Swamp Cat Part 5

A rover by nature, he must not rove until conditions were much more auspicious than they were right now. What he knew about the hills consisted largely of the fact that he did not know them at all. But if he stayed near the meadow, he was certain of finding plenty of fat gra.s.shoppers to eat any time he was hungry. It was a common sense decision.

When five deer came slowly into the meadow, Frosty's built-in ear antenna immediately picked up the thudding of their hooves and a moment later he heard their noisy chewing as they ate gra.s.s. He stayed where he was, lacking the slightest idea as to what manner of creature had come into the meadow now but determined to find out. They were feeding toward his stump.

Twenty minutes later, they were directly in front of it and, as before, Frosty eased just far enough out so he could see them. They were big animals, but obviously they intended no harm. When the shuffling hooves of one disturbed a meadow mouse that leaped in wild panic toward the stump, Frosty had only to move aside in order to catch it. He pinned the mouse with his paws, ended its tiny struggle with his teeth and gazed defiantly at the deer.

They swung their heads toward him, jaws moving in graceless discord as they continued to chew the gra.s.s with which they had filled them. Then they lowered their heads to crop more gra.s.s.

Frosty lay down to eat his prize, liking the taste of hot flesh in his mouth and the salty tang of fresh-caught prey. He ate all except the hairless tail, and the mouse whetted his appet.i.te for more. Slipping out from beneath his root, he looked about for the deer.

Still cropping gustily, they were feeding toward the forest on the far side of the meadow. Frosty minced after them. They had driven one mouse from its covert; the chances were that they would drive more. Frosty edged up to a sleek doe that suddenly wheeled and pounded down on him.

Just in time, he saved himself by slipping behind a boulder. . . . When he could no longer hear the plunging doe, he peered over it. She had resumed feeding. More watchful now, Frosty slunk toward the deer. They saw him but paid no attention. Evidently they did not mind his trailing them. They did not want him on the place where they were feeding now or where they might feed a moment from now.

Another mouse panicked. Frosty caught and ate it. By the time he had a third mouse, his appet.i.te was satisfied. In addition, he had learned a priceless lesson; large grazing beasts are apt to disturb small creatures that dwell in the gra.s.s. The deer, having grazed their fill, drifted to beds in the shady forest. Frosty curled up in a sunny spot and let this new world come to him.

When two more crows winged lazily over the meadow, cawing as they flew, he knew it as the same sound he had heard while a prisoner in the sack and satisfied his curiosity on that score. He was alert to every furtive rustling, every note in the multi-toned song the breeze sang, every motion in the gra.s.s and every flutter of every leaf on a grove of nearby sycamores.

The creatures that lived in the meadow were small ones; various insects; moles and mice; cottontail rabbits and harmless snakes. Frosty identified each in turn and after he'd done so, he stored each away in his brain. Having met and known anything at all, it was his forever.

He'd never forget it and never fail to know it should he meet it again.

But there was much that he did not know and the unknown roused his instant curiosity. When he saw a flicker of motion over near the sycamores, he concentrated his whole attention on it.

He did not know that he'd seen one of two gray squirrels that had chosen to abide for a couple of days in the sycamores, or that all he'd seen was a glimpse of its tail as it climbed a tree. It was strange and he could not rest until it was familiar. Frosty began to stalk the sycamores, and the stalk saved his life.

He saw nothing and heard nothing, but the same coyote that had ripped the sack open was suddenly upon him. Knowing of the gray squirrels, and hoping to catch one or the other on the ground, the coyote had been stalking the sycamores, too. Finding Frosty, the creature had accepted him instead.

Not stopping to see what threatened, but reacting instantly, Frosty sprang for a sycamore trunk and drew himself up less than two inches ahead of the coyote's snapping jaws. He climbed to the sycamore's crotch and turned to look down. Tongue lolling like a dog's, the coyote looked anxiously up and whined his disappointment. Then, realizing he'd get nothing among the sycamores, he turned away to hunt some rabbits with whose thicket he was acquainted.

Frosty remained in the sycamore's crotch. Though he had considered himself very alert, he'd had no slight inkling of the coyote's presence until it was almost too late. Concentrating on the gray squirrel, he had given little thought to the fact that something might be stalking him.

Never again must he be so lax--but he had learned.

Had he been beneath the root, very probably the coyote might have dug him out. But, as had just been proven, the coyote was unable to climb trees. It followed, therefore, that a tree would be a much safer place in which to rest. Frosty cleaned his fur, and when one of the gray squirrels appeared in the higher branches of the same tree, he looked at it with challenging interest. But the squirrel fled in panic-stricken terror when it saw the kitten.

Frosty stayed in his perch until just before nightfall, then descended to hunt again. But the gra.s.shoppers, that had been so easy to catch when numbed by early morning cold, were amazingly agile now. The kitten stalked one that was crawling up a blade of gra.s.s. Escaping from between his clutching claws, the insect spread bright-colored wings and flew away. Frosty marked it down, but when he went to the place where it had descended, it was not there. Alighting, the gra.s.shopper had crawled along the ground. Presently, four feet to one side, it spread gaudy wings and took flight once more.

Again Frosty marked it down and again failed to find it. Crawling beneath a dead weed that matched its drab color exactly, the gra.s.shopper was remaining perfectly still.

An hour's hard hunting brought the black kitten one gra.s.shopper, a vast frustration and a mounting hunger. Then twilight crept stealthily over the hills and the gra.s.shoppers settled down in various places where they would pa.s.s the hours of darkness. Because they did not move at all and were almost perfectly camouflaged when holding still, and because it was dark, Frosty could not see them.

He pounced eagerly when a mouse rustled in front of him. But since he did not know how to hunt mice--the only ones he'd caught were those that fled in terror from the feeding deer--he missed. He ambled disconsolately down to the cold little stream that wandered through the meadow.

He was hungry and growing hungrier, but he had not forgotten the earlier lesson of the day when, because he'd given all his attention to the gray squirrel in the sycamores, the coyote had almost caught him. Though he was princ.i.p.ally interested in getting anything at all to eat, he did not neglect that which lay about him. When he came near the stream, he knew that something else was already there. He stalked cautiously forward until he could see what it was.

A mink crouched on the stream bank, busily eating a fourteen-inch trout that it had surprised in the shallows. Sure of its own powers, fearing nothing, the mink gave no attention to anything save the meal it had caught. Finished, it licked its chops and turned to stare at the tall gra.s.s in which Frosty lay.

The mink knew and had known since the kitten came that Frosty was there, for its nose had told it. A b.l.o.o.d.y little creature, ordinarily it might have amused itself by killing the kitten. But a full belly can make even a mink feel good, and after a moment, it turned to travel downstream.

Frosty stole forward to find the trout's tail, head and fins. The epicurean mink had chosen only the choice portions and left this carrion for any scavenger that might come. But it was good and it dulled Frosty's hunger. His meal ended, he washed up, then and went back into the meadow.

No longer hungry and thus no longer finding it necessary to devote his attention to finding food, the kitten could concentrate on the other creatures that had come into the meadow. He sat on a hillock to watch a fox hunt mice.

It was a big, sleek dog fox, with a mate and cubs back in a hillside den, and it made not the slightest effort to stalk its quarry. Instead, it walked openly, head up and ears alert. When it heard a mouse in a gra.s.s-thatched runway, the fox reared, to come stiffly down with both front paws. Five times it reared, and five times it pinned the mouse it wanted and extricated it from the gra.s.s beneath which it was pinned.

Suddenly the fox smelled Frosty and whirled. It came trotting, its att.i.tude more one of aroused curiosity than hostility. The kitten was something new, and before the fox took any further action, it wanted to know exactly what this strange creature was. Its head curving gracefully toward Frosty, it stopped four feet away.

Trapped and knowing it, the kitten made ready to fight. He laid his ears back and framed a snarl on his jaws. The growl that rumbled from his chest was the most ferocious of which he was capable. Looking more amused than cautious, the fox extended an exploring paw. Frosty struck and missed. He was no match for this veteran of the wilderness. The fox circled and the kitten turned with him.

After a short s.p.a.ce, seemingly well-entertained, the fox padded away.

No wanton killer, it was a good hunter and, in this time of plenty, it could take its choice of mice, fat rabbits, or plump grouse. Any one of them was preferable to this snarling kitten, though had it been lean hunting, or had the fox been hungry enough, Frosty would have died right there.

The black kitten tried to hunt mice as he had seen the fox catch them, but, though he could hear them scurrying along their runways, his timing was poor and his knowledge scant. One needed the skill that only experience brought to succeed at this sort of hunting. Frosty leaped a dozen times without pinning even one mouse.

When the five deer came back into the meadow, he trotted eagerly toward them. Though they had no war with mice, the deer never cared where they walked. Their hooves penetrated gra.s.s-roofed runways and now and then plowed into a nest. Whenever they did, the mice suffered a panic that momentarily robbed them of reason or of any desire save to escape destruction.

The feeding deer disturbed two that Frosty caught and ate. With the first light of morning, hunger satisfied, he returned to his sycamore and climbed to the familiar crotch. Impatiently he lay down. He was fed and tired, and he wanted to sleep, but the cold morning wind ruffled his fur and made comfortable sleep impossible.

Any other animal would have accepted conditions as they were and slept anyhow. Frosty was a cat, and cats never accept second best if they can get the best.

Frosty climbed out on one of the sycamore's ma.s.sive limbs until the slender branches in which the limb terminated swayed beneath his weight.

That made him afraid of falling, so he turned and went back. But he was still disinclined to accept a bed where the cold wind could chill him if there were a possibility of something better. He tried a second limb, a third, then went up the trunk and found exactly what he sought.

A big limb, growing out of the trunk, had rotted and fallen. In falling, it had left a cavity that had been enlarged by a pair of pileated woodp.e.c.k.e.rs which had nested in it over a period of years. Blowing leaves had sifted in and partly filled the hollow, and the cold wind seethed harmlessly past. Frosty found it a warm, dry and safe bed. Since the opening was barely big enough to admit him, he could defend it against anything else that tried to enter.

More than once, in the days that followed, it was necessary for him to fill his belly with gra.s.shoppers only for the simple reason that he could catch nothing else. He learned to see them in the gra.s.s, and to gauge his strike so he could catch them before they were able to take to the air. He became an expert hunter of gra.s.shoppers, and the precise training this afforded helped him in other ways.

The mice in their gra.s.s-thatched runways could never be seen. They must be heard, and since the strike was always blind, it had to be exact. A fraction of an inch one way or the other and the mouse escaped. Frosty learned to strike so expertly that almost never did his victim elude him. Only when he was feeling lazy or had a run of bad luck did he depend on the browsing deer to flush his mice for him.

As he lived, so did he learn. Stealthy footsteps foretold some slinking beast of prey. But so did the sudden chatter of an excited bird, a madly-scooting rabbit, or the deer when they stopped eating and became alert. Frosty taught himself to read such signs, and by them he always knew when the coyote or some other dangerous creature was aprowl. He acquired a vast confidence in his own ability to meet and overcome any dangers that threatened.

Hunting mice in the meadow one night, he came face to face with a bobcat that was similarly engaged. The bobcat snarled and leaped at him, and had he turned to run, Frosty would have been overtaken and killed.

Instead of running, he stood his ground and spat back. The bobcat, pretending vast interest in a clump of gra.s.s near the kitten, sc.r.a.ped the gra.s.s with contemptuous feet and stalked away.

Frosty extended his range from the meadow into the woods, and each journey became a bit longer and a bit more daring. He not only lived but lived well, and his first great triumph was achieved some six weeks after he came to the meadow.

Every afternoon, when the sun was hot and high, a mother grouse led her five bobtailed young to some abandoned ant hills beside the forest. The birds burrowed luxuriously in the gritty earth, working it into their feathers and using their wings and beaks to throw it over their backs.

The sand and grit acted as a cleansing bath.

Occasionally other predators visited the meadow in the afternoon, but the grouse came so quietly that these pa.s.sers-by never knew of them.

Frosty, who hunted the meadow almost every afternoon, knew all about them. But after stalking his stealthiest, only to have the mother grouse sound a warning and the whole brood take wing in his very face, he gave himself over to studying them. They were very difficult to stalk because the gra.s.s around the ant hills was short and he could be seen. But after two weeks, he thought he saw a way.

This afternoon, a full hour before the grouse family was due to come out of the woods, Frosty was lying motionless behind one of the ant hills.

His eyes were unblinking and even the tip of his tail did not twitch. To all appearances, he was a dead thing.

He heard the grouse coming; they were announced by the tiny sounds of their own feet and the mother's querulous clucking as she warned her young to take every care. Frosty remained motionless until two of the young grouse mounted the very ant hill behind which he lay. Then, without seeming to move at all and certainly without visible effort, he was up and over. While the other grouse took thundering wing, he fastened his claws in one and pulled it down.

That gave him an inflated idea of his own prowess, and the next afternoon he was again hiding in the ant hills, waiting for the grouse.

They did not come. The young were silly and inexperienced but the mother was no fool. She would never be deceived by the same ruse twice in succession. However, catching just one grouse gave Frosty so much confidence that he increased his field vastly, and as he did, he learned still more.

Because enemies could be anywhere, it was at all times necessary to be sharply alert. But Frosty had already discovered that the things besides himself which could climb trees were disinclined to be hostile, and, once in the forest, he was never very far from a convenient tree. He changed his sleeping place from the sycamore's hollow trunk to the hollow limb of a ma.s.sive oak in the forest.