Part 3
At that moment when he had dropped upon all fours and darted forward through the grass toward the nest, all the immobility of the watching bittern had vanished. His long crest standing straight up in his fury, he had launched himself to the attack, covered the intervening distance with two tremendous thrusts of his powerful wings, and fallen like a cyclone upon the violator of his home. The dagger of his bill had struck deeply, though at random; his hard wing-elbows had landed their blows effectively; and the impetus of his charge had swept the battle clear of the nest, thus saving the two remaining eggs from destruction. The same impetus carried him clear of his foe and a couple of paces past, but he turned adroitly in the air and landed facing about, ready for the inevitable counter-attack.
Amazed and startled though he was, and handled with a roughness quite new to his experience, the mink was in no way daunted. Rather he was so boiling with rage that his wonted wariness forsook him completely. With a snarl that was almost a screech he sprang straight at the long, exposed, inviting throat of his adversary. Had those keen white fangs of his, still dripping with egg, reached their aim, the fight would have been over. His leap was swift, true, and deadly. But equally true, and more swift, was the counter-stroke. He was met, and stopped in mid-air, by a thrust of the bittern's bill, which, had he not twisted his head just in time, would have split his skull. As it was, it laid open one side of his snarling face, destroyed one eye, and brought him heavily to the ground. Even under this punishment, however, he would not acknowledge defeat. Springing aside, with a lightning zigzag movement to confuse the aim of that terrific bill, he darted low and made a leap at his antagonist's long, vulnerable legs. He missed only by a hair's breadth, as the bittern, keenly alive to the risk of such a manoeuvre, leapt nimbly aside and baulked him with a stiff wing-stroke. He seized the baffling wing and strove to pull his tall adversary down. But two great pinion feathers came away in his jaws, and the next moment he got another terrible, driving stab from the dagger beak, well forward on the flank. It was a slanting thrust, or it would have pierced his lungs; but it nearly knocked the wind out of him, and ploughed a deep red gash in his glossy coat.
Screeching furiously, he doubled on himself like a snake to meet this attack. But at the same moment he cringed under another excruciating stab, this time in the haunch; and looking up, he saw himself enveloped in a cloud of blinding wings. The hen bittern had arrived to join in the defence of her nest.
Now, bloodthirsty and merciless marauder though he was, the mink's courage was a thing beyond dispute; and terribly though the fight had so far gone against him, with a single foe to confront he would probably have held on to the death. But for all his fury he was not quite mad; and this reinforcement of the enemy was too much for him. Suddenly straightening himself out long and small like an eel, he slipped from under the terrifying storm of wings and stabs, and made off through the grass at the best speed that in all his swift career he had ever attained. He made for the water, which he felt would be his safest refuge. The angry bitterns were after him on the instant, flying as low as possible and stabbing down at him through the grass-stems. But his cunning and slippery zigzags enabled him to dodge most of their thrusts; and in their eagerness they got in each other's way--which probably saved him his bare life. At length, streaming with blood, and leaving behind him a red trail to proclaim his discomfiture to the mice, he reached the water, and dived in. Without daring to come to the surface he swam across the channel--here about two score paces in width--and cautiously raised his head behind a screen of over-hanging weeds. He saw his two pursuers standing, motionless and erect, on the opposite bank, watching with fierce eyes for him to reappear. He decided not to reappear. Submerging himself again, he swam on down stream till he had rounded a sharp bend of the channel. When he thought it prudent to show himself once more, he was sheltered from those avenging eyes by a dense screen of alder and willows. These bushes were full of nesting red-wings, who chattered at him angrily. He paid no heed to their scolding, but hurried through the thicket, and on down the bank till he found an ancient musk-rat hole. Into this he crept eagerly, and lay down in the grateful dark to nurse his wounds and his humiliation.
After the disappearance of the mink the hen bittern soon returned to her nest. But the male stayed where he was. From time to time he would snap up a butterfly or beetle, or spear a passing frog or chub or sucker. But always his indignant heart was hoping that the mink would return. After an hour or two, however, his wrath died down and he began to forget.
Then he would occasionally vary his still-hunting, by walking with slow, meditative steps up and down the strip of bare ooze between the grass and the water, feeling out with his sensitive claws the little freshwater clams which lay hidden in the mud. The clams were scarce, however, so along about the middle of the afternoon he flapped lazily back to his old fishing station on the other side of the meadow.
Later in the day, when the osiers were beginning to throw long shadows across the water, and the red-and-black butterflies had grown too indolent to dance, and the blue-and-amethyst dragon-flies had ceased their hawking of mosquitoes over the lily-pads and arrow-weed, the great bittern, full fed and at ease with life, flapped languidly up from the water-side and dropped close beside the nest. His brooding mate lifted her head, as if in greeting, and laid it back at once between her shoulders, with her yellow bill pointing skyward as was her vigilant custom.
Soon the first warm tints of sunset began to stain the edges of the clouds above the far fringes of the swamp. Motionless and erect beside his mate, the bittern watched the oncoming of the enchantment as his day drew to its quiet close. Suddenly the coloured quiet of the air was disturbed by the beating of hurried wings. He glanced upward, without moving. A mallard drake, in frantic flight, whirred past, fifteen or twenty feet above his head, making for the water. Close after the fugitive, and swiftly overhauling him with long, tremendous thrusts of his mighty wings, came that most dreaded cut-throat of the air, a great blue goshawk. Swift and bullet-like was the flight of the desperate fugitive; but that of the hawk was far swifter. Had the water been two feet further away the fate of the glossy drake would have been sealed. He would have been overtaken, his throat torn out in mid-air, his body carried off to the nearest tree-top to be plucked and devoured. But this time the inscrutable Fates of the wilderness, too seldom so lenient to the weak, decided to favour him. With a heavy-sounding splash he shot down into the blessed water, and disappeared into safety beneath the lily-pads, just in time.
The destroying talons of the great hawk clutched convulsively at the dandy curled tips of his tail as he vanished.
With his arrowy speed, his precision of stroke, his audacity and fiery spirit, the blue goshawk was little accustomed to the experience of being baulked of his prey. He knew well enough that his quarry would not show itself again, but would swim away under water and only come up to breathe in the safe shelter of some dense thicket of rushes. With a sharp yelp of wrath, he swept up from the water on a long, graceful curve, wheeled sharply above the osiers, and sailed back low above the bittern's island, seeking other prey. And his piercing gaze fell upon the bittern, standing rigid beside the nest.
His swoop was instantaneous, straight and swift as a bolt from a cross-bow. But that coiled steel spring of the bittern's neck was even swifter; and as his talons struck downward, the bittern's dagger thrust caught him in the very centre of the impending claw, splitting the foot fairly and disabling it. Nevertheless, by the shock of the attack the bittern was borne downward, and would have been caught in the breast or throat by the other talon; but at the same instant his watchful mate, who had half risen on the nest that her eggs might not be crushed in the melee, delivered her thrust. It went true. And it had not only the drive of her sinewy neck behind it, but also the full force of her powerful thighs, as well as the assailant's descending weight to drive it home. It caught the goshawk full in the base of the neck, pierced clean through, and severed the spine. And in a wild confusion of sprawled legs and pounding wings the three great birds fell in a heap in the grass, just beyond the nest.
The two bitterns nimbly extricated themselves, and with wings pounding, stabbed savagely, again and again, at the unresisting body of the hawk. Presently, as if by one impulse, they both stood up, erect and still as images, their yellow bills dripping with blood. The male had a bleeding gash along the side of his head, and had lost several of his haughty crest feathers. But this concerned him little. His heart swelled with triumph. He was forced to give it utterance. He snapped his bill sharply, gulped a few mouthfuls of air, and then sent forth his booming challenge across the swamp:--_Klunk-er-glungk ... Klunk-er-glungk ... Klunk-er-glungk_.
His mate spread her broad wings, shook herself till her ruffled plumage fell into place, wiped her conquering bill on the grass, stepped delicately back into the nest, and softly settled herself down upon her two eggs, so miraculously preserved.
Silence fell on Lost-Water Swamp. The air became gradually transfused with amethyst and pale rose. And then, far and faint, tranquil and poignant, came the entrancing cadence--_Oh, spheral, spheral, oh, holy, holy, spheral_--the silver vesper ecstasy of the hermit-thrush, in his tree-top against the pellucid sky.
*QUILLS THE INDIFFERENT*
Quills was born in a capacious hole in the heart of a huge and ancient red maple, near the banks of the Tobique River, in New Brunswick.
The hole had to be capacious, for Quills's mother was a fine porcupine, in her prime, fully two and a half feet in length, massive in build, and a good twenty pounds in weight; and, moreover, her armament of long, bristling spines made it essential that she should not be unduly crowded in her nest. But the entrance was only large enough for her to squeeze through it without discomfort, so the dusky interior was sheltered, warm and dry. It was also safe; for in all the wilderness there was no savage marauder reckless enough to invade a porcupine's nest while the owner was at home.
In proportion to the size of his mother, Quills, like all young porcupines, was an amazingly big baby--hardly smaller, indeed, than the new-born cub of the black bear. His length was about eleven inches, his weight a shade over two pounds--and this when he was not yet twenty-four hours old. He was richly clothed with long, dark fur, almost black, under which lay hidden his sprouting armament of spines, already formidable, though only about half an inch in length. Born with the insatiable appetite of his tribe, he lay stretched out between his mother's stumpy fore-legs, nursing greedily, with an incessant accompaniment of tiny squeaks and squeals of satisfaction. The sounds were loud enough to attract the notice of two little black-and-white woodpeckers who had just alighted on the trunk near the hole. With sleek heads cocked alertly, and bright eyes keen with interrogation, they listened to the curious noises inside the tree. Then they clambered on up the trunk to a safer height, wondering, no doubt, that any youngling should be guilty of such an indiscretion as thus to betray the secret of its hiding-place. They could not know that the porcupine baby, almost alone among the babes of the wild, was exempted, through the reputation of his spines, from the law of silence as the price of life. Young or old, the porcupine will make a noise whenever it pleases him to do so, and with a lofty indifference as to who his hearers may be.
* * * * * *
It was spring, and spring comes late to the high valley of the Tobique stream. The ancient red maple, still full of vigorous life in the sap-wood of its outer shell, in spite of the great hollow at its decaying heart, was mantled over every branch and twig with a glowing veil of tiny rose-bud blooms, though the green of its leaf-buds was hardly yet showing through the brown sheaths. The ice had been broken up and been swept away in tumbling masses, and the current of the swift river, swollen with the spring freshet, filled the air about the porcupine's nest with a pleasant, softly thunderous roar. From all the open glades the snow was gone, though masses of it, shrunken and greyish and sprinkled with dead leaves and twigs, still lingered in the fir thickets and the deeper hollows. On the drier hillocks and about the rotting stumps a carpet of round, flat, yellowish-green and bronzy leaves shielded the lurking pink-and-white blossoms and haunting perfumes of the Mayflower, or trailing arbutus, the shy darling of the Northern spring. The fairy fragrance came and went elusively across the pervading scent of moist earth and spicy balsam-tips, as the mild breeze pulsed vaguely through the forest.
It was mid-afternoon of the second day of Quills's life. Pleasantly fatigued from his double duty of nursing and growing, he fell into a sound sleep. Then his mother, spurred by the now insistent demands of her own appetite, gently disentangled herself from the clutch of his baby claws in her fur, crawled from the hole, and descended the trunk to seek a hasty meal.
But what was haste for a porcupine would have been regarded at the extreme of lazy loitering in any other creature of the wild. At the foot of the old maple she stood for some moments loudly sniffing the air with her blunt nostrils. Then, as if making up her mind that it was hemlock she wanted, she ambled off with heavy deliberation to the nearest hemlock tree, climbed it with a noisy rattling of claws, settled herself comfortably in the first crotch, and fell to gnawing the rough bark. When she had taken the edge off her appetite with this fare--which no stomach but a porcupine's could ever digest--she crawled out along a branch, as far as it would bear her weight, and, gathering a lot of the slender twigs between her fore-paws, made a hearty dessert of the dark-green, glossy frondage. Other hemlocks, standing at a greater distance from her nest, already bore the conspicuous marks of her foraging; but this one she had hitherto left untouched against the day when she would be wanting to take her meals near home.
While his mother was away feeding, Quills had slept, soundly and silently, for perhaps an hour or more. Then he woke up--hungry, of course, as befitted a healthy young porcupine. Finding no warm mother to snuggle him and feed him, he at once set up his small but earnest complaint of whines and squeals and grumbles, all unconcerned as to who or what might overhear him.
As it chanced at this moment, a hungry weasel--the most insatiably bloodthirsty of all the wilderness prowlers--was just approaching the foot of the old maple, nosing out the somewhat stale trail of a rabbit. As his keen ear caught these tell-tale sounds from within the tree, he stopped short, and his malignant little eyes began to blaze. Then he glided around the great trunk, halted just below the hole, and sniffed discriminately at the strong fresh scent upon the bark. But at this point he hesitated--and it is not usual for a hungry weasel to hesitate. The scent was porcupine, and a grown-up porcupine was a proposition which not even his audacity was prepared to tackle. The sounds from within that tempting hole, to be sure, were the voice of a baby porcupine. But was the baby alone, or was the mother with it? In the latter case, he would as soon have jumped into the jaws of a lynx as enter that hole. The fresh scent on the bark offered no solution to the problem. Was it made in coming out or going in? He sniffed at it again, growing fiercer and more hungry every moment.
Suddenly he heard behind him a dry rattling of quills and a confused noise of squeals and chattering grunts. The mother porcupine was hurrying across the moist turf, gnashing her jaws, and looking twice her natural size with every quill on end. In her rage and anxiety she was making remarkable speed for a porcupine. The weasel, his long white fangs bared and his eyes red with disappointed fury, whipped about and stood facing her till she was within three or four feet of him. But for all his rage he was no fool. For her gnashing yellow teeth he had no respect whatever. But those deadly, poisonous, needle-sharp spines of hers! He had no wish to interview them too closely. With eleventh-hour discretion he slipped aside to make way for her, and glided off to pick up again the trail of the rabbit.
The mother porcupine never even turned her head to see where the enemy had gone to. Wild with anxiety, she scrabbled up the trunk and into her nest. Her experienced nose, however, at once assured her that the weasel had not been inside. Instantly appeased, she stretched herself on her side, drew the complaining youngster to her breast, licked and nosed him for a few moments, and settled into a comfortable doze.
Having this hearty mother's attention all to himself--an exceptional advantage, as a porcupine baby has generally one brother or sister, if not more, to share the maternal supply--young Quills grew and throve amazingly. And his armoury of spines throve with him. In a few weeks he was out of the hole and following his mother up into the hemlock trees, where he speedily learned to feed on the glossy green tips of the frondage. From this diet he passed quickly to the stronger fare of the harsh and bitter bark, the gnawing of which was a delight to his powerful, chisel-like teeth. By the time the full flush of the Tobique summer, ardent and swift, had crowded the rich-soiled valley with greenery and bloom, Quills's mother had grown altogether indifferent to him. She had long ago refused him her breasts, of which, indeed, he had no further need. But she still permitted him to follow her about, if he wanted companionship, so long as he did not trouble her. And in this way he learned the few things--astonishingly few, it would seem--that a porcupine needs to know in order to hold his own in the struggle for existence. He learned, among other things, that nearly all the green stuff that the forest produced was more or less fit for his food, that there were other trees besides the hemlock whose bark was tasty and nourishing and pleasantly resistant to his teeth, and that in a broad, sunny backwater of the river there grew a profusion of great round flat leaves, the pads of the water-lily, which were peculiarly thrilling to his palate. In fact, most of his learning had to do with food, which was what he appeared to live for. His enemies were few, and seldom enthusiastic. And he never troubled his head about avoiding them. With an indifference nothing less than colossal, he left it to them to avoid him, if they wished; and they did so wish, ninety-nine times out of the hundred.
Along towards the latter part of August, Quills found that his mother was no longer indifferent. She had grown actively unfriendly. Whenever he came near her she grunted and chattered to him in such an irritable fashion that it was obvious, even to a not over-sensitive spirit like his, that his companionship was distasteful to her. This attitude neither grieved nor angered him, however. She was no longer of any importance to him. He simply quit following her, went his own way, and forgot her. Striking off on his own, and impelled by instinct to seek a fresh range for himself, he plunged into the still, warm tide of the sunny backwater and swam, with much splashing and little speed, to the opposite bank. Swimming was no task to him, for his coat of hollow quills made it impossible for him to sink. The backwater was not more than thirty or forty yards in width, but when he had crossed it, and crawled forth upon the opposite bank, he felt that he had found a new world, and owned it. He ambled joyously along the bank to a point where he had marked a bed of bright-green arrow-weed, and gorged himself to his great content on the shapely, pointed leaves and stout succulent stalks. Then he climbed a big poplar and curled up to sleep, self-sufficient and pleased to be alone.
Quills was by this time more than half grown up, and, moreover, thanks to his happily selected parentage and his ample nourishment when a baby, he was as big and strong as many a less favoured porcupine achieves to be at maturity. In colour he was of a very dark brown, verging on black, and peppered with a dingy yellowish white, his long fur being dark with light tips, and his spines cream-coloured with black tips. The spines on his body ranged from two to four inches in length, and when he was not angry, they were partly concealed by the fur, which was considerably longer. The quills on his head and the sides of his face were about an inch in length. His short, blunt muzzle was free from spines, but closely furred to the lips, and conspicuously adorned by his large and prominent front teeth, his gnawing teeth, which were of a vivid dark yellow colour. His legs and all the under parts of his body were clothed in dense, soft fur, entirely without spines. His tail, about five inches in length, was very thick and powerful, and heavily armed with spines to the tip. The spines on his body were for his protection, but this armed tail was his one weapon of offence--a weapon with which at a single stroke he could fill an enemy's mouth or paws with a hundred barbed and poisonous needles; and the peculiar deadliness of these needles, large and small alike, lay in their power of swift and inexorable burrowing. Once their subtle points penetrated the skin, their innumerable, microscopic, scale-like barbs would begin working them inwards through the muscles, setting up violent inflammations as they went, till they would reach some vital part and put their wretched victim out of his misery.
So far in his career young Quills had had no occasion to test the efficiency of that formidable tail of his as a weapon, though from time to time he would stretch himself elaborately, leg after leg and claw after claw, ruffle up all his spines as if to see that they were in working order, and lash out alarmingly with the aforesaid tail by way of keeping it efficient and ready for action. And now, as luck would have it, the first enemy he was to encounter was the very one against whom his best defences were of least avail--namely, Man himself. But fortunately for young Quills, and for this his brief biography, the man in question was neither needing meat--least of all, such harsh meat as porcupine--nor of a destructive disposition. He was magnanimous, and Quills never knew that he held on to his little lease of life by favour.