Chapter 17

She saw the white wolf leap, beheld his wrenching side-stroke at the terrified horse's throat, heard the horse scream, and watched it bound forward. Followed another leap of the relentless giant white shape; the horse seemed to stumble in full gallop, and next instant came down headlong. The rest was a whirl of snow, flying hoofs, and a horrible worrying sound. Then all settled down, and as she tore up she found the white wolf feeding ravenously against time, bolting his meal as only the wild members of the dog tribe, hyenas, and vultures can. She was starving, that she-wolf, but she halted upon her hams, such was the reputation of the white leader; but when he failed to snarl at her, she, too, fell to, and bolted her meal like a crazy thing.

Directly he had fed enough the white wolf flung round upon his heels, and, with a single quick whimper, was gone, streaking over the plain away from the hunters, away from the scattered, discomfited pack; away, away, as he had never galloped before. But, then, before he had always been the hunter. This time, if he knew anything of "Pack Law" and the temper of the pack over this bad defeat and heavy loss, coming on top of the bad bear "break"--this time, I say, it was he who was, or, at any rate, might be, the hunted. And he had reasons--very sound and private reasons--why he must not meet even one wolf of the pack in combat. Wherefore he streaked, stretched flat, and doubled into a bow, his shadow chasing him, and the she-wolf--afraid to be left alone--chasing his shadow.

Very often before the white wolf had caused the pack to run into dangerous and decimating trouble, but always with a feed at the end. He had never before sold them a pup, as the saying is, like this one. Moreover, he felt that his slaying of the horse secretly--and they were bound to scent out and read that--would not improve matters. Wherefore he guessed that, after years of restless rule, it was about time to quit, and he quitted. But unfortunately there is only one thing harder than becoming leader of a big wolf-pack, and that is, ceasing to be leader and--live.

Five miles over the desolate waste of white--and what is five miles, or ten, or fifteen, to a desperate wolf?--the two beasts ran into a river--literally into a river. Ice stretched far out from the bank, yet the river was so wide that they could scarce see the opposite bank. They could see the grinding, growling ice-blocks floating all round them which they plunged in, however, and they could feel the icy bite of the water--water that would stop the action of a man's heart.

But the white wolf did not attempt to swim to the opposite bank, or mean to. He made a detour, and landed upon the same side he had started from. He did that three times, the she-wolf always following faithfully, because she had now become too frightened to stay alone and do anything else; and then he started upon another mad gallop of miles, but this time along the bank of the great river.

Finally he stopped and stared out over the ice, the thick water, and the gnashing pack-ice. Far away, it seemed, through the snow-haze, he could see a wooded height, an immense island, round which the river looped in two great arms.

He knew the spot--trust him.

No beast in its senses would try to swim the long distance across to that island, but from time to time a hunted deer had made the attempt, and a few of those that tried it had survived the ordeal and populated the island. More than once, in heavy snow, the white wolf himself, at the head of his pack, had hunted a deer down to that very spot, and had watched its head fade across the water into the distance. Once he had started to follow; but the pack had turned back, and he at length after them, snarling at their heels. Now he knew how long the swim looked from the deer's point of view.

It was an ugly proposition. But--he turned his head in the stillness, broken only by the multitudinous voices of the ice, and heard a far, far distant multitudinous murmur, and that was no ice, and it settled him. It was the united voice of the pack _on his trail_!

He paused, ran up and down, gave an odd, little, deeply expressive whine, like a puppy afraid to take its first bath, plunged in with a rush, and struck out. Soon he was out upon a piece of drift ice, shaking himself, and began leaping from one lump of floating ice to another. It was tricky, slippery, slidy work, and a fall might mean a broken leg or a crushed skull; but anything was better than dissolving like mincemeat in the jaws of the slavering pack.

Once, when a long way out, he looked back, and beheld the she-wolf, whining piteously as if she were being thrashed--and wolves are dumb beasts when "up against it"--following him.

She, too, had heard that wild, terrifying, implacable music of the wolf-pack following them; and although I, personally, doubt if they would have touched her--unless it was the other she-wolves that did it--she seemed to have been smitten by panic, and to prefer the deep sea, or the river, rather, to that pack of maddened devils.

And so, slipping, sliding, splashing, swimming, scrambling, the white wolf, after the most appalling struggle of his life, managed somehow, blindly in the end, with sobbing breath and pounding sides, to make that terrible passage, and collapse as he landed in a stiff white heap, the water frozen in icicles upon his body as he landed.

For a long time he did not move, and it began to seem as if he had burst his heart. But at last he dragged himself to his feet and turned drunkenly--to find the she-wolf lying at his side.

Thoughts came back slowly; but at length he shook himself, and stood erect at his full, immense height. He had given the wolf-pack something tricky in the way of trails to unravel, but he knew what he had taught them too well to build too much on that. And he was right, for presently, from far, far across the water, came the unutterably terrible baying clamor of the pack, moving swiftly along--then it stopped.

For a long while he waited after that, straining ears and eyes out over the moving ice, and the water, and the night that was there; but nothing could he see, and nothing more he heard except at last, far away, one last, long, lonely, ghastlily lonesome howl--the howl of defeat.

Then it seemed--but truly it may only have been a trick of the moonlight as he snarled, revealing his white fangs under his wickedly-curled-back lip--it seemed, I say, that the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste grinned. And good reason had he to grin, for the life of the white wolf had been nothing more nor less than one long, bad, bold, blustering, bullying _bluff_! What's that? Yes, sirs--bluff! And in this wise.

Firstly, his extraordinarily long legs gave him a height out of all proportion to his real hulk; secondly, his abnormally long and woolly coat gave him an apparent bulk which was out of all proportion to fact; thirdly, his actual bulk was really scarcely larger than that of any very large wolf; and, fourthly--but this concerned him only now--he was really quite an old wolf; one long past his prime, one quite unable to face any really full-grown fine young wolf, one retaining only his matchless speed by reason of his abnormally long legs, and his leadership by terrific and cleverly acted ferocity on the strength of his apparent giant dimensions. That was all, but it was enough; wasn't it, boys? Would you care to have changed places with the old rascal, and played that bluff out against _those_ odds, in _that_ company, for years as he had done? I _don't_ think. No, nor I, either. It was some gamble, that. What?

At last the White Wolf of the Frozen Waste turned, with an insolent flourish of his brush, and trotted up the bank on the heels of the she-wolf, who had come to life again and preceded him into the dense tangle of the woods, which swallowed him up, him and his darned bluff, utterly.

XV

FATE AND THE FEARFUL

We are the little folks--we! Too little to love or to hate.--RUDYABD KIPLING.

No one ever accused him of not being all there. The job was to see what was there.

A tiny alderman of the red bank-vole people, whose tunnels marched with the road through the wood, taking the afternoon sun--a slanting copper net, it was--at his own front-door under the root of the Scots fir, was aware of a flicker at a hole's mouth. He looked again, and saw the mouth of that hole was empty. He blinked his star-bright eyes in his fat, furry, little square head, after the manner of one who thought he had been dreaming. But catch a bank-vole dreaming! Besides, how about the squirrel overhead? He was hanging over a branch where the flicker had been, swearing fit to slit his lungs, and old squirrel wasn't much given to make mistakes, as a rule.

The bank vole turned back into his hole, knowing the law against taking chances in the wild, and the first stride fetched him up short in violent collision with another bank-vole--otherwise red-backed field-mouse, if you like--coming the other way.

The blow, full on the forehead, did not break his neck; but it ought to have done. It cast him clean over backwards out of his own front-door, where he fell down the bank, and was received, all his little short paws scrambling for a hold, by a thistle, and would have told all the world, with a thin, high squeak, what he had sat on, if the squeak had not frozen between his chisel teeth.

There had shot out of the hole, and back, a Thing. It might have been the thick end of a whip-lash or a spring, and, like a spring, as it recoiled it coiled, and was still.

The bank-vole saw. Most entirely did he see, and felt no joy in the seeing, either. Indeed, there was no room for mistake in the zigzag black chain down the back, in the unspeakably cruel, fixed stare of the glassy, lidless eyes, in the short head and flat cranium of the true viper--viper, adder, or whatever you like to call the calamity without legs, whose other name is death.

Now, bank-voles know all about vipers. They have to; they die, else. They die anyway; but no matter, for they are small and very many. Also, vipers know all about voles, field and bank; they specialize in 'em!

But our bank-vole knew all about the "freezing" game, too, and he "froze." My word, how that little beggar was still, so utterly bereft of movement that a fly settled upon him--about the first and the last that would, I should judge! And if a learned native had come along the road at that moment--on tiptoe, of course--he would have said the viper had hypnotized friend vole with fear. Hypnotize your grandmother! But you may take it from me that serpent thing was playing his game, too. He was "freezing" to induce the quarry to move and give himself away, because, since the vole was motionless, he had no idea where the little fellow was, although he seemed to be looking straight at him--in that execrable way snakes have of seeming to look straight at everything.

You think it was a battle of patience? W-e-ll, maybe. Maybe, too, it was a battle of nerves. I like to think so, anyway, for that snake-servant of the Devil had none, and the bank-vole had; and the bank-voices broke under the awful tension--or seemed to--and the bank-vole broke the terrifying spell. Also, he broke the silence.

Away down the ditch he went, bouncing like a tiny ball of dark thistle-down, all in and out among the vegetation, which, worse luck for him, the ditch being under the accursed shadow of the firs, was scanty. And as he galloped he squeaked three times--like a little needle stabbing the late afternoon silence, it was.

His removal was one kind of quick dodge in the art of quitting; that of the viper another, and a very beastly one. The crawling thing was not much more than one-tenth of a second after the poor bank-vole in getting under way, and the rest was a--was a--oh, anything you please! I call it a sliding flicker that you rather "felt" than saw. Also, the thing rustled horribly, and Fact can say what she likes. I swear it shot along quite flat, crawling, not undulating; but, ough! what a lightning, footless, legless crawl! No wonder the poor little devil of a bank-vole squeaked! The wonder was he didn't faint on the spot, for he knew what was coming.

Up the bank he pattered, and into that, to him, great subterranean highway which seems to be conjointly kept up and used by all the mysterious little four-footed tribes of the field, and which runs the length of practically every bank and hedgerow. The place was dark and cool and echoing, and bare as the palm of your hand, and far cleaner than many palms. It might have been cleaned out that very day by a fairy vacuum-cleaner; but it hadn't. It was always like that, clean as the proverbial new pin. Heaven alone knows who did the "charing" there, but those little furry tribes might have given lessons on health in trench warfare, I reckon, at a guinea a time--and cheap at that. They had found out that dirt meant disease, you bet.

Down that tunnel drummed the bank-vole, seeking to foul his trail with just any other creature; and, the highway being, as I have said, a sort of public affair, he met first a mouse gone astray, then a mole asleep, then a long-tailed wood-mouse, then a short-tailed field-vole, then a shrew about as big as your little finger. But they must have heard the scrape of the snake's scales down that echoing tunnel following hard behind, for they avoided our bank-vole like the plague, and dived up one or other of the thousand and one side-tunnels, which opened on to the main one, too quickly for the viper to catch them.

Then the poor, little, panting bank-vole found himself once more in the open. His beady eyes shone like microscopic stars as lie paused in a copper bar of setting sunlight and looked about for a refuge. It seemed, by the piston-like throb of the whole body, that his heart would burst and slay him out of hand before the hated snake could, if he did not jolly soon find one.

Then a hedge caught his eye, and he climbed it, being a good acrobat in his spare time. Beyond, however, bringing down upon himself the pecks of several birds, he did no good, for it seemed that, whithersoever he could go, the snake could follow, and--help!--the flat, terrible head was not a yard from him now.

Worse was to follow, though. He dropped to earth again, already a beaten beast; and, to complete the catastrophe, by a miracle he had landed where there was not a mouse or mole or vole hole, or any other cover, within reach. Only one big clod of earth there was, and round that he flung himself, with that stub, scaly snout weaving at his very tail, and rolled over and over and over--done, too utterly spent even to squeak.

Then Fate lifted her finger, and things happened. All that had gone before didn't count, it seemed.

The little bank-vole was dimly aware of rolling under a big, warm, live shape. He was also aware of a funny little fussy grunt in his ear, and that a set of very white and business-like teeth flashed for an instant in the sun, as they chopped surprisedly at him going under them, and missed. Thereafter the shape sat down, nearly stifling him; and in the same instant the whole air seemed to fill with the sudden, long-drawn, venomous, terrifying hiss of the viper close at hand. Evidently the limbless death had come round the corner too quickly, and had all but rammed the shape that grunted.

I can give you my word, though, that the vole was not happy one bit. He appeared to be between the Devil and the deep sea. He had no confidence in the deep sea, or any other thing that he could think of in his world. Moreover, the deep sea, besides keeping all the air off, was most horribly bristly, even on the belly. Wherefore that vole made haste to quit station, so to speak. But in a second, it seemed, before he could clear himself, that unspeakable serpent's hiss appeared to sound in his very ear, and the deep sea, folding upon itself, made the poor vole yell as if he had touched off a live-wire. He had not, of course; but it was like being struck with a dozen pins at once. He would have got out if he could, but to move was to discover more pins, and he just had to keep where he was, squealing fit to burst.

And that saved the vole, probably.

Not that there was any magic or rubbish of that kind, of course. It was simply that the viper, shooting his every inch round the corner in the effort to grab the vole's hindlegs then or never, had hit, full pelt and nose first, the nice little array of pointed arguments carried on the back of the neck of a hedgehog, snuffing under the clod, pig-fashion, for spiders. The hedgehog, whose phlegmatic disposition and special armament allowed him the luxury of never being surprised at anything, promptly and literally shut up, so that long before the viper thing had unhooked his nose and was waving his forward part about over the hedgehog, with murder in his eye and death behind his flickering tongue, looking for a place to strike home, old hedgehog was rolled up, and snuffling and snoring away inside there, like an old man chuckling when he has just cried "Mate!" at chess.

This trying position continued for perhaps five minutes. It seemed like five days to the wretched bank-vole.

Then the slow temper of the funny old hedgepig smoldered gradually alight. His eyes grew red in the foxy head of him, his snout "worked," and he snuffled and grunted faster and faster. He made up his mind to fight. And the extraordinary combat began. Lit by the blood rays of a setting sun, from a sky all raw and red, backed by the blue-gray haze of the watching woods, the silence broken only by the ghostly whisper of the snake's scales and the tiny pig-like grunting of the hundred-spiked hedgehog, that duel started.

Peering out of a peep-hole in himself, the hedgehog waited for an opening. It was no blunderer's game, this. Death was the price of a slip. He knew, however, and accepted the risks deliberately--a plucky enough act, when you come to think of it, for a beast no more than a foot long and one and a half pounds heavy.

The opening came. Quicker than you could realize, the hedgehog half unrolled, and side-chopped with his glistening teeth. Quick, too, and quicker, the venomous, flat serpent head writhed aloft and back-lashed, swift as a released spring; but the hedgehog had ducked, or tucked if you like, more than instantly back into himself. Followed an infernal, ghastly writhing and squirming of the long, unprotected mottled serpent body as it struck--too late to stop itself--simply spines, spines only, that tore and lacerated maddeningly. Whip, whip, whip! flashed the deadly reptilian head, pecking, quicker than light flickers, at the impassive round _cheval-de-frise_ that was the hedgehog, in a blind access of fury terrible to see; and each time the soft throat of the horror only tore and tore worse, in a ghastly manner, on those spines that showed no life and said no word, and defied all. It was a siege of the wild, and a terrible one.

Probably this was the first time in his life that anything had dared to stand up to that viper. He acted as if it was, anyway. Usually his malignant hiss, so full of hateful cruelty, was enough of a warning. And those who ignored that did not generally live to repeat the omission. He seemed utterly unable to understand that anything could face his fangs of concentrated death and not go out in contortions. And there were no contortions about this prickly foe, only an impassable front, or, if you love exactness, back.

Wild things, unlike man, are rarely given to lose their tempers. It isn't healthy--in the wild. But if ever a creature appeared to human eyes to do so, it was that snake. He struck and he struck and he struck, impaling himself ghastlily each time, and using up his small immediate magazineful of venom uselessly on--uncompromising spikes!

At last he drew back, a horrible affront to the fairy scene, and, in the snap of a finger, the hedgehog had unpacked himself, run forward--a funny little patter it was, much faster than you would expect--slashed with his dagger fangs, and repacked himself again in an instant.

The snake, writhing afresh under the punishment, threw himself once more upon the impassive "monkey-puzzle" on four legs, but beyond tearing himself into an even more ghastly apparition than before, he accomplished nothing. Finally he broke away, and slid off, a rustling, half-guessed, fleeting vision, and there was fear at last in those awful eyes, that could never close, as he went.

Then it was that the quiet, unobstrusive, retiring, self-effacing hedgehog threw off the mask, and hoisted his true colors. And yet, if one came to think of it, there was no cause for surprise, for was he not a member of the strange, the mysterious, the great Order of Insectivora, which includes among its members probably the most pugnacious, the most implacable, the most furiously passionate fighters in all the wild? He fairly flung himself, unrolled, and running with an absurdly clock work-toy-like gait, whose speed checked the laugh that it caused, was after that viper in considerably less than half-a-second, his eyes red as the sun they glinted in, his fangs bared for action, his swinish snout uplifted at the tip in a wicked grin. No beast to bandy words with, this. It was a fight to a finish, with no surrender save to death.

The bank-vole had already fled; but it was in the direction that the fight finally veered that he had gone, and so, peeping from between the weed-stems at the mouth of a hole, he saw all. He saw the viper, his head swaying to and fro, come sliding along, making for that very hole; he heard the sudden quick rustle in the grass behind that followed, beheld the dusky, squat form that it heralded pounce. He watched the snake's head whip round, and drive with all its power in one last desperate stroke; watched it straighten out suddenly, and recoil in an awful quivering spasm, like a severed telegraph-wire, as the hedgehog's razor-sharp teeth cut through skin and flesh and backbone; and, trembling from head to foot, he witnessed, half-fascinated, I think, the awful last threshing flurry of the viper that followed.

Later, when the moon peeped out of a hole in the clouds, and the bank-vole peeped out of one in the bank, together--and his beady eyes were not much behind the moon for brightness--when the tiny, long-eared bats were imitating black lightning overhead, and a single owl was hooting like a lost soul seeking a home, away in the black heart of the woods, the bank-vole witnessed the burial of that hated viper. It was not a big affair. Only one person--the hedgehog--took part in it, and he was singularly unhurried, for he ate that poisonous fiend all up, beginning at the tail, and thoughtfully chewing on from side to side to the head--twenty inches of snake--as if he, the hedgehog, had been inoculated in infancy, and was poison-proof.

Then, still grunting, he went away, slowly, nosing here and there, rustling loudly in that stillness, an odd, squat figure in the moonlight; and the bank-vole thought he had seen the last of him, and came out to pass about his "lawful occasions," as per custom.

Now, if you or I had taken our meals after the fashion of that "wee, timorous beastie," we should probably have departed this life from indigestion or nervous prostration inside a month.

He came very cautiously from his hole, and the first thing his fine long whiskers telegraphed him the presence of was an oak-gall--one of those round knobs that grow upon twigs like nuts, you know, but have a fat grub inside instead of a kernel. At the same instant a leaf rustled, and--flp!--there was no bank-vole.