Produced by Al Haines.

[Illustration: Charles G. D. Roberts, title page]

                                 *SOME
                                 ANIMAL
                                STORIES*

                                   BY

                         CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

                   NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
                 J. M. DENT & SONS LTD LONDON & TORONTO

                          All rights reserved

                       FIRST PUBLISHED . . . 1921
           REPRINTED . . . 1923, 1925, 1926, 1928, 1930, 1932

                        PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

                               *CONTENTS*

Do Seek their Meat from God

"The Young Ravens that Call upon Him"

Strayed

The Watchers in the Swamp

Quills the Indifferent

Stripes the Unconcerned

The Black Mule of Aveluy

Star-Nose of the Under Ways

Kroof, the She-Bear

The Initiation of Miranda

A Royal Marauder

                         *SOME ANIMAL STORIES*

                     *DO SEEK THEIR MEAT FROM GOD*

One side of the ravine was in darkness.  The darkness was soft and rich,
suggesting thick foliage.  Along the crest of the slope tree-tops came
into view—great pines and hemlocks of the ancient unviolated
forest—revealed against the orange disc of a full moon just rising.  The
low rays slanting through the moveless tops lit strangely the upper
portion of the opposite steep,—the western wall of the ravine, barren,
unlike its fellow, bossed with great rocky projections, and harsh with
stunted junipers.  Out of the sluggish dark that lay along the ravine as
in a trough, rose the brawl of a swollen, obstructed stream.

Out of a shadowy hollow behind a long white rock, on the lower edge of
that part of the steep which lay in the moonlight, came softly a great
panther.  In common daylight his coat would have shown a warm fulvous
hue, but in the elvish decolourising rays of that half hidden moon he
seemed to wear a sort of spectral grey.  He lifted his smooth round head
to gaze on the increasing flame, which presently he greeted with a
shrill cry.  That terrible cry, at once plaintive and menacing, with an
undertone like the fierce protestations of a saw beneath the file, was a
summons to his mate, telling her that the hour had come when they should
seek their prey.  From the lair behind the rock, where the cubs were
being suckled by their dam, came no immediate answer.  Only a pair of
crows, that had their nest in a giant fir-tree across the gulf, woke up
and croaked harshly their indignation.  These three summers past they
had built in the same spot, and had been nightly awakened to vent the
same rasping complaints.

The panther walked restlessly up and down, half a score of paces each
way, along the edge of the shadow, keeping his wide-open green eyes upon
the rising light. His short, muscular tail twitched impatiently, but he
made no sound.  Soon the breadth of confused brightness had spread
itself further down the steep, disclosing the foot of the white rock,
and the bones and antlers of a deer which had been dragged thither and
devoured.

By this time the cubs had made their meal, and their dam was ready for
such enterprise as must be accomplished ere her own hunger, now grown
savage, could hope to be assuaged.  She glided supplely forth into the
glimmer, raised her head, and screamed at the moon in a voice as
terrible as her mate’s.  Again the crows stirred, croaking harshly; and
the two beasts, noiselessly mounting the steep, stole into the shadows
of the forest that clothed the high plateau.

The panthers were fierce with hunger.  These two days past their hunting
had been wellnigh fruitless. What scant prey they had slain had for the
most part been devoured by the female; for had she not those small blind
cubs at home to nourish, who soon must suffer at any lack of hers?  The
settlements of late had been making great inroads on the world of
ancient forest, driving before them the deer and smaller game. Hence the
sharp hunger of the panther parents, and hence it came that on this
night they hunted together. They purposed to steal upon the settlements
in their sleep, and take tribute of the enemies’ flocks.

Through the dark of the thick woods, here and there pierced by the
moonlight, they moved swiftly and silently.  Now and again a dry twig
would snap beneath the discreet and padded footfalls.  Now and again, as
they rustled some low tree, a pewee or a nuthatch would give a startled
chirp.  For an hour the noiseless journeying continued, and ever and
anon the two grey, sinuous shapes would come for a moment into the view
of the now well-risen moon.  Suddenly there fell upon their ears, far
off and faint, but clearly defined against the vast stillness of the
Northern forest, a sound which made those stealthy hunters pause and
lift their heads.  It was the voice of a child crying,—crying long and
loud, hopelessly, as if there were no one by to comfort it.  The
panthers turned aside from their former course and glided toward the
sound. They were not yet come to the outskirts of the settlement, but
they knew of a solitary cabin lying in the thick of the woods a mile and
more from the nearest neighbour.  Thither they bent their way, fired
with fierce hope.  Soon would they break their bitter fast.

Up to noon of the previous day the lonely cabin had been occupied.  Then
its owner, a shiftless fellow, who spent his days for the most part at
the corner tavern three miles distant, had suddenly grown disgusted with
a land wherein one must work to live, and had betaken himself with his
seven-year-old boy to seek some more indolent clime.  During the long
lonely days when his father was away at the tavern the little boy had
been wont to visit the house of the next neighbour, to play with a child
of some five summers, who had no other playmate.  The next neighbour was
a prosperous pioneer, being master of a substantial frame house in the
midst of a large and well-tilled clearing.  At times, though rarely,
because it was forbidden, the younger child would make his way by a
rough wood road to visit his poor little disreputable playmate.  At
length it had appeared that the five-year-old was learning unsavoury
language from the elder boy, who rarely had an opportunity of hearing
speech more desirable.  To the bitter grief of both children, the
companionship had at length been stopped by unalterable decree of the
master of the frame house.

Hence it had come to pass that the little boy was unaware of his
comrade’s departure.  Yielding at last to an eager longing for that
comrade, he had stolen away late in the afternoon, traversed with
endless misgivings the lonely stretch of wood road, and reached the
cabin only to find it empty.  The door, on its leathern hinges, swung
idly open.  The one room had been stripped of its few poor furnishings.
After looking in the rickety shed, whence darted two wild and hawklike
chickens, the child had seated himself on the hacked threshold, and
sobbed passionately with a grief that he did not fully comprehend.  Then
seeing the shadows lengthen across the tiny clearing, he had grown
afraid to start for home.  As the dusk gathered, he had crept trembling
into the cabin, whose door would not stay shut.  When it grew quite
dark, he crouched in the inmost corner of the room, desperate with fear
and loneliness, and lifted up his voice piteously.  From time to time
his lamentations would be choked by sobs, or he would grow breathless,
and in the terrifying silence would listen hard to hear if any one or
anything were coming.  Then again would the shrill childish wailings
arise, startling the unexpectant night, and piercing the forest depths,
even to the ears of those great beasts which had set forth to seek their
meat from God.

The lonely cabin stood some distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile, back
from the highway connecting the settlements.  Along this main road a man
was plodding wearily.  All day he had been walking, and now as he neared
home his steps began to quicken with anticipation of rest.  Over his
shoulder projected a double-barrelled fowling-piece, from which was
slung a bundle of such necessities as he had purchased in town that
morning.  It was the prosperous settler, the master of the frame house.
His mare being with foal, he had chosen to make the tedious journey on
foot.

The settler passed the mouth of the wood road leading to the cabin.  He
had gone perhaps a furlong beyond, when his ears were startled by the
sound of a child crying in the woods.  He stopped, lowered his burden to
the road, and stood straining ears and eyes in the direction of the
sound.  It was just at this time that the two panthers also stopped, and
lifted their heads to listen.  Their ears were keener than those of the
man, and the sound had reached them at a greater distance.

Presently the settler realised whence the cries were coming.  He called
to mind the cabin; but he did not know the cabin’s owner had departed.
He cherished a hearty contempt for the drunken squatter; and on the
drunken squatter’s child he looked with small favour, especially as a
playmate for his own boy. Nevertheless he hesitated before resuming his
journey.

"Poor little devil!" he muttered, half in wrath. "I reckon his precious
father’s drunk down at ’the Corners,’ and him crying for loneliness!"
Then he reshouldered his burden and strode on doggedly.

But louder, shriller, more hopeless and more appealing, arose the
childish voice, and the settler paused again, irresolute, and with
deepening indignation.  In his fancy, he saw the steaming supper his
wife would have awaiting him.  He loathed the thought of retracing his
steps, and then stumbling a quarter of a mile through the stumps and bog
of the wood road.  He was foot-sore as well as hungry, and he cursed the
vagabond squatter with serious emphasis; but in that wailing was a
terror which would not let him go on. He thought of his own little one
left in such a position, and straightway his heart melted.  He turned,
dropped his bundle behind some bushes, grasped his gun, and made speed
back for the cabin.

"Who knows," he said to himself, "but that drunken idiot has left his
youngster without a bite to eat in the whole miserable shanty?  Or maybe
he’s locked out, and the poor little beggar’s half scared to death.
_Sounds_ as if he was scared"; and at this thought the settler quickened
his pace.

As the hungry panthers drew near the cabin, and the cries of the lonely
child grew clearer, they hastened their steps, and their eyes opened to
a wider circle, flaming with a greener fire.  It would be thoughtless
superstition to say the beasts were cruel.  They were simply keen with
hunger, and alive with the eager passion of the chase.  They were not
ferocious with any anticipation of battle, for they knew the voice was
the voice of a child, and something in the voice told them the child was
solitary.  Theirs was no hideous or unnatural rage, as it is the custom
to describe it. They were but seeking with the strength, the cunning,
the deadly swiftness given them to that end, the food convenient for
them.  On their success in accomplishing that for which nature had so
exquisitely designed them depended not only their own, but the lives of
their blind and helpless young, now whimpering in the cave on the slope
of the moon-lit ravine.  They crept through a wet alder thicket, bounded
lightly over the ragged brush fence, and paused to reconnoitre on the
edge of the clearing, in the full glare of the moon.  At the same moment
the settler emerged from the darkness of the wood-road on the opposite
side of the clearing. He saw the two great beasts, heads down and snouts
thrust forward, gliding toward the open cabin door.

For a few moments the child had been silent.  Now his voice rose again
in pitiful appeal, a very ecstasy of loneliness and terror.  There was a
note in the cry that shook the settler’s soul.  He had a vision of his
own boy, at home with his mother, safe-guarded from even the thought of
peril.  And here was this little one left to the wild beasts!  "Thank
God!  Thank God I came!" murmured the settler, as he dropped on one knee
to take a surer aim.  There was a loud report (not like the sharp crack
of a rifle), and the female panther, shot through the loins, fell in a
heap, snarling furiously and striking with her fore-paws.

The male walked around her in fierce and anxious amazement.  Presently,
as the smoke lifted, he discerned the settler kneeling for a second
shot.  With a high screech of fury, the lithe brute sprang upon his
enemy, taking a bullet full in his chest without seeming to know he was
hit.  Ere the man could slip in another cartridge the beast was upon
him, bearing him to the ground and fixing keen fangs in his shoulder.
Without a word, the man set his strong fingers desperately into the
brute’s throat, wrenched himself partly free, and was struggling to
rise, when the panther’s body collapsed upon him all at once, a dead
weight which he easily flung aside.  The bullet had done its work just
in time.

Quivering from the swift and dreadful contest, bleeding profusely from
his mangled shoulder, the settler stepped up to the cabin door and
peered in.  He heard sobs in the darkness.

"Don’t be scared, sonny," he said, in a reassuring voice.  "I’m going to
take you home along with me. Poor little lad, _I’ll_ look after you if
folks that ought to don’t."

Out of the dark corner came a shout of delight, in a voice which made
the settler’s heart stand still. "_Daddy_, daddy," it said, "I _knew_
you’d come.  I was so frightened when it got dark!"  And a little figure
launched itself into the settler’s arms, and clung to him trembling.
The man sat down on the threshold and strained the child to his breast.
He remembered how near he had been to disregarding the far-off cries,
and great beads of sweat broke out upon his forehead.

Not many weeks afterwards the settler was following the fresh trail of a
bear which had killed his sheep.  The trail led him at last along the
slope of a deep ravine, from whose bottom came the brawl of a swollen
and obstructed stream.  In the ravine he found a shallow cave, behind a
great white rock.  The cave was plainly a wild beast’s lair, and he
entered circumspectly.  There were bones scattered about, and on some
dry herbage in the deepest corner of the den, he found the dead bodies,
now rapidly decaying, of two small panther cubs.

                *"THE YOUNG RAVENS THAT CALL UPON HIM"*

It was just before dawn, and a greyness was beginning to trouble the
dark about the top of the mountain.

Even at that cold height there was no wind.  The veil of cloud that hid
the stars hung but a hand-breadth above the naked summit.  To eastward
the peak broke away sheer, beetling in a perpetual menace to the valleys
and the lower hills.  Just under the brow, on a splintered and creviced
ledge, was the nest of the eagles.

As the thick dark shrank down the steep like a receding tide, and the
greyness reached the ragged heap of branches forming the nest, the young
eagles stirred uneasily under the loose droop of the mother’s wings. She
raised her head and peered about her, slightly lifting her wings as she
did so; and the nestlings, complaining at the chill air that came in
upon their unfledged bodies, thrust themselves up amid the warm feathers
of her thighs.  The male bird, perched on a jutting fragment beside the
nest, did not move.  But he was awake.  His white, narrow, flat-crowned
head was turned to one side, and his yellow eye, under its straight,
fierce lid, watched the pale streak that was growing along the distant
eastern sea-line.

The great birds were racked with hunger.  Even the nestlings, to meet
the petitions of whose gaping beaks they stinted themselves without
mercy, felt meagre and uncomforted.  Day after day the parent birds had
fished almost in vain; day after day their wide and tireless hunting had
brought them scant reward.  The schools of alewives, mackerel, and
herring seemed to shun their shores that spring.  The rabbits seemed to
have fled from all the coverts about their mountain.

The mother eagle, larger and of mightier wing than her mate, looked as
if she had met with misadventure. Her plumage was disordered.  Her eyes,
fiercely and restlessly anxious, at moments grew dull as if with
exhaustion.  On the day before, while circling at her viewless height
above a lake far inland, she had marked a huge lake-trout, basking near
the surface of the water.  Dropping upon it with half-closed, hissing
wings, she had fixed her talons in its back.  But the fish had proved
too powerful for her.  Again and again it had dragged her under water,
and she had been almost drowned before she could unloose the terrible
grip of her claws.  Hardly, and late, had she beaten her way back to the
mountain-top.

And now the pale streak in the east grew ruddy. Rust-red stains and
purple, crawling fissures began to show on the rocky face of the peak.
A piece of scarlet cloth, woven among the faggots of the nest, glowed
like new blood in the increasing light.  And presently a wave of rose
appeared to break and wash down over the summit, as the rim of the sun
came above the horizon.

The male eagle stretched his head far out over the depth, lifted his
wings and screamed harshly, as if in greeting of the day.  He paused a
moment in that position, rolling his eye upon the nest.  Then his head
went lower, his wings spread wider, and he launched himself smoothly and
swiftly into the abyss of air as a swimmer glides into the sea.  The
female watched him, a faint wraith of a bird darting through the gloom,
till presently, completing his mighty arc, he rose again into the full
light of the morning.  Then on level, all but moveless wing, he sailed
away toward the horizon.

As the sun rose higher and higher, the darkness began to melt on the
tops of the lower hills and to diminish on the slopes of the upland
pastures, lingering in the valleys as the snow delays there in spring.
As point by point the landscape uncovered itself to his view, the eagle
shaped his flight into a vast circle, or rather into a series of
stupendous loops.  His neck was stretched toward the earth, in the
intensity of his search for something to ease the bitter hunger of his
nestlings and his mate.

Not far from the sea, and still in darkness, stood a low, round hill, or
swelling upland.  Bleak and shelterless, whipped by every wind that the
heavens could let loose, it bore no bush but an occasional juniper
scrub.  It was covered with mossy hillocks, and with a short grass,
meagre but sweet.  There in the chilly gloom, straining her ears to
catch the lightest footfall of approaching peril, but hearing only the
hushed thunder of the surf, stood a lonely ewe over the lamb to which
she had given birth in the night.

Having lost the flock when the pangs of travail came upon her, the
unwonted solitude filled her with apprehension.  But as soon as the
first feeble bleating of the lamb fell upon her ear, everything was
changed. Her terrors all at once increased tenfold,—but they were for
her young, not for herself; and with them came a strange boldness such
as her heart had never known before.  As the little weakling shivered
against her side, she uttered low, short bleats and murmurs of
tenderness.  When an owl hooted in the woods across the valley, she
raised her head angrily and faced the sound, suspecting a menace to her
young.  When a mouse scurried past her, with a small, rustling noise
amid the withered mosses of the hillock, she stamped fiercely, and would
have charged had the intruder been a lion.

When the first grey of dawn descended over the pasture, the ewe feasted
her eyes with the sight of the trembling little creature, as it lay on
the wet grass. With gentle nose she coaxed it and caressed it, till
presently it struggled to its feet, and, with its pathetically awkward
legs spread wide apart to preserve its balance, it began to nurse.
Turning her head as far around as she could, the ewe watched its every
motion with soft murmurings of delight.

And now that wave of rose, which had long ago washed the mountain and
waked the eagles, spread tenderly across the open pasture.  The lamb
stopped nursing; and the ewe, moving forward two or three steps, tried
to persuade it to follow her.  She was anxious that it should as soon as
possible learn to walk freely, so they might together rejoin the flock.
She felt that the open pasture was full of dangers.

The lamb seemed afraid to take so many steps.  It shook its ears and
bleated piteously.  The mother returned to its side, caressed it anew,
pushed it with her nose, and again moved away a few feet, urging it to
go with her.  Again the feeble little creature refused, bleating loudly.
At this moment there came a terrible hissing rush out of the sky, and a
great form fell upon the lamb.  The ewe wheeled and charged madly, but
at the same instant the eagle, with two mighty buffetings of his wings,
rose beyond her reach and soared away toward the mountain.  The lamb
hung limp from his talons; and with piteous cries the ewe ran beneath,
gazing upward, and stumbling over the hillocks and juniper bushes.

In the nest of the eagles there was content.  The pain of their hunger
appeased, the nestlings lay dozing in the sun, the neck of one resting
across the back of the other.  The triumphant male sat erect upon his
perch, staring out over the splendid world that displayed itself beneath
him.  Now and again he half-lifted his wings and screamed joyously at
the sun.  The mother bird, perched upon a limb on the edge of the nest,
busily rearranged her plumage.  At times she stooped her head into the
nest to utter over her sleeping eaglets a soft chuckling noise, which
seemed to come from the bottom of her throat.

But hither and thither over the round bleak hill wandered the ewe,
calling for her lamb, unmindful of the flock, which had been moved to
other pastures.

                               *STRAYED*

In the Cabineau Camp, of unlucky reputation, there was a young ox of
splendid build, but of a wild and restless nature.

He was one of a yoke, of part Devon blood, large, dark-red, all muscle
and nerve, and with wide magnificent horns.  His yoke-fellow was a
docile steady worker, the pride of his owner’s heart; but he himself
seemed never to have been more than half broken in. The woods appeared
to draw him by some spell.  He wanted to get back to the pastures where
he had roamed untrammelled of old with his fellow-steers. The
remembrance was in his heart of the dewy mornings when the herd used to
feed together on the sweet grassy hillocks, and of the clover-smelling
heats of June when they would gather hock-deep in the pools under the
green willow-shadows.  He hated the yoke, he hated the winter; and he
imagined that in the wild pastures he remembered it would be for ever
summer. If only he could get back to those pastures!

One day there came the longed-for opportunity; and he seized it.  He was
standing unyoked beside his mate, and none of the teamsters were near.
His head went up in the air, and with a snort of triumph he dashed away
through the forest.

For a little while there was a vain pursuit.  At last the lumbermen gave
it up.  "Let him be!" said his owner, "an’ I rayther guess he’ll turn up
agin when he gits peckish.  He kaint browse on spruce buds an’
lung-wort."

Plunging on with long gallop through the snow he was soon miles from
camp.  Growing weary he slackened his pace.  He came down to a walk.  As
the lonely red of the winter sunset began to stream through the openings
of the forest, flushing the snows of the tiny glades and swales, he grew
hungry, and began to swallow unsatisfying mouthfuls of the long moss
which roughened the tree-trunks.  Ere the moon got up he had filled
himself with this fodder, and then he lay down in a little thicket for
the night.

But some miles back from his retreat a bear had chanced upon his
foot-prints.  A strayed steer!  That would be an easy prey.  The bear
started straightway in pursuit.  The moon was high in heaven when the
crouched ox heard his pursuer’s approach.  He had no idea what was
coming, but he rose to his feet and waited.

The bear plunged boldly into the thicket, never dreaming of resistance.
With a muffled roar the ox charged upon him and bore him to the ground.
Then he wheeled, and charged again, and the astonished bear was beaten
at once.  Gored by those keen horns he had no stomach for further
encounter, and would fain have made his escape; but as he retreated the
ox charged him again, dashing him against a huge trunk. The bear dragged
himself up with difficulty, beyond his opponent’s reach; and the ox
turned scornfully back to his lair.

At the first yellow of dawn the restless creature was again upon the
march.  He pulled more mosses by the way, but he disliked them the more
intensely now because he thought he must be nearing his ancient pastures
with their tender grass and their streams. The snow was deeper about
him, and his hatred of the winter grew apace.  He came out upon a
hill-side, partly open, whence the pine had years before been stripped,
and where now grew young birches thick together.  Here he browsed on the
aromatic twigs, but for him it was harsh fare.

As his hunger increased he thought a little longingly of the camp he had
deserted, but he dreamed not of turning back.  He would keep on till he
reached his pastures, and the glad herd of his comrades licking salt out
of the trough beside the accustomed pool.  He had some blind instinct as
to his direction, and kept his course to the south very strictly, the
desire in his heart continually leading him aright.

That afternoon he was attacked by a panther, which dropped out of a tree
and tore his throat.  He dashed under a low branch and scraped his
assailant off, then, wheeling about savagely, put the brute to flight
with his first mad charge.  The panther sprang back into his tree, and
the ox continued his quest.

Soon his steps grew weaker, for the panther’s cruel claws had gone deep
into his neck, and his path was marked with blood.  Yet the dream in his
great wild eyes was not dimmed as his strength ebbed away.  His weakness
he never noticed or heeded.  The desire that was urging him absorbed all
other thoughts,—even, almost, his sense of hunger.  This, however, it
was easy for him to assuage, after a fashion, for the long, grey,
unnourishing mosses were abundant.

By and by his path led him into the bed of a stream, whose waters could
be heard faintly tinkling on thin pebbles beneath their coverlet of ice
and snow.  His slow steps conducted him far along this open course.
Soon after he had disappeared, around the curve in the distance there
came the panther, following stealthily upon his crimsoned trail.  The
crafty beast was waiting till the bleeding and the hunger should do its
work, and the object of its inexorable pursuit should have no more heart
left for resistance.

This was late in the afternoon.  The ox was now possessed with his
desire, and would not lie down for any rest.  All night long, through
the gleaming silver of the open spaces, through the weird and chequered
gloom of the deep forest, heedless even of his hunger, or perhaps driven
the more by it as he thought of the wild clover bunches and tender
timothy awaiting him, the solitary ox strove on.  And all night, lagging
far behind in his unabating caution, the panther followed him.

At sunrise the worn and stumbling animal came out upon the borders of
the great lake, stretching its leagues of unshadowed snow away to the
south before him. There was his path, and without hesitation he followed
it.  The wide and frost-bound water here and there had been swept clear
of its snows by the wind, but for the most part its covering lay
unruffled; and the pale dove-colours, and saffrons, and rose-lilacs of
the dawn were sweetly reflected on its surface.

The doomed ox was now journeying very slowly, and with the greatest
labour.  He staggered at every step, and his beautiful head drooped
almost to the snow When he had got a great way out upon the lake, at the
forest’s edge appeared the pursuing panther, emerging cautiously from
the coverts.  The round face and malignant green eyes were raised to
peer out across the expanse.  The labouring progress of the ox was
promptly marked.  Dropping its nose again to the ensanguined snow, the
beast resumed his pursuit, first at a slow trot, and then at a long,
elastic gallop. By this time the ox’s quest was nearly done.  He plunged
forward upon his knees, rose again with difficulty, stood still, and
looked around him.  His eyes were clouding over, but he saw, dimly, the
tawny brute that was now hard upon his steps.  Back came a flash of the
old courage, and he turned, horns lowered, to face the attack.  With the
last of his strength he charged, and the panther paused irresolutely;
but the wanderer’s knees gave way beneath his own impetus, and his horns
ploughed the snow.  With a deep bellowing groan he rolled over on his
side, and the longing, and the dream of the pleasant pastures, faded
from his eyes.  With a great spring the panther was upon him, and the
eager teeth were at his throat,—but he knew nought of it.  No wild
beast, but his own desire, had conquered him.

When the panther had slaked his thirst for blood, he raised his head,
and stood with his fore-paws resting on the dead ox’s side, and gazed
all about him.

To one watching from the lake shore, had there been any one to watch in
that solitude, the wild beast and his prey would have seemed but a speck
of black on the gleaming waste.  At the same hour, league upon league
back in the depth of the ancient forest, a lonely ox was lowing in his
stanchions, restless, refusing to eat, grieving for the absence of his
yoke-fellow.

                      *THE WATCHERS IN THE SWAMP*

Under the first pale lilac wash of evening, just where the slow stream
of the Lost-Water slipped placidly from the open meadows into the
osier-and-bulrush tangles of the swamp, a hermit thrush, perched in the
topmost spray of a young elm tree, was fluting out his lonely and
tranquil ecstasy to the last of the sunset.  _Spheral, spheral, oh,
holy, holy, clear,_ he sang; and stopped abruptly, as if to let the
brief, unfinished, but matchlessly pure and poignant cadence sink
unjarred into the heart of the evening stillness.  One minute—two
minutes—went by; and the spaces of windless air were like a crystal
tinged with faint violet.  And then this most reticent of singers loosed
again his few links of flawless sound—a strain which, more than any
other bird-song on this earth, leaves the listener’s heart aching
exquisitely for its completion.  _Spheral, spheral, oh, holy, holy_—but
this time, as if seeking by further condensation to make his attar of
song still more rare and precious, he cut off the final note, that
haunting, ethereal—_clear_.

Again the tranced stillness.  But now, as if too far above reality to be
permitted to endure, after a few seconds it was rudely broken.  From
somewhere in the mysterious and misty depth of the swamp came a great
booming and yet strangulated voice, so dominant that the ineffable
colours of the evening seemed to fade and the twilight to deepen
suddenly under its sombre vibrations.  Three times it
sounded:—_Klunk-er-glungk_ ... _Klunk-er-glungk_ ... _Klunk-er-glungk_,
an uncouth, mysterious sound, sonorous, and at the same time half
muffled, as if pumped with effort through obstructing waters.  It was
the late cry of the bittern, proclaiming that the day was done.

The hermit-thrush, on his tree-top against the pale sky, sang no more,
but dropped noiselessly to his mate on her nest in the thickets.  Two
bats flickered and zigzagged hither and thither above the glimmering
stream.  And the leaf-scented dusk gathered down broodingly, with the
dew, over the wide solitudes of Lost-Water Swamp.

It was high morning in the heart of the swamp. From a sky of purest
cobalt flecked sparsely with silver-white wisps of cloud, the sun glowed
down with tempered, fruitful warmth upon the tender green of the
half-grown rushes and already rank water-grasses—the young leafage of
the alder and willow thickets—the wide pools and narrow, linking lanes
of unruffled water already mantling in spots with lily-pad and
arrow-weed.  A few big red-and-black butterflies wavered aimlessly above
the reed-tops.  Here and there, with a faint elfin clashing of
transparent wings, a dragon-fly, a gleam of emerald and amethyst fire,
flashed low over the water.  From every thicket came a soft chatter of
the nesting red-shouldered blackbirds.

And just in the watery fringe of the reeds, as brown and erect and
motionless as a mooring stake, stood the bittern.

Not far short of three feet in length, from the tip of his long and
powerful dagger-pointed bill to the end of his short rounded tail, with
his fierce, unblinking eyes round, bright and hard, with his snaky head
and long, muscular neck, he looked, as he was, the formidable master of
the swamp.  In colouring he was a streaked and freckled mixture of slaty
greys and browns and ochres above, with a freckled whitish throat, and
dull buff breast and belly—a mixture which would have made him
conspicuous amid the cool light green of the sedges, but that it
harmonised so perfectly with the earth and the roots.  Indeed, moveless
as he stood, to the undiscriminating eye he might easily have passed for
a decaying stump by the water side.  His long legs were of dull olive
which melted into the shadowy tones of the water.

For perhaps ten minutes the great bird stood there without the movement
of so much as a feather, apparently unconcerned while the small
inhabitants of the swamp made merry in the streaming sunshine.  But his
full round eyes took in, without stirring in their sockets, all that
went on about him, in air, or sedge, or water.  Suddenly, and so swiftly
that it seemed one motion, his neck uncoiled and his snaky head darted
downward into the water near his feet, to rise again with an eight-inch
chub partly transfixed and partly gripped between the twin daggers of
his half-opened bill.  Squirming, and shining silverly, it was held
aloft, while its captor stalked solemnly in through the sedges to a bit
of higher and drier turf.  Here he proceeded to hammer his prize into
stillness upon an old half-buried log.  Then, tossing it into the air,
he caught it adroitly by the head, and swallowed it, his fierce eyes
blinking with the effort as he slowly forced it down his capacious
gullet.  It was a satisfying meal, even for such a healthy appetite as
his, and he felt no immediate impulse to continue his fishing.
Remaining where he was beside the old log, thigh deep in the young
grasses and luxuriously soaking in the sunshine, he fell once more into
a position of rigid movelessness. But his attitude was now quite
different from that which he had affected when his mind was set on fish.
His neck was coiled backwards till the back of his head rested on his
shoulders, and his bill pointed skyward, as if the only peril he had to
consider seriously during his time of repose might come, if at all, from
that direction.  And though he rested, and every nerve and muscle seemed
to sleep, his gem-like eyes were sleeplessly vigilant.  Only at long
intervals a thin, whitish membrane flickered down across them for a
fraction of an instant, to cleanse and lubricate them and keep their
piercing brightness undimmed.

Once a brown marsh-hawk, questing for water-rats, winnowed past, only
ten or a dozen feet above his head. But he never stirred a muscle.  He
knew it would be a much more formidable and daring marauder than the
marsh-hawk that would risk conclusions with the uplifted dagger of his
bill.

In about half-an-hour—so swift is the digestion of these masters of the
swamp—the bittern began to think about a return to his easy and pleasant
hunting. But, always deliberate except when there was need for instant
action, at first he did no more than uncoil his long neck, lower his
bill to a level, and stand motionlessly staring over the sedge-tops.
One of the big red-and-black butterflies came wavering near, perhaps
under the fatal delusion that that rigid yellow bill would be a good
perch for him to alight on.  A lightning swift dart of the snaky head;
and those gay wings, after curiously adorning for a moment the tip of
the yellow bill, were deftly gathered in and swallowed—an unsubstantial
morsel, but not to be ignored when one is blest with a bittern’s
appetite.

After a few minutes more of statuesque deliberation, having detected
nothing in the landscape particularly demanding his attention, the
bittern lazily lifted his broad wings and flapped in slow flight, his
long legs almost brushing the sedge-tops, back to the post of vantage
where he had captured the chub.  As soon as he alighted he stiffened
himself erect, and stared about as if to see whether his flight had been
noticed. Then, presently, he seemed to remember something of importance.
This was the season of mating joys and cares.  It was time he signalled
his brown mate.  First he began snapping his bill sharply, and then he
went through a number of contortions with his throat and neck, as if he
were trying to gulp down vast quantities of air, and finding the effort
most difficult.  At length, however, the painful-looking struggle was
crowned with achievement.  Once more, as on the preceding evening, that
great call boomed forth across the swamp, sonorous yet strangulated,
uncouth yet thrilling and haunting, the very voice of solitude and
mystery:—_Klunk-er-glungk—Klunk-er-glungk—Klunk-er-glungk_.

Almost immediately came an acknowledgement of this untuneful love-song—a
single hoarse _quaw-awk_; and another snaky brown head and yellow dagger
bill were raised above the tops of the sedges.  The hen bittern, in
response to her mate’s cry, had just come off her nest.

For some tranquil moments the two eyed each other without stirring, and
it almost seemed as if their very immobility was a mode of expression, a
secret code for communication between them.  The result, if so, appeared
to be satisfactory.  The hen came stalking solemnly through the grass
and sedges towards the water’s edge, only pausing on the way to transfix
and gulp down a luckless frog.  And the stately male, once more
spreading his spacious vans, flapped slowly over and dropped again into
the grass some ten or a dozen feet from the nest.

The nest was a rather casual structure of dry grass and weeds, in a
hollow of the turf, and more or less concealed by leaning tufts of
swamp-grass.  It contained three large eggs of a dull greenish buff,
clouded with darker tones, and blending elusively with the soft
colourings of the nest.  These precious eggs the male bittern had no
intention of brooding.  His object was merely to stand guard over them,
with jealous vigilance, while his mate was away foraging.  The sun was
softly warm upon them, through the thin shadows of the grass blades, and
he knew they would not chill during her brief absence.  He took his post
just near enough to keep his eye upon the nest, without unduly drawing
attention to its hiding-place.

This patch of water-meadow, perhaps a half-acre in extent, on which the
bitterns had their nest, was one of many such tiny islands scattered
amid the interlacing channels of Lost-Water Swamp.  It formed a
congenial refuge for all that small life of the wilderness which loves
to be near water without being in it.  It was particularly beloved of
the meadow-mice, because the surrounding watercourses and morasses were
an effectual barrier to some of their worst enemies, such as foxes,
skunks, and weasels; and they throve here amazingly.  To be sure the
bittern would take toll of them when they came his way, but he did not
deliberately hunt them, rather preferring a diet of frogs and fish; and
moreover, his depredations upon the mice were more than counterbalanced
by his eager hostility to their dreaded foes, the snakes.  So, on the
whole, he might have been regarded by the mouse community as a
benefactor, though a rather costly one.

Even now, as he stood there apparently thinking of nothing but his
guardianship of the nest, he gave a telling example of his beneficence
in this regard.  There was a tiny, frightened squeak, a desperate small
rustling in the grass-stems, and a terrified mouse scurried by, with a
two-foot black snake at its tail.  The bittern’s head flashed down,
unerringly, and rose again, more slowly, with the snake gripped by the
middle. Held high in air, as if on exhibition, between the knife-edge
tips of that deadly yellow bill, the victim writhed and twisted, coiling
itself convulsively around its captor’s head and neck.  But with two or
three sharp jerks it was drawn further back, towards the base of the
mandibles, and then, with an inexorable pressure, bitten clean in two,
the halves uncoiled and fell to the ground, still wriggling
spasmodically.  With grave deliberation the bittern planted one foot
upon the head half, and demolished the vicious head with a tap of his
bill.  This done, he swallowed it, with determined and strenuous
gulpings.  Then he eyed the other half doubtfully, and decided that he
was not yet ready for it.  So, placing one foot upon it with a precise
air, as if in assertion of ownership, he lifted his head again and
resumed his motionless guarding of the nest.  If any mice were
watching—and their beady bright eyes are _always_ watching—they may well
have congratulated themselves that the pair of bitterns had chosen this
particular island for their nesting-place.

A little later in the morning—perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes after
the incident of the snake—the mice found yet another potent reason for
congratulating themselves on the presence of their expensive champion.
The hen bittern, apparently, had not been very successful in her
foraging.  She had shown as yet no sign of returning to the nest.  The
male was just beginning to get impatient.  He even went so far as to
move his head, though ever so slightly.  Indeed, he was on the very
point of beginning those grotesque snappings of the bill and gulpings of
air, which would be followed by his booming triple call, when he caught
sight of a dark form moving through the grass, beyond the nest.
Instantly he stiffened again into rigidity. Only, very slowly, the long
slender feathers which crowned his head and lay along his neck began to
rise.

The dark form, gliding stealthily among the grasses, was that of an
animal about two feet in length, low on the legs, slender, sinuous,
quick-darting.  The bittern had never chanced to observe a mink before,
but he needed no one to tell him that this creature was dangerous.
Ferocity and efficiency were written all over the savage, triangular
head, and lithe, swift body. But the intruder had evidently not yet
discovered the precious nest.  He was half a dozen paces away from it,
and not moving directly towards it.  He seemed quite otherwise occupied.
Indeed, in the very next moment he pounced upon a mouse, which he tore
and devoured with an eagerness which showed him to be hungry.  The
bittern, being blest with prudence and self-control, made no move to
meet trouble half-way. He waited, and hoped anxiously that the treasure
of the nest might escape discovery.

The mink, to do that sanguinary marauder justice, was not at the moment
thinking of any such luxury as eggs.  A restless and far-ranging slayer,
and almost as much at home in the water as on dry land, he had entered
the swamp in the hope of finding just such a happy hunting ground as
this bit of mouse-thronged meadow.  He had just arrived, after much
swimming of sluggish channels, scrambling over slimy roots, and picking
a fastidious way about dark pools of treacherous ooze, and he was now
full of blood-thirsty excitement over the success of his adventure.  His
acute ears and supersensitive nostrils had already assured him that the
meadow was simply swarming with mice.  His nose sniffed greedily the
subtle, warm mousy smells. His ears detected the innumerable, elusive
mousy squeaks and rustlings.  His eyes, lit now with the red spark of
the blood-lust, were less fortunate than his ears and nose, because word
of a new and dreadful foe had gone abroad among the mouse-folk, and
concealment was the order of the day.  But already, he had made one
kill—and that so easily that he knew the quarry here was not much
hunted.  He felt that, at last, he could afford to take life easily and
do his hunting at leisure.

He licked his lips, gave his long whiskers a brush with his fore-paws,
to cleanse them after his rather hasty and untidy meal, and was just
preparing to follow a very distinct mouse trail which lay alluringly
before his nose, when a chance puff of air, drawing softly across the
grass, bore him a scent which instantly caught his attention.  The scent
of bittern was new to him, as it chanced.  He knew it for the scent of a
bird, a water-bird of some kind,—probably, from its abundance, a large
bird, and certainly, therefore, a bird worth his hunting.  That the
hunting might have any possible perils for himself was far from
occurring to his savage and audacious spirit.

Curious and inquiring, he rose straight up en his hind-quarters in order
to get a good view, and peered searchingly over the grass-tops.  He saw
nothing but the green and sun-steeped meadow with the red-and-black
butterflies wavering over it, the gleam of the unruffled water, and the
osier-thickets beyond, their leafage astir with blackbirds and
swamp-sparrows. He looked directly at, and _past_, the guardian bittern,
not discovering him for a bird at all, but probably mistaking that
rigid, vigilant shape for an old brown stump.  For the mink’s eyes, like
those of many other animals, were less unerring than his ears and
nostrils, and much quicker to discern motion than fixed form. Had the
bittern stirred by so much as a hair’s breadth, the mink would have
detected him at once for what he was.  But there in the full glare of
the open, his immobility concealed him like a magic cloak.  The mink
looked at him and saw him not; nor saw another similar form, unstirring,
tensely watchful, over by the water-side.  The hen bittern, warned
perhaps by some subtle telepathic signal from her mate, had stopped her
fishing and stood on guard.

Having failed to detect the source of that strange, intriguing smell,
the mink concluded, from past experiences with partridge, grouse, and
duck, that it must come from a brooding mother, hiding on a nest in the
grass.  Nothing could be more satisfactory.  His eyes blazed blood-red
at the prospect of slaughter. Dropping down again upon all fours, he
darted forward, up the trail of the scent, soundless as a shadow and
swift as a shifting beam of light,—and came full upon the nest with its
three unsheltered eggs.  Instantly seizing the nearest one between his
agile forepaws, he crunched the shell and began greedily sucking up the
contents.

But the savour of the feast had hardly thrilled his palate when it
seemed as if the skies had fallen upon him.  A scalding anguish stabbed
his hunched-up shoulders, a smother of buffeting wings enveloped him,
and he was borne backward from the nest in an ignominious bundle, the
broken egg-shell still clinging to his nose.

At that moment when he had dropped upon all fours and darted forward
through the grass toward the nest, all the immobility of the watching
bittern had vanished.  His long crest standing straight up in his fury,
he had launched himself to the attack, covered the intervening distance
with two tremendous thrusts of his powerful wings, and fallen like a
cyclone upon the violator of his home.  The dagger of his bill had
struck deeply, though at random; his hard wing-elbows had landed their
blows effectively; and the impetus of his charge had swept the battle
clear of the nest, thus saving the two remaining eggs from destruction.
The same impetus carried him clear of his foe and a couple of paces
past, but he turned adroitly in the air and landed facing about, ready
for the inevitable counter-attack.

Amazed and startled though he was, and handled with a roughness quite
new to his experience, the mink was in no way daunted.  Rather he was so
boiling with rage that his wonted wariness forsook him completely.  With
a snarl that was almost a screech he sprang straight at the long,
exposed, inviting throat of his adversary.  Had those keen white fangs
of his, still dripping with egg, reached their aim, the fight would have
been over.  His leap was swift, true, and deadly.  But equally true, and
more swift, was the counter-stroke.  He was met, and stopped in mid-air,
by a thrust of the bittern’s bill, which, had he not twisted his head
just in time, would have split his skull.  As it was, it laid open one
side of his snarling face, destroyed one eye, and brought him heavily to
the ground.  Even under this punishment, however, he would not
acknowledge defeat.  Springing aside, with a lightning zigzag movement
to confuse the aim of that terrific bill, he darted low and made a leap
at his antagonist’s long, vulnerable legs.  He missed only by a hair’s
breadth, as the bittern, keenly alive to the risk of such a manoeuvre,
leapt nimbly aside and baulked him with a stiff wing-stroke.  He seized
the baffling wing and strove to pull his tall adversary down. But two
great pinion feathers came away in his jaws, and the next moment he got
another terrible, driving stab from the dagger beak, well forward on the
flank. It was a slanting thrust, or it would have pierced his lungs; but
it nearly knocked the wind out of him, and ploughed a deep red gash in
his glossy coat.

Screeching furiously, he doubled on himself like a snake to meet this
attack.  But at the same moment he cringed under another excruciating
stab, this time in the haunch; and looking up, he saw himself enveloped
in a cloud of blinding wings.  The hen bittern had arrived to join in
the defence of her nest.

Now, bloodthirsty and merciless marauder though he was, the mink’s
courage was a thing beyond dispute; and terribly though the fight had so
far gone against him, with a single foe to confront he would probably
have held on to the death.  But for all his fury he was not quite mad;
and this reinforcement of the enemy was too much for him.  Suddenly
straightening himself out long and small like an eel, he slipped from
under the terrifying storm of wings and stabs, and made off through the
grass at the best speed that in all his swift career he had ever
attained. He made for the water, which he felt would be his safest
refuge.  The angry bitterns were after him on the instant, flying as low
as possible and stabbing down at him through the grass-stems.  But his
cunning and slippery zigzags enabled him to dodge most of their thrusts;
and in their eagerness they got in each other’s way—which probably saved
him his bare life.  At length, streaming with blood, and leaving behind
him a red trail to proclaim his discomfiture to the mice, he reached the
water, and dived in.  Without daring to come to the surface he swam
across the channel—here about two score paces in width—and cautiously
raised his head behind a screen of over-hanging weeds. He saw his two
pursuers standing, motionless and erect, on the opposite bank, watching
with fierce eyes for him to reappear.  He decided not to reappear.
Submerging himself again, he swam on down stream till he had rounded a
sharp bend of the channel.  When he thought it prudent to show himself
once more, he was sheltered from those avenging eyes by a dense screen
of alder and willows.  These bushes were full of nesting red-wings, who
chattered at him angrily. He paid no heed to their scolding, but hurried
through the thicket, and on down the bank till he found an ancient
musk-rat hole.  Into this he crept eagerly, and lay down in the grateful
dark to nurse his wounds and his humiliation.

After the disappearance of the mink the hen bittern soon returned to her
nest.  But the male stayed where he was.  From time to time he would
snap up a butterfly or beetle, or spear a passing frog or chub or
sucker. But always his indignant heart was hoping that the mink would
return.  After an hour or two, however, his wrath died down and he began
to forget.

Then he would occasionally vary his still-hunting, by walking with slow,
meditative steps up and down the strip of bare ooze between the grass
and the water, feeling out with his sensitive claws the little
freshwater clams which lay hidden in the mud.  The clams were scarce,
however, so along about the middle of the afternoon he flapped lazily
back to his old fishing station on the other side of the meadow.

Later in the day, when the osiers were beginning to throw long shadows
across the water, and the red-and-black butterflies had grown too
indolent to dance, and the blue-and-amethyst dragon-flies had ceased
their hawking of mosquitoes over the lily-pads and arrow-weed, the great
bittern, full fed and at ease with life, flapped languidly up from the
water-side and dropped close beside the nest.  His brooding mate lifted
her head, as if in greeting, and laid it back at once between her
shoulders, with her yellow bill pointing skyward as was her vigilant
custom.

Soon the first warm tints of sunset began to stain the edges of the
clouds above the far fringes of the swamp.  Motionless and erect beside
his mate, the bittern watched the oncoming of the enchantment as his day
drew to its quiet close.  Suddenly the coloured quiet of the air was
disturbed by the beating of hurried wings.  He glanced upward, without
moving.  A mallard drake, in frantic flight, whirred past, fifteen or
twenty feet above his head, making for the water. Close after the
fugitive, and swiftly overhauling him with long, tremendous thrusts of
his mighty wings, came that most dreaded cut-throat of the air, a great
blue goshawk.  Swift and bullet-like was the flight of the desperate
fugitive; but that of the hawk was far swifter.  Had the water been two
feet further away the fate of the glossy drake would have been sealed.
He would have been overtaken, his throat torn out in mid-air, his body
carried off to the nearest tree-top to be plucked and devoured.  But
this time the inscrutable Fates of the wilderness, too seldom so lenient
to the weak, decided to favour him.  With a heavy-sounding splash he
shot down into the blessed water, and disappeared into safety beneath
the lily-pads, just in time.

The destroying talons of the great hawk clutched convulsively at the
dandy curled tips of his tail as he vanished.

With his arrowy speed, his precision of stroke, his audacity and fiery
spirit, the blue goshawk was little accustomed to the experience of
being baulked of his prey.  He knew well enough that his quarry would
not show itself again, but would swim away under water and only come up
to breathe in the safe shelter of some dense thicket of rushes.  With a
sharp yelp of wrath, he swept up from the water on a long, graceful
curve, wheeled sharply above the osiers, and sailed back low above the
bittern’s island, seeking other prey.  And his piercing gaze fell upon
the bittern, standing rigid beside the nest.

His swoop was instantaneous, straight and swift as a bolt from a
cross-bow.  But that coiled steel spring of the bittern’s neck was even
swifter; and as his talons struck downward, the bittern’s dagger thrust
caught him in the very centre of the impending claw, splitting the foot
fairly and disabling it.  Nevertheless, by the shock of the attack the
bittern was borne downward, and would have been caught in the breast or
throat by the other talon; but at the same instant his watchful mate,
who had half risen on the nest that her eggs might not be crushed in the
mêlée, delivered her thrust.  It went true.  And it had not only the
drive of her sinewy neck behind it, but also the full force of her
powerful thighs, as well as the assailant’s descending weight to drive
it home.  It caught the goshawk full in the base of the neck, pierced
clean through, and severed the spine.  And in a wild confusion of
sprawled legs and pounding wings the three great birds fell in a heap in
the grass, just beyond the nest.

The two bitterns nimbly extricated themselves, and with wings pounding,
stabbed savagely, again and again, at the unresisting body of the hawk.
Presently, as if by one impulse, they both stood up, erect and still as
images, their yellow bills dripping with blood. The male had a bleeding
gash along the side of his head, and had lost several of his haughty
crest feathers. But this concerned him little.  His heart swelled with
triumph.  He was forced to give it utterance.  He snapped his bill
sharply, gulped a few mouthfuls of air, and then sent forth his booming
challenge across the swamp:—_Klunk-er-glungk ... Klunk-er-glungk ...
Klunk-er-glungk_.

His mate spread her broad wings, shook herself till her ruffled plumage
fell into place, wiped her conquering bill on the grass, stepped
delicately back into the nest, and softly settled herself down upon her
two eggs, so miraculously preserved.

Silence fell on Lost-Water Swamp.  The air became gradually transfused
with amethyst and pale rose. And then, far and faint, tranquil and
poignant, came the entrancing cadence—_Oh, spheral, spheral, oh, holy,
holy, spheral_—the silver vesper ecstasy of the hermit-thrush, in his
tree-top against the pellucid sky.

                        *QUILLS THE INDIFFERENT*

Quills was born in a capacious hole in the heart of a huge and ancient
red maple, near the banks of the Tobique River, in New Brunswick.

The hole had to be capacious, for Quills’s mother was a fine porcupine,
in her prime, fully two and a half feet in length, massive in build, and
a good twenty pounds in weight; and, moreover, her armament of long,
bristling spines made it essential that she should not be unduly crowded
in her nest.  But the entrance was only large enough for her to squeeze
through it without discomfort, so the dusky interior was sheltered, warm
and dry.  It was also safe; for in all the wilderness there was no
savage marauder reckless enough to invade a porcupine’s nest while the
owner was at home.

In proportion to the size of his mother, Quills, like all young
porcupines, was an amazingly big baby—hardly smaller, indeed, than the
new-born cub of the black bear.  His length was about eleven inches, his
weight a shade over two pounds—and this when he was not yet twenty-four
hours old.  He was richly clothed with long, dark fur, almost black,
under which lay hidden his sprouting armament of spines, already
formidable, though only about half an inch in length. Born with the
insatiable appetite of his tribe, he lay stretched out between his
mother’s stumpy fore-legs, nursing greedily, with an incessant
accompaniment of tiny squeaks and squeals of satisfaction.  The sounds
were loud enough to attract the notice of two little black-and-white
woodpeckers who had just alighted on the trunk near the hole.  With
sleek heads cocked alertly, and bright eyes keen with interrogation,
they listened to the curious noises inside the tree.  Then they
clambered on up the trunk to a safer height, wondering, no doubt, that
any youngling should be guilty of such an indiscretion as thus to betray
the secret of its hiding-place.  They could not know that the porcupine
baby, almost alone among the babes of the wild, was exempted, through
the reputation of his spines, from the law of silence as the price of
life. Young or old, the porcupine will make a noise whenever it pleases
him to do so, and with a lofty indifference as to who his hearers may
be.

It was spring, and spring comes late to the high valley of the Tobique
stream.  The ancient red maple, still full of vigorous life in the
sap-wood of its outer shell, in spite of the great hollow at its
decaying heart, was mantled over every branch and twig with a glowing
veil of tiny rose-bud blooms, though the green of its leaf-buds was
hardly yet showing through the brown sheaths.  The ice had been broken
up and been swept away in tumbling masses, and the current of the swift
river, swollen with the spring freshet, filled the air about the
porcupine’s nest with a pleasant, softly thunderous roar.  From all the
open glades the snow was gone, though masses of it, shrunken and greyish
and sprinkled with dead leaves and twigs, still lingered in the fir
thickets and the deeper hollows.  On the drier hillocks and about the
rotting stumps a carpet of round, flat, yellowish-green and bronzy
leaves shielded the lurking pink-and-white blossoms and haunting
perfumes of the Mayflower, or trailing arbutus, the shy darling of the
Northern spring.  The fairy fragrance came and went elusively across the
pervading scent of moist earth and spicy balsam-tips, as the mild breeze
pulsed vaguely through the forest.

It was mid-afternoon of the second day of Quills’s life.  Pleasantly
fatigued from his double duty of nursing and growing, he fell into a
sound sleep.  Then his mother, spurred by the now insistent demands of
her own appetite, gently disentangled herself from the clutch of his
baby claws in her fur, crawled from the hole, and descended the trunk to
seek a hasty meal.

But what was haste for a porcupine would have been regarded at the
extreme of lazy loitering in any other creature of the wild.  At the
foot of the old maple she stood for some moments loudly sniffing the air
with her blunt nostrils.  Then, as if making up her mind that it was
hemlock she wanted, she ambled off with heavy deliberation to the
nearest hemlock tree, climbed it with a noisy rattling of claws, settled
herself comfortably in the first crotch, and fell to gnawing the rough
bark.  When she had taken the edge off her appetite with this fare—which
no stomach but a porcupine’s could ever digest—she crawled out along a
branch, as far as it would bear her weight, and, gathering a lot of the
slender twigs between her fore-paws, made a hearty dessert of the
dark-green, glossy frondage. Other hemlocks, standing at a greater
distance from her nest, already bore the conspicuous marks of her
foraging; but this one she had hitherto left untouched against the day
when she would be wanting to take her meals near home.

While his mother was away feeding, Quills had slept, soundly and
silently, for perhaps an hour or more. Then he woke up—hungry, of
course, as befitted a healthy young porcupine.  Finding no warm mother
to snuggle him and feed him, he at once set up his small but earnest
complaint of whines and squeals and grumbles, all unconcerned as to who
or what might overhear him.

As it chanced at this moment, a hungry weasel—the most insatiably
bloodthirsty of all the wilderness prowlers—was just approaching the
foot of the old maple, nosing out the somewhat stale trail of a rabbit.
As his keen ear caught these tell-tale sounds from within the tree, he
stopped short, and his malignant little eyes began to blaze.  Then he
glided around the great trunk, halted just below the hole, and sniffed
discriminately at the strong fresh scent upon the bark. But at this
point he hesitated—and it is not usual for a hungry weasel to hesitate.
The scent was porcupine, and a grown-up porcupine was a proposition
which not even his audacity was prepared to tackle.  The sounds from
within that tempting hole, to be sure, were the voice of a baby
porcupine.  But was the baby alone, or was the mother with it?  In the
latter case, he would as soon have jumped into the jaws of a lynx as
enter that hole.  The fresh scent on the bark offered no solution to the
problem.  Was it made in coming out or going in?  He sniffed at it
again, growing fiercer and more hungry every moment.

Suddenly he heard behind him a dry rattling of quills and a confused
noise of squeals and chattering grunts.  The mother porcupine was
hurrying across the moist turf, gnashing her jaws, and looking twice her
natural size with every quill on end.  In her rage and anxiety she was
making remarkable speed for a porcupine.  The weasel, his long white
fangs bared and his eyes red with disappointed fury, whipped about and
stood facing her till she was within three or four feet of him.  But for
all his rage he was no fool.  For her gnashing yellow teeth he had no
respect whatever.  But those deadly, poisonous, needle-sharp spines of
hers!  He had no wish to interview them too closely.  With eleventh-hour
discretion he slipped aside to make way for her, and glided off to pick
up again the trail of the rabbit.

The mother porcupine never even turned her head to see where the enemy
had gone to.  Wild with anxiety, she scrabbled up the trunk and into her
nest.  Her experienced nose, however, at once assured her that the
weasel had not been inside.  Instantly appeased, she stretched herself
on her side, drew the complaining youngster to her breast, licked and
nosed him for a few moments, and settled into a comfortable doze.

Having this hearty mother’s attention all to himself—an exceptional
advantage, as a porcupine baby has generally one brother or sister, if
not more, to share the maternal supply—young Quills grew and throve
amazingly.  And his armoury of spines throve with him.  In a few weeks
he was out of the hole and following his mother up into the hemlock
trees, where he speedily learned to feed on the glossy green tips of the
frondage.  From this diet he passed quickly to the stronger fare of the
harsh and bitter bark, the gnawing of which was a delight to his
powerful, chisel-like teeth. By the time the full flush of the Tobique
summer, ardent and swift, had crowded the rich-soiled valley with
greenery and bloom, Quills’s mother had grown altogether indifferent to
him.  She had long ago refused him her breasts, of which, indeed, he had
no further need.  But she still permitted him to follow her about, if he
wanted companionship, so long as he did not trouble her.  And in this
way he learned the few things—astonishingly few, it would seem—that a
porcupine needs to know in order to hold his own in the struggle for
existence.  He learned, among other things, that nearly all the green
stuff that the forest produced was more or less fit for his food, that
there were other trees besides the hemlock whose bark was tasty and
nourishing and pleasantly resistant to his teeth, and that in a broad,
sunny backwater of the river there grew a profusion of great round flat
leaves, the pads of the water-lily, which were peculiarly thrilling to
his palate. In fact, most of his learning had to do with food, which was
what he appeared to live for.  His enemies were few, and seldom
enthusiastic.  And he never troubled his head about avoiding them.  With
an indifference nothing less than colossal, he left it to them to avoid
him, if they wished; and they did so wish, ninety-nine times out of the
hundred.

Along towards the latter part of August, Quills found that his mother
was no longer indifferent.  She had grown actively unfriendly.  Whenever
he came near her she grunted and chattered to him in such an irritable
fashion that it was obvious, even to a not over-sensitive spirit like
his, that his companionship was distasteful to her.  This attitude
neither grieved nor angered him, however.  She was no longer of any
importance to him.  He simply quit following her, went his own way, and
forgot her.  Striking off on his own, and impelled by instinct to seek a
fresh range for himself, he plunged into the still, warm tide of the
sunny backwater and swam, with much splashing and little speed, to the
opposite bank.  Swimming was no task to him, for his coat of hollow
quills made it impossible for him to sink.  The backwater was not more
than thirty or forty yards in width, but when he had crossed it, and
crawled forth upon the opposite bank, he felt that he had found a new
world, and owned it.  He ambled joyously along the bank to a point where
he had marked a bed of bright-green arrow-weed, and gorged himself to
his great content on the shapely, pointed leaves and stout succulent
stalks.  Then he climbed a big poplar and curled up to sleep,
self-sufficient and pleased to be alone.

Quills was by this time more than half grown up, and, moreover, thanks
to his happily selected parentage and his ample nourishment when a baby,
he was as big and strong as many a less favoured porcupine achieves to
be at maturity.  In colour he was of a very dark brown, verging on
black, and peppered with a dingy yellowish white, his long fur being
dark with light tips, and his spines cream-coloured with black tips.
The spines on his body ranged from two to four inches in length, and
when he was not angry, they were partly concealed by the fur, which was
considerably longer.  The quills on his head and the sides of his face
were about an inch in length.  His short, blunt muzzle was free from
spines, but closely furred to the lips, and conspicuously adorned by his
large and prominent front teeth, his gnawing teeth, which were of a
vivid dark yellow colour.  His legs and all the under parts of his body
were clothed in dense, soft fur, entirely without spines.  His tail,
about five inches in length, was very thick and powerful, and heavily
armed with spines to the tip.  The spines on his body were for his
protection, but this armed tail was his one weapon of offence—a weapon
with which at a single stroke he could fill an enemy’s mouth or paws
with a hundred barbed and poisonous needles; and the peculiar deadliness
of these needles, large and small alike, lay in their power of swift and
inexorable burrowing.  Once their subtle points penetrated the skin,
their innumerable, microscopic, scale-like barbs would begin working
them inwards through the muscles, setting up violent inflammations as
they went, till they would reach some vital part and put their wretched
victim out of his misery.

So far in his career young Quills had had no occasion to test the
efficiency of that formidable tail of his as a weapon, though from time
to time he would stretch himself elaborately, leg after leg and claw
after claw, ruffle up all his spines as if to see that they were in
working order, and lash out alarmingly with the aforesaid tail by way of
keeping it efficient and ready for action.  And now, as luck would have
it, the first enemy he was to encounter was the very one against whom
his best defences were of least avail—namely, Man himself.  But
fortunately for young Quills, and for this his brief biography, the man
in question was neither needing meat—least of all, such harsh meat as
porcupine—nor of a destructive disposition.  He was magnanimous, and
Quills never knew that he held on to his little lease of life by favour.

The man had come up to the Tobique in a canoe, partly for the fishing,
partly to refresh his spirit with the clean airs of the wilderness.  He
left his guide frying bacon and trout for the midday meal, and strolled
up the backwater to cast a fly and see if there were any big fish
lurking in the shade of the lily-pads.  He forgot about his fishing,
however, when he caught sight of Quills, looking somewhat like a big
dilapidated bird’s nest, curled up asleep in the crotch of a young
poplar. Being interested in all the kindred of the wild, the man reeled
in his line, stood his rod carefully in a bush, and went and shook the
tree as hard as he could, to see what Quills would do.

Quills woke up with a startled squeak, dug his claws into the bark to
secure himself, and peered down to see what was the matter.  At sight of
this wanton disturber of his dreams he grew very angry.  He chattered
and grunted, and clashed his big yellow teeth loudly, and ruffled up his
deadly spines as a clear warning to the intruder to keep off.

The man laughed, as if pleased at this bold defiance. He looked about
for a long pole, thinking to poke Quills from his perch, so as to study
him a little nearer at hand.  But poles for poking porcupines do not lie
about the Tobique wilderness, as he presently realised. He decided to
climb the poplar, for a closer—but not too close—investigation.  But the
moment he began to climb, Quills, boiling with indignation, started down
to meet the danger half-way.  He came down backwards, with his tail
lashing savagely.  And he came down so astonishingly fast that the man
had barely time to drop to the ground and jump out of the way, chuckling
at the speedy success of his experiment.

"Half a jiffy, and the beggar would have made my face look like a
pin-cushion," he muttered approvingly.

Reaching the ground, Quills stopped and stood chattering his defiance.
The man, some paces distant, eyed him humorously for a few seconds, then
went and got his fishing-rod out of the bush.  With a bit of string from
his jacket pocket he tied his cloth cap over the butt of the rod, and
then, like a fencer with a button on his foil, with this weapon of
courtesy he came and made a gentle thrust at Quills’s blunt nose.  Quick
as a flash Quills whisked around and lashed at the impertinent weapon
with his tail.  The man at once withdrew it and examined his cap.  It
was stuck full, at that one slashing blow, with beautiful, polished,
black-tipped white quills.

"Thanks awfully, old chap," said he.  "They are lovely specimens, so I
won’t tease you any more." And, carrying his prize carefully before him,
he turned back to the canoe.  Quills glared after him, till his long
form had vanished through the trees.  Then his anger cooled, and
exultation at this easy and signal triumph took its place.  His spines
went down till they were hidden beneath the dark fur and he seemed to
have shrunk to half his size.  The stress of his emotions having made
him hungry—_anything_ will do to make a porcupine hungry—he crawled down
to the edge of the water and fell to feasting in a patch of arrow-weed.

Autumn on the Tobique passed swiftly in a blaze of colour.  A few sudden
touches of frost in the night, and then the maples stood glorious in
scarlet and crimson, the birches and poplars shimmered in pale gold, the
ash trees smouldered in dull purple, and the rowans flaunted their great
bunches of waxy orange-vermilion berries against the solid dark-green
background of hemlock and spruce.  The partridge-coveys whirred on
strong wing across the glowing corridors of the forest, under a sky of
sharp cobalt.  For a day or two every tree-top was elusively vocal with
the thin-drawn single notes of the migrating cedar wax-wings—notes which
were mere tiny beads of sound.  The ice which formed each night along
the edges of the shallow pools flitted away each morning before the
unclouded sun was two hours high.  And the air, stirred with light
breezes, sparkling, and rich with earth-scents, was like wine in the
veins of every creature alive.  One night came a light sifting of snow,
in gossamer flakes which vanished at the first touch of the sun.  Then
the breezes died away; the air, losing its crisp tang, grew balmy and
languorous, the sharp blue of the sky veiled itself in a tender opaline
haze; the wilderness seemed to fall asleep, its silence broken only by
the whispers of the falling leaves and, once in a while, the startling
_chirr-rr-rr_ of a red squirrel exulting over his hoard of beech-nuts.
Life for the moment had taken on the tissue of a dream.  It was the
magic "Indian Summer."  And folk in the scattered settlements, drinking
in the beauty and the wonder of it, were sad because they knew how
swiftly it must pass.

It passed, as it had come, in a night.  Day broke steel-grey and
menacing, with a bitter wind cutting down out of the North, and in a few
hours everything was rigid with frost.  Quills, though cold in reality
had small terror for his hardy and well-clad frame, had been disturbed
and annoyed by the sudden change. He didn’t like the wind.  It occurred
to him that a warm and sheltered retreat, like his dimly-remembered nest
in the heart of the old maple, would be a better sleeping-place than the
draughty branches of a hemlock or a spruce.  In this frame of mind he
thought of a tempting-looking hole which he had noticed under a big
boulder some fifty yards or so up the backwater. He knew, to be sure,
that the hole belonged to an old dog-fox, but that fact did not trouble
him.  His brain had only room for one idea at a time.  He set out
straightway for that hole.

At the entrance to the den the strong smell of fox seemed to him like a
challenge, and his spines rose angrily.  He had no idea whether the
owner was at home or not, and he made no attempt to find out.  By way of
precaution, however, he turned round before entering and backed in,
slashing vigorously with his armed tail as he did so.  The fox was not
at home. He found the retreat dry and warm—in fact, just what he wanted.
So, having well breakfasted before leaving his tree, he settled himself
down with his hind-quarters to the entrance, pretty well blocking it,
and unconcernedly went to sleep.

Presently the fox came trotting home, intent on getting out of the wind
and having a nap in his snug den.  But just before the threshold he
stopped short, the fur on his neck stood up, and his eyes went green. He
had scented the trail of Quills, and it led straight into his lair.
Stealthily he tiptoed forward, peered in, and saw confronting him that
spiny tail and rump, just inside the doorway.

His blood boiled at the intruder’s insolence.  But he was a wise old
beast, and in his rash youth he had once been lame for a month, with a
steely quill burning and festering under his knee-joint, through having
tried to interfere with a most insignificant-looking porcupine.  Curbing
his righteous wrath—as there was nothing else to do—he turned about and
with his scratching hind paws insultingly sent a shower of soiled earth
upon the slumbering Quills.  Then he trotted off to seek another
retreat.  Quills, thus rudely awakened, crawled forth, chattering
indignantly, and shook out the defilement from his long coat.  But, as
the fox was nowhere in sight, he promptly forgot his wrath and turned
into the den again to resume his nap.

Gradually, but inexorably, winter now closed down upon the valley of the
Tobique.  And it was a hard winter—for all the hunting beasts and birds,
a desperate winter.  The rabbits that autumn had been smitten with one
of their periodical epidemics, and died off like flies.  This did not
trouble Quills directly—a strict vegetarian, he was assured of plenty so
long as the forest stood.  But indirectly it made a vital difference to
him.  All the prowling and pouncing kindred—the great horned owls and
the eagles, the lynxes, foxes, martens, and minks, and even certain
surly old he-bears who were too restless to "hole-up" for the
winter—soon found themselves goaded by such a hunger as might at any
moment drive them to take unwonted risks.  Quills little guessed how
often, as he was gnawing complacently at his meal of hemlock bark, he
would be watched longingly by savage and hungry eyes.  But, had he
guessed it, his indifference would have remained quite unruffled.  He
had all he could eat, and a warm hole to sleep in, and why should he
borrow trouble?

But one biting December afternoon, when the straight shadows of the fir
trees were stretching long and blue across the snow, Quills’s
complacency got something of a shock.  Just as he was crawling
luxuriously into his den, one of those great horned owls which are the
feathered Apaches of the wilderness came winnowing low overhead on wings
as silent as sleep.  His round staring eyes caught sight of Quills’s
hind-quarters just vanishing into the hole.  There was no time to note
exactly what it was, and hunger had made the great bird rash even beyond
his wont. He swooped instantly and struck his terrible talons into the
tail and haunch.

With a loud hiss, like that of an angry cat, he let go precipitately and
fairly bounced up into the air again, both murderous talons stuck deep
with spines which seemed to burn into his sinews.  He flew in haste to
the nearest branch, steadied himself with difficulty on the perch, and
set himself to the painful task of plucking out the torments with his
beak, holding up first one claw and then the other.  With some of the
spines he was successful, but others he merely managed to nip off close
to the skin.  His feet began to swell immediately.  For several weeks he
could do no hunting, for the fiery anguish in them, but could only sit
moping in his hollow tree, where he would soon have starved but for the
food brought to him by his faithful mate.

As for Quills, this was his first experience of physical pain, and it
was his first taste of fear.  Whining and squealing and grunting all at
once, he shrank into his den, and, carefully parting the spines and fur
with his nose, strove to lick the wounds made by those steel-sharp
talons.  For a day or two he had no appetite, and stayed sulking in the
den.  But the healthy flesh, being unpoisoned, soon healed, and Quills
was himself again, except for a certain unaccustomed watchfulness. He
did not know what creature it was which had dared to attack him, so at
sight of any strange beast whatsoever, up would go his spines and he
would put himself on guard.  Even a malevolent—but to him
harmless—little weasel, or a scouting mink, he would honour with his
suspicions; and one day, when a gigantic bull moose came and stood
beneath the tree in which he was feeding, he chattered down at him
furiously and arrayed all his defences as if expecting immediate attack.
But as the huge black beast did not even trouble to look at him, his
fears were soon allayed.

A porcupine’s memory, however, seems to be extraordinarily short, and
Quills’s was no exception to the rule.  In the course of three or four
weeks, when his wounds no longer pricked him to remembrance, he forgot
all about the affair and recovered his old indifference.  One day when
he was returning to his den for a doze—and only a score of yards away
from the entrance—right into his pathway, with a noiseless pounce,
dropped a great, grey, furry beast with tufted ears, and long, white
snarling teeth, and huge pads of paws.  It crouched before him, its stub
of a tail twitching, and glared upon him with pale, cruel, moon-like
eyes.  Up went Quills’s spines at once, and he ducked his nose between
his fore-paws; but he was determined to get to his den, so he came right
on. Seeing, however, that the intruder showed no sign of getting out of
the way, Quills suddenly turned round and came on backwards, lashing out
fiercely with his tail.  The lynx was wild with hunger, but not to the
pitch of suicidal recklessness.  He ached intolerably for the
well-nourished flesh that he knew lay hidden beneath those bristling
spines, but he knew the price that he would have to pay for it.  With a
screech of disappointed rage, he restrained himself and slipped from the
path; and Quills, chattering noisily, disappeared into his hole.

As the long and bitter winter drew on, burying the wilderness under five
or six feet of snow and scourging it with storm and iron frost, Quills
had many more or less similar encounters with the lynxes, and twice with
a surly old black-bear.  Paradoxical as the statement may appear, he
usually faced the foe with his tail. And the result was always the same.
No prowler was prepared to pay the price which Quills would have exacted
for his carcase.  But along in March, when the snow had begun to settle
heavily under a week of thaw, Quills was confronted by a new enemy
before whom his indifference melted more swiftly than the snow.

Very early one morning, when the first ghost-grey light of dawn was
beginning to glimmer through the windless forest, Quills had just come
down out of an old hemlock, when he caught sight of a strange beast
gliding over the snow some thirty or forty yards away. The stranger,
dark brown in colour, with a bushy tail, long and low-set body,
weasel-shaped head, and grizzly-grey face with black snout, was somewhat
under three feet in length.  It was distinctly smaller, and at first
glance less dangerous-looking, than a lynx.  But some inherited instinct
told Quills at once that this was an enemy far more to be dreaded than
the fiercest of lynxes.  He had never seen a fisher before.  Fortunately
for the porcupine tribe, fishers were very scarce in the valley of the
Tobique.  But a chill of ancestral fear struck to Quills’s heart.

The fisher, catching sight of him, whirled in his tracks and darted at
him with a light swiftness and deadly intensity of purpose very
different from the hesitating attitude of Quills’s other foes.  And
Quills’s tactics were now different.  Jutting from the snow, near the
trunk of the hemlock, was a heavy windfall, its top supported by the
lower branches of a neighbouring beech tree.  Under this protection
Quills thrust his nose and head, clear to the shoulders, leaving only
his armed back and fiercely-slashing tail exposed to the assault.  He
was no more than in position ere the enemy was upon him.

Now, in nine cases out of ten—perhaps even in ninety-nine out of a
hundred—the fight between a porcupine and a fisher has but one result.
The fisher eats the porcupine.  He is incomparably the stronger. He is,
taking it all in all, the most savage, swift, and crafty of all the
marauders of the wilderness, and, above all else, for some reason as yet
unexplained by the naturalists, the porcupine’s quills, so deadly to
others, have for him comparatively few terrors.  They do not poison or
inflame his flesh, which seems to possess the faculty of soon rejecting
them and casting them forth again through the skin.  All he has to do is
to flip the victim over on its back—annexing as few spines as possible
in the act—and he has the unprotected throat and belly at the mercy of
his fangs.

In the present case, however, the too-confident fisher had an
exceptional porcupine to deal with. Quills was not only unusually large
and vigorous, but, _for a porcupine_, sagacious.  He had settled himself
down solidly into the snow, and when the fisher, dodging a blow of his
tail, and accepting a sharp dose of spines in the shoulder, tried to
turn him over with a twist of the paw, Quills resisted successfully,
and, with a timely swing of his haunches, stabbed his assailant’s whole
flank full of spines.

The fisher had expected some resistance, some more or less futile
defence, but this was attack.  Always short in temper, he flew into a
blind rage at the pain and the surprise of it.  He drew back a few
inches to gain impetus for the next effort, and this was his
mistake—this, and underrating his opponent.  At that very instant he got
a full, flailing stroke across his face from Quills’s tail.  It filled
his nose and mouth with spines—that was to be expected; but—for the blow
had surely been guided by the patron spirit of all the porcupines—it
also filled both his eyes.

With a screech of anguish he flung himself full on Quills’s back and
strove to bite down through the armour of spines.  But he was now
totally blind, and his jaws were stuck so full of spines as to be
practically powerless.  Meanwhile his mad struggles were simply driving
deeper and deeper into all his tender underparts those terrible
four-inch spikes which clothed the back of his intended victim.  All at
once the agony grew too appalling for even his indomitable spirit.  He
lurched off and dragged himself away, stumbling and staggering, and
bumping into tree trunk and bush, till he reached a thicket which he
felt to be dense enough to hide his defeat.  And here death came to him,
not too soon.

For some minutes after his defeated foe had gone, Quills remained with
his head thrust under the branch, chattering fierce defiance and lashing
wildly with his tail.  Then very cautiously he backed off and looked
about him.  He had been roughly mauled.  His spines and fur were
dishevelled, and he was bleeding from some deep scratches where his
assailant’s claws had got home.  But he was not seriously the worse from
his terrible encounter, and he had beaten, fairly and overwhelmingly,
the terrible killer of porcupines.  His sombre and solitary spirit
glowed with triumph. Rather hurriedly he crawled on to his lair, and
there set himself to a much-needed toilet.  And outside his retreat the
first long, level rays of the sunrise crept across the snow, touching
the trunks of the birches and the poplars to a mystical rose-pink and
saffron.

                       *STRIPES THE UNCONCERNED*

On the edge of evening, when the last of the light was gathered in the
pale-green upper sky, and all the world of the quiet backwoods clearings
was sunken in a soft violet dusk, a leisurely and self-possessed little
animal came strolling among the ancient stumps and mossy hillocks of the
open upland sheep-pasture.  He was about the size of an average cat, but
shorter of leg, with a long, sharp-muzzled head, and he carried his
broad feathery tail very high in a graceful arch, like a squirrel in
good humour.  Unlike most other creatures of the wild, his colouring was
such as to make him conspicuous rather than to conceal him.  He was
black, with a white stripe down his face, a white patch on the back of
his neck, and a white stripe all the way along each side of his body.
And, also unlike the rest of the furtive folk, he seemed quite
unconcerned to hide his movements from observation.  Neither was he for
ever glancing this way and that, as if on the watch for enemies.  Rather
he had the air of being content that his enemies should do the
watching—and avoid him.

The skunk—for such was the undignified appellation of this very
dignified personality of the wilderness—was pleasantly engrossed in his
own business.  That business, at the moment, consisted in catching the
big, fat, juicy, copper-brown "June-bugs" as they emerged from their
holes in the sod, crawled up the bending grass-stems, and spread their
wings for their heavy evening flight.  It was easy hunting, and he had
no need of haste.  To snap up these great slow and clumsy beetles as
they clung upon the grass-stems was as easy as picking strawberries,
and, indeed, not altogether dissimilar, as he would nip off the hard,
glossy wing-cases of the big beetles as one nips off the hull of the
berry before munching the succulent morsel.

Having slept the day through in his snug burrow, in the underbrush which
fringed the forest edge of the clearing, he had come forth into the dewy
twilight equipped with a fine appetite.  He had come with the definite
purpose of hunting "June-bugs," this being the season, all too brief,
for that highly-favoured delicacy.  At first he had thought of nothing
else; but when he had taken the edge off his hunger, he began to
consider the chances of varying his diet.  As he seized an unlucky
beetle, close to the edge of a flat, spreading juniper bush, a brooding
ground-sparrow flew up, with a startled _cheep_, from under his very
nose.  He dropped the beetle and made a lightning pounce at the bird.
But her wing had flicked him across the eyes, confusingly, and he missed
her.  He knew well enough, however, what her presence there among the
warm grass-tussocks meant.  He went nosing eagerly under the juniper
bush, and soon found a nest with four little brown-mottled eggs in it.
Tiny though they were, they made a tit-bit very much to his taste, all
the more so that they were very near hatching.  Having licked his jaws
and fastidiously polished the fur of his shrewd, keen face, he sauntered
off to see what other delicacies the evening might have in store for
him.

A little further on, toward the centre of the pasture, he came upon a
flat slab of rock, its surface sloping toward the south, its southward
edge slightly overhanging and fringed with soft grass.  He knew the rock
well—knew how its bare surface drank in the summer sun all day long, and
held the warmth throughout the dew-chill nights.  He knew, too, that
other creatures besides himself might very well appreciate this genial
warmth.  Stealthily, and without the smallest disturbance of the grassy
fringe, he sniffed along the overhanging edge of the rock.  Suddenly he
stiffened, and his sharp snout darted in under the rock.  Then he jerked
back, with the writhing tail of a snake between his jaws.

The prize was a big black-and-yellow garter snake, not far from three
feet long—not venomous, but full of energy and fight.  It tried to cling
to its hiding-place; but the shrewd skunk, instead of attempting to pull
it out straight, like a cork from a bottle-neck, ran forward a pace or
two and, as it were, "peeled" it forth.  It doubled out, struck him
smartly in the face with its harmless fangs, and then coiled itself
about his neck and fore-legs.  There was a moment of confused
rough-and-tumble, but the skunk knew just how to handle this kind of
antagonist.  Having bitten the reptile’s tail clean through, he
presently, with the help of his practised little jaws, succeeded in
getting hold of it by the back, an inch or two behind the head. This
ended the affair, as a struggle, and the victor proceeded to round off
his supper on snake.  He managed to put away almost all but the head and
tail, and then, after a meticulous toilet to fur and paws—for he was as
fastidiously cleanly as a cat—he sauntered back toward his burrow in the
underbrush, to refresh himself with a nap before seeking further
adventures.

Directly in his path stood three or four young seedling firs, about two
feet high, in a dense cluster.  Half a dozen paces beyond this tiny
thicket a big red fox, belly to earth, was soundlessly stalking some
quarry, perhaps a mouse, which could be heard ever so faintly rustling
the grass-stems at the edge of the thicket. To the skunk, with his
well-filled belly, the sound had no interest.  He rounded the thicket
and came face to face with the fox.

Neither in size, strength, nor agility was he any match for the savage
red beast which stood in his path, and was quite capable, indeed, of
dispatching him in two snaps of his long, lean jaws.  But he was not in
the least put out.  Watchful, but cool, he kept straight on, neither
delaying nor hastening his leisurely and nonchalant progress.  The fox,
on the other hand, stopped short.  He was hungry.  His hunting was
interfered with, for that rustling under the fir-branches had stopped.
His fine red brush twitched angrily. Nevertheless, he had no stomach to
tackle this easy-going little gentleman in the black-and-white stripes.
Showing his long white teeth in a vindictive but noiseless snarl, he
stepped aside.  And the skunk, glancing back with bright eyes of
vigilance and understanding, passed on as if the twilight world belonged
to him.  He knew—and he knew his enemy knew as well—that he carried with
him a concealed weapon of such potency that no fox, unless afflicted
with madness, would ever willingly run up against it.

Reaching his burrow in the underbrush without further adventure, he
found it empty.  His mate and her young ones—now three-quarters
grown—were scattered away foraging for themselves over the wide,
forest-scented clearings.  It was a spacious burrow, dug by a sturdy,
surly old wood-chuck, who, though usually as pugnacious as a badger and
an obstinate stickier for his rights, had in this case yielded without a
fight to the mild-mannered little usurper, and humped off in disgust to
hollow a new abode much deeper in the forest, where such a mischance
would not be likely to happen to him again.  Under the tenancy of the
skunk family the burrow was sweet and dry and daintily kept.  With a
little grumble of content deep in his throat he curled himself up and
went to sleep.

When he woke and set forth again to renew his foraging, although he had
only slept an hour, his vigorous digestion had quite restored his
appetite. He had no more thought for June-bugs.  He wanted bigger game,
more red-blooded and with some excitement in it.  He thought of the
farmyard, half a mile away across the clearings, down over the round of
the upland.  It was weeks now since he had visited it.  There might be
something worth picking up.  There might be a mother-hen with chickens,
in a pen which he could find a way into.  There might be a hen sitting
on her clutch of eggs in a stolen nest under the barn.  He had
discovered in previous seasons that most sitting hens had their nests
provided for them in secure places which he could in no way manage to
come at.  But he had also found that sometimes a foolish and
secretive—and very young—hen will _hide_ her nest in some such
out-of-the-way place as under the barn floor, where the troublesome
human creatures who preside over the destinies of hens cannot get at it.
Here she keeps her precious eggs all to herself till she has enough to
cover comfortably, and then she proceeds to the pleasant task of
brooding them, and has things all her own way till some night-prowler
comes along and convicts her, finally and fatally, of her folly.

A full moon, large and ruddy like a ripe pumpkin, was just rising behind
the jagged black tops of the spruce forest.  It threw long, fantastic,
confusing shadows across the dewy hillocks of the pasture. Hither and
thither, in and out and across the barred streaks of light, darted the
wild rabbits, gambolling as if half beside themselves, as if smitten
with a mid-summer madness by the capricious magic of the night.  But if
mad, they retained enough sound sense to keep ever at a prudent distance
from the leisurely striped wayfarer who appeared so little interested in
their sport.  Though they were bigger than he, they knew that, if they
should venture within reach of his pounce, his indifference would vanish
and his inexorable fangs would be in their throats.

Knowing his utter inability to compete with the speed of the rabbits,
now they were wide awake, the skunk hardly noticed their antics, but
kept on his direct path toward the farmyard.  Presently, however, his
attention was caught by the rabbits scattering off in every direction.
On the instant he was all alert for the cause.  Mounting a hillock, he
caught sight of a biggish shaggy-haired dog some distance down the
pasture.  The dog was racing this way and that as crazily, it seemed, as
the rabbits, with faint little yelps of excitement and whines of
disappointment. He was chasing the rabbits with all his energy; and it
was evident that he was a stranger, a new-comer to the wilderness world,
for he seemed to think he might hope to catch the fleet-foot creatures
by merely running after them.  As a matter of fact, he had just arrived
the same day at the backwoods farm from the city down the river.  His
experience had been confined to streets and gardens and the chasing of
cats, and he was daft with delight over the spacious freedom of the
clearings.  The skunk eyed him scornfully, and continued his journey
with the unconcern of an elephant.

A moment later the dog was aware of a little, insignificant
black-and-white creature coming slowly towards him as if unconscious of
his presence.  Another rabbit!  But as this one did not seem alarmed, he
stopped and eyed it with surprise, his head cocked to one side in
inquiry.  The skunk half turned and moved off slowly, deliberately, at
right angles to the path he had been following.

With a yelp of delight the dog dashed at this easy victim, which seemed
so stupid that it made no effort to escape.  He was almost upon it.
Another leap and he would have had it in his jaws.  But the amazing
little animal turned its back on him, stuck its tail straight in the
air, and jerked up its hindquarters with a derisive gesture.  In that
instant something hot and soft struck the inexperienced hunter full in
the face—something soft, indeed, but overwhelming, paralysing.  It
stopped him dead in his tracks. Suffocating, intolerably pungent, it
both blinded him and choked him.  His lungs refused to work, shutting up
spasmodically.  Gasping and gagging, he grovelled on his belly and
strove frantically to paw his mouth and nostrils clear of the dense,
viscous fluid which was clogging them.  Failing in this, he fell to
rooting violently in the short grass, biting and tearing at it and
rolling in it, till some measure of breath and eyesight returned to him.
Thereupon, his matted head all stuck with grass and moss and dirt, he
set off racing madly for the farmhouse, where he expected to get relief
from the strange torment which afflicted him. But when he pawed and
whined at the kitchen door for admittance, he was driven off with
contumely and broomsticks.  There was nothing for him to do but slink
away with his shame to a secluded corner between the wagon-shed and the
pig-pen, where he could soothe his burning muzzle in the cool winds and
fresh earth. On the following day one of the farm hands, with rude hands
and unsympathetic comment, scrubbed him violently with liquid soap and
then clipped close his splendid shaggy coat.  But it was a week before
he was readmitted to the comfortable fellowship of the farmhouse
kitchen.

For a moment or two, with a glance of triumph in his bright eyes, the
skunk had watched the paroxysms of his discomfited foe.  Then, dropping
the tip of his tail into its customary disdainful arch, he had turned
back towards his burrow.  This was a redoubtable foe whom he had just
put to rout, and he had expended most of his armoury upon him.  He had
no wish to risk another encounter until the potent secretion which he
carried in a sac between the powerful muscles of his thighs should have
had time to accumulate again.  He dropped, for that night, all notion of
the distinctly adventurous expedition to the farmyard, contenting
himself with snapping up a few beetles and crickets as he went.  He was
lucky enough to pounce upon an indiscreet field-mouse just as she
emerged from her burrow, and then a few minutes’ digging with his
powerful and expert fore-paws had served to unearth the mouse’s nest
with her half-dozen blind sucklings.  So he went home well satisfied
with himself.  Before re-entering he again made a careful toilet; and as
the opening of the sac from which he had projected the potent fluid into
his enemy’s face had immediately closed up tight and fast, he carried no
trace of the virulent odour with him.  Indeed, that fluid was a thing
which he never by any chance allowed to get on to his own fur.  Always,
at the moment of ejecting it, the fur on his thighs parted and lay back
flat to either side of the naked vent of the sac, and the long tail
cocked itself up rigidly, well out of the way. It was a stuff he kept
strictly for his foes, and never allowed to offend either himself or his
friends.

On entering his burrow he found there his mate and all the youngsters,
curled up together in the sleep of good digestion and easy conscience.
He curled himself up with them, that the supply of his high-explosive
might accumulate during another forty winks.

About an hour before the dawn he awoke again, feeling hungry.  The rest
of the family were still sleeping, having gorged themselves, as he might
have done had it not been for that encounter with the misguided dog.  He
left them whimpering contentedly in their cosy slumber, and crept forth
into the dewy chill alone, his heart set on mice and such-like
warm-blooded game.

The moon was now high overhead, sailing honey-coloured through a faintly
violet sky.  The rough pasture, with its stumps and hillocks, was
touched into a land of dream.

Now, it chanced that an old bear, who was accustomed to foraging in the
valley beyond the cedar swamp, had on this night decided to bring her
cub on an expedition toward the more dangerous neighbourhood of the
clearings.  She wanted to begin his education in all the wariness which
is so necessary for the creatures of the wild in approaching the works
and haunts of man.  On reaching the leafy fringe of bushes which fringed
the rude rail-fence dividing the forest from the pasture, she cautiously
poked her head through the leafage, and for perhaps a minute, motionless
as a stone, she interrogated the bright open spaces with eyes and ears
and nostrils.  The cub, taking the cue from his mother, stiffened to the
like movelessness at her side, his bright little eyes full of interest
and curiosity.  There was no sign of danger in the pasture. In fact,
there were the merry rabbits hopping about in the moonlight undisturbed.
This was a sign of security quite good enough for the wise old bear.
With crafty and experienced paws she forced a hole in the fence—leaving
the top rail, above the binder, in its place—and led the eager cub forth
into the moonlight.

The special notion of the bear in coming to the pasture was to teach her
cub the art of finding, unearthing, and catching the toothsome wild
mice. Keeping along near the fence, she sniffed the tussocky, uneven
grass with practised nose.  But the first thing she came upon was a
bumble-bees’ nest.  This was far more to her taste than any mice.  She
gave a low call to the cub; but the cub was preoccupied now, sniffing at
the rabbit tracks, and lifting himself on his hindquarters to stare
longingly at the rabbits, who were hopping off to discreeter distance.
The mother did not insist on his coming to watch her tackle the bees’
nest.  After all, he was perhaps a bit young to face the stings of the
angry bees, and she might as well have the little hoard of honey and
larvæ and bee-bread for herself.  The cub wandered off a little way,
with some vague notion of chasing the elusive rabbits.

Just then through the edge of the underbrush appeared the skunk,
stretching himself luxuriously before he started off across the pasture.
He saw the bear, but he knew that sagacious beast would pay him no
attention whatever.  He trotted out into the moonlight and pounced upon
a fat black cricket as an appetiser.

The cub caught sight of the pretty little striped creature, and came
darting clumsily and gaily to the attack.  He would show his mother that
he could do some hunting on his own account.  The striped creature
turned its back on him and moved off slowly. The cub was delighted.  He
was just going to reach out a rude little paw and grab the easy prize.
Then the inevitable happened.  The pretty striped creature gave its
stern a contemptuous jerk, and the deluded cub fell in a heap,
squealing, gasping, choking, and pawing convulsively at the horrible
sticky stuff which filled his mouth and eyes.

Just before the catastrophe occurred, the old bear had looked up from
her business with the bees, and had uttered a loud _woof_ of warning.
But too late.  The last thing in the world she wanted to do was to try
any fooling with a skunk.  But now her rage at the suffering and
discomfiture of her little one swept away all prudence.  With a grunt of
fury she charged at the offender.  One glance at the approaching
vengeance convinced the skunk that this time he had made a mistake.  He
turned and raced for the underbrush as fast as his little legs would
carry him.  But that was not fast enough.  Just as he was about to dart
under the fence, a huge black paw, shod with claws like steel, crashed
down upon him, and his leisurely career came to an end.

The bear, in deep disgust, scraped her reeking paw long and earnestly in
the fresh earth beneath the grass, then turned her attention to the
unhappy cub. She relieved her feelings by giving him a sharp cuff which
sent him sprawling a dozen feet.  Then, relenting, she showed him how to
clean himself by rooting in the earth.  At length, when he could see and
breathe once more with some degree of comfort, she indignantly led him
away back into the depths of the consoling forest.

                       *THE BLACK MULE OF AVELUY*

The mule lines at Aveluy were restless and unsteady under the tormented
dark.  All day long a six-inch high-velocity gun, firing at irregular
intervals from somewhere on the low ridge beyond the Ancre, had been
feeling for them.  Those terrible swift shells, which travel so fast, on
their flat trajectory, that their bedlam shriek of warning and the
rending crash of their explosion seem to come in the same breathless
instant, had tested the nerves of man and beast sufficiently during the
daylight; but now, in the shifting obscurity of a young moon harrowed by
driving cloud-rack, their effect was yet more daunting.  So far they had
been doing little damage, having been occupied, for the most part, in
blowing new craters in the old lines, a couple of hundred yards further
east, which had been vacated only two days before on account of their
deep-trodden and intolerable mud.  All day our ’planes, patrolling the
sky over Tara Hill and the lines of Regina, had kept the Boches’ airmen
at such a distance that they could not observe and register for their
batteries; and this terrible gun was, therefore, firing blind.  But
there came a time, during the long night, when it seemed to reach the
conclusion that its target must be pretty well obliterated.  Squatting
in its veiled lair behind the heights of Ancre, it lifted its raking
muzzle, ever so slightly, and put another two hundred yards on to its
range.

The next shell screamed down straight upon the lines.  The crash tore
earth and air.  A massive column of black smoke vomited upwards, pierced
with straight flame and streaked with flying fragments of mules and
ropes and tether-pegs.  Deadly splinters of shell hissed forth from it
on all sides.  The top of the column spread outwards; the base thinned
and lifted; a raw and ghastly crater, like some Dantesque dream of the
mouth of Hell, came into view; and there followed a faint, hideous sound
of nameless things pattering down upon the mud.

Near the edge of the crater stood a big, raw-boned black mule.  His team
mate and the three other mules tethered nearest to him had vanished.
Several others lay about on either side of him, dead or screaming in
their death agonies.  But he was untouched.  At the appalling shock he
had sprung back upon his haunches, snorting madly; but the
tethering-rope had held, and he had almost thrown himself.  Then he had
lashed out with his iron-shod heels.  But he was tough of nerve and
stout of heart far beyond the fashion of his kind, and almost at once he
pulled himself together and stood trembling, straining on the halter,
his long ears laid back upon his head.  Then his eyes, rolling white,
with a green gleam of horror at the centre, took note of the familiar
form of his driver, standing by his head and feeling himself curiously,
as if puzzled at being still alive.

This sight reassured the black mule amazingly.  His expressive ears
wagged forward again, and he thrust his frothing muzzle hard against the
man’s shoulder, as if to ask him what it all meant.  The man flung an
arm over the beast’s quivering neck and leaned against him for a moment
or two, dazed from the tremendous shock which had lifted him from his
feet and slammed him down viciously upon the ground.  He coughed once or
twice, and tried to wipe the reek of the explosion from his eyes.  Then,
coming fully to himself, he hurriedly untethered his charge, patted him
reassuringly on the nose, loosed the next mule behind him on the lines,
and led the two away in haste toward safer quarters.  As he did so,
another shell came in, some fifty yards to the left, and the lines
became a bedlam of kicking and snorting beasts, with their drivers,
cursing and coaxing, according to their several methods, clawing at the
ropes and hurrying to get their charges away to safety.

At any other time the big black mule—an unregenerate product of the
Argentine, with a temper which took delight in giving trouble to all in
authority over him—might have baulked energetically as a protest against
being moved from his place at this irregular hour.  But he was endowed
with a perception of his own interests, which came rather from the
humbler than the more aristocratic side of his ancestry.  He was no
victim of that childish panic which is so liable, in a moment of
desperation, to pervert the high-strung intelligence of the horse.  He
felt that the man knew just what to do in this dreadful and demoralising
situation.  So he obeyed and followed like a lamb; and in that moment he
conceived an affection for his driver which made him nothing less than a
changed mule.  His amazing docility had its effect upon the second mule,
and the driver got them both away without any difficulty.  When all the
rest of the survivors had been successfully shifted to new ground, far
off to the right, the terrible gun continued for another hour to blow
craters up and down the deserted lines.  Then it lengthened its range
once more, and spent the rest of the night shattering to powder the
ruins of an already ruined and quite deserted street, under the
impression that it was smashing up some of our crowded billets.  A
little before daylight, however, a shell from one of our forward
batteries, up behind Regina Trench, found its way into the lair where
the monster squatted, and rest descended upon Aveluy in the bleak
autumnal dawn.

This was in the rain-scourged autumn of 1916, when the unspeakable
desolation of the Somme battlefield was a sea of mud.  The ruins of the
villages—Ovillers, La Boisselle, Pozières, Courcelette, Martinpuich, and
all the others which had once made fair with flowers and orchards this
rolling plateau of Picardy—had been pounded flat by the inexorable guns,
and were now mere islands of firmer ground in the shell-pitted wastes of
red mire.  Men went encased in mud from boots to shrapnel helmet.  And
it was a special mud of exasperating tenacity, a cement of beaten chalk
and clay. The few spidery tram-lines ran precariously along the edges of
the shell-holes, out over the naked, fire-swept undulations beyond
Mouquet Farm and Courcelette, where they were continually being knocked
to pieces by the "whizz-bangs," and tirelessly rebuilt by our dauntless
pioneers and railway troops.  Scattered all about this dreadful naked
waste behind our front trenches lurked our forward batteries, their
shallow gun-pits cunningly camouflaged behind every little swell of
tumbled mud.

And this foul mud, hiding in the deep slime of its shell-holes every
kind of trap and putrid horror, was the appropriate ally of the Germans.
Stinkingly and tenaciously and treacherously, as befitted, it opposed
the feeding of the guns.  Two by two or four by four, according to their
size, the shells for the guns had to be carried up from the forward
dumps in little wicker panniers slung across the backs of horses and
mules. It was a slow process, precarious and costly, but it beat the
mud, and the insatiable guns were fed.

After the night when the mule-lines at Aveluy were shelled, the big
black mule and his driver were put on this job of carrying up shells to
the forward batteries. The driver, a gaunt, green-eyed, ginger-haired
teamster from the lumber camps of Northern New Brunswick, received the
order with a crooked grin.

"Say your prayers now, Sonny," he muttered in the mule’s big, waving
ear, which came to "attention" promptly to receive his communication.
"You’ll be wishing you was back in them old lines at Aveluy afore we’re
through with this job.  Fritzy over yonder ain’t goin’ to like you an’
me one little bit when he gits on to what we’re up to.  It ain’t like
haulin’ fodder, I tell you that.  But I guess we’ve got the nerve all
right."

Instead of rolling the whites of his eyes at him, in surly protest
against this familiarity, the black mule responded by nibbling gently at
the sleeve of his muddy tunic.

"Geezely Christmas," murmured the driver, astonished at this evidence of
goodwill, "but it’s queer, how a taste o’ shell-fire’ll sometimes work a
change o’ heart, even in an Argentine mule.  I only hope it’ll last,
Sonny.  If it does, we’re goin’ to git along fine, you an’ me."  And the
next time he visited the canteen he brought back a biscuit or two and a
slab of sweet chocolate, to confirm the capricious beast in its mended
manners.

Early that same afternoon the black mule found himself in new
surroundings.  He was at the big ammunition dump which lay concealed in
an obscure hollow near the ruins of Courcelette.  He looked with
suspicion on the wicker panniers which were slung across his sturdy
back.  Saddles he knew, and harness he knew, but this was a contraption
which roused misgivings in his conservative soul.  When the shells were
slipped into the panniers, and he felt the sudden weight, so out of all
proportion to the size of the burden, he laid back his long ears with a
grunt, and gathered his muscles for a protesting kick.  But his driver,
standing at his head, stroked his muzzle soothingly and murmured:
"There, there, steady, Son!  Keep your hair on!  It ain’t goin’ to bite
you."

Thus adjured, he composed himself with an effort, and the lashing kick
was not delivered.

"What a persuasive cuss you must be, Jimmy Wright!" said the man who was
handling the shells. "I wouldn’t trust you round with my best girl, If
you can get a bucking mule locoed that way with your soft sawder."

"It ain’t me," replied the New Brunswicker.  "It’s shell-shock, I guess,
kind of helped along with chocolate an’ biscuits.  He got a bit of a
shaking up when they shelled the lines at Aveluy night afore last, an’
he’s been a lamb ever since.  Seems to think I saved his hide for him.
He was the very devil to handle afore that."

For some way from the dump the journey was uneventful.  The path to the
guns led along a sunken road, completely hidden from the enemy’s
observation posts.  The dull, persistent rain had ceased for a little,
and the broad patches of blue overhead were dotted with our droning
aeroplanes, which every now and then would dive into a low-drifting rack
of grey cloud to shake off the shrapnel of the German "Archies."  Of
German ’planes none were to be seen, for they had all sped home to their
hangars when our fighting squadrons rose to the encounter.  The earth
rocked to the explosions of our 9.2 howitzers ranged about Pozières and
Martinpuich, and the air clamoured under the passage of their giant
shells as they went roaring over toward the German lines.  Now and again
a vicious whining sound would swell suddenly to a nerve-racking shriek,
and an enemy shell would land with a massive cr-r-ump, and a furious
blast of smoke and mud would belch upwards to one side or other of the
sunken road.  But none of these unwelcome visitors came into the road
itself, and neither the black mule nor Jimmy Wright paid them any more
attention than the merest roll of an eye to mark their billet.

"Change o’ heart hain’t spoiled old Sonny’s nerve, anyhow," thought the
driver to himself, with deep approval.

A little further on and the trail up to "X’s Group," quitting the
shelter of the sunken road, led out across the red desolation, in the
very eye, as it seemed to the New Brunswicker, of the enemy’s positions.
It was a narrow, undulating track, slippery as oil, yet tenacious as
glue, corkscrewing its laborious way between the old slime-filled
shell-pits.  From the surface of one of these wells of foul-coloured
ooze the legs of a dead horse stuck up stiffly into the air, like four
posts on which to lay a foot-bridge.  A few yards beyond, the track was
cut by a fresh shell-hole, too new to have collected any water.  Its raw
sides were streaked red and white and black, and just at its rim lay the
mangled fragments of something that might recently have been a mule.
The long ears of Wright’s mule waved backwards and forwards at the
sight, and he snorted apprehensively.

"This don’t appear to be a health resort for us, Sonny," commented the
New Brunswicker, "so we won’t linger, if it’s all the same to you."  And
he led the way around the other side of the new shell-hole, the big mule
crowding close behind with quivering muzzle at his shoulder.

However urgent Wright’s desire for speed, speed was ridiculously
impossible.  The obstinate pro-German mud was not lightly to be
overcome.  Even on the firmer ridges it clung far above the fetlocks of
the black mule, and struggled to suck off Wright’s hob-nailed boots at
every labouring step.  Though a marrow-piercing north-easter swept the
waste, both man and mule were lathered in sweat.  Half their energy had
to be expended in recovering themselves from continual slithering slides
which threatened to land them in the engulfing horrors of the
shell-holes.  For all that he had so little breath to spare, Jimmy
Wright kept muttering through his teeth strange expletives and
objurgations from the vocabulary of the lumber camps, eloquent but
unprintable, to which the black mule lent ear admiringly.  He seemed to
feel that his driver’s remarks, though he could not understand them,
were doubtless such as would command his fullest accord.  For his own
part he had no means of expressing such sentiments except through his
heels, and these were now all too fully occupied in their battle with
the mud.

By this time the black mule had become absolutely convinced that his
fate was in the hands of his ginger-haired driver.  Jimmy Wright, as it
seemed to him, was his sole protection against this violent horror which
kept bursting and crashing on every hand about him.  It was clear to him
that Jimmy Wright, though apparently much annoyed, was not afraid.
Therefore, with Jimmy Wright as his protector he was safe.  He wagged
his ears, snorted contemptuously at a 5.9 which spurted up a column of
mud and smoke some hundred yards to the left, and plodded on gamely
through the mud.  He didn’t know where he was going, but Jimmy Wright
was there, and just ahead of his nose, where he could sniff at him; and
he felt sure there would be fodder and a rub down at the end of the
weary road.

In the midst of these consoling reflections something startling and
inexplicable happened.  He was enveloped and swept away hi a deafening
roar.  Thick blackness, streaked with star-showers, blinded him.  Though
half stupefied, he kicked and struggled with all his strength, for it
was not in him to yield himself, like a stricken horse, to any stroke of
Fate.

When he once more saw daylight, he was recovering his feet just below
the rim of an old shell-hole.  He gained the top, braced his legs, and
shook himself vigorously.  The loaded panniers thumping heavily upon his
ribs restored him fully to his senses. Snorting through wide red
nostrils, he stared about him wildly.  Some ten paces distant he saw a
great new crater in the mud, reeking with black and orange fumes.

But where was Jimmy Wright?  The mule swept anxious eyes across the
waste of shell-holes, in every direction.  In vain.  His master had
vanished.  He felt himself deserted.  Panic began to clutch at his
heart, and he gathered his muscles for frantic flight.  And then he
recovered himself and stood steady.  He had caught sight of a
ginger-haired head, bare of its shrapnel helmet, lying on the mud at the
other side of the shell-hole from which he had just struggled out.

His panic passed at once, but it gave place to anxious wonder.  There,
indeed, was Jimmy Wright, but what was he doing there?  His body was
buried almost to the shoulders in the discoloured slime that half filled
the shell-hole.  He was lying on his face.  His arms were outstretched,
and his hands were clutching at the slippery walls of the hole as if he
were striving to pull himself up from the water.  This effort, however,
seemed anything but successful.  The mule saw, indeed, that his
protector was slowly slipping deeper into the slime.  This filled him
with fresh alarm.  If Jimmy Wright should disappear under that foul
surface, that would be desertion complete and final.  It was not to be
endured.

Quickly but cautiously the mule picked his way around the hole, and
then, with sagacious bracing of his hoofs, down to his master’s side.
But what was to be done next?  Jimmy Wright’s face was turned so that he
could not see his would-be rescuer.  His hands were still clutching at
the mud, but feebly and without effect.

The mule saw that his master was on the point of vanishing under the
mud, of deserting him in his extremity.  This was intolerable.  The
emergency quickened his wits.  Instinct suggested to him that to keep a
thing one should take hold of it and hold on to it.  He reached down
with his big yellow teeth, took hold of the shoulder of Jimmy Wright’s
tunic, and held on.  Unfamiliar with anatomy, he at the same time took
hold of a substantial portion of Jimmy Wright’s own shoulder inside the
tunic, and held on to that.  He braced himself, and with a loud,
involuntary snort began to pull.

Jimmy Wright, up to this point, had been no more than half conscious.
The mule’s teeth in his shoulder revived him effectually.  He came to
himself with a yell.  He remembered the shell-burst.  He saw and
understood where he was.  He was afraid to move for a moment, lest he
should find that his shoulder was blown off.  But no, he had two arms,
and he could move them.  He had his shoulder all right, for something
was pulling at it with quite sickening energy. He reached up his right
arm—it was the left shoulder that was being tugged at—and encountered
the furry head and ears of his rescuer.

"Sonny!" he shouted.  "Well, I’ll be d——d!"  And he gripped fervently at
the mule’s neck.

Reassured at the sound of his master’s voice, the big mule took his
teeth out of Wright’s shoulder and began nuzzling solicitously at his
sandy head.

"It’s all right, old man," said the New Brunswicker, thinking quickly,
while with his left hand he secured a grip on the mule’s head-stall.
Then he strove to raise himself from the slime.  The effort produced no
result, except to send a wave of blackness across his brain. Wondering
sickly if he carried some terrible injury concealed under the mud, he
made haste to pass the halter rope under his arms and knot it beneath
his chest.  Then he shouted for help, twice and again, till his voice
trailed off into a whimper and he relapsed into unconsciousness.  The
mule shifted his feet to gain a more secure foothold on the treacherous
slope, and then stood wagging his ears and gazing down on Jimmy in
benevolent content.  So long as Jimmy was with him, he felt that things
were bound to come all right.  Jimmy would presently get up and lead him
out of the shell-hole, and take him home.

Shell after shell, whining or thundering according to their breed,
soared high over the hole, but the black mule only wagged his ears at
them.  His eyes were anchored upon the unconscious sandy head of Jimmy
Wright.  Suddenly, however, a sharp voice made him look up.  He saw a
couple of stretcher-bearers standing on the edge of the shell-hole,
looking down sympathetically upon him and his charge.  In a second or
two they were beside him, skilfully and tenderly extricating Jimmy’s
body from the mud.

"He ain’t gone west this time," pronounced one, who had thrust an
understanding hand into the breast of the tunic.

Jimmy Wright opened his eyes wide suddenly.

"Not by a d——d sight I ain’t, Bill!" he muttered, rather thickly.  Then,
his wits and his voice coming clearer, he added: "But if I ain’t, it’s
thanks to this here old —— of an Argentine mule, that come down into
this hole and yanked me out o’ the mud, and saved me.  Eh, Sonny?"

The big mule was crowding up so close to him as to somewhat incommode
the two men in their task on that treacherous incline.  But they warded
off his inconvenient attentions very gently.