Part 20

Down dropped the raven in front of her.

Down winnowed the hen-raven at the back of her.

And, both together, they approached. And all the time the great black-backed gull continued to yell, "How-how-how-how!"

At last, when he had got close enough, the cock-raven lunged at her, or, rather, underneath her. She parried his stroke, and--the hen-raven lunged. Nothing now, she knew, could save her eggs, unless she rose to fight the cock-raven. The hen-raven then ran in. She only required a second in which to ruin each egg, but she never got it.

Nobody saw the avalanche coming, but everybody heard it arrive. It was of snow-white, and it was of jet-black, and it knocked the cock-raven one way, and sent the hen-raven, picking up her skirts, as it were, and fleeing, the other. And the name of the avalanche was Cob.

I fancy he considered that he bore a grudge against that cock bandit-raven. Perhaps in dreams he could still feel that trap on his leg. Who knows? He certainly used to wake up with outcries, and he equally certainly made that cock-raven shy of that island for evermore.

VIII

THE WHERE IS IT?

No one would have thought of looking for any living beast in the raffle of dried twigs and tamarisk "leaves" between the crawling, snake-like roots of the feathery tamarisks if it had not been for the noise. The noise was unmistakable, as the noise of a fight always is; and the only other living thing near the spot, a tiny, tip-tailed, brown wren--a little ball of feathers, dainty as you please, and all alone there, and out of place down by the terrible, snow-covered, wind-tortured estuary shore--made shift to remove herself, making remarks--wrens can't help saying what they feel--as she flitted.

Then the combatants fell out--literally. Up from the solid earth between the twisted roots they seemed to come, but that proved the art of one of them in concealing his front-door from the curious, and down the bank of the sea-wall, over and over and over, squeaking the most murderous language, and grappling like pocket-devils--tumbled a little jet-black and a little dark-brown beast.

They continued the duel upon the dry gravel below--the finest and the whitest gravel ever you did see--and they would apparently have gone on for goodness knows how long if a gray-white, thin, worn post a couple of yards away had not turned into a heron and stalked an ungainly stalk towards them.

Then they fell apart, and one of them, at any rate--the brown one--ran away in the shape of a water-vole--water-"rat," if you will--the heron making spear-lunges at him with his bill as he ungainlily skipped at the other's tail all the way up the bank. The other fighter, the black one, could not rightly be said to have turned into anything very much--at least, not anything that any one could swear to. It just seemed as if a dark blur whizzed about--more bird-like than beast-like--around the astonished and prancing heron, and then into nowhere. It was like watching a blue-bottle in a tumbler, and very extraordinary. The heron never even professed to follow it or lunge at it. He preferred the water-vole, whose agility was not too fast to see.

At the place where it had come from, the mouth of the hole, it stopped--this beast that could move quicker than eye could follow--stopped so suddenly and completely that its change from almost lightning motion to stony motionlessness in the fraction of a second was nearly as amazing as its first marvelous exhibition. It stopped, I say, and became a--a rat.

To nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand, the word "rat" conveys only one impression. This rat did not fulfill that impression. In fact, there is more than one kind of rat, and though fate and their fathers' Kismet has cursed them all with a name of shame, they are not all the kind of people that made it so. There is the foreigner, the invader, the common brown rat, who is accursed; there is the old English black rat, whom the accursed one has nearly wiped out into little more than a ghost; and there is the water-rat, who is not a rat, but a vole, and would thank you to remember the fact.

And this rat was a black rat, as black as jet, shark-jawed, star-eyed, elfin-eared, snake-tailed, lean, long-legged, and graceful--a very greyhound among the rats. He was there, in that dancing-floor of the winds by the estuary, because no common or sewer rats were there. They were anathema to him, and they were worse--death in many horrible forms. He had been there all the summer, all the autumn, and all the---- No, by whiskers! he was not going to remain there all the winter. He had his limit, and he hated cold; and here, down by the flat, sodden, mud-choked shore of the estuary, it was so cold that if you didn't jolly well mind what you were up to and keep your tummy always full, you went to sleep, and--never woke up any more.

A little pile of mussel, winkle, and shore-crab shells, and the backbone of what had been a stranded fish, close to the mouth of the hole, showed the rat's account-book to date; but there was a line to be drawn even in this trade. That dawn--if you could call the gray dark of a snowstorm dawn--he, wondrously adventurous, had gone shell-fish collecting, away out upon the freezing wet mud-ooze. He had got three mussels; a muddy face; muddier feet; nearly an eye pecked out by a mighty, great black-backed gull; three chivyings from herring-gulls; one nip from a crab who ought to have been dead; two winkles under big stones that took half-an-hour to shift; one dead pigmy shrew--length two inches--with a hole in its skull, no brains, and a horrible smell; nearly his life removed by the swoop of a kestrel falcon and the javelin-stab of a heron's beak; and twenty minutes' hard cleaning to remove the mud-stains that were not properly off--to his nice liking--yet. And, to add to that, he had no sooner finished than he found that some clumsy fool of a water-rat--vole, I mean--with a mania for mining, had run a shaft into his hole, and brought the whole roof crumbling down upon his scrupulously neat and tidy nest of fine hay and carefully shredded rush--the only approximately warm corner he possessed in all that biting cold--so that days of labor would not repair the silly damage; and he had had to enter into a free fight with and turn the fool out, nearly losing his life, for the fourth time that short, dark, bitter day, in the process. And now he had to clean himself all over again!

No wonder he was fed-up, and decided to quit. He loved the dank marsh, the brackish channels, the long, lone wind blowing through the tamarisks, and the smell--salt, seaweed, mud, and fish--of it all; but in this--weather, when the cold here, even in shelter, was greater than the cold in any other spot--and the unchecked wind cut like swords of ice--he realized that one must be an eider-duck or an Iceland gull, a northern diver or an Arctic owl, to stand it, and he was none of these. Wherefore, though the dusk had made the dull day only a little more dark as yet, and the pink, luminous frost-haze still hung in the west, he called down his hole to his wife--his one and only wife, but that was not his fault--and quitted.

Ten minutes later you behold our black rat--if you had eyes quick enough, but it was a matter of momentary glimpses, anyway--trekking up a ditch. You have pretty well got to take my word for it, because, though sometimes you saw him for the half of a second, mostly you didn't, and couldn't tell whether there was his wife only, or he only, or both. Really there were both, but our black friend with the embarrassingly, the abnormally, long tail and the genteel head--Mr. Mus rattus on Sundays, if you please, and in nowise to be confused with that canaille, Citizen Mus decumanus, the common brown rat--had not the slightest intention that any one should see him, if he could help it. His wife might be trusted to look out for herself. And for this reason, perhaps, his march was a progress to wonder at.

Did a flock of wild-duck come over from the sea with whistling wings, he did not so much get under the over-hanging grass as be there. Did a "gaggle" of wild-geese go by high over, clamoring like hounds, he went out like a blown candle. Did a party of teal--for it was the magic hour of "flight," when all wildfowl shift their quarters to feed, or not to feed--fairly hissing with speed, like masterless bullets, dash over, he--well, he was not before you could realize that he had moved.

Then up and flew round them a shape, and the name of that shape was death. It might have been a gull with hawk-like form. It might have been a hawk in gull-like light-gray uniform. And it might have been an owl with gull-like dress and hawk-like lines. Whatever it was, it was clipper-built, swift, and in fighting trim. As a matter of fact, it was neither gull nor hawk nor owl, but a harrier, a hen-harrier--that's its name, not its sex, for it was a cock--and the same is a half-way house, so to speak, between hawk and owl. Possibly because they are crepuscular, harriers may be thought more rare than they are. This one was "crepusculing," and--the black rat did not like it. They had met before, and Mr. Ratus had gained a lively dislike for this hawk-owl combination, greater than his respect--which itself was not small--for owl or hawk.

Seeing nowhere to go, and nothing to hide in when he got there, our Mr. Ratus shifted from one spot to the other when the harrier made his cat-like pounce--yes, he was something cat-like, too--and had the pleasure of seeing the harrier's uninviting talons grab a clawful of grass, which, by all powers of judgment, ought to have been black rat's fur.

A mere hawk, or even an owl, might have considered this rebuff enough, but not the harrier. He wafted himself ten feet aloft on his long narrow vans, and, flapping owl-like, or almost butterfly-like, began to beat, and the beating of the harrying harrier, up and down, is one of the most trying ordeals, for the game beaten for, in the wild.

Mrs. Ratus sat where she was, he presumed, playing the same bluff.

But both were without cover, and the black rat, I fear, devoutly hoped that she would be fool enough to move and give herself away first; whilst she, on her part, was cursing him for many kinds of a fool for starting their "flitting" before it was dark.

While she sat and froze--in both senses--however, the black rat, rigid as a beast cut out of coal, with one bright, shining eye upon the harrier beating up and down, was probing the dusk with the other eye. And presently he thought he saw his chance. He would have had to move, anyway, I fancy, for the strain of sitting there bang in the open was unendurable. His nerves would have snapped. So he went to his chance--a hole in the bank of the ditch.

I say he went, but I only take it to be so because he got there. One could not actually see him go. One had only an idea, quite an uncertain idea, that something, most like a swift bird, had passed up the ditch, and one could not swear even to that. It seemed impossible that the flying something had been a four-legged animal.

It was the black rat. Nor did he go straight. He went, if I may so put it, every way at once, ending up with a merry-go-round dance with death--the harrier was pouncing savagely--round a tuft of grass, at such a speed that he looked exactly like the rim of a quickly spun bicycle-wheel--a halo, that is to say, and nothing else.

And then--he was crouched, panting, inside the hole, wondering whether his heart or his lungs would be the first to burst. And then? Oh, and then he--cleaned himself, naturally and of course. What else did you expect? He was the original black rat of Old England, and one of the cleanest animals on earth.