The Way of the Wild Part 9

Indeed, he appeared to prefer traveling in ballast that way. But his eyes shone, and his wing-strokes, with little pauses of rigidity between, such as many birds take--only one doesn't notice it much--were strong and sure.

Once a large-winged, smudged shape, making no sound as it slipped across the heavens, came flapping almost up to him, peering this way and that at him and his companions, with amber flaming eyes set in a cat-like, oval face. The thrush's heart gave a great jump, and seemed threatening to choke him, for that shape--and it howled at him suddenly, in a voice calculated to make strong men jump--was death of the night, otherwise a short-eared owl.

But a gun went "boomp!" with that thick, damp sort of sound that smacks of black powder, somewhere down on earth, and a huge "herd" of green plover, _alias_ peewits, which are lapwings, rose, as if blown up by an explosion, to meet them, their thousand wings flickering in the frost-haze like a shower of confetti, and the owl was so disconcerted by the disturbance that he dropped back into the night whence he came, as one who falls into a sea.

Then suddenly the thrush--all the thrushes, indeed--tipped tails, and flew downward--offering no explanation to help one to understand why--till they dropped, each one entirely on his own hook, apparently, in or about some gardens, as if they had tumbled out of the sky; and our thrush, in twenty seconds, had slipped into some apple-trees, and thence to some laurels round a shed, and--was asleep! I say "was asleep." Out of the starry sky, down, in under, and asleep--all without emotion, and like a machine. Now, what is one to make of such a bird?

He did not see, or, more correctly, did not appear to see--for I do not know what he saw and what he pretended not to see, really--the lean, lithe, long, low weasel that pa.s.sed, climbing and sniffing, beneath him--within six inches--possibly scenting out a rat. He did not hear, or show that he heard, the blackbird--she was rusty, dark brown, as a matter of actual fact--scream, a piercing and public-spirited scream, when the very big claws of a little, round, spotted-feathered ball with wings, like a parody of a cherub--but men call it a little owl, really--closed upon her and squeezed, or pierced, out her life. He did not feel, or let on that he felt, the branches gently sway as two eyes, glinting back the light of the moon--eyes which were the property of a "silver tabby" female cat--floated among the twigs, looking for him, him most certainly, whom she seemed faintly to smell, but never saw.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A 'silver tabby' floated among the twigs, looking for him"]

These things represented tense moments dotted through hours of cold, dark silence, and the blue-black dome of night arched, and the moon drifted, all in rigid, cold, and appalling stillness.

Then the wind changed, and our thrush awoke to a "muggy" day, under a soaked, cotton-wool, gray sky, all sodden with streaming showers of rain. And, by that token alone, he must have known that he was in England. No other climate is capable of such crazy, unwarned, health-trying changes. He had come in an icy, practically petrified silence. He left in a steaming, swis.h.i.+ng, streaming gale.

But that was not before he had been down to scratch like a fowl among the dead leaves under the privet-hedge for grubs, who "kidded"

themselves that they were going to be fine, flas.h.i.+ng insects next summer. He also prospected a snail or two, and broke through their fortifications by hammering the same upon a stone. And, by some magic process that looked akin to the way in which some men divine water, he divined a worm out of seemingly bare earth. It was there, too, and it came up, not joyfully, but tugged, to be hammered and shaken into something not too disgustingly alive to be swallowed.

Then, while a robin mounted to a spruce-spire and acted as Job's comforter to all the birds of the garden by singing--ah, so plaintively and sweetly!--of the dismal days of frost and snow, he "preened"--i.e.

went over and combed every feather, and tested and retested, cleaned and recleaned, each vital quill. Then, in one single, watery, weak stab of apology for suns.h.i.+ne, on the top of a fowl-shed, he surrendered himself to what, in wild-bird land, is known as the "sunning reaction,"

which really consists of giving body and mind utterly to the sun and complete rest.

And then he left.

Now, it was no chance that he left. Birds don't do business that way.

To you or me, that location and its climate would have seemed as good for him to "peg out a claim" in as any other. He knew better.

Something--Heaven alone knows what--within him told him what was coming. He had the power to take a draft on the future, and by that means to save himself--if he could. Wherefore he flew on southward--always south.

And six hours after he had gone, the wind swung like a weather-c.o.c.k, swung and stopped at northeast, and frost began to grip that garden in an iron fist that threatened to squeeze the life out of every living thing in it, and the sky hung like the lid of a lead box.

The thrush flew, with a few halts, practically all day and well into the night, and the northeast wind and the Frost King chased him south.

He roosted in a great fastness of age-old holly-bushes within a wood, whose branches were packed with his relations--redwings, thrushes, and blackbirds, and also starlings--all tired out, all booked for the south.

Some woods seem to hold a curse of gloom. One cannot say why. And this was one of them. And the tawny owl that n.o.body saw but everybody heard, and the white stoat that everybody saw and n.o.body heard, and the amorous dog-fox with the cruel bark that everybody saw and heard, did not, taken together or singly, add to the gayety of the scene.

The thrush was just ahead of the cold when he went to roost in pouring rain. In the night, however, the cold had overtaken him, and the thousand-jeweled beauty of frost-flakes flashed to his waking eye.

He was numbed and puffed out and peevish, and disinclined to move, but anything was better than sticking about in this roosting-place, this casual ward and clearing-house of the wild. The keen starlings were already off, swinging away, regiment by regiment, with a fine, bold rush of wings; the blackbirds were dotting the glades; the redwings were slipping "weeping" away, to find soft fields to mope in; and the pigeon host--what was left alive of it after diphtheria had taken its toll--had streamed onwards, heading southwest.

_t.u.r.dus philomelus_ spelt L-u-c-k for our friend that morn, for he had not prospected two hundred yards when he came on a place where a vagrant "sounder" of half-grown, domestic, unringed pigs had been canva.s.sing the wood for beech-mast, acorns, and roots during the night.

The soil was all torn up for a s.p.a.ce of about an acre, probably the only soil for miles--except along streams and by springs--penetrable by beaks until the sun came out; and the thrush feasted royally upon hibernating caterpillars and chrysalids that would have become moths, beetle larvae all curled up and asleep, and other pests; and he must have done a considerable amount of good in that place during the next hour or so.

But feasts do not go begging long in a frost-bound wild, even if they are hidden; and by the time our thrush had driven several other thrushes away--for he was a jealous feeder--and had been driven away by blackbirds himself more than once, starlings descended upon the place with their furious greed, and our thrush concluded that it was about time to "step off." The crowded place might become a quick-lunch resort for some others, not insect-feeders--hawks, for instance--and was unhealthful for that reason. Indeed, he had not more than moved away into the shelter of the rhododendrons when a shadow with a hooked bill shot round the corner, going like the wind. He had time to see it dive like a dipping kite--but it was a sparrow-hawk--and to hear the death-scream of a feeding blackbird, before he went completely from that place, and it knew him no more.

Soon after that he sighted the sea, wide-stretched and restless, ahead, and turned westward parallel with the coast-line, till, in the afternoon, he came unto "a land where it was always afternoon"--a flat, damp, dwarf-treed, relaxing, gray land, mild, as a rule, and melancholy--a land full of water. But for once it was a cold land, and the thrush realized that the bitter frost had leapt ahead of him, and that he might now never outstrip it again, perhaps. I do not know if he realized, too, that the lead sky, that looked as if it were going to come down and crush one, meant snow.

In a bare orchard he was attracted by the sight of several blue t.i.tmice and two robins, feeding upon one or two odd apples that had been left unpicked at the very top of a tree. It seemed strange and out of place to behold apples in midwinter like that; but, for some reason, he took only a few pecks, and his devil prompted him down to peck at some soaked bread among the violets, and to drink at a spring so exquisitely encrusted with moss that it looked as if everything, every floating dead leaf, stone, and root, had been upholstered in plush.

Then Fate struck--hard.

A snap, a thump, and he was bouncing over and over, with an air-rifle bullet in his thigh. It was a blow that knocked him half-silly, and he was down before he knew, but only for a second, because of what he saw.

He beheld a boy, with an air-rifle in hand, running towards him; but ahead of the boy was the boy's young cat, who evidently had learnt to look for a meal when the air-rifle went off.

The cat, being young, however, managed to bungle his pounce for the fraction of a second, and that is long enough for most of the wild-folk. Came a mad fluttering, a beating of wings, a quick mix-up, and, before he knew, that cat found himself frantically chasing that thrush across the orchard, striking wildly always at a thrush that just wasn't there, as the latter part flew, part hopped, with every ounce of strength and agility that clean, hard living had given him, till he was clear of the trees. Then--up and away, with his heart in his beak, so to speak, and his brain whirling, till the orchard lay "hull down" on the horizon, and was only another bitter experience, and a warning, seared into the bird's memory.

So far, so good. He had made his escape, had euchred Fate, but--the payment for laziness, the terrible cess for a momentary lapse from vigilance, which great Nature, in her grim, wise cruelty, always demands, had to be met, and the end of it was not yet.

It began, however, now.

The thrush discovered that he was not alone in the air, and that he had all at once got himself, as it were, fixed in the public eye, and was "wanted." A swish in the sky made him look up, to see a rook, with a leering eye, coming down upon him. He cleverly "side-slipped" in mid-air, and let the rook, braking wildly, go diving by. Perhaps he wondered what had turned the rook hawk. As a matter of fact, the weather had, partly, and the rifle had, the rest; for the rook could see what the thrush did not yet realize.

The rook went away astern, shouting bad language, and another foe came to take his, or her, place. Again our thrush discovered that he was not alone. Little, white, silent, cruel, dancing flakes of white were traveling more or less with him and downwards, upon the following wind.

The snow! The snow at last! And he was trapped, for it was to keep ahead of the snow that he had journeyed all that way back again.

Indeed, you can hardly realize, unless you have almost lived their life, what the snow and the frost mean to all the thrush people, but more especially to the common song-thrush and the redwing. At the worst it means death; at the best, little more than a living death.

However, to race the snow were useless. Yet he flew on, and on, and on, like a stampeded horse, blindly, one-sidedly, while the ordnance survey map beneath turned from brown, and chocolate, and silver-gray, and dull green, first to pepper and salt, then to freckled white, then all over to the spotless white eider-down quilt of the winter returned, as far as the eye--even his binocular orbs--could reach, m.u.f.fling tree and house, and garden and copse, and farm and field, and fallow and plow and meadow in the one mystical, silent, white disguise of winter.

And the thrush at length came down.

His eye had spotted a little corner of a garden that might have been a spread table in the wilderness. It was only a small triangle of lawn, with a summer-house at its apex, and a spruce-fir and a house at its base, and privet-hedges marking off the rest. But it had a "bird-table," and a swept-clean circle on the gra.s.s, and there was sopped bread upon both. And that place was given over entirely to chaffinches, _all hens_, tripping, mincing, pecking, feasting, fighting--because they were chaffinches, I suppose, and must fight--all over the place.

The thrush came to anchor upon the roof of the summer-house, and--straightway fell upon his beak! And that was Fate's punishment for laziness, one second's relaxation from vigilance.

Righting himself, he almost overbalanced the other way, and only finally managed to come to an intricate halt on one leg. The other leg--the right one--was twisted back under him, in line with his closed wings and tail; that is to say, it was pointing the wrong way for a bird's leg, or, rather, so far as could be seen among the feathers, that was how it seemed. But the leg was not broken; he could still move his toes and expand his foot. Otherwise he could do nothing with it. The leg might not have been there, for all the use it was to him; it would have been better if it had not been there, for it hampered his flight, or unbalanced him, or something, so that he was incapable of traveling now beyond the snow, even if he would. Undoubtedly the air-rifle had done its work.

Now, in the wild it is a fairly sound maxim that an injured wildling is a dead wildling--that is, unless the injury is quite slight. There are exceptions, of course. Flesh-wounds and quick-healing wounds are exceptions.

However, our thrush seemed to be no coward, and he at once buckled to, to fight Fate and all the world--one bird _v_. the rest. It was appalling odds, and I guess no darn fool could have been found to back that bird's chance of winning through.

Then he showed that he had at least one trump up his sleeve. A shape like unto the shape of a silken kite came floating in ample circles across the low-hung sky. And the color of that shape was brown--pale brown; and the shape was alive, and had the appearance of eternally looking for something, which it always could not find. So hunts the kestrel falcon, and by the same token the thrush knew that this was a big hen-kestrel. I say "big" advisedly, because in kestrel society it is the ladies who have the weight and the vote.

And the thrush, who had by that time flown to the ground, promptly "froze "--froze to stillness, I mean--and vanished. It was a startling little trick of his, almost an eccentricity; but the fact was that so long as he kept still on the dark ground where the snow had been swept away--and earth and gra.s.s mingled almost to a black whole against the white--he was practically invisible. This was because of his peculiar somber color. Had he been light of dress, like an ordinary song-thrush, any eye could have picked him up in that spot.

Now, that kestrel was in a bad temper and vicious. She was cursing the snow which covered the doings of the field-mice, which ordinarily were her "staff of life"; and she had not killed since dawn. Hence she was a public danger, even to wild-folk she usually left alone, and just now she was looking for our thrush, who she had seen fly down and--vanish.

There he was, however, bang in the open, uns.h.i.+elded by any cover, motionless on one leg, looking upwards, and, to all intents and purposes, not there. The kestrel came shooting up superbly, going at a great pace on the wind, cutting the cold air like a knife, twisting and turning her long tail tins way and that, but moving her quarter-shut wings not one stroke. Right over him she dived, her wonderful eyes stabbing down, so close that you could see her small, rounded head turning and craning. But no thrush did she see. She "banked," hung, swept round, and came back. Then she hovered, like a bird hung from the sky by an invisible hair; and for our thrush she was indeed the sword of Damocles, for the spot in the air where she hung was directly over him. If anybody had shot her dead at that instant, she would have fallen upon his back. At that instant, or the next, she might fall upon his back, anyway, without anybody shooting her. Indeed, the betting seemed a good few hundred to one that she would.

Very few human beings know the full meaning of the word "still"--not even bluejackets!--but most of the wild-folk do. They have to. So did the thrush, but never before had he kept so utterly, stonily, frozenly, strickenly motionless. If he had moved an eyelid even, winked, or gulped too hard, it would have been all up with him. But he didn't and it was not all up; though the kestrel seemed as if she were going to hover there, in that spot, through all eternity. And when at last she condescended to surrender to the wind and vanish like a falling star into the horizon, our friend was as near nervous prostration and hysteria as a bird can be. A very little longer and I believe he would actually have died from sheer overstrain, instead of from kestrel.

Then the thrush fed. He did it against time, before dark, for if night came and caught him with an empty crop, he froze. Perhaps he would freeze, anyway; but no matter.

The hen-chaffinches, presumably at the end of a journey, or part way along it, too, were in a like hurry, and for the same reason. He could see them now only as faint splashes of white, as they opened tail and wing to fight; but they could not fight _him_, and he savagely kept the little clearing in the snow free of all save himself. It was as if he knew that he was "up against it," and the fact had developed a grim fierceness in his character.

An owl must have gone over about this time, because an owl did go over that garden about the same time every night; but perhaps she was not expecting thrushes in that gloom, or was in a hurry to keep an appointment with a rat. Anyway, the owl did not develop.

Thereafter and at last the thrush went to sleep in a spruce-fir.

Dead silence reigned over the garden, and Cold, with a capital C, gripped the land. Heaven help any bird who roosted on an empty stomach on such a night! It would freeze to its perch before morning, most like.