Chapter 15

Mesomelas side-stepped, and neatly chopped--a terrible, wrenching bite--at his hindleg in passing. It fetched him over, and he lay still, the moon shining on his side, doubly and redly striped now.

This time it was Mesomelas who sprang at his throat--to be met by fangs. But in the quarter of an instant, changing his mind after he sprang, he shot clean up in the air, and came down to one side, and, rebounding like a ball, had the other by the neck.

For one instant he kept there, hung, wrenching ghastlily, then sprung clear, and, backing slowly, limping, growling horribly, flat-eared and beaten, the side-striped jackal began his slow, backward retreat into the heart of the nearly impenetrable thorns, where the winner was not such a fool as to follow him. And the black-backed jackal never saw him again. Living or dead, he faded out of our jackal's life forever.

And when he turned, his wife was standing at the entrance to the "earth" alone. The other, the female side-striped jackal's form, could be dimly seen dissolving into the night--on three legs.

"Yaaa-ya-ya-ya!" howled Mesomelas.

XIII

THE STORM PIRATE

The sea-birds were very happy along that terrible breaker-hewn coast. Puffin, guillemot, black guillemot, razorbill, cormorant, shag, fulmar petrel, storm petrel perhaps, kittiwake-gull, common gull, eider-duck, oyster-catcher, after their kind, had the great, cliff-piled, inlet-studded, rock-dotted stretch of coast practically to themselves--to themselves in their thousands. Their only shadow was the herring-gulls, and the herring-gulls, being amateur, not professional, pirates, were too clumsy to worry too much.

Then came the rain-shower. Not that there was anything in that. Rain-showers came to that land as easily as blushes _used_ to do to maidens' cheeks--rain-showers, and sudden squalls, and all manner of swift storm phenomena. But behind the rain-shower, or in it, maybe--it blotted out cliff and inlet and sandbar and heather-covered hills, and, with the wind, whipped the sea into spume like an egg-whisk--came he, the storm pirate.

A guillemot--you know the guillemot, the fish-hunter, who flies under the waters more easily than she flies the air above the waters--had risen, and was making inshore with a full catch, when the squall caught her without warning. For a little she faced it, her wings whirring madly, her body suspended in mid-air, but she not making headway one inch against the sudden fury of a forty-mile-an-hour wind. Then, since she could no longer see the shore, which was blotted out with hissing rain, she turned and ran down-wind, like a drawn streak, to the lee of a big stack of rock.

The next that was seen of her, she was heading out to sea at top speed, in wake of the rain-shower and the squall, which had passed as suddenly as it had come; and behind her, pursuing her with a relentless fury that made one gasp, shot another and a strange bird-shape. Its lines were the lines of the true pirate; its wings long and sharp-cut; its beak wickedly hooked at the tip; its claws curved, for no gentle purpose, at the end of its webbed feet; its eye fierce and haughty; its uniform the color of the very stormcloud that had just passed--dun and smoked cream below, and sooty above. True, he was not big, being only twenty-one inches--two inches less than the herring-gull. But what is size, anyway? It was the fire that counted, the ferocity, the "devil," the armament, and the appalling speed. Just as a professional boxer of any size can lay out any mere hulking hooligan, so this bird carried about him the stamp of the professional fighter that could lay out anything there in that scene that he chose--almost.

The guillemot flew as never in all her life had she flown before, and every known artifice of dodging she had heard of she tried, and--it all failed. The terrible new bird gained all the time steadily, following her as if towed by an invisible string, till at last he was above her, his wonderful wild scream was ringing in her ears, his cruel eyes glaring into hers, his beak snapping in her very face, his claws a-clutch.

No, thank you. In sheer terror she opened her beak and dropped her fish. It fell like a column of silver, and in a flash her pursuer was gone--nay, was not gone; had turned, rather, into a second column, a sooty one, falling like a thunderbolt, till he overtook even the falling fish, and wonderfully snatched it up in his hooked bill ere ever it could touch the waves, without a word or explanation of any kind whatever.

That, apparently, was his manner of getting his living; a strange manner, a peculiar way--the way of the pirate on the ocean.

Despoiled, but safe, the guillemot rattled away "for another cast"; but the foe settled, riding lightly on the lift and fall of the bottle-green waves.

Here he was no longer a wonderful phantom spirit of the storm, but just a bird that might have been passed over at first glance as simply a seagull. But not at a second glance.

Men called this strange bird Richardson's skua, or Arctic skua, or lesser skua, or, officially, _Stercorarius crepidatus_, or, most unofficially, in the vernacular, "boatswain," or "man-o'-war," or "gull-tormentor." Apparently you could take your choice what you called him. But he did not belong to Mr. Richardson really. He belonged to nobody, only to himself, to the wind and the rain, that seemed to have begot him, and to the grim north, from which he took his other name. He might have claimed the gulls as his near relations--they loathed him enough.

For a long time he sat on the lifting, breathing swell, floating idly. There was nothing else on the face of the lonely waters except himself and a flock, or fleet, I should say, of razorbills and guillemots, very far away, who alternately showed all white breasts, and vanished--as they dived and rose all together--like white-faced, disappearing targets, and one gull, who wheeled and wheeled in the middle distance, with one eye on the divers and one on the skua, as if, gull-like, waiting on a chance from either.

Then at last the skua rose again, and swept hurriedly out to sea to meet a small black-and-white speck that was coming in. It was a little, rotund, parrot-beaked puffin, loaded with fish--sprats--four of them set crossways in his wonderful bill. He seemed to know nothing about the skua till that worthy was upon him, and then, as he fled, after a furious chase of about three minutes, he suddenly surrendered by letting fall all his spoil.

The skua caught up one sprat before it hit the surface, but, being too late to overtake the rest, seemed to take no further notice of them, but swept on, to settle upon the water a mile away and preen himself. And this was where the waiting, watching gull came in--the herring-gull. He sprang to strenuous life, and, arriving swiftly at full speed over the spot, snatched up off the surface, and by clumsily attempting to plunge, two more of the sprats, before the skua could intervene.

Then it was that a terrible and a totally unexpected thing happened, and yet, if one comes to think about it and study the matter more, the most natural in the world; probably, also, on those wild seas, even common-place. Only, you see, there was no interval at all between the skua sitting placidly on the lap of the waves, eyeing the gull vengefully, and that same skua shooting straight upwards, all doubled up, on the top of what appeared to have been a submarine mine in a mild form in active demonstration.

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, shining, 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 shore--always towards the shore. It is true that the tide was falling offshore, 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 grass behind the rock-bowlders, and brown-plush furze behind the green grass, 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 scraped 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 carcass on land. Sometimes they touch things on land which were not carcasses 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 assist him in their own peculiar way, or a raven, who would not assist 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 fashion 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 grass, 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 passing, 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 shores 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 shell-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 knob 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 shore crabs, and they hopped, and they sat up hunched, like hobgoblins, and--they scratched! This last identified them, for the soulless, shelled crab-people are not given to scratch much--at least, not in _that_ way. They were rats--shore rats. The last designation is necessary, for there are rats _and_ rats, all bad, but the shore 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 shell-fish he relieves of life are legion.

The hard, horny carapace of a retreating crab scraped, 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 fashion they put on an armor coat, as it were, through which very little can pierce. It showed that he was ready.