Part 5
Meanwhile Tiger was spinning slowly on the rope. He started to swing, backwards and forwards, aiming for the ledge whereon was the mass of twigs and sticks comprising the ravens’ nest. He was about two hundred feet above the rocks, and looking down he noticed how the waves slid smoothly over them, churning and boiling white with foam afterwards. Sometimes a gull passed near him, showing its yellow beak with the reddish blotch at the end. Now he was swinging nearer the ledge--in and out, in and out. Once or twice he looked upwards and wondered what he should do if the old ravens came for him. He had no stick, and their beaks could easily pierce a lamb’s skull. But not so much as a croak was to be heard. He decided--as he heaved to and fro--that with his share of the money he would buy a purse-net for shore-fishing. Nearer and nearer he swung to the nest, and at last he could touch it with his foot. But the time was not yet, so he pushed hard away with his feet, and a loose fragment of stone, dislodged from above, hissed past him, and grew smaller as it dropped towards the sea. Once more he pushed away from the ledge, which was about two feet wide, swung towards it, grasped a projecting stone, clung hard with his left hand, and gave one tug on the guide-rope. Up above they lowered him one foot, and he clambered to the ledge, panting.
In the centre of the cradle of sticks, a yard across, gaped three fledgeling ravens. At sight of Tiger they opened their big black beaks in fear and croaked dolefully. He put his hand over and one pecked at it; he struck it a sharp blow and it croaked the more, deep, rasping, and hoarse.
Tiger knew he would have to hurry. He seized one of the three birds by the leg and dragged it from the fouled nest, to which it clung gawkily. But at last it was free, its legs tied with the twine already looped to his belt, and thrust into his basket. Quickly he seized the other two and tied them, noticing while he did so that pieces of dead gulls, rabbits, chickens, lamb’s wool, fish, frogs, and broken ducks’ eggs lay about on the twigs. At last he had secured them, and left the ledge. The old birds, if they were near, made no sign. For a while Tiger swung idly, satisfied, looking lazily at the tide below. A few stones hurtled down, and one hit his wrist, numbing it; the fledgelings kicked and struggled, squawking. Three minutes, and his swinging was much lessened; he gave five tugs for the hauling signal.
There was no response, for just before John Smith and Aaron had realised with fear that the crowbar had worked loose in the sward. Unthinkingly they had relaxed the strain, and the loose stratum had yielded.
The Tiger tugged away, but there was no answering lift. Five times he tugged, slowly. He hung still over the rocks, whence the tide was now ebbing, leaving them gaunt and gray.
Up above the two men held tight. They dared not move, for fear of the bar coming right out of the ground. If there had been one more man it would have been possible to haul Tiger up, bit by bit. As it was, they could only remain still. The weight on the rope was heavy, but they could stop so for hours if need be; till help came, at any rate.
Presently Tiger realised what had happened, and grunted in disgust. He started to climb, using his arms only, for he was frightened lest he should hurt the birds and so lessen their value. Dimly he realised that if he tired and dropped, the rope would jerk the other two over the cliff-edge, and all three, with the birds, would crash to their death. He climbed twenty feet, feeling no fatigue. There was another hundred feet to go, easy work, before the cliff bulged slightly. Slabs of dislodged rock hurtled past him, and one cut his brow. The blood poured into his eye, and he spat angrily.
When the first ache came to his damaged wrist he wound the rope round his right leg and stood upon it. He cared no longer about the birds. But he knew that to rest thus was no rest at all, so upwards he went again--a terrible laboured climbing, slowly and with a strained wrist, blood running from broken knuckles, and the sweat pouring from his body. He began to feel the weight of the dragging loop of rope below him, but still he struggled upwards. A shower of dust spat into his face, and he wondered if he were blinded. His arms shook, his muscles burned, and his palms, in spite of their coating of horn, were beginning to tear. He could hardly see for the blood and sweat in his eyes, and as he breathed he snored heavily, with great shuddering gasps.
The jutting-out cliff was just above him now. Here the rope lay flat and taut against the loose rubble, but he dug each hand alternately into the shale and literally dragged himself up, fist over fist. Then it was possible to press his toes into the slight slope, and rest.
For a minute he lay thus, in agony. But he knew that to rest much was fatal; reaction would set in. He wound his left leg round the rope, seized the guide-rope (which ran through another loose belt) and patiently pulled its lower end through so that there should be no slack between him and the two men above. After an eternity of patient hauling the line lay straight between him and the lip of the Hole. Then he wound it twice round his thick neck, and bit on it firmly with his teeth. This done, he gave five tugs on it, and saw it tighten. Crushing his jaws together, he took the mighty strain, and was drawn up a foot. Arching his back, and leaning out nearly at right angles to the face of the cliff, he put one foot above the other. All the weight of his ascent was borne by his teeth; they were his last hope. Tiger’s teeth were yellow like old ivory, and the best in the village. Many a time he had taken a hundredweight sack in them and moved about with it; many a time he had swung from a beam by them, holding a rope in his jaws. Now they were to save his life. Both the haulers and himself were well-nigh exhausted when his beard covered with blood-stained froth appeared over the lip of the cliff, and they dragged him sobbing and cursing on the matted grass.
Ten minutes later they had coiled up their ropes, taken up the bar, and were walking quickly to the village. The three ravens were alive and well, quite unhurt by Tiger’s struggles. The men spoke seldom as they walked; their fear was that the policeman would see them.
They reached Tiger’s cottage in safety and closed the door behind them. His wife had a two-gallon jar of small ale for them, and Tiger drank a gallon, only pausing to fill his basin. Then he licked his moustache, and sat down on a chair. The other two men had thrown the tackle on the table, and were taking deep draughts of the beer. They had finished the two gallons when a succession of heavy blows came on the door; these ceased, and there was a great thudding on the roof.
At first they thought it was the policeman. Rural folk are usually terrified at the idea of the law; they have the simple imagination of children.
“Come in, zur,” quavered Mrs. Tiger.
Aaron, who was a devout chapel-goer, began to tremble.
“It be a ghostie!” he whispered.
“Git out!” scoffed Mrs. Tiger, for she had seen two large black shapes that she recognised pass across the little window.
Sure enough, the old ravens had discovered their young. The curious thing, Muggy emphasised, was that there had been no sign of them either during Tiger’s climb or afterwards, while the three men were tramping the three miles to his cottage, nor had they heard any croaking.
Meanwhile, the people in the cottage were fearful that the policeman would come their way and discover everything. The old birds kept banging away at the thatch, tearing out great mouthfuls of it in an endeavour to get at the fledgelings. Tiger did not dare to use his gun; the situation frightened him; so he opened the door. Immediately the cat pounced at a young bird, but one of the old birds swooped down and gave the cat a tap on the head that sent it spinning away, to drop dead with a hole in its skull that Tiger could put two fingers in. The youngsters, with nobody to stop them, got right away, half flying and half hopping.
“And since that day, zur,” Muggy said solemnly, “no raven has been known to touch a lamb. That’s as true as I’m sitting here.”
The ravens have nested on the headland again this year, using their old breeding ledge; and I am glad that at least one pair of these rare birds haunts the solitudes by the sea. No one interferes with them, except the peregrines, but the raven is too much for that fierce swift raider, turning on his back in mid-air and holding his beak upwards like a javelin as the falcon is about to strike. A quick eye the raven needs, for the hawk plunges at about two hundred miles an hour. But they never harm one another, and I know for a fact, having seen it myself, that the ravens practise their turning movement. They love to float in an uprushing wind just below the cliff-edge, and roll over like a twirled distaff, sideways, and then back again. And I think that if any stranger tried to shoot one, the Nightcrow Inn would rise in anger against him. The ravens have earned their sanctuary.
THE OUTLAW:
_Being the indisputable (journalese) truth about the peregrine falcon that came to St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1920._
The beechwood was ten miles from London. One morning in late September a strange visitor came to it, and perched upon a low branch. A blackbird, feeding below among the dried moss and brown leaves, shrilled a sudden alarm. The blackbird had never seen such an apparition before, but he recognised the family.
The newcomer remained still. He was tired and exhausted after a long journey. Since dawn he had flown high up, his pinions urged on and on by a fierce despair. For his mate had been shot upon Lundy Island, and he had flown straight into the sun’s face as though to find her spirit taken back into its flame that gave all the wild ones life. Swift had he flown, never pausing till he came to the beechwood; seeing it below, and wrapping his wings around him, he had fallen like a great iron arrowhead into its solitude.
The pigeons who roosted were in the stubble: the starlings haunted the water-meadows: the jackdaws flocked with the rocks about the furrows. The beechwood was still, for the blackbird had slipped away.
The stranger flapped his long thin wings, and looked around him.
He was about eighteen inches long, and bluish-ash in colour. His throat and upper breast were white, tinged with yellow, and marked with a few dark streaks. But the most noticeable thing was the eyes. They were large, and keen, dusky; ringed with yellow eyelids. Fierce and remorseless was their expression, aided by the short, hooked bill.
The falcon suddenly stiffened. From the lake below the sloping forest had come a faint trumpet-like call. He knew the call well, for many times had he and his mate preyed upon the wild duck in the Devon estuary opposite Lundy Island.
The next moment he had gone through the trees, a swift shadow. A little vole splitting a beechmast on the ground below crouched in terror. For everything preyed upon its kind. The weasel came by day, and in summer the grass snake; if it left the wood and went to the meadow there was the poised kestrel hawk; in the furrows a fox sometimes ran, snapping at the tiny mice; in the dark night came the great wood owl, and that white devil, the barn owl.
The mouse crouched in terror, but he passed on, a swift shadow: he was a noble bird, and did not take rodents.
Seven duck had flighted, and were going towards the reaches of the Thames. They flew fast and steadily, at fifty miles an hour. The passing narrow shadow became a relentless and swift whirling speck above them, ever climbing.
Then one of the duck was falling, the flight was scattered; the falling one clutched and borne to the beechwood, where the hooked beak tore and ripped.
Thenceforward the wood became a place of terror. One morning the keeper discovered a cock pheasant lying dead on the leaves. A small part of its breast had been eaten. At first he thought that it was the work of a fox--but he was puzzled; he knew that the fox usually ate more of a longtail than a small part of its breast, and always buried his half-eaten victim for consumption on another occasion. And on turning it over, he was still more puzzled. The back was ripped as though a knife had slashed and turned the skin right back.
A hundred yards away he found a carrion crow. The back of the crow was also smashed, although no attempt had been made to eat any section of its body. In other parts of the wood the keeper found slain pheasants, all badly broken; the remains of a squirrel--one forepaw and a bushy tail comprising the remains. Three dead duck floated in the lake. Whatever new and ghastly thing was causing the havoc, he told his head man later, it seemed to delight in destroying and killing for sport.
Gradually the terror became the topic of talk in the inns roundabout Bromley, in Kent. Some of the bolder and more imaginative declared that it was caused by an Arctic owl--one even said that he had seen it stooping at a dog in the twilight. He was a well-known liar.
No one in the district--which was outlying to a large town just outside the suburban area of south-east London--had ever heard of the like.
The mystery was solved in a sudden manner. The keeper had been setting baited traps--of the “gin” variety--tempting the unknown with the entrails of rabbits. But he caught nothing save a mangy stoat, blind in one eye and the other filming over with age. The gins were of no avail.
The keeper kept fowls in his garden. One day he was sitting in the porch of his cottage, smoking after the midday meal, and ruminating on what the squire had said about giving up the rearing of pheasants. His fowls were strutting and scratching: one had recently produced an egg and was proclaiming the fact with unmelodious insistency.
There came a hissing as of something falling: an alarmed curse from a hen. The keeper jumped up, swearing at the bluish tumbling of narrow wings that had gone over the hedge.
One of his fowls was kicking the air spasmodically. There was blood on the path. He picked the hen up--it was headless.
The keeper swore; he knew what had caused the mischief among his longtails and duck. It was a big hawk--of a kind never seen before. So swiftly had it come that the fowl was decapitated by those dagger spikes on the hind claw of the raider’s feet.
* * * * *
One day a journalist was walking in a meadow. The meadow was near to a copse containing a dozen tall elm trees. In the elms were nearly a hundred black patches--a colony of rooks at their old nests. The rookery had been deserted in June, when old and young birds took to the fields and made local migrations.
That morning a mist had lain in the meadow and the rooks had known that it was time to return to the colony.
As the journalist, happy in the October sunshine, passed near the rookery, he was surprised to see the whole flock--some hundreds of birds--rise with harsh imperative cries into the air. The beating of many jet wings caused a vast soughing, and the leaves below the trees rose and flitter-fluttered with the winnowing. As suddenly as it had begun, the outcry ceased. Yet still the birds climbed higher.
Soon they were just specks against the blue, wheeling like a ring of smoke in one great circle. Then the agitated cries came again. One segment of the circle broke into falling and diving, zooming and slipping, birds, as though a strong wind had scattered them every way.
The journalist was mystified. He sat down to watch, and to discover the reason.
Two of the rooks had left the circle, and were diving to earth. As they came nearer he saw that their wings hung limp. They fell a hundred yards away, and he ran over to them. They were dead.
Picking one up, it was warm, the sunlight gleaming on the hues of its wings, glinting green and purple. Their backs were bare of feathers, and gaping with a terrible wound. He was more mystified, then thought that for some inexplicable reason the other rooks had pecked them to death. But why? He was more puzzled as he thought. He was well known for his puzzles.
Looking up, he saw that the circle had swung higher than ever. Gradually it drifted away, silent.
The journalist, who had some knowledge of natural history and ornithology, returned to London the next day and wrote the incident up as a “news story.” But he could give no explanation. The editor was sceptical; said that it was no good. He laughed, and mentioning that it was “punk,” promptly “spiked” it.
Meanwhile something was about to happen in London.
It was half-past five on Saturday afternoon. The journalist, who worked with a newspaper that went to press on Saturday night for publication on Sunday, was passing St. Paul’s Cathedral. He stopped to look at the pigeons strutting and searching for crumbs upon the worn paving stones. He found two months continuous work to be most exhausting. He still was puzzled about the dead rooks. He had been to every paper in London with his “rook story,” but no one would print it. He even got laughed at as a “fake merchant”--a tribute to imagination, but damning as a reputation.
Like chaff before a blast of wind the pigeons scattered. His paper was rumpled by the agitated draught caused by their departure.
Looking up to the dome he saw a flock of about fifty pigeons wheeling in steady flight near the cross at the top. A speck fell with a suddenness that reminded him of a shot aeroplane: like a plunging halbert-head it was; there was a puff of feathers dancing and fluttering--the flock scattered, dived to earth, anywhere, anyhow, and the dark halbert-head became outlined against the sky, perched on the gilt cross that glistened in the afternoon sun.
Then he knew that it was a peregrine falcon, and thrilling with the sight, took a taxi-cab back to Fleet Street (he was young and keen) and “wrote the story up.”
His editor “liked” the idea, but demanded that it should be rendered in what the journalist thought was the most illiterate English. The journalist and the editor sneered at each other about prose for some time: and the editor won. The illiterate account was penned, mauled over by a sub-editor, and finally displayed prominently on the front page of his paper. But the editor only leered when the journalist asked for his taxi-cab fare.
* * * * *
The falcon, leaving the woods near London came once more. The woods were ten miles from St. Paul’s, and it took him eight minutes to fly to the dome.
His end was an epic one, and becomes such a noble spirit. From what the journalist dreamed, he was able to imagine the death, and here it is.
One morning by the lake side stood a gray stump, a tall thing on two stalk-like legs. The gray stump remained motionless, as though watching his own dull image in the water.
It was a heron fishing.
He remained still for many minutes. Something passed in the water, a long neck shot forward, and a gleaming fish, pierced by the beak, drawn from the lake. The heron, who had paid a visit every morning from the heronry at Tonbridge, flew away; a slow-flapping, unwieldy thing, over a yard in length. His feet stretched out behind him, his head was tucked in between his shoulders.
The falcon was about. He stooped at the heron. Perhaps the spirit of ancestors, who left the gauntletted wrists of falconers to fly at the heron of olden times, was about him: for how else should he have dared that pointed beak? Rolling like a ship in a gale, heavily and in distress, the heron turned on his back, and held his beak pointed at the stooping falcon.
The hawk swerved; swept up again; regained height, wrapped his wings about him and plunged. Again the beak met him, once more he swerved.
So the combat went on. Nearer the keeper’s cottage they drifted. Now the heron was calling in distress, _Kaa-ack, kaa-ack_. Fell the halbert-head, darted the spear-beak, slipped the halbert-head. It was to be a fight to the death, till one should misjudge by the minutest error of time, the plundering heron or the outlawed falcon. The small birds hid themselves in the bushes--the sound of a shot rang out, the heron tumbled in alarm, recovered, flapped away; an eddy of gray feathers swirled in the wind, the echo of the report shivered back from the woods--and the falcon fell on the grass, its beak gaping, and panting for breath.
The keeper picked up the wild one, never more to swoop on “longtail” or “bird,” never more to descend upon terrorised tame pigeon in Barnstaple or the great Dome of London. The proud eyes misted, the noble head fell back--the keeper was surprised to feel how light the bird was; and while he was weighing it in his hand the outlaw died.
* * * * *
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this falcon-raid was that nearly every journalist in London saw the bird; but I saw it first, therefore it is mine.
PEREGRINES IN LOVE
(_To E. G. S._)
In the salt winds of the Atlantic, and above their ancient eyrie, the peregrine falcons anchor their flight with easy mastery of the gusty uptrends of the precipitous headland face. When first the celandine came below the hedges, the male hawk mounted high, and stooped at his larger mate like a black and shaftless arrowhead of iron, uttering shrill love-notes the while. Now the dog violets and the red campion flowers are among the grasses; the pink sea-thrift blooms in sheltered places; and still the peregrines pursue each other and kiss with swift fondness over the foamed waters.
The kestrel is considered by some naturalists to be the most scientific hoverer of our British hawks. Certainly he uses with great skill the winds of heaven for his livelihood. He leans upon the moving air, sometimes slipping sideways and losing height, but reassuming poise by quick beats of his chestnut pinions. Our largest hawk, the buzzard, is common in this district by the sea, and with large wings outspread he sails circlewise till his prey is detected, when a slow descent is made to the ground. Often these birds have been observed to hang low over the heather and gorse, motionless, wings arched and bent backwards, for nearly a minute at a time. But the peregrines, so swift and ruthless in flight and habit, out-hover both the kestrel and the buzzard. The hovering of the kestrel is weak, delicately balanced; that of the buzzard clumsily weighty, and only managed in a strong air-current; the peregrine falcon cuts into the gusts, controlling his flight with instant power, unheeding the wind’s vagaries. He can remain still, soar higher, or drift sideways with ease.
The eyrie is a hundred feet down the cliff-face, upon a narrow ledge. For years their young have been taken by the Tiger, a small, wiry man who, descends by a rope attached to a driven crowbar, swings inwards to the ledge, and is hauled to the top with the young falcons in a basket. Yet every year when the celandines come the falcons’ courtship begins, ending only when the scent of the wild thyme fades and the sea-thrift rusts with autumn’s decay. They hunt together, ranging afar. Their stoop is terrible to behold, so swift and shattering its ending. It may be at a rabbit which ventures forth from the holes of the swarded slopes, at a stock-dove beating speedy flight from Lundy Island, or at an immigrant swallow flying from alien wastes to the shore and sanctuary. Nothing is immune from ravage save the larger gulls and the sombre ravens, who croak defiance from their aerial soughing.