The Way of the Wild Part 19

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, s.h.i.+ning, 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 sh.o.r.e--always towards the sh.o.r.e. It is true that the tide was falling offsh.o.r.e, 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 gra.s.s behind the rock-bowlders, and brown-plush furze behind the green gra.s.s, 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 carca.s.s on land. Sometimes they touch things on land which were not carca.s.ses 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 a.s.sist him in their own peculiar way, or a raven, who would not a.s.sist 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sing, 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 sh.o.r.es 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 sh.e.l.l-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 k.n.o.b 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 sh.o.r.e crabs, and they hopped, and they sat up hunched, like hobgoblins, and--they scratched!

This last identified them, for the soulless, sh.e.l.led crab-people are not given to scratch much--at least, not in _that_ way. They were rats--sh.o.r.e rats. The last designation is necessary, for there are rats _and_ rats, all bad, but the sh.o.r.e 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 sh.e.l.l-fish he relieves of life are legion.

The hard, h.o.r.n.y carapace of a retreating crab sc.r.a.ped, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 sh.o.r.e crabs could be nothing to him. But a few hundred ravening sh.o.r.e 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 sc.r.a.pe of h.o.r.n.y sh.e.l.ls 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 fas.h.i.+on?

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 pa.s.sed. 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 sc.r.a.ped 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.