Chapter 7

The lean night wind next evening came down, and day went out almost imperceptibly. Blackness grew under the furze caverns, and the last glimpse of the estuary faded away in a steely glimmer; a brown ghost of an owl slid low over the spiked ramparts, and wings--the wings of fighting wild-duck coming up from the sea to feed--"spoke" like swords through the star-spangled blue-black canopy of heaven.

The night-folk began to move abroad. You could hear them pass--now a faint rustle here, now a surreptitious "pad-pad" there. Once some bird-thing of the night cried out suddenly, very far away in the sky, "Keck! keck!" and was gone.

It was not Pharaoh, however, that you would have heard move. None of the wild-folk could tell how at midnight he managed to land himself far out over the marsh, unperceived. He was there--you must take my word for it--just two faintly luminous yellow-green lamps floating on the mist.

Not many men knew their way across the marsh by day; certainly not five even of the oldest wildfowlers could have got over safely by night. It was not man, therefore, that was causing the cat to melt into the short, salt grass, so closely that there was nothing of him left. Something else was coming his way.

Along the edge of the dike it came--tall, thin, pale, ghostly, and--yes, I could have sworn it, though night does play odd tricks with the human eyesight--faintly phosphorescent. At least, it seemed to glow ever so dimly, like one that moves in a nearly burnt-out halo.

Every yard or two it paused, that thing. Once there was a splash, as if some one were spearing fish and had missed.

The cat moved rather less than an average stone. He knew that in the wild to be motionless is, in nine cases out of ten, to be invisible. The tenth case doesn't matter, because the creature that discovers it usually dies. Moreover, there was no cover to move to, and cover is the cat's trump card.

Now, everything would have gone off all right if--well, if the cat hadn't been a cat, I suppose; that is, if he had been able to stop the ceaseless twitching of the black tip of his tail. Tiger-hunters know that twitching, and those who have stalked the lion will tell you of it, as also the sparrow on the garden wall, whose life may have been saved from somebody's pet "tabby" by that same twitching. It is a characteristic habit of the tribe, I take it.

The luminous ghost-thing was close now. Heaven knows whether it saw that twitching then! I think so. It stopped, anyway, and became a pillar of stone. The cat, almost under it, fairly pressed himself into the grass.

Then--whrrp!

Something shot through the air like a lance, and pinned that twitching tail-point to the ground. There had been no warning--nothing! Just that javelin from the ghost, and---the cat on his hindlegs, screaming like a stricken devil, clawing at the ghost, now revealed as a very big, long-legged bird which flapped. It flapped huge wings and danced a grotesque dance, and it smelt abominably, with the stench of ten fish-markets on a hot day.

Then at last, the cat clawing and yelling the whole time, the bird's slow brain seemed to realize the mistake. The javelin, which was its beak, was withdrawn from the protesting tail-tip hurriedly--to be driven through the cat's skull as a sheer act of necessary self-defense, I fancy. But the cat did not wait to see. Imagine the infamy, the absolute sacrilege, from a cat's point of view, of spitting a feline tail in that disgusting fashion. Why, if you only tread on one, you hear about it in five-tenths of the average second, and offend the supercilious owner for a month afterwards!

There was a vision, just a half-guessed vision, of our cat shooting straight upwards through the air, and outwards over the still waters of the dike; there was a number one splash that set the reflected stars dancing, and the water-voles ("rats," if you like) bolting to their holes; and there was the sighing "frou-frou-frou!" of great wings as the big bird rose and fled majestically. There was the sucking gurgle and drip-drip of a furred body leaving the water on the far side, eyes that glared more hate than pen can set down, and a deep, low, malignant feline curse. That cat had swum the rest of the way over the dike which he could not jump.

The bird was only a heron, and that does not sound much unless you are acquainted with the ways of the heron and all his beak implies. A heron is one of those birds that can fight at need, and--knows it. Moreover, in his long beak, set on his steel-spring neck, he has a weapon of awful "piercefulness," and--knows that too. The bird is an example of armed defense.

This one had merely been fishing for eels in that pessimistic way peculiar to all fishermen, and seeing the tail-tip waving in the grass, and nothing else, had mistaken the same for his quarry. And this will be the easier to believe because we know, and probably the heron did also, that eels are given at times to overland journeys on secret errands of their own.

The cat crawled away down the dike in offended silence. He was wet, and the only cat I ever knew who did not seem to be scandalized past speech at the fact. Indeed, he went farther. He came upon a ripple and a dot, some fifty yards farther on, which to the initiated such as he, represented a water-vole ("rat," if you will) swimming.

Then, before you could take your pipe from your mouth to exclaim, the water-vole was not swimming. He was squealing in a most loud and public-spirited fashion from between Pharaoh's jaws, and it was the cat who was swimming. He had just taken a flying leap from the bank and landed full upon the dumbfounded water-vole--splash! Then he swam calmly ashore and dined, all wet and cold. Now, what is one to say of such a cat?

III

Long did the keepers, in Colonel Lymington's woods and along the hedges, search with dog and gun for Pharaoh, and many traps did they set. The dogs truly found a cat--two cats, and the guns stopped them, but one had a nice blue ribbon round his neck, and the other had kittens; the traps were found by one cat--and that was the pet of the colonel's lady--one stoat, one black "Pom"--and that was the idol of the parson's daughter--and one vixen--and she was buried secretly and at night--but Pharaoh remained where he had chosen to remain, and he remained also an enigma.

Then the colonel's rare birds began to evaporate in real earnest. Hawkley's little efforts at depleting them were child's-play to those of Pharaoh that followed, although, of course, Pharaoh himself did not know, or care the twitch of a whisker, whether the birds he slew were rare or not.

Now, if there was one thing more than another about which the colonel prided himself in his bird sanctuary, it was the presence of the bittern. I don't know where the bittern came from, nor does the colonel. Perhaps the head-keeper knew. Bitterns migrate sometimes, but--well, that keeper was no fool, and knew his master's soft spot.

It was a night or two later that Pharaoh surmounted the limit, so to speak, and "sprung all mines in quick succession." He had been curled up all day in his furze fortress, that vast stretch of prickly impenetrability which, even if a dog had been found with pluck enough to push through to its heart, would still, in its massed and tangled boughs, have given a cat with Pharaoh's fighting prowess full chance to defy any dog.

He was beautifully oblivious of the stir his previous doings had kicked up, and of the winged words the colonel had used to the head-keeper; of the traps set all about, of the gins doubled and trebled in the wood and round the park, and of the under-keepers who, with guns and tempting baits, took up their positions to wait for him as night fell.

No one seemed to have suspected the furze a mile away, and still less the marsh and the coverless bleak shore of the estuary, as his home. Indeed, no one looks for a cat on a wind-whipped marsh when woods are near at all. Yet this open, wet country seemed to be a peculiarly favorite hunting-ground of Pharaoh's.

It was a night of rain-squalls and moonlit streaks when Pharaoh, wandering devious among the reeds, first became aware of the bittern, in the shape of reptilian green eyes steadily regarding him from the piebald shadows. Possibly the cat's whiskers first hinted at some new presence by reason of the "ancient and fish-like smell" which pervaded this precise reed jungle.

Pharaoh stopped dead. Pharaoh, with cruel, thin ears pressed back, sank like a wraith into the soft ground. Pharaoh ceased to be even a grayish-yellow, smoky something, and became nothing but eyes--eyes floating and wicked. A domestic cat, after one frozen interval, would have crept away from the foe it could not fathom, but Pharaoh had other blood in his veins.

To begin with, he was wondering what manner of beast the owner of those saurian-like orbs might be. To go on with, he was hungry, and--smelt fish. But though he was looking full at the big bird, he could not see it, which is the bittern's own private little bit of magic.

Nature has given him a coat just like a bunch of dried reeds and the shadows between, and he does the rest by standing with his bead stuck straight up and as still as a brass idol. Result--invisibility.

None know how long those two sought to "outfreeze" the "freezer," while the rain-showers came up and passed hissing, and the moon played at hide-and-seek. None knew when Pharaoh, flat as a snake, first began that deadly, silent circling, which was but acting in miniature the ways of the lion. None knew, either, at what point of bittern first begun to sink and sink, till he crouched, and puffed, his neck curved on his back like a spring ready set, his beak, like a sharpened assegai, upright.

Only the short-eared owl, with his wonderful eyes, beheld Pharaoh make his final rush; watched that living spring _sprung_ quick as light, shooting out straight at the cat's glaring eyes, and saw--greatest miracle of all the lot--Pharaoh dodge his head aside in the twentieth of a second, and blink, letting the blow that spelt death whiz by.

And only those same owl's ears--sharpest of all the ears of the wild--heard the diabolical yell of Pharaoh as the long, sharp beak pierced through the loose skin of his shoulders, and, thanks to that same looseness, came out again an inch or two farther on, transfixing him; or listened to the devilish noise of the "worry," as the cat turned in agony on himself and buried his fangs where he could behind those expressionless green reptilian eyes; or caught the stupendous flurry and whirl of wings and fur and gripping claws and scaly legs, as a cloud put out the moon and darkness fell with silence, like the falling curtain that ends a play.

* * * * * *

The very last pale rays of a watery setting sun slid bar-like through the cottage window, and fell, twirling, aslant the floor.

A late spider had spun a web across the fireplace, and the one last fly that always lingers sat in the sunbeam. It was Hawkley's cottage, dismantled and derelict.

Something like a furry round hassock, lying motionless in a far corner, moved at the sound of rain, and lifted a round head with round eyes that glared with so terrible an expression that one caught one's breath. There was blood--dried blood--by the furry shape, and drops of dried blood across the floor from the window in the next room, that it had been nobody's business to shut.

The day went out in gloom and howling rain-rushes. Darkness took possession of the room. And--_the gate clicked_.

Truly, it might only have been the wind, but--Pharaoh was on his feet in a flash, growling, and there was a glint of green-yellow light as his eyes whipped round.

Followed a pause. Then, in a lull, once, twice, the unmistakable crunch of a shod foot on gravel.

Another pause. Pharaoh was crouching close now, trembling from head to foot.

"Pharaoh! Pharaoh! Pharaoh, old cat, are--are you in there?"

The voice, strained and husky, came in at the open window. In the last lingering afterglow of dying day, a face, haggard and set, showed there, framed in the lead casement.

"Phar---- Ah!"

Pharaoh was up. Pharaoh had given a strange, coaxing little cry, such as a she-cat gives to her kittens. Pharaoh, lame and stiff, but with tail straight as a poker, was running to the window in the next room, was up on the sill, was rubbing against and caressing the haggard face like a mad thing.

There was a long, tense pause, broken only by a continuous purring. Then the creaking sound as of the lid of a wicker basket being opened. The purring ceased. The creaking came again, as if the lid were being shut. There came the crunch once more of stealthy shod feet on gravel, the click of the gate, and--silence!

Hawkley had come for, and found, his cat.

VI

THE CRIPPLE

It was gradually getting colder and colder as he flew, till at last, in a wonderful, luminous, clear, moonlit sunset, when day passed, lingering almost imperceptibly, into night, the wind fixed in the north, and a hard white frost shone on the glistening roofs--far, far below.

Up there, at the three-thousand or four-thousand feet level, where he was flying, the air was as clear and sparkling as champagne, and as still as the tomb. If he had been passing over the moon instead of over the earth, the effect would have been something like it, perhaps.

He was only a thrush, _Turdus philomelus_ the songster, but big and dull and dark for his kind, and he had come from--well, behind him, all shimmering and restless in the moonlight, like a fountain-basin full of quicksilver, lay the North Sea; ahead and beneath lay England; and across that sea, three hundred miles, as I count it, at the very least, to the lands of melting snow, he was going when late cold weather had caught him and warned him to come back. And alone? No, sirs, not quite. Ahead, just visible, blurredly--a little phantom form rose and fell on the magic air; behind, another; on his right, a third--all thrushes, flying steadily westward in silence; and there may have been a few more that could not be seen, or there may not.

His crop, as were the crops of the others, was perfectly empty. Indeed, he appeared to prefer traveling in ballast that way. But his eyes shone, and his wing-strokes, with little pauses of rigidity between, such as many birds take--only one doesn't notice it much--were strong and sure.

Once a large-winged, smudged shape, making no sound as it slipped across the heavens, came flapping almost up to him, peering this way and that at him and his companions, with amber flaming eyes set in a cat-like, oval face. The thrush's heart gave a great jump, and seemed threatening to choke him, for that shape--and it howled at him suddenly, in a voice calculated to make strong men jump--was death of the night, otherwise a short-eared owl.

But a gun went "boomp!" with that thick, damp sort of sound that smacks of black powder, somewhere down on earth, and a huge "herd" of green plover, _alias_ peewits, which are lapwings, rose, as if blown up by an explosion, to meet them, their thousand wings flickering in the frost-haze like a shower of confetti, and the owl was so disconcerted by the disturbance that he dropped back into the night whence he came, as one who falls into a sea.

Then suddenly the thrush--all the thrushes, indeed--tipped tails, and flew downward--offering no explanation to help one to understand why--till they dropped, each one entirely on his own hook, apparently, in or about some gardens, as if they had tumbled out of the sky; and our thrush, in twenty seconds, had slipped into some apple-trees, and thence to some laurels round a shed, and--was asleep! I say "was asleep." Out of the starry sky, down, in under, and asleep--all without emotion, and like a machine. Now, what is one to make of such a bird?

He did not see, or, more correctly, did not appear to see--for I do not know what he saw and what he pretended not to see, really--the lean, lithe, long, low weasel that passed, climbing and sniffing, beneath him--within six inches--possibly scenting out a rat. He did not hear, or show that he heard, the blackbird--she was rusty, dark brown, as a matter of actual fact--scream, a piercing and public-spirited scream, when the very big claws of a little, round, spotted-feathered ball with wings, like a parody of a cherub--but men call it a little owl, really--closed upon her and squeezed, or pierced, out her life. He did not feel, or let on that he felt, the branches gently sway as two eyes, glinting back the light of the moon--eyes which were the property of a "silver tabby" female cat--floated among the twigs, looking for him, him most certainly, whom she seemed faintly to smell, but never saw.

These things represented tense moments dotted through hours of cold, dark silence, and the blue-black dome of night arched, and the moon drifted, all in rigid, cold, and appalling stillness.

Then the wind changed, and our thrush awoke to a "muggy" day, under a soaked, cotton-wool, gray sky, all sodden with streaming showers of rain. And, by that token alone, he must have known that he was in England. No other climate is capable of such crazy, unwarned, health-trying changes. He had come in an icy, practically petrified silence. He left in a steaming, swishing, streaming gale.

But that was not before he had been down to scratch like a fowl among the dead leaves under the privet-hedge for grubs, who "kidded" themselves that they were going to be fine, flashing insects next summer. He also prospected a snail or two, and broke through their fortifications by hammering the same upon a stone. And, by some magic process that looked akin to the way in which some men divine water, he divined a worm out of seemingly bare earth. It was there, too, and it came up, not joyfully, but tugged, to be hammered and shaken into something not too disgustingly alive to be swallowed.

Then, while a robin mounted to a spruce-spire and acted as Job's comforter to all the birds of the garden by singing--ah, so plaintively and sweetly!--of the dismal days of frost and snow, he "preened"--i.e. went over and combed every feather, and tested and retested, cleaned and recleaned, each vital quill. Then, in one single, watery, weak stab of apology for sunshine, on the top of a fowl-shed, he surrendered himself to what, in wild-bird land, is known as the "sunning reaction," which really consists of giving body and mind utterly to the sun and complete rest.

And then he left.

Now, it was no chance that he left. Birds don't do business that way. To you or me, that location and its climate would have seemed as good for him to "peg out a claim" in as any other. He knew better. Something--Heaven alone knows what--within him told him what was coming. He had the power to take a draft on the future, and by that means to save himself--if he could. Wherefore he flew on southward--always south.

And six hours after he had gone, the wind swung like a weather-cock, swung and stopped at northeast, and frost began to grip that garden in an iron fist that threatened to squeeze the life out of every living thing in it, and the sky hung like the lid of a lead box.

The thrush flew, with a few halts, practically all day and well into the night, and the northeast wind and the Frost King chased him south.

He roosted in a great fastness of age-old holly-bushes within a wood, whose branches were packed with his relations--redwings, thrushes, and blackbirds, and also starlings--all tired out, all booked for the south.

Some woods seem to hold a curse of gloom. One cannot say why. And this was one of them. And the tawny owl that nobody saw but everybody heard, and the white stoat that everybody saw and nobody heard, and the amorous dog-fox with the cruel bark that everybody saw and heard, did not, taken together or singly, add to the gayety of the scene.

The thrush was just ahead of the cold when he went to roost in pouring rain. In the night, however, the cold had overtaken him, and the thousand-jeweled beauty of frost-flakes flashed to his waking eye.

He was numbed and puffed out and peevish, and disinclined to move, but anything was better than sticking about in this roosting-place, this casual ward and clearing-house of the wild. The keen starlings were already off, swinging away, regiment by regiment, with a fine, bold rush of wings; the blackbirds were dotting the glades; the redwings were slipping "weeping" away, to find soft fields to mope in; and the pigeon host--what was left alive of it after diphtheria had taken its toll--had streamed onwards, heading southwest.

_Turdus philomelus_ spelt L-u-c-k for our friend that morn, for he had not prospected two hundred yards when he came on a place where a vagrant "sounder" of half-grown, domestic, unringed pigs had been canvassing the wood for beech-mast, acorns, and roots during the night. The soil was all torn up for a space of about an acre, probably the only soil for miles--except along streams and by springs--penetrable by beaks until the sun came out; and the thrush feasted royally upon hibernating caterpillars and chrysalids that would have become moths, beetle larvae all curled up and asleep, and other pests; and he must have done a considerable amount of good in that place during the next hour or so.

But feasts do not go begging long in a frost-bound wild, even if they are hidden; and by the time our thrush had driven several other thrushes away--for he was a jealous feeder--and had been driven away by blackbirds himself more than once, starlings descended upon the place with their furious greed, and our thrush concluded that it was about time to "step off." The crowded place might become a quick-lunch resort for some others, not insect-feeders--hawks, for instance--and was unhealthful for that reason. Indeed, he had not more than moved away into the shelter of the rhododendrons when a shadow with a hooked bill shot round the corner, going like the wind. He had time to see it dive like a dipping kite--but it was a sparrow-hawk--and to hear the death-scream of a feeding blackbird, before he went completely from that place, and it knew him no more.

Soon after that he sighted the sea, wide-stretched and restless, ahead, and turned westward parallel with the coast-line, till, in the afternoon, he came unto "a land where it was always afternoon"--a flat, damp, dwarf-treed, relaxing, gray land, mild, as a rule, and melancholy--a land full of water. But for once it was a cold land, and the thrush realized that the bitter frost had leapt ahead of him, and that he might now never outstrip it again, perhaps. I do not know if he realized, too, that the lead sky, that looked as if it were going to come down and crush one, meant snow.

In a bare orchard he was attracted by the sight of several blue titmice and two robins, feeding upon one or two odd apples that had been left unpicked at the very top of a tree. It seemed strange and out of place to behold apples in midwinter like that; but, for some reason, he took only a few pecks, and his devil prompted him down to peck at some soaked bread among the violets, and to drink at a spring so exquisitely encrusted with moss that it looked as if everything, every floating dead leaf, stone, and root, had been upholstered in plush.

Then Fate struck--hard.