexpected agility, and pulling her down out of limitless freedom and safety. There was just a rush, a snap, a wild-bird squawk, and down the pair went, to the accompaniment of furiously fluttering wings and in a cloud of feathers.

She had made a slight mistake in her calculations, that peewit, a matter of perhaps a quarter of a second, but enough. Nature has not got much room for those who commit slight mistakes in the wild, I guess; they mostly quit the stage before passing that habit on, or soon after.

For a moment there was a horrible, strenuous jumble of fur and feathers on the ground, and then the polecat's flat head rose up on his long neck out of the jumble, his eyes alight with a new look, and his lifted upper lip stained with a single little bright carmine spot. The peewit was dead.

He pivoted upon his shanks and examined the nest. It was empty.

He got to his feet with rapidity, and, in great excitement, dropped his head and began hunting. In a minute a mottled pebble seemed to get up under his nose and run. He snapped at it, and it fell upon the grass, stretching out slowly in death—a baby peewit.

He circled rapidly, stopped, swerved, and, at the canter, took up another scent. Suddenly, in a tussock of marram, his nose and he stopped dead. Nothing moved. Then he bit, and a second buff-and-black-mottled soft body stretched slowly out into the open as death took it—a second baby peewit. He circled again, fairly racing now, and so nearly fell over a third pebble come to life that it scuttled back between his legs; but he spun upon himself like a snake, and caught it ere it had gone a yard. He snapped again, held it, dropped it, and another downy, soft, warm chick thing straightened, horribly and pathetically, in the unpitying sun, and was still—a third baby peewit.

But there were no more. He hunted around and around for the next ten minutes, but never struck a trail. Evidently there had been only three. And all the time father-peewit, who had just come back from dinner, swooped, and stooped, and dived, and rocketed, and shot down and around, his wings humming through the still air above as he went clean mad, and seemed like to break his neck and the polecat's back in any and every one of his demented abysmal plunges, but somehow never did quite.

And all the time, also, the polecat, without seeming to take the slightest notice of him, was watching him out of the corner of his eye, waiting, hoping for a chance while he hunted.

But this was not intended as an exhibition of "frightfulness," though the beast had slain far more innocents than he could eat. It was part of his duty; and though men have accused his kind of being possessed of a joy of killing, the accusation is by no means proven. And, in any case, the accused might reply to civilization, "Same to you, sir, and many hundreds of times more so."

Anyway, he now picked up a young peewit and made for the nearest dike; then along this, and presently into the water and across to the other side, swimming strongly and well; then along a smaller dike, hugging the reeds as much as possible, and pursued by a running fire of abuse from the sedge and marsh and grasshopper warblers, from wagtails, meadow-pipits, reed-buntings, larks, and all the small-bird population of those parts, till he came to the sea-bank, called by the natives "sea-wall." This was a high, grass-bearded bank designed to constrain the waters of the estuary, and there, in a hole, curtained by a dandelion and guarded by the stiff spears of the coarse marram grass, he stuffed his victim.

The burrow was not empty when he came to it, for it already contained two moorhens' eggs; but there was still room for more, and one by one he fetched the remainder of his victims, mother and all, that way, and stuffed them into the burrow, with a plodding, steady, exact doggedness of purpose that was rather surprising in a mere wild beast who, if seen casually, would have appeared to the ordinary man to be merely aimlessly wandering about the landscape. And, mind you, this was not quite such a simple and "soft" job as it looked. Grit was needed to accomplish it, even.

There was, for instance, the sudden, far too suggestive, swirl in the water as he crossed the dike for the third time, loaded, that gave more than a hint of some unknown—and therefore the more sinister—haunter of those muddied depths of pollution, who took a more than passing interest in the smell of blood, and must, to judge by the swirl, have been too big to be safe. And that was probably a giant female eel, as dangerous a foe as any swimmer of his size—though he ate eels—might care to face. Then there was the marsh-harrier—and the same might have been a kind of owl if it wasn't a sort of hawk—who flapped up like some gigantic moth, and dogged his steps, only waiting—he felt sure of it—for the polecat to slip, or meet a foe, or have an accident, or something, before breaking its own avine neutrality. Then, too, there was the stoat, or, rather, not the stoat only, but the stoat and his wife, who would have murdered him if they had dared, and took to shadowing and watching him from cover in the most meaning sort of way. And, finally, there was the lean, nosing, sneaking dog, the egg-thief, who had no business there with his yolk-spattered, slobbering jaws, plundering the homes of the wild feathered ones—he who was only a tame slave, and a bad one at that. But the dog followed the polecat into a jungle-like reed fastness, and—almost never came out again! When he did, it was to the accompaniment of varied and assorted howls, and at about the biggest thing in the speed line he had ever evolved. He was no end glad to get out, and the distant haze swallowed him wonderfully quickly, still howling every yard of the way—for, mark you, that polecat's teeth, once felt, wore nothing to laugh at or forget.

These things he accomplished as the night was beginning to fall, and the solemn eye of the setting sun—such an eye of such a setting sun as the estuary alone knows; bloodshot, and in a sky asmoke as of cities burning—regarded him as he finished and stood back outside as one who considers. He was a grim figure of outlawry and rapine, alone there in that lonely place, amidst the gathering, dank gray of the marsh mists, the red rays touching his coat and turning it to deep purple, and his eyes to dull ruby flame; a beast, once seen, you would not forget, and could never mistake.

But his work was not yet done. He was hungry again, but for him there could be no more food yet, and he turned with the same immutable and dumbly dogged air that characterized so many of his actions, and made off down the "sea-bank." Once he hid—vanished utterly would better express it—to avoid the passage of an eel-spearer, an inhabitant of the estuary almost as amphibious and mysterious as himself. Once he very nearly caught a low-flying snipe as he leapt up at it while cutting low over the top of the "bank"; and once—here he sprang aside with a half-stifled snarl and every bristle erect—he was very nearly caught by a horrible steel-toothed trap, set there to entertain that same dog we have already met, by reason of the small matter of a late lamb or two that had suddenly developed bites, obviously not self-inflicted, in the night. Then he crossed the dike at the foot of the sea-wall, shook himself, sat down to scratch, and straightway hurled himself backwards and to one side, as something that resembled a javelin whizzed out of six straggling, upright, faded, tawny reeds at the water's edge, by which he had sat down. The javelin struck deep into the little circle of lightly-pressed-down grass where his haunches had rested, and he caught a glimpse, or only a half-glimpse, of weird onyx eyes, and heard strange and shuddery reptilian hissings. Eyes and noises might have belonged to a crocodile, or some huge lizard thing, or snapping turtle, but the javelin was clearly the property of no such horror, and was very obviously a beak—now, by the way, withdrawn.

Followed the harsh rattle and the swish of big feathers and vast wings—he felt the draught of them—the dim outline, as it were, of a ghost, of some great shape rising into the gloom, and as instantly vanishing over the sea-"wall," and he was alone, and—there were now three upright and faded reeds in the clump near which he had sat him down by the water's edge to scratch, not six. The Thing, the portent, the apparition, or whatever you like to call it, had been the other three; yet you could have sworn to the six reeds before it moved. And the worst of it was that he did not know from frogs and fresh water what the Thing was. He had never glimpsed such a sudden death before, and had no burning desire to do so again, for he was shrewd enough to know that, but for that fling-back of his, the javelin would have struck him, and struck him like a stuck pig, perhaps through the skull! Oh, polecat! The bird was a bittern, relation of the herons, only brown, and if not quite so long, made up for it in strength and fiery, highly developed courage.

Caution is not the polecat's trump card, as it is the cat's, but if ever he trod carefully, it was thence onwards, as he threaded the dike-cut and pool-dotted gloom. He came upon a lone bull bellowing, and gave him room. He came upon something unknown, but certainly not a lone bull, bellowing too; it was the bittern, and he gave that plenty of room. He came upon two moorhens, fighting as if to the death, but he was the death; and slew one of them from behind neatly, and had to go back with it, past both bellowings, to a second burrow in the sea-bank, where he put it; and later he came upon only seven great, mangy, old, stump-tailed, scarred, horrible ghouls of shore rats, all mobbing a wounded seagull—a herring-gull—with a broken wing.

The gull lived, but that was no fault of the polecat's, for she managed to run off into the surrounding darkness what time he was dealing warily but effectively with one of those yellow-toothed devils of murderous rats—whose bite is poison—in what dear, kind-hearted people might have said was a most praiseworthy rescue of the poor, dear, beautiful bird. (The poor, dear, beautiful bird, be it whispered, had herself swallowed a fat-cheeked and innocent-eyed baby rabbit whole that very day, before she was wounded; but never mind.)

The polecat, after one wary sniff, did not seem to think the rat worthy of a journey to the sea-bank and decent burial, and passed on, the richer for a drink of rat's blood, perhaps, but very hungry. He came upon a redshank's nest in a tuft of grass.

The redshank, who has much the cut of a snipe, plus red-orange legs, must have heard or seen him coming in the new, thin moonlight, and told all the marsh about it with a shrieking whistled, "Tyop! tyop!" But the nest contained four eggs, which the polecat took in lieu of anything bigger, carrying two—one journey for each—all the way to the sea-bank, to yet another hole he had previously scraped, or found, therein. One of the other two eggs he consumed himself, and was just making off with number four, when something came galloping over the marsh in the moonlight, splashing through the pools, and making, in that silence, no end of a row for a wild creature.

The polecat stood quite still, with his long back arched, his sturdy, short forepaws anchored tense, and his short, rounded ears alert, and watched it come, not because he wanted to, but because there did not happen to be any cover thereabouts, and to move might give him away.

When he saw that the beast was long and low, and short-legged and flat-beaded, his long outer fur began to bristle. Those outlines were the trade-marks of his own tribe—not his own species only—and were, he knew, more likely to mean tough trouble than anything else. Then he realized that the path of the new arrival would take it right towards him, and that was bad, because to move now and get out of the way was hopeless. Also, he could see the size of the beast now, and that was worse than bad—some ten inches to a foot worse.

The beast held a wild-duckling in its jaws, and the little body, with its stuck-out webbed feet, flapped and flopped dismally from side to side, as the animal cantered along with a somewhat shuffling, undulating gait. And then the polecat became transfixed. He had recognized the new-comer. He knew the breed, and would have given a lot not to have molested that redshank's abode and be found there.

The strange beast—palpably a large, sinuous, and wicked proposition—came right up to the polecat, standing there rigid, erect, motionless, and alone in the moonlight, with the fourth egg between his paws, and then stopped dead, almost touching him. Apparently, it saw him for the first time. Certainly it was not pleased; it said so under its breath, in a low growl.

The polecat said nothing, perhaps because he had nothing to say.

The beast was an otter, and an old one. Also, it appeared to be suffering from a "grouch."

The polecat felt uncomfortable. He was eyeing the other's throat, and marking just the place where he meant to take hold, if things came to the worst; but he knew all the time that the otter, although its eyes had never been removed for a fraction of a second off his face, was really watching the egg. The otter was a female; probably she had young to feed; the presence of the duckling darkly hinted at it. If so, so much the worse for the polecat.

Then the otter put down her duckling, and growled again; but the polecat might have been carved in unbarked oak for all the sign of life that he gave. Then—she sailed in.

It was really very neatly and prettily done, for, as an exponent of lithesome agility, the otter is—when the pine-marten is not by—certainly quite It. The polecat seemed to side-twist double, making some sort of lightning-play with his long neck and body as she came, and—he got his hold. Yes, he got his hold all right. The only thing was to stay there; for, as he was a polecat and a member of the great, the famous, weasel tribe, part of his fighting creed was to stay there.

When, however, hounds fail to puncture an otter's hide, any beast might be pardoned for losing its grip; but he did not. Between the tame hounds' fangs and his smaller wild ones was some difference—about the difference between our teeth and a savage's, multiplied once or twice; and the old she-otter, who had felt hounds' teeth in her life, realized the difference. Also, it hurt, and the polecat did not lose his hold.

Then, maddened, wild with rage, the rage of one who expects a walk-over and receives a bad jolt instead, that old she-otter really got to work. She recoiled like a coiled snake, and the polecat felt fire in one loin.

It looked like the contortions of one big, furry beast twisted with cramp, by the moonlight. You could not possibly separate the combatants, or tell that there were two. But the polecat only fought because he dared not expose his flank with the foe facing him. Now, however, as they both rolled he—

Hi! It was done in an instant. At a moment when the roll brought him on top, and when the otter was shifting her own hold for another, and more deadly, which might have "put him to sleep" forever, he miraculously twisted and writhed, eel-fashion, and with one mighty wrench—a good strip of his skin and fur had to go in that pull, but it couldn't be helped—he had broken the other's hold, leapt clear of the clinch, and was gone.

The otter was up before you could guess what had happened, and was drumming away on his heels; but she soon pulled up, realizing that a polecat may be slow in the books, but not so slow in real life, with her to assist speed. Anyway, she seemed slower; and, in any case, she could not hope to follow him in the intricacy of holes and cover he was sure to take to, like a fish to water. Moreover, she was spitting up blood, result of friend polecat's neat and natty strangle-hold on her throat, and felt more in need of the egg—which she had won, at any rate—than a wild-goose chase.

Like a thin, wavy line through the night, friend polecat betook himself to the sea-bank, to a hole in the sea-bank, to the very depths of that hole; and there, in the shape of two angrily smoldering, luminous orbs shining steadily through the pit-like dark, he stayed. Most of the time, I fancy, he used up in licking his wounds. They needed it, for, though clean, the punctures from the otter's canines had gone deep, and a red trail of drops marked the polecat's route to his lair—one of his lairs.

Not, be it noted, that he was entirely ignored. Blood-trails are always items of interest in the wild, especially in the dark hours while man sleeps. Thus there once came to the mouth of the hole scufflings, and the noise as of an eager, inquisitive crowd—rats, who hoped for a chance to get their own back on a detested foe. But one evil snarl from the wounded beast removed them, convinced that the time was not yet.

Once, also, something sniffed out of the stilly night, and that was a fox; but one snap from within, a perfectly abominable smell, and the narrowness of the accommodation proved too much for brer fox, and he, with an insolent cock of the brush, retired.

Then, too, there was a rabbit, not looking where he was going, who got half-way down the burrow before he realized the awful truth, and went out backwards, like a cat with a salmon-tin on its head.

But along towards dawn there came an altogether different sort of sound, somehow—a sort of a little chuckling sound; and the polecat, answering it, came out. He looked rather less awful now than when he had gone in. A form was standing outside—a dark, low, long form, like himself; and, like himself, you could easily become aware of it without seeing it, even with your handkerchief to your nose.

It was his wife, smaller, but no less dangerous, than he. She was carrying an old hen-redshank in her jaws, its long beak and one of its wings clearly silhouetted against the moon. And apparently she would be very pleased if her husband would come out of the hole and make room for her to stuff the redshank into it.

Then, together, they moved at their indescribable, undulating gait—they looked like a snake between them in the moonlight—along the sea-bank, till they came, with caution and many clever tricks of vanishing, in case anybody might be watching, to yet another burrow, screened completely and very neatly guarded by the splayed leaves of a bunch of frosted sea-holly.

Both beasts went into the burrow, at the end of which was a nest containing live things, which squirmed and made little, tiny, infant noises in the darkness. They were the polecats' children, four of them, all quite young, and all very hungry and very lively indeed; and they explained a good deal of the reason for the stores of food set by in other burrows in the "sea-wall."

But they did not explain quite all, for, unless Mrs. Polecat liked her dinner high—and there was nothing I could find in her methods to show that she did—or unless Mr. Polecat had got a craze for collecting specimens and eggs, or forgot where half of his trophies were hidden as a natural habit of absent-mindedness, one cannot quite see the reason for hiding so much so soon, before the young could feed upon the "specimens."

However, I suppose the two beasts knew their own business best. The old male polecat seemed to, anyway, for just as the first flicker of dawn was paling the eastern sky he went off down to the mist-hidden dike, and, in no more than ten short minutes, returned with an eel, protesting violently in that horrible way eels have, which he promptly proceeded to decapitate and eat.

The afternoon had still some little time to run, when the waving grass down the side of the sea-bank and the half of a glimpse of dull tawny gave away the male polecat leaving his "earth" for the war-path once more. Was he ever anything else than on the war-path if he moved abroad at all?

That, even from above, was, I swear, all the indication he gave of his exit. Now, although it is a rule in the wild that self-advertisement is most unhealthful, there may be times when a beast like the polecat may not advertise itself enough. And this was one of those times.

Far overhead, circling grandly on effortless, still, great pinions, swimming, one might say, in the dome of the sky, a big bird, known as a buzzard, was staring downwards with the flashing, sheathed glance of all birds of prey—and aviators—at the world below. She, too, had young, and simply had to find a meal. The hour was late, and her success nil. Perhaps that accounted for much. Perhaps, however, all she saw was that half-glimpse of dull, tawny fur, which accounted for still more; that is to say, she probably made a mistake.

Anyway, the polecat was suddenly aware of a sound like the swish of a lady's skirt in the air above him, and of a dimming of the light. He sprang forward first, and glanced up second—knowing the rules of the wild. But he was too late, for instantly the long, hooked talons of the bird came down through the grass, and gripped. It was an awful handshake, for the bird was a buzzard, we said, who is a sort of smaller and less kingly edition of the eagle, without the imperial power.

For a few seconds there followed an awful struggle—great wings beating mightily downwards, beak hammering, and fangs meeting the hammerings with audible clashings. It seemed that the bird could not quite lift the beast, and that the beast could not quite retain connection with solid earth.

And then the bird rose, slowly, strainingly, with her vast pinions winnowing the air with deep "how-hows!" Like mighty fans rose she, still gripping the struggling polecat hard by the back in a locked clutch of steel—up and up, and out over the estuary, growing slowly from a great bird to a medium-sized one, to a smaller, and a smaller, all the time fighting, it seemed, like a mad creature, to gain the upper air, to climb to the clouds, as a drowning man fights his way upwards in the water. And there was reason—the old polecat's jaws were fast shut in a vise-grip, as of a Yale lock, upon her throat.

Never a sound broke the silence that brooded forever—in spite of the wind—over the lake-like, flattened expanse of the estuary save the deep "how-how!" of the buzzard's superb pinions as she climbed slowly into the sublime vault of the heavens; never a sound from bird or from beast. The beast hung on, dumbly dogged, with fangs that met in the flesh beneath the stained feathers; and the blood of the bird mingled with the blood of the beast as it trickled slowly down over his mangled head, upon which one fearful claw of the buzzard was clutched in an awful grip.

The bird struggled dumbly also, upwards, ever upwards, gasping, with open beak and staring eyes, fighting vainly for the breath she could not draw, till at last the two were no more than a speck—one little, dark, indefinite speck, floating athwart the great, piled, fleecy mountains of the clouds.

And then, quite suddenly, so suddenly that it was almost like pricking a bladder, the end came. The magnificent, overshadowing pinions collapsed; the bird reeled, toppled for an instant in the void, and then slid back and down, faster and faster and faster, turning over and over, in one long, sickening dive back to earth.



A watcher, had there been one, might have seen, just as the last rays of the setting sun touched the steely reaches of the estuary, turning them to lakes of crimson, something, somebody—or bodies, truly, for they were locked together—suddenly appear, streaking down headlong from out the heavens. There followed a single terrific splash far out over the tide, an upheaval of waters, a succession of ripples hurrying outwards, ever outwards, to tell the tale, and then—nothing.

Next morning, as the sun rose, a party of mournfully shrieking black-backed, herring, common, and black-headed gulls were gathered around the soaked and bedraggled carcasses of a polecat and a buzzard, stranded by the falling tide upon a mud spur, and still locked savagely and implacably in death.

Half a mile away, in the darkness of her burrow, the she-polecat stirred uneasily in her sleep, and, waking for a moment, stared out at the still, silent, secret marshes, wondering, perhaps, why her mate had not returned.

And ten miles away, far up in their great nest among the boughs of a mighty Scotch fir, three downy, but already fierce-eyed, buzzard nestlings craned their necks upwards, calling hungrily, and wondering why their mother had not returned; while their father shot and swerved backwards and forwards over the tree-tops, mewing and calling, uneasily and lonelily, to the clouds for his wife, who had so mysteriously disappeared. And so—fate and the end.

This only remains to be said—the female polecat and the male buzzard did, in spite of Fate, manage to rear their young. And if the gamekeeper and the collector, the sportsman and the farmer, have not been too cruel, those young are alive-to-day.



XII

THE FURTIVE FEUD

There was a sun. You could not see it much because of burning, dancing haze, but you could not get anywhere without feeling it. Almost everything you touched—sand, rock, and such like—blistered you; and the vegetation, where it wasn't four-inch thorns and six-inch spikes and bloated cacti, was shriveled yellow-brown, like the color of a lion. Perhaps it was a lion, some of it. How could one tell?

Lizards, which were bad; and scorpions, which were worse; and snakes, which were worse than worse, lay about in the sun, as if they were pieces of leather drying. You could not see them—which was awkward, for some of them held a five-minute death up their sleeve—partly because they matched their surroundings, partly because they were still. They were colored burnt to hide in a burnt land.

Yet it was possible to be bright and gay and unobtrusive in this place, too—if you were cold-blooded enough not to boil dry and explode before getting a drink—for under some trees lay, in the old-gold, yellow, black-shade-streaked, tawny-red grass, a sleek and glistening, banded, blotched, and spotted, newly painted python. Yes, sirs, a python snake; and you couldn't see it in its new levee uniform—the old one lay not fifty yards away—any more than you could see the other, and plainly attired, bad dreams—so long as it did not move. Its length was not apparent, because it was coiled up; but it would have uncoiled out into something most alarming if stretched, I fancy.

The jackal made no sound as he came, tripping daintily, graceful and light as a rubber ball, into the scene, blissfully oblivious, apparently, of the fact that any other next step might awake a volcano under his feet.

He was a black-backed jackal; red-tawny sides, fading to nearly white under-parts; black back, grizzled with white hairs, neatly ruled off from the rest of him, like a big saddle; large, wide-awake ears; long, thin legs; bushy tail; very knowing eyes, and all complete—part wolf, part fox, and yet neither and something of both. No one living could, perhaps, have been agile enough to measure him, but he looked over two and a half feet from nose-tip to tail-root; and you can add, possibly, a third of that for the tail. But he was all there, whatever his length, every short hair of him, and none of the swarms of buzzing flies around seemed anxious to settle upon him.

He picked his way across to the shade of the trees, slouching quite casually, apparently; though how he avoided treading upon any of the sudden deaths variously thrown about seems a mystery. And just short of the shade of the trees he stopped. He had spotted, or scented—the latter is most likely, for the smell beat a chemical-works, a slaughter-house, and a whaleship rolled into one—the big snake.

The big snake remained motionless, and made no sign. Goodness knows whether it was asleep, if snakes ever do sleep. It certainly had its horrible eyes open, fixed in an evil stare at anything, or nothing, after the fashion of snakes, who are cursed in that they cannot shut their eyes to things. (Imagine the position of some people in this world if they were afflicted like the snakes!)

For about a minute that jackal stood like a carved beast in wood, with the original bark left on his back. Then he began to sink, slowly, gradually, till he lay as flat as a punctured bladder. And the picture of that little black-backed fellow—that Canis mesomelas, if you like official terms—all alone there, and surrounded by a dozen deaths at least, and all nasty, doing the stalking act upon that python was great. He stalked. My! how he stalked! And with reason, for he was taking on, perhaps, the biggest thing in the hunting line that he had ever tackled, and it was a million to one that, if he did not win, he died, and horribly, too; and he knew it. Ordinarily he would have been the python's prey.



There was a little snicker, as it were, in the air as his fangs closed, and the python, waking one-twentieth of a second too late, lifted its head. Then, short and crisp—snap!

Talk about tweaking a lightning-flash by its tail! It would have been a wake to what followed then.

The jackal knew what to expect—by instinct, I suppose. Anyway, he did not wait longer than it takes to scrunch as hard as possible with canine teeth as sharp as knives, and leap clear.

Ho did it, however, and stood well back, with his ears cocked and his head on one side. It was as if he were panting, "Now, let her rip"—and she did.

A hurricane in a cage, a volcano in an eligible house-lot, a geyser in a water-jug—what you will; but they were all tame alongside that python, after the little black-back had got his fangs home.

You know the size of pythons? 'Bout the biggest things in snakes there are going, bar two; and this one was not a baby. But nobody can properly measure their strength. This one unwrapped itself in one awful swiftness, and wrapped itself up again more awfully swiftly and in worse knots. Then things became hazy, and one could only tell by the dust, and the sand, and the grass, and the leaves, and the other things flying around that something was happening.

But the jackal did not seem to care. He only sat well back, with jaws open and very red tongue lolling, obviously doing a dog-laugh to himself. Perhaps it touched his sense of humor to think that so small a beast as he, with just one scientific bite, should create such a deal of disturbance. But the—er—aroma could not have amused even him, and he was, as you might say, salted to stenches; for, though he was on the up-wind side, even there it was enough to knock flat anything that the python's tail could not reach. It was a most stupendous stench—a sort of weapon of defense, or danger-signal, that these big snakes have.

Now, perhaps it was the reek that drew the purr. Purring is generally looked upon as a nice and comfy sort of a sound, but this was not.

The jackal just heard it intruding upon the confusion of the python's last contortions, as if suddenly, and it seemed to come from the ground, and the sky, and the surrounding scenery all at the same time. There was nothing nice and comfy about it at all. The jackal removed himself, at sound of it, about four yards in as many bounds, and every grizzled scrap of fur along his black back stood on end. If we had heard it, we should have reached for our rifle, and felt tingly all down our spine, for that was the sort of purr it was—a horrible, hungry, suggestive, cruel, and blood-curdling sound of ghoulish pleasure.

The jackal ceased to dog-laugh, and his tail was between his legs, for he knew that purr, and its name was death. Death angry is bad enough, but death pleased—

Louder and louder the purr became, till it seemed, as the python began to lash out the very last of its life, apparently, to fill the whole place. Finally, it became real, and—a shape walked slowly out of a thorn-bush.

It would be blatant exaggeration to call that shape a lion. It—he—had been one. He was now a walking hat-rack. Never have you seen such a lion. Never had the jackal seen such a lion, even; and he had done business—of the snatch-and-run order—with lions all his life.

However many years that lion had lived, to kill mercilessly, Heaven alone knows; but how on earth he had contrived to avoid for some time being equally mercilessly killed by hyenas, or wild hogs, Heaven and himself alone knew, too. He was a very, very old lion, a derelict of a lion, a shadow of a ghost of one, mangy, tottering, toothless—come down to eat snakes killed by others, even by jackals.

Then the jackal went away, dejected and disgusted. He was honestly proud of his slaying of that python.

It was the biggest screw-up of courage he had ever accomplished in his life, and to be done out of his rewarding big feast by that purring skeleton of a king of beasts! It was too much even for his pessimistic philosophy.

"Yaaa-ya-ya-ya-ya!" he howled, with his nose pointed to the brazen sun, and melted away among the accursed thorn-scrub with a look about him that said, as plainly as words, "And that's what comes of hunting in daylight."

The jackal, after a long skirmish and a drink, retired homewards towards sunset, when suddenly, from a tuft of grass ahead of him, a shadow shot and vanished. He picked up the trail at once, diagnosed it as that of a hare, and gave chase.

It was a fine chase, characterized by every aspect of first-class trailing, and carried along at such a speed that the quarry never got a chance to stop and get its second wind. Indeed, the quarry never had a chance to stop at all, until it was stopped, and the manner of that happening was strange.

Whether designedly driven, or whether by chance, one cannot tell, but the fact remains that the hare took a "line of country" which, if persisted in, would lead her close past the jackal's lair, or, rather, his wife's lair. This was important—for the jackal.

Once, indeed, our hunter all but overran a small—but quite big enough—boa-constrictor, which must have aimed to drop from a tree upon the hare passing below, and missed. It was in an even more evil temper, in consequence, than snakes usually are, and struck at the jackal with its head and shut mouth. The jackal quietly side-stepped, snapped, missed, and made off after his quarry, and about five hundred yards farther on he came up with "puss"—dead.

The jackal sat on his bushy tail, stuck out his fore-feet straight, and stopped as quickly as ever he could. Then he snarled, and full right had he to snarl.

The hare was lying on her back, weakly kicking out the last of her life with her hindlegs, and a stocky, short-nosed, evil, leering, side-striped jackal was standing over her. He had done the deed. And our black-back knew that side-stripe, had met him before. The two families lived only a few hundred yards apart, and it was Mrs. Side-stripe who was responsible for our friend's wife's crippled condition at that moment. This was a typical side-striper, one of the creeping, hunting-by-surprise-and-pounce sort, and it may be that he had never run down any prey worth speaking about in his life. In a way, he was the very opposite from our black-back, who was mostly legs, and a bit of a sportsman, and, I believe, really delighted in a good ringing hunt. Wherefore there was not much cause for surprise at the bitter blood-feud that had gradually grown up between them, till now things had come pretty well to a head.

The other beast folded back his lean upper-lip till his teeth glistened, and grinned at him—a menacing grin. I don't know if he guessed that it was, by all the laws of the chase, the black-back's hare, but he knew that he had pounced upon her as she passed—pounced like a cat, as was his way, what time he was profiting by his enemy's absence to keep that enemy's lame wife indoors, and from hunting even for insects or fruit, by prowling round her lair, and threatening her with growls. Perhaps he had designs upon her puppies. Perhaps his wife had. And perhaps Mrs. Mesomelas knew that. It is difficult to tell.

There was a sort of a blackish-tawny line drawn to the side-stripe—whose other and learned name was Adustus—and back. It scarcely seemed possible that the black-backed little chap had moved, but he had—leaped in and out again, chopping wickedly with a sword-like gleam of fangs as he did so. The other pivoted, quick as thought, and counter-slashed, and, before you could wink, Mesomelas was in and away, in and out, once, twice, and again. One bite sent a little flick of the other's brown fur a-flying; one missed, one got home, and the side-stripe's ugly snarling changed to a yap to say so.

Twice the two beasts whirled round and round, like roulette-balls, the black-back always on the outside, always doing the attacking, dancing as if on air, light as a gnat. Once he got right in, and the foe sprang at his throat. He was not there when the enemy's teeth closed, but his fangs were, and fang closed on fang, and the resulting tussle was not pretty to behold.

Mesomelas cleared himself from that scrunch with very red lips, but never stopped his whirling, light-cavalry form of attack. He was trying to tease the other into dashing after him, and giving up the advantage which his foe had in size and strength, but it was no good; and finally Adustus suddenly scurried into cover, redder than he had been, and our black-back, too, had to bolt for his hole, as an aardwolf, clumsy, hyena-like, and cowardly, but strong enough for them, scenting blood, came up to investigate.

Mercifully, the side-stripe seemed to attract the more attention, or shed the more blood, and while the aardwolf was sniffing at his hole—not intending to do anything if the jackal had a snap left in him, which he had, for the aardwolf possessed the heart of a sheep, really—the black-back managed to dash out and abscond to his hole with the hare. When the aardwolf came back, and sniffed out what he had done, he said things.

Our jackal's head appeared at his hole next dawn as a francolin began to call, and a gray lowrie—a mere shadow up among the branches—started to call out, "Go away! go away!" as if he were speaking to the retreating night. A gay, orange-colored bat came and hung up above the jackal's den—well out of reach, of course—and a ground-hornbill suddenly started his reverberating "Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!" and, behold—'twas dawn!

The jackal scuttled down to the river to have a drink, which he got rather riskily among the horns of drinking, congregated hartebeests, impala, and other antelope, and returned with the leg-bone of a bush-buck, which had been slain the night before by a leopard, and he went to ground very quickly, for the great spotted cat could be heard, grunting wrath, at his heels.

Then the day strode up, and the light, creeping in, showed our jackal, curled up and fast asleep, in his lair, as far away as he could possibly get in the space—two ant-bears', or aardvarks', holes run into one—from his also curled-up wife.

Later—for it was quite chilly—he came out to sleep in the sun, under a bush, till the sun, in turn, half-baked him, and he retired again to the den.

The days were, as a rule, for the jackal, a succession of sleeping blanks, but at the end of this day it was the fate of a small python—small for a python—to hunt a pangolin—who was as like a thin pineapple with a long tail, if you understand me, as it was like anything, or like a fir-cone many times enlarged, only it was an animal, and a weird one—into that den of thieves.

Mrs. Mesomelas, she appeared to shoot straight from dreamless slumber on to the pangolin's back in some wonderful way, and Mr. Mesomelas, he bounced from the arms of Morpheus into—the jaws of the snake? No, sirs; on to the nape of that snake's neck, if snakes may be said to have napes to their necks. But to get hold of the neck of a python is one thing, to keep there quite a different, and very risky, affair; and our jackal, who was no pup, knew that. If that legless creation of the devil could only have got his tail round something, our jackal might have been turned into food for his food, so to speak. Wherefore, possibly, he was frightened. It was like taking hold of a live wire by the loose end. Moreover, the space was confined, and there were the whelps and all, and I rather fancy black-back was more frightened to leave go and stay than he was to hold on and run.

Anyway, he held on and ran.

An old, fat zebra stallion, round-barreled and half-asleep, snorted suddenly, and stared with surprise at the sight of a black-backed jackal galloping as fast as circumstances would permit him, with the wide-mouthed head of a python in his jaws, and the remaining long, painted body trailing out behind. The snake was not going with any pleasure, and his wriggling tail was feeling for a hold every inch of the way, and if he could have got one—oh, jackal! But he could not, for the jackal kept on going, and the snake's after-length kept on trailing out straight, like a loose rope behind a boat, through the perishing glare and the heat-flurry that seemed to be making the whole world jump up and down, as it does when you look at it over the top of a locomotive-funnel.

Snakes take a long time to die, or to seem dead, even with a double set of glistening sharp teeth scrunching as hard as their owner knows how into their neck. At last, however, after a final series of efforts to get, and keep, in the shape of a letter S, the python's tail gradually ceased to feel for a hold, and the writhing strain in the jackal's jaws relaxed. Still, our Mesomelas was taking no chances, and he galloped home with his capture before he stopped, as proud and happy an old dog, rascally jackal as ever cracked a bone on a fine day.

He was a little puffed, and more than a little puffed up, and it may have been that he did not keep his eyes all round his head, as a jackal should always do. Anyway, there, in the gathering shadows of night, came a waiting, watching shadow, that was presently joined by another, and the two—their eyes glinted once in a nasty metallic fashion—stood head to head, watching him.

By the time Mrs. Mesomelas had hobbled out to view the "kill" for herself, and snarl her appreciation—truly, it was a strange way of showing it—with thin, wicked ears laid back, and more than wicked fangs bared, the waiting, watching shadows had crept forward a little, on their bellies, head up, and—Mrs. Mesomelas, with the quick suspicion of motherhood awake in her, saw them.

The snarl that she whipped out fetched the jackal round upon himself as if stung. Then he saw, and understood, and rage flamed into his intelligent, dog's eyes. It was the side-striped jackals, Mr. and Mrs., plotting to loot his "kill."

It was the black-back who attacked. Perhaps he knew that one secret of defense is swift and unexpected offense. Anyway, he attacked, sailing in with his dancy, chopping, in-and-out skirmishing methods; and Mrs. Mesomelas, on three legs and with the bill for the other to be settled, helped him.

It was very difficult, in the tropic dust, to follow what exactly happened next. For the next few minutes black-back was here, there, and everywhere, leaping and dodging in and out like a lambent flame. The human eye could scarcely follow him, but the human ear could hear plainly the nasty, dog-like snarling and the snap of teeth.

The side-stripe, as I have said, was the weightier beast, but the black-back never gave him the advantage, which he sought, of the close-fought fight.

More than once he was chased, but only to lead his foe into the open, where he could play his own game to his own liking; and at last, when the moon rose, and his mate had the female black-back driven back to her last ditch, so to speak, at the entrance to her lair, the side-stripped jackal, spouting blood at every joint, it seemed, collapsed suddenly, and apparently gave up the ghost.

Now, our black-backed jackal was not a young beast, and he was up to most wild-folks' games—which was as well. He approached the corpse with caution, and as he poised for the last spring the corpse was at his throat. Black-back, however, was not there, but his tail was, and the side-striped one got a mouthful of the bushy black tip of that. Whereupon Mesomelas recoiled on himself, and for a moment a horrible "worry" followed, at the end of which the other dropped limply again, this time, apparently, really done for.

Very, very gingerly the black-back—himself a red and weird sight in the eye of the moon—approached, and seized and shook the foe, dropped him, and—again that foe was a leaping streak at his throat.

Mesomelas side-stepped, and neatly chopped—a terrible, wrenching bite—at his hindleg in passing. It fetched him over, and he lay still, the moon shining on his side, doubly and redly striped now.

This time it was Mesomelas who sprang at his throat—to be met by fangs. But in the quarter of an instant, changing his mind after he sprang, he shot clean up in the air, and came down to one side, and, rebounding like a ball, had the other by the neck.

For one instant he kept there, hung, wrenching ghastlily, then sprung clear, and, backing slowly, limping, growling horribly, flat-eared and beaten, the side-striped jackal began his slow, backward retreat into the heart of the nearly impenetrable thorns, where the winner was not such a fool as to follow him. And the black-backed jackal never saw him again. Living or dead, he faded out of our jackal's life forever.

And when he turned, his wife was standing at the entrance to the "earth" alone. The other, the female side-striped jackal's form, could be dimly seen dissolving into the night—on three legs.

"Yaaa-ya-ya-ya!" howled Mesomelas.



XIII

THE STORM PIRATE

The sea-birds were very happy along that terrible breaker-hewn coast. Puffin, guillemot, black guillemot, razorbill, cormorant, shag, fulmar petrel, storm petrel perhaps, kittiwake-gull, common gull, eider-duck, oyster-catcher, after their kind, had the great, cliff-piled, inlet-studded, rock-dotted stretch of coast practically to themselves—to themselves in their thousands. Their only shadow was the herring-gulls, and the herring-gulls, being amateur, not professional, pirates, were too clumsy to worry too much.

Then came the rain-shower. Not that there was anything in that. Rain-showers came to that land as easily as blushes used to do to maidens' cheeks—rain-showers, and sudden squalls, and all manner of swift storm phenomena. But behind the rain-shower, or in it, maybe—it blotted out cliff and inlet and sandbar and heather-covered hills, and, with the wind, whipped the sea into spume like an egg-whisk—came he, the storm pirate.

A guillemot—you know the guillemot, the fish-hunter, who flies under the waters more easily than she flies the air above the waters—had risen, and was making inshore with a full catch, when the squall caught her without warning. For a little she faced it, her wings whirring madly, her body suspended in mid-air, but she not making headway one inch against the sudden fury of a forty-mile-an-hour wind. Then, since she could no longer see the shore, which was blotted out with hissing rain, she turned and ran down-wind, like a drawn streak, to the lee of a big stack of rock.

The next that was seen of her, she was heading out to sea at top speed, in wake of the rain-shower and the squall, which had passed as suddenly as it had come; and behind her, pursuing her with a relentless fury that made one gasp, shot another and a strange bird-shape. Its lines were the lines of the true pirate; its wings long and sharp-cut; its beak wickedly hooked at the tip; its claws curved, for no gentle purpose, at the end of its webbed feet; its eye fierce and haughty; its uniform the color of the very stormcloud that had just passed—dun and smoked cream below, and sooty above. True, he was not big, being only twenty-one inches—two inches less than the herring-gull. But what is size, anyway? It was the fire that counted, the ferocity, the "devil," the armament, and the appalling speed. Just as a professional boxer of any size can lay out any mere hulking hooligan, so this bird carried about him the stamp of the professional fighter that could lay out anything there in that scene that he chose—almost.

The guillemot flew as never in all her life had she flown before, and every known artifice of dodging she had heard of she tried, and—it all failed. The terrible new bird gained all the time steadily, following her as if towed by an invisible string, till at last he was above her, his wonderful wild scream was ringing in her ears, his cruel eyes glaring into hers, his beak snapping in her very face, his claws a-clutch.

No, thank you. In sheer terror she opened her beak and dropped her fish. It fell like a column of silver, and in a flash her pursuer was gone—nay, was not gone; had turned, rather, into a second column, a sooty one, falling like a thunderbolt, till he overtook even the falling fish, and wonderfully snatched it up in his hooked bill ere ever it could touch the waves, without a word or explanation of any kind whatever.

That, apparently, was his manner of getting his living; a strange manner, a peculiar way—the way of the pirate on the ocean.

Despoiled, but safe, the guillemot rattled away "for another cast"; but the foe settled, riding lightly on the lift and fall of the bottle-green waves.

Here he was no longer a wonderful phantom spirit of the storm, but just a bird that might have been passed over at first glance as simply a seagull. But not at a second glance.

Men called this strange bird Richardson's skua, or Arctic skua, or lesser skua, or, officially, Stercorarius crepidatus, or, most unofficially, in the vernacular, "boatswain," or "man-o'-war," or "gull-tormentor." Apparently you could take your choice what you called him. But he did not belong to Mr. Richardson really. He belonged to nobody, only to himself, to the wind and the rain, that seemed to have begot him, and to the grim north, from which he took his other name. He might have claimed the gulls as his near relations—they loathed him enough.

For a long time he sat on the lifting, breathing swell, floating idly. There was nothing else on the face of the lonely waters except himself and a flock, or fleet, I should say, of razorbills and guillemots, very far away, who alternately showed all white breasts, and vanished—as they dived and rose all together—like white-faced, disappearing targets, and one gull, who wheeled and wheeled in the middle distance, with one eye on the divers and one on the skua, as if, gull-like, waiting on a chance from either.

Then at last the skua rose again, and swept hurriedly out to sea to meet a small black-and-white speck that was coming in. It was a little, rotund, parrot-beaked puffin, loaded with fish—sprats—four of them set crossways in his wonderful bill. He seemed to know nothing about the skua till that worthy was upon him, and then, as he fled, after a furious chase of about three minutes, he suddenly surrendered by letting fall all his spoil.

The skua caught up one sprat before it hit the surface, but, being too late to overtake the rest, seemed to take no further notice of them, but swept on, to settle upon the water a mile away and preen himself. And this was where the waiting, watching gull came in—the herring-gull. He sprang to strenuous life, and, arriving swiftly at full speed over the spot, snatched up off the surface, and by clumsily attempting to plunge, two more of the sprats, before the skua could intervene.

Then it was that a terrible and a totally unexpected thing happened, and yet, if one comes to think about it and study the matter more, the most natural in the world; probably, also, on those wild seas, even common-place. Only, you see, there was no interval at all between the skua sitting placidly on the lap of the waves, eyeing the gull vengefully, and that same skua shooting straight upwards, all doubled up, on the top of what appeared to have been a submarine mine in a mild form in active demonstration.



This submarine mine, however, in addition to the burst and heave of torn and upflung falling waters and foam, had a visible heart, a great, shining, wet, torpedo-shaped body, which rose on end beneath the stricken bird, and fell again with a splintering crash that shot up the heads of the diving birds half a mile away. It might have been a thresher-shark, or some other northern shark, or it might have been a dolphin, which is bad, or a killer whale, which is a good deal worse, if it had not been a great gray seal seeking dinner; and its effect on the luckless skua was the effect of a battering ram, and the skua that fell back again with the fall of snarling water was to all intents and purposes a corpse.

But it was a good thing that he was so. Had it been otherwise, had he tried to get away or fluttered, there would have been no more of him. That is to say, the head of the seal came up—or its wet and suggestive big nose did—and poked about, trying to find the bird. It had evidently meant to grab him, to engulf him utterly and forever in the first rush; but something—some unlooked-for lift of a wave or turn of the bird—had made the shot miss, or nearly miss, so that the bird had been hit by the bloated six-footer's nose, instead of being crushed in its teeth—its terrible long and glistening array of murderous teeth.

All the same, the nose blow was bad enough. It was like being hit by the beak of a torpedo at full speed, fit almost to bash a boat in.

The seal was quite evidently looking for the bird, and, equally quite evidently, seemed bound to find him. To know why it did not at once see him is to know that the seal's view, from below the surface, of the world above is about a twelve-foot circle of white-gold light, that is all; and the skua, floating limp and floppy, had been, by chance, till then always carried hither and yon by the waves just outside that circle. But that chance could not last.

Then came the other seal. Came she easily and gracefully, as a seal should in her element, effortlessly gliding along, her head from time to time up like a dog's—some gentle dog's, say a mild-eyed spaniel's—looking about. She was just a female seal. She knew nothing of the bird or her companion, who were at sea-level, and more often than not hidden in the trough, till she came sliding down the slope of a round-barreled swell, practically on top of them. Then it was too late to avoid mutual recognition.

Quick as sound she had seen, had realized, had spun on her apology for a tail, and had gone, leaving a little trail of foam behind her to prove her speed and her coyness. But, quick as light, the magnificent male seal had sunk from sight, leaving a little chain of bursting bubbles behind to mark his speed. And the last that was seen of that lady seal was a speck far on the horizon, going like a masterless torpedo, alternately leaping forward through the air and shooting along on, or just under, the surface—switchbacking, they call it; and that, I dare to fancy, if it proves anything, proves that the coyness was only make-believe, and that she had allowed the daring admirer to catch her up and force her to act as if she were already vanquished and using the last arts of swift swimming she knew.

It left the skua, however; left him still floating, floating, floating up one long breaker's side, and sliding down its other side to its fellow behind, towards the shore—always towards the shore. It is true that the tide was falling offshore, but that made no difference to the currents of those parts, which were independent currents and of a great force. They were shouldering the skua steadily to land, and if you had dropped a line overboard there, with an ordinary lead on, you would have felt them pulling at it, and taking the lead along like a live thing. And the currents were Fate, so far as that bird was concerned.

There was a little inlet, and a little bay in the inlet no larger than a good-sized dining-table, and seaweed, green and red, upon the rock-bowlders that encircled it, and old-gold patches of sand between the rock-bowlders, and green grass behind the rock-bowlders, and brown-plush furze behind the green grass, and a patch of blue sky over all. And in the middle of the little bay in the inlet, bob-bobbing on the lap-lapping of the littlest waves, that—sifted out by then, as it were—had found their way so far, floated the skua, the Richardson's or Arctic skua, dead, to all appearances, as the proverbial door-nail. But that was not the rub. The rub was in the—ah!

"He-oh!" pealed down the clear, ringing bugle-cry from above, and a shadow floated upon the reflections a-dance on the surface in the little bay in the little inlet—floated and hung, so that it exactly covered the skua like a funeral pall; floated, and hung, and came down. As its claws scraped a bowlder, and it furled its long, narrow vans, it was revealed as the big herring-gull—him we left out upon the face of the waters, watching and waiting on chance.

His spotless expanse of head and neck alone marked him, gave him away, a speck you could see for a mile. His size—just on two feet—proved what his snowy hood proclaimed, in case there were any doubts. A smaller gull, an uncommon common gull—of eighteen inches—came and looked, to make quite sure—and went away again. The herring-gull, in spite of his silly name, has a reputation, and a "plug ugly" one.

And the herring-gull, he—did nothing. That is the strength of the herring-gull—doing nothing. He can do it for an hour, half a morning, or most of a day. His battle-cry might well have been, "Wait and see," but he must be one of the few living, breathing things on this earth who have made the game pay, and—lived. He might have been a lump of chalk, or a marble carving, or a stuffed specimen, or asleep, or dead, for all the signs of living that he gave. One began to wonder if he ever would move again. He had been a bird, but was now the life-size model of one cut in alabaster, with clear pebbles for eyes—they were quite as hard and cold as that, his eyes.

And all the time the body of the skua floated, and danced, and drifted, and lifted in, making an inch on one wavelet, to lose three-quarters of it on the next, but still, unnoticeably perhaps, but undoubtedly, gradually, surely, for all that, drifting in.

Somebody has written somewhere that gulls never touch a carcass on land. Sometimes they touch things on land which were not carcasses before they touched them. This gull, however, did not wait for any landing. Perhaps he knew that, once stranded, the gray crows might come to assist him in their own peculiar way, or a raven, who would not assist him at all, except into the next world, if he did not relinquish all claim to the feast. Anyway, whatever we poor mortals may kid ourselves into thinking he did or did not know, or what we may think he ought to have known, he began operations as soon as the skua came alongside, so to speak—that is, drifted against the particular bowlder upon which the sphinx-like herring-gull happened by chance—always by chance, of course—to be standing.

Now, there is no particular joy in having your eyes hammered at by a blunted sharp instrument, like a herring-gull's beak, for instance, even if those eyes happen to be shut, as I think the skua's were, and the instrument wielded with the extreme clumsiness of the half-trained, as I know the herring-gull's beak was. But, all the same, it was the kindest thing that could have happened, for, had it not been for that, the skua was like to have drifted in that fashion from that little inlet out upon another sea; not the one connected with the inlet, but one where you can drift forever, and whose name is Death. The physical pain, however, brought him round. He was only stunned, and the agony of the eyes, or eye, rather, was acute.

He opened the other eye—a wonderful, piercing, fierce orb. He contracted his feathers. The world grew from a mist in that eye to a little bay in a little inlet, with the seaweed-covered bowlder-rocks, the old-gold sand, the green grass, the brown-plush furze, and the patch of wonderful blue sky over-top. Then it took in the spotless, gaunt form of the herring-gull, and—he remembered that he was a skua, only some twenty-one inches long, 'tis true, but still a skua, to be treated and respected as such.

Wherefore, who so surprised as that big father of herring-gulls when the bedraggled, smoky-hued thing under his bill, which he may, or may not, have taken for a corpse, woke up, returned to life suddenly, and erupted into his very face, with the yells of a fiend, the weapons of a fury, and the rage of several devils? He yelled, too, that herring-gull, not entirely with rage, and did his best to get under way as quickly as might be, but became, before he knew where he was, altogether too busy even for that.

Not being in the habit of performing optical operations upon Arctic skuas as a rule, he had nothing in his memory to warn him of what followed, nothing to put him up to the absolutely diabolical fury of the onslaught he had to meet in the next few seconds. He certainly did his level best with such weapons as Nature had given him, but his blunt, hooked beak and the claws he had not got seemed suddenly meager against the hammering, tearing, stabbing, rending dagger weapons of his—"meal."

The skua saw red, and the herring-gull saw mainly red skua, as he was hurled back and down under the first rush, and instantly, without a second to recover, was hurled, equally helplessly, the other way, shrieking for his very life, and decorating the air and the old-gold sand with a pretty little cloud of his spotless feathers.

He fought with the desperation of almost all the wild-people, when there is no help for it; hammering, too, but wildly and clumsily. The skua fought with the cunning and precision of the professional, plus such a rage as can only be described as berserk.

It was not a long fight. Perhaps the skua felt that, after his collision at sea, his bolt would be soon shot, and he had better do what he was going to do as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Certainly he did appear to do so; and when at length he drew back, rocking and gasping like a drunken creature, the famed purity of that herring-gull's uniform was a thing of beauty no longer. That part of him, indeed, which was not red was mud, or sand, or green slime, and in his eyes was the most worried and tired look you ever saw.

He rocked, too, in his gait, as he ran and blundered, and he gasped with his beak open. When he rose, which he did without any sort of procrastination, he rocked worse than ever, and twice nearly fell, and once hit the water, before finally slowly dragging himself away upward, flapping low and heavily across the little waves.

With the one available eye—the eye left him in working condition by the herring-gull's clumsy efforts—flaming like a live-coal, that implacable skua watched him go. He may or may not have known it, of course, but I feel pretty certain that he would a few thousand times rather have been standing there upon the old-gold sand, with only one eye doing duty and an unspeakable agony in the other eye, than be that herring-gull in the condition he was then, going back to the bosom of his tribe. It is not a thing to dwell upon in polite society, but I tell you that the gull-folk do not always treat their wounded well, and there would be no chance, no earthly chance at all, of his finding a place in all that vast horizon of sea and sky and island where they, the ceaseless, never-resting "White Patrol," would not eventually find him.

Then the skua lay down, and thereafter surrendered himself to that utter reaction which birds, who live more intensely in action than almost any other creatures, have brought to an apparently exaggerated pitch. He did not sleep, but he did not move, and every muscle in him, every fiber, every nerve, faculty, organ, was surrendered utterly to rest.

Night came fluttering her sable wings across the scene, breathing and sighing audibly in the first silence that wild landscape of storms and squalls had known throughout the day, and the skua moved. His neck went up straight, and his head turned, looking sharply this way and that, fierce apprehension written upon him.

There was nothing one could see to give cause for this. A flock of curlew were passing, wailing one to the other, across the sunset; a string of late gulls trailed athwart the sky; and a wedge of those beautiful little wild-duck known as wigeon was letting itself down to the shores of the inlet. Far out to sea a black line, which might have been a sea-serpent if it hadn't been scoter ducks, trailed undulating over the waves, and a single great white gannet plunged from aloft into the deep at intervals with a report like a sunset gun. But they were all innocent, except in the opinion of the fish and shell-fish, and no manner of folk to trouble the pirate skua. Set a thief to catch a thief, however. And, besides, there was blood on the bird and around him, or the taint of it, and blood is the devil and all in the wild. There was nothing to be seen. No. That was the worst part of it. It was what was unseen that the skua was thinking about.

Wherefore, then, our friend of the pirate rig rose and walked stiffly to the summit of one of the bowlder-rocks right at the water's edge. He was by no means recovered yet, or in any condition for a fight in that desolate scene, and had to select the most strategic position he could crawl to. He did, and awaited Fate's reply.

The day died, and the moon came out to wink and dodge and play a foolish game of hide-and-seek in and out among the clouds. She showed the skua, a black knob atop of the black blob of his bowlder, apparently fast asleep, invisible if we did not know he was there. She showed black dots bobbing upon silver lanes, which were sea-duck of various kinds—scaup, long tail, scoter, and the rest. She showed a line of old, rotten posts, broken off short by the waves, along a sand-ridge, which were wild-geese; and she showed three big, white swans—wild-swans, wilder even than the geese—floating like ghosts in the enchanted light.

But she also showed other things, indistinctly, 'tis true; but enough—quite enough. She revealed for an instant, as she shone on the spot on the sand where the skua had sat, the fact that the sand seemed to be alive, horribly alive, as if the pebbles had taken legs and ran about. It was a sudden, ghastly flashlight, hidden as soon as seen, and it gave one the shudders. Those pebbles were crabs mad with hunger, as crabs always seem to he.

They had arrived there as if by magic—been creeping in ever since dusk, probably (one of the things that were unseen); but whether blood, or feathers, or taint of blood, or what horrible, ghoulish system of espionage drew them, is not for me to say. They were there, anyway, and—and—well, and then they were not there. The next flashlight of the moon showed that some others had taken their place. This was ghastly, for the others were bigger than any shore crabs, and they hopped, and they sat up hunched, like hobgoblins, and—they scratched! This last identified them, for the soulless, shelled crab-people are not given to scratch much—at least, not in that way. They were rats—shore rats. The last designation is necessary, for there are rats and rats, all bad, but the shore rat is the worst. How many sleeping birds, wounded, tired, or unalert, die at his hands, or, rather, his teeth, in the course of a year would amaze anybody if known, and the shell-fish he relieves of life are legion.

The hard, horny carapace of a retreating crab scraped, in the dead silence, against the rock-bowlder on which the skua sat. He made no move at the sound, the suggestive sound; but his feathers were shut down quite tight, and he looked far smaller than usual. When birds shut down their feathers in that fashion they put on an armor coat, as it were, through which very little can pierce. It showed that he was ready.

And you think that the mere shore crabs could be nothing to him. But a few hundred ravening shore crabs, with their lives for sale—all digging pieces out of you in the dark—are not so easy a proposition to dispose of as people may think. Try it.

One of the rats turned suddenly and faced towards him. The skua could see its little, cruel eyes gleaming like gimlet-holes in the wall of a lighted room. Then another, and another, and another did the same.

The skua was scarcely bleeding at all now, but he had left enough of a trail for them—they who make a specialty of the job. And they followed it. Hopping grotesquely across the mottled, hurrying patches of moonlight they came, one behind the other, and without noise.

The skua remained as still as the bowlder he sat upon. In that position, even peering closely, you would never have seen him, unless, like ourselves, you knew he was there. But he was drawn together, drawn in all his muscles like a tense spring, and—though this his persecutors could not know—he was recovering from his hurts rapidly, with the wonderful power of recuperation of all the wild-folk, who pay their price for it in clean, hard living.

Then suddenly there was a scuffle below him in the dark. One of the rats squeaked a little, acknowledging receipt of a crab's pincers closed upon him, or her. Followed the sounds of some scuttering, confusion, and the horrible slide and scrape of horny shells upon stone. Then silence, and the skua knew that, in that wonderful way they have, the crabs, at any rate, were gone—for the moment.

Remained, however, the rats, and one peered up over the bowlder the next instant, its eyes glinting in a momentary splash of moonlight fiendishly. Also, his quick ears could hear the soft creepings of the others on every side of the bowlder, back and front. They had surrounded him, and, like wolves, would now rush, and then—and then—— They had gone.

Yes, there could be no shadow of doubt about it. There had come an instant's furtive, hurried movement, a glimpse—no, half a glimpse—of hunched forms hopping through the dark, and they were no more.

The skua stared, and as he stared a great terror seized him. What more deadly form of death than themselves had they suddenly become aware of, to cause them to invite themselves into nowhere in that magic fashion?

In the dead silence that fell, he could hear nothing, see nothing. Yet he felt—indeed he knew—something seemed to tell him, that a deadly foe was at hand.

Hours passed. They were minutes really, but they seemed hours to him. Nothing happened; nothing showed. But the rats did not come back. Therefore, whatever incarnation of death it was that removed them must be there still. He knew that. That lonely, wounded bird knew that. And he was right.

Behind him, practically invisible, flat to the ground, a long, low, narrow, dark shape was lying crouched, creeping, creeping, creeping towards his tail. Slowly, almost painfully slowly, it drew upon him gradually, so gradually that the distance between them could scarce be seen to lessen. And soundlessly, so soundlessly that even his quick ears, trained far beyond the quickest human aural perception, could not hear it.

Then, so quickly that the eye could not follow it, the crouching form made its rush.

The skua was sitting motionless, with his head looking straight in front of him. The dark form came from behind, and there would have been no time for the skua to move before the thing, whatever it was, had him by the back of the neck, and dead, save for one little tiny fact. As it propelled itself forward, in the first bound, the claws of the beast's hindpaw's scraped upon a stone. It was only a little sound, and it gave the skua barely a fraction of a second's warning; but, he being a wild thing, it was enough.

Quick as light the bird had half turned upon one side, and flung up one claw and wing to cover his neck, whilst his head jerked round hindpart before in the same atom of time.

Thus it happened that the beast, unable to stop, found himself with his head and eyes being dug at by a hooked beak, and his jaws closed upon a skinny leg instead of upon the skua's spinal column, as he had intended, which would have put the skua out of life like turning out a gas-jet.

And it was then, in that instant, that the moon chose to dodge from behind a cloud and reveal the beast as a big, long, lean, and hungry dog-stoat. Probably he had thought that the skua was a gull, and a wounded one. There is a difference, however, between the skuas and the gulls, though they bear a family likeness. He discovered the difference now, and for the next few minutes was not overjoyed at the knowledge.

One cannot do much blood-sucking to weaken one's prey out of a scrawny leg that resembles a twig wrapped round with leather. And the stoat found this out, too, and he would have shifted his hold to the bird's body like a flash, if he had been given a chance, but he never was.

Before he knew what was happening, he was blinded by the beating of vast wings, his claws began to slip and slide, and—oh, horror!—still slipping and sliding, he found the bowlder going from him. It went from him, receding downwards with terrifying rapidity, and the dancing, silvery, sparkling water was sliding below, too.

Being a stoat, he hung on with V.C. doggedness and courage; but it was the worst thing he could have done. Moreover, as it was, he forced the bird to attempt reprisals in mid-air—a terrible proceeding.

Now, this was difficult, might almost seem impossible; but the skua is one of the most wonderful flyers that haunt the seas even—and most of the best are there—and what he could not execute in the air was scarcely worth mentioning. It included in this case a perfectly diabolical scraping of the foe's head with his available claw, and after that, since the dogged stoat did not leave go, and the pain was excruciating, a wonderful bend forward, and, at a pronounced and dangerous angle, a fiendish stabbing at the stoat's head with his murderous beak. This last involved a drop of nearly a hundred feet, but it did the trick.

Blinded, dazed, shaken, and maddened by the agony of blows upon his sensitive nose, the stoat opened his jaws to grip higher up the leg; and in an instant he was gone, turning over and over, down, down, down to the hungry waves below.

Ten minutes later the skua was calmly and safely asleep upon the top of a frowning black stack of rock, untroubled, I think, even by dreams of the terrible things he had gone through.

* * * * * *

Next morning, an apparition of wonder and fierce beauty, the skua, quite recovered except that he had a lameness in one leg and a weakness in one wonderful eye that would last him a lifetime, came racing down-shore out of a stormcloud into the full gold of the sun at some seventy miles an hour. He was in pursuit of a common gull who, with more luck than judgment, had caught a fish.

The gull held on for a few minutes, on and in and around the horizon, going like the wind up and down and around, as for his life, with friend skua ever close to his tail, before a wild yell, which he could not mistake, sounded in his ear, and he dropped the prize. The skua executed his wonderful dive, and caught the gleaming silver thing before it reached the waves, and shooting up again, was just about to continue his course, when a constant and peculiar flickering above the beach caught his telescopic eye.

He checked, flung up, came round beautifully effortless, and headed towards the sight. Probably he knew what it was, had fathomed it even from that distance. It was a gang of gulls flying round and mobbing a hapless wounded gull on the beach.

It was a foul thing to do, a horrible, blundering, clumsy murder, done slowly; but even so, it was all over before, with a scream that rang like the battle-cry of a Highland chief, and set the murderous heads up in wild alarm, the skua came shooting, twisting, turning, diving, and darting right into the heart of the crowd.

And they went circling, and wheeling, and hurling down-wind like sheets of paper, those murderous sea-birds, dispersed and scattered over the face of the waters, and were gone almost without a word.

Then the skua came lightly down, rocking on the wind, and settled beside the poor, draggled, white body, no longer white, upon the shingle, which had been so foully done to death by gulls of various clans. He may, or may not, have known it, but I can tell you that the gull was the self-same herring-gull who had tried to kill him the day before. Now he—but we will draw a curtain here.

Next day the skua went away, and the fishing wild-folk breathed a sigh of relief as they watched him go, and for three days peace brooded over the winged fishers of those parts, so that birds could feed upon what they caught, nor be in fear of getting hunted for it. But upon the fourth day the skua came back. And he was not alone. A dusky, nearly brown—for they vary much in color—female skua came with him. And in due course they built them a home on the ground among the heather, and they guarded their treasured eggs and reared with amazing fierce devotion their beloved young.

Before his advent that strip of wild sea-coast had been, mercifully, without its skuas. Our bold buccaneer, however, having won his footing, took care to see that, so far as one bird could accomplish the great task, it never should be again.



XIV

WHEN NIGHTS WERE COLD

And the Northern Lights come down To dance on the houseless snow; And God, who clears the grounding berg, And steers the grinding flow, He hears the cry of the little kit-fox And the lemming on the snow.—RUDYARD KIPLING.

A snipe rose suddenly, and began to call out; a capercailzie lofted all at once, with a great rush of winged bulk, above the snow-bound forest; and a white hare slid, like a wraith of the winter, down a silent forest aisle.

Then came the White Wolf of the Frozen Wastes, the terror of the blizzard, ghost-like, enormous, and swift. In dead, grim silence came he, loping his loose, tireless wolf's lope, and stopped at a windfall, where two forest giants, their decaying strength discovered by the extra weight of snow, lay prone, one across the other.

For a moment he paused, nose up, testing the still, cold air; then he leapt upon the upper fallen tree. He had, seen up there and clearly, an enormously thick and woolly coat, that magnified his already record size. You see him trotting along the tree-trunk. Then he stopped and stared down into the dark hollow under the upper tree. Then he sniffed—audibly. Then he licked his nose—and very red was his tongue. Then—but this he couldn't help, I verily believe, as he balanced there with his pricked ears and bright eyes—he whined.

And instantly his little, impatient, dog-like whine was answered by a deep, deep growl, that seemed to come out of the bowels of the earth.

He was just in time, as he leapt lightly off the windfall, to avoid the rush of a vast brown bulk, reeking of carrion, furry, terrible, with live-coals for eyes, and threshing the air with claws Heaven knows how long, which hurled itself like an avalanche out of the hollow at him. And that thing was a bear.

Now, bears do not, as a rule, without extraordinary reason, in that land, rouse themselves out of their winter sleep for the mere whine of a wolf. They are impregnable where they are, and know it. The extraordinary reason, however, was present. The white wolf was sniffing at it now—the bear's blood-trail to the windfall. Bruin had been roused once before that day—by beaters. He had then been driven forward, shot at by hunters, wounded, escaped, and returned to his den. But—but, I give you my word, if those beaters, those peasants, had known the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was out, nothing in the wide world would have induced them to beat for bears or anything else in that vicinity.

The white wolf stretched himself to a canter, and slid away through the forest, dropping the trees past him like telegraph-poles past a railway-carriage window. He looked like the very spirit of winter, the demon of the snows, and stood for that in the ignorant minds of the sparsely scattered people—perhaps because at a short distance he was nearly invisible. His white coat, which was simply a conspicuous curse to him when there was no snow—which was one reason, maybe, why he retired from the limelight to some lonely fastness during summer—was an incalculable asset to him in winter, and he knew it.

He ran, with his smooth, loose, effortless lope, perhaps a quarter of a mile, then stopped, and putting up his head, howled a howl so full of hopeless, cruel yearning, so vibrant with desolation, that it sounded like the cry of a soul doomed forever to seek something it could never find. It was a lugubrious yowl there, in that setting, and it made one's scalp creep all over one's cranium.

And instantly almost, even as the last, long, horrible echoes died, sobbing adown the blue-haze perspective of the forest glades, the answer came—a far-away, fluttering, wandering howl, like the moan of the wind in its sleep.

The white wolf waited a moment, then howled again, and the ghastly sound came back to him, louder and nearer this time.

A third time he howled, and the forest cringed under the reply.

Then at last the shadows between the ranked tree-trunks took unto themselves life, and eyes, eyes in pairs, horribly hungry, cruel port-holes of brains, with a glary, stary, green light behind them, suddenly appeared everywhere, like swiftly-turned-on electric lamps. There was a whispering rush, as if giants were swiftly dealing cards in the silence, and—the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was away, racing like a cloud-shadow, rapid and impetuous as a greyhound, at the head of a pack of one hundred and twenty-nine empty-stomached wolves.

They made no sound as they tore, compact as a Zulu impi, over the spotless white, because they had no trail to follow, only this huge devil of a leader; and they had their work cut out to follow him, for he was the longest-legged male wolf any of them had ever set eyes upon.

Straight as a twelve-inch shell the white wolf headed back to the fallen trees and the bear's den. When he reached them, he stopped so abruptly that the wolves behind him almost sat on their haunches in the effort to pull up. Those that failed fell sideways under a rain of wicked snaps from him, that followed one another quick as the stutter of a machine-gun.

The pack did not stop—at least, not the flanks of it. They swept on without a pause, out and round, like flood-water round a knoll, joined at the far side, and—were still. As a maneuver, a military maneuver, swift, unexpected, faultless, and silent, it was perfect.

For as long as a man takes to light a pipe there was dead silence, broken only by the quick motor-like panting of the pack. And one hundred and twenty-nine pairs of eyes regarded the fallen trees.

Then the white wolf, all alone, with hackles up, stepped forward and leaped upon the trunk of the tree that was poised upon its fellow. He ran lightly up it till he was exactly above the hollow formed by the junction of the two trees, then stopped, looking down.

Half-a-dozen of the older and more cunning wolves followed him; the pack surged forward until both trees became lined with a row of wolves, without breaking the circle of the main pack outside, and then stopped. All this in silence.

Then—but you could almost hear the trees breathe while he did it—the white wolf yawned very deliberately, and whined, insolently and very audibly.

The answer was instant.

Something rumbled within the den, deep down, like a geyser.

The white wolf whined again, and sprang aside just as the bear, maddened with the pain of a .450-caliber rifle bullet in his stomach, and seeking a sacrifice, hurled out of the dark and up over the tree-trunk, striking, with appalling nail-strokes, right and left; and the quickness of those strokes was only a less astonishment than the agility of the wolves getting out of the way of them. But—but he had come out to abolish one wolf, that bear; not one hundred and twenty-nine.

The white wolf dropped without a sound upon the bear's great, broad back. The half-dozen old wolves followed him like figures moved by a single lever. The pack sucked in with the rush of a waterspout. The bear vanished under a wave of fangs and tails, as a sinking boat vanishes beneath the billows. And the rest was the most diabolical devils' riot that ears ever heard.

The bear unwounded, even if he had been induced to come out at all, might have fought his way home again; but the bear wounded and cut off was a different matter. He battled as only a cornered bear can battle; but the exertion of it gave the .450 bullet its chance, and he died—horribly—as they die who are pulled down by the starving wolf-pack, and that is not printable at all.

He took three wolves—smashed-in-heads and chests—with him to the other world, that bear, and left three others well on the road there. All six followed him by the path he had gone when the pack had done with him; but the losses might not improve the temper of the pack, though they partially stayed the hunger of a few. And the white wolf seemed to know that. Full devilish indeed was the cunning of that brute.