Chapter 16

And you think that the mere shore crabs could be nothing to him. But a few hundred ravening shore 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 scrape of horny shells 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 fashion?

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 passed. 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 scraped 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.

Thus it happened that the beast, unable to stop, found himself with his head and eyes being dug at by a hooked beak, and his jaws closed upon a skinny leg instead of upon the skua's spinal column, as he had intended, which would have put the skua out of life like turning out a gas-jet.

And it was then, in that instant, that the moon chose to dodge from behind a cloud and reveal the beast as a big, long, lean, and hungry dog-stoat. Probably he had thought that the skua was a gull, and a wounded one. There is a difference, however, between the skuas and the gulls, though they bear a family likeness. He discovered the difference now, and for the next few minutes was not overjoyed at the knowledge.

One cannot do much blood-sucking to weaken one's prey out of a scrawny leg that resembles a twig wrapped round with leather. And the stoat found this out, too, and he would have shifted his hold to the bird's body like a flash, if he had been given a chance, but he never was.

Before he knew what was happening, he was blinded by the beating of vast wings, his claws began to slip and slide, and--oh, horror!--still slipping and sliding, he found the bowlder going from him. It went from him, receding downwards with terrifying rapidity, and the dancing, silvery, sparkling water was sliding below, too.

Being a stoat, he hung on with V.C. doggedness and courage; but it was the worst thing he could have done. Moreover, as it was, he forced the bird to attempt reprisals in mid-air--a terrible proceeding.

Now, this was difficult, might almost seem impossible; but the skua is one of the most wonderful flyers that haunt the seas even--and most of the best are there--and what he could not execute in the air was scarcely worth mentioning. It included in this case a perfectly diabolical scraping of the foe's head with his available claw, and after that, since the dogged stoat did not leave go, and the pain was excruciating, a wonderful bend forward, and, at a pronounced and dangerous angle, a fiendish stabbing at the stoat's head with his murderous beak. This last involved a drop of nearly a hundred feet, but it did the trick.

Blinded, dazed, shaken, and maddened by the agony of blows upon his sensitive nose, the stoat opened his jaws to grip higher up the leg; and in an instant he was gone, turning over and over, down, down, down to the hungry waves below.

Ten minutes later the skua was calmly and safely asleep upon the top of a frowning black stack of rock, untroubled, I think, even by dreams of the terrible things he had gone through.

* * * * * *

Next morning, an apparition of wonder and fierce beauty, the skua, quite recovered except that he had a lameness in one leg and a weakness in one wonderful eye that would last him a lifetime, came racing down-shore out of a stormcloud into the full gold of the sun at some seventy miles an hour. He was in pursuit of a common gull who, with more luck than judgment, had caught a fish.

The gull held on for a few minutes, on and in and around the horizon, going like the wind up and down and around, as for his life, with friend skua ever close to his tail, before a wild yell, which he could not mistake, sounded in his ear, and he dropped the prize. The skua executed his wonderful dive, and caught the gleaming silver thing before it reached the waves, and shooting up again, was just about to continue his course, when a constant and peculiar flickering above the beach caught his telescopic eye.

He checked, flung up, came round beautifully effortless, and headed towards the sight. Probably he knew what it was, had fathomed it even from that distance. It was a gang of gulls flying round and mobbing a hapless wounded gull on the beach.

It was a foul thing to do, a horrible, blundering, clumsy murder, done slowly; but even so, it was all over before, with a scream that rang like the battle-cry of a Highland chief, and set the murderous heads up in wild alarm, the skua came shooting, twisting, turning, diving, and darting right into the heart of the crowd.

And they went circling, and wheeling, and hurling down-wind like sheets of paper, those murderous sea-birds, dispersed and scattered over the face of the waters, and were gone almost without a word.

Then the skua came lightly down, rocking on the wind, and settled beside the poor, draggled, white body, no longer white, upon the shingle, which had been so foully done to death by gulls of various clans. He may, or may not, have known it, but I can tell _you_ that the gull was the self-same herring-gull who had tried to kill him the day before. Now he--but we will draw a curtain here.

Next day the skua went away, and the fishing wild-folk breathed a sigh of relief as they watched him go, and for three days peace brooded over the winged fishers of those parts, so that birds could feed upon what they caught, nor be in fear of getting hunted for it. But upon the fourth day the skua came back. And he was not alone. A dusky, nearly brown--for they vary much in color--female skua came with him. And in due course they built them a home on the ground among the heather, and they guarded their treasured eggs and reared with amazing fierce devotion their beloved young.

Before his advent that strip of wild sea-coast had been, mercifully, without its skuas. Our bold buccaneer, however, having won his footing, took care to see that, so far as one bird could accomplish the great task, it never should be again.

XIV

WHEN NIGHTS WERE COLD

And the Northern Lights come down To dance on the houseless snow; And God, who clears the grounding berg, And steers the grinding flow, He hears the cry of the little kit-fox And the lemming on the snow.--RUDYARD KIPLING.

A snipe rose suddenly, and began to call out; a capercailzie lofted all at once, with a great rush of winged bulk, above the snow-bound forest; and a white hare slid, like a wraith of the winter, down a silent forest aisle.

Then came the White Wolf of the Frozen Wastes, the terror of the blizzard, ghost-like, enormous, and swift. In dead, grim silence came he, loping his loose, tireless wolf's lope, and stopped at a windfall, where two forest giants, their decaying strength discovered by the extra weight of snow, lay prone, one across the other.

For a moment he paused, nose up, testing the still, cold air; then he leapt upon the upper fallen tree. He had, seen up there and clearly, an enormously thick and woolly coat, that magnified his already record size. You see him trotting along the tree-trunk. Then he stopped and stared down into the dark hollow under the upper tree. Then he sniffed--audibly. Then he licked his nose--and very red was his tongue. Then--but this he couldn't help, I verily believe, as he balanced there with his pricked ears and bright eyes--he whined.

And instantly his little, impatient, dog-like whine was answered by a deep, deep growl, that seemed to come out of the bowels of the earth.

He was just in time, as he leapt lightly off the windfall, to avoid the rush of a vast brown bulk, reeking of carrion, furry, terrible, with live-coals for eyes, and threshing the air with claws Heaven knows how long, which hurled itself like an avalanche out of the hollow at him. And that thing was a bear.

Now, bears do not, as a rule, without extraordinary reason, in that land, rouse themselves out of their winter sleep for the mere whine of a wolf. They are impregnable where they are, and know it. The extraordinary reason, however, was present. The white wolf was sniffing at it now--the bear's blood-trail to the windfall. Bruin had been roused once before that day--by beaters. He had then been driven forward, shot at by hunters, wounded, escaped, and returned to his den. But--but, I give you my word, if those beaters, those peasants, had known the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was out, nothing in the wide world would have induced them to beat for bears or anything else in that vicinity.

The white wolf stretched himself to a canter, and slid away through the forest, dropping the trees past him like telegraph-poles past a railway-carriage window. He looked like the very spirit of winter, the demon of the snows, and stood for that in the ignorant minds of the sparsely scattered people--perhaps because at a short distance he was nearly invisible. His white coat, which was simply a conspicuous curse to him when there was no snow--which was one reason, maybe, why he retired from the limelight to some lonely fastness during summer--was an incalculable asset to him in winter, and he knew it.

He ran, with his smooth, loose, effortless lope, perhaps a quarter of a mile, then stopped, and putting up his head, howled a howl so full of hopeless, cruel yearning, so vibrant with desolation, that it sounded like the cry of a soul doomed forever to seek something it could never find. It was a lugubrious yowl there, in that setting, and it made one's scalp creep all over one's cranium.

And instantly almost, even as the last, long, horrible echoes died, sobbing adown the blue-haze perspective of the forest glades, the answer came--a far-away, fluttering, wandering howl, like the moan of the wind in its sleep.

The white wolf waited a moment, then howled again, and the ghastly sound came back to him, louder and nearer this time.

A third time he howled, and the forest cringed under the reply.

Then at last the shadows between the ranked tree-trunks took unto themselves life, and eyes, eyes in pairs, horribly hungry, cruel port-holes of brains, with a glary, stary, green light behind them, suddenly appeared everywhere, like swiftly-turned-on electric lamps. There was a whispering rush, as if giants were swiftly dealing cards in the silence, and--the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste was away, racing like a cloud-shadow, rapid and impetuous as a greyhound, at the head of a pack of one hundred and twenty-nine empty-stomached wolves.

They made no sound as they tore, compact as a Zulu impi, over the spotless white, because they had no trail to follow, only this huge devil of a leader; and they had their work cut out to follow him, for he was the longest-legged male wolf any of them had ever set eyes upon.

Straight as a twelve-inch shell the white wolf headed back to the fallen trees and the bear's den. When he reached them, he stopped so abruptly that the wolves behind him almost sat on their haunches in the effort to pull up. Those that failed fell sideways under a rain of wicked snaps from him, that followed one another quick as the stutter of a machine-gun.

The pack did not stop--at least, not the flanks of it. They swept on without a pause, out and round, like flood-water round a knoll, joined at the far side, and--were still. As a maneuver, a military maneuver, swift, unexpected, faultless, and silent, it was perfect.

For as long as a man takes to light a pipe there was dead silence, broken only by the quick motor-like panting of the pack. And one hundred and twenty-nine pairs of eyes regarded the fallen trees.

Then the white wolf, all alone, with hackles up, stepped forward and leaped upon the trunk of the tree that was poised upon its fellow. He ran lightly up it till he was exactly above the hollow formed by the junction of the two trees, then stopped, looking down.

Half-a-dozen of the older and more cunning wolves followed him; the pack surged forward until both trees became lined with a row of wolves, without breaking the circle of the main pack outside, and then stopped. All this in silence.

Then--but you could almost hear the trees breathe while he did it--the white wolf yawned very deliberately, and whined, insolently and very audibly.

The answer was instant.

Something rumbled within the den, deep down, like a geyser.

The white wolf whined again, and sprang aside just as the bear, maddened with the pain of a .450-caliber rifle bullet in his stomach, and seeking a sacrifice, hurled out of the dark and up over the tree-trunk, striking, with appalling nail-strokes, right and left; and the quickness of those strokes was only a less astonishment than the agility of the wolves getting out of the way of them. But--but he had come out to abolish one wolf, that bear; not one hundred and twenty-nine.

The white wolf dropped without a sound upon the bear's great, broad back. The half-dozen old wolves followed him like figures moved by a single lever. The pack sucked in with the rush of a waterspout. The bear vanished under a wave of fangs and tails, as a sinking boat vanishes beneath the billows. And the rest was the most diabolical devils' riot that ears ever heard.

The bear unwounded, even if he had been induced to come out at all, might have fought his way home again; but the bear wounded and cut off was a different matter. He battled as only a cornered bear can battle; but the exertion of it gave the .450 bullet its chance, and he died--horribly--as they die who are pulled down by the starving wolf-pack, and that is not printable at all.

He took three wolves--smashed-in-heads and chests--with him to the other world, that bear, and left three others well on the road there. _All six_ followed him by the path he had gone when the pack had done with him; but the losses might not improve the temper of the pack, though they partially stayed the hunger of a few. And the white wolf seemed to know that. Full devilish indeed was the cunning of that brute.

Scarcely was the last bone cracked, scarcely the last wisp of skin snapped up, than the white wolf, wet, and red and wringing over the head, was away again, at full speed--and his full speed was a thing to gasp over--with a wild and rousing howl that gave the pack no time to ponder on its casualties.

This time also there was no trail, so the pack had full leisure to concentrate all its energies upon the job in hand, or paw, I should say--namely, galloping. No, racing would be the only word; for the white wolf, knowing his kind, perhaps, gave the pack no leisure to grow dangerous over its losses or its hunger. Only idleness gives time for questions to be asked about leadership, and he kept them busy; and if they wanted to keep up with him at all, they must needs extend themselves to the full.

Soon he led them to a clearing running, straight as a railway cutting, through the forest. Out in the clearing, he dropped his head, howled, flung half round, and began to follow tracks; but the scent was enough for him without the tracks. They were the footprints, the sleigh-trail, and the hoofprints of the beaters, the hunters, and the pack-horses, loaded with game from the hunt of the day that had just gone.

For a moment the pack, even _that_ pack, his pack, the pack of the White Wolf of the Frozen Wastes, checked a little, shied, and were dumb. They were used to his leading them upon some hectic murder-raids, but never one quite so blatant as this.

Quickly, however, the real pain in their empty stomachs got the better of them, and they swept round and began to follow--half-a-dozen here and there--with whimpers. And then, the excitement spreading, they all rushed in, and breaking out, with a blood-curdling rush, into the full-throated chorus, "Yi-yi-i-ki-yi!" of the wolf-pack in full cry--an M.F.H. who had never heard wolves might have mistaken it for the music of a pack of hounds if he had listened to it from a distance--they swept on after the vanishing white brush of their leader, like some great, hurrying, dark cloud-shadow, up the trail.

Anon, going always at their tireless wolf-lope that no beast in the world can outdistance in the end, they came to a village. Some of the beaters lived at this village, and had remained there. The wolves swept on and round the miserable place--some actually raced through the snowed-up street--and took up the continued trail on the other side.

Anon they came to an open plain, where the trail split, many of the beaters that were left striking away to another village where they lived; but the white wolf tore straight on along the main trail, the trail of the hunters, the attendants, and the pack-horses. And the shadows of the wolves in the moonlight kept pace with them all that terrible way.

The plain looked flat, but was gently undulating, like some gigantic ocean petrified; so that, in due time, the pack, still giving tongue wildly and terribly, saw before them, far, far ahead, a procession of dots straggling along over the endless, unbroken white. And instantly their music shut off as if at the wave of an invisible hand.

Then, as the quarry ran from scent to view, they raced. All their long, loose, nickel-steel-limbed, tireless gallop before had been nothing to their flying speed now. The taint of the blood of the slaughtered game from the chase was in their sensitive nostrils. It was like the sight of rare wines to a drunkard. Shift! Say, but the way those long-legged demons ate up the distance between them and their prey was awe-inspiring. It was uncanny. It was almost magic. It was awful.

Then things happened, as you might say, with some rapidity.

Three shots rang out in the silence--three shots in quick succession. They were fired at the wolves by the only man in the group who had an efficient rifle, but were really meant to recall the sleighs with the sportsmen _and_ the rifles, which had gone on.

The wolves spread out into a long line; the ends of the line crept forward swiftly on either hand, and the whole pack raced to the attack in the formation of a Zulu impi--in the shape of a pair of horns, that is. When the points of the horns got on the far side of their "prey," they rushed together, and turned inwards, still at full gallop.

At this juncture the sleighs came back--at the gallop, too. Four .450-caliber Express rifle bullets, one .375-caliber magazine and one .315-caliber magazine bullet, arriving among the wolves in quick succession produced no confusion. Not a wolf stopped. Each beast continued its tireless gallop, swerving and dispersing as it raced, and without uttering a sound, till, almost before you could realize what had happened at all, there was a dwindling crescent of gray specks in the background, and four or five other gray shapes--two kicking--lying about in the foreground.

But--and this is where we come in--neither there in the distant snow-haze nor close in by the crowding hunting-party was the white wolf.

He had been last on view far in advance of, and heading, the point of the right-hand horn of the swiftly encircling pack--his usual place, by the way--but from the moment the returning sleighs hove in sight, and the bar-like gleam of the moonlight could be seen upon the ready rifle-barrels--he had seen that, too, and knew its meaning--he had been--nowhere.

Now, before the encircling horns of the pack closed round, one of the pack-horses, maddened with fear, had stampeded and got clear away. That horse was galloping now madly across the plain, hidden from view by a gentle swell of ground, and--the white wolf was racing alongside of it; and away behind--for few could keep up with the tremendous speed of the white wolf--another, and an ordinary gray wolf was gliding in their tracks. That was a female wolf, who more than once before had found it a profitable investment to keep her eye upon the doings of the great white leader.