Part 21

Mrs. Ratus, having vanished past finding while the hunt to the hole was on, presently scented her lord out, when the night had come and the harrier was gone, and together, starting like antelope at every hint of a sound, they traveled up the ditch, and up the bank of a stream that the ditch folded into.

Once an owl--the nomad, short-eared owl of the marshes--let forth a hoot that would have sent a nervous lady into "astericks," and sent them into no-where, as if it had detonated a charge of that lively mystery called T.N.T. under their dainty feet. Once, just as they were lapping like dogs at the edge of the ice that was conspiring to span the brook, an otter shot up his head--jaws wide and dripping--almost under their long and pointed noses, and they, with one accord, and driven by their long tails acting as a spring, leapt simply into space. At any rate, they could not be followed by mortal eye, wherever they did leap to.

And once they met a wandering cat. And that cat seemed to go mad, for she shifted about the steep bank of that stream, and up, and about--here she swore because the spikes pricked her--and down a holly-bush, as if she had got a rocket tied to her tail. She had not, of course. She was hunting black rats. I suppose she saw them. If so, she was the only person who did, and I feel sure that, instant as she was, when she was up the bank or the holly-bush they were down it, and when she was down they were up. Finally, when her lost temper had completely run her out of breath, she slouched away, spitting like a worn sparking-plug, and very much disgusted. And--the black rats cleaned themselves!

That night was not a profitable one. The shell-fish of the estuary were gone, and there was little instead on the stream--only snow, and the snow fell quietly at intervals throughout the night, hiding everything. Rats, too, are creatures of warmth. They hate cold as much as the writer, and these two black rats became very miserable. They had no home, and did not know where to go; and, save for a few berries, they had nothing to eat. Mercifully, they had plenty to drink, and that is an item with rats, who die in a very few hours if they cannot get a drink.

A bitter, dull paling of the sky, which by courtesy we will call dawn, found them cleaning again, with their hand-like forepaws, exactly like cats, inside a water-vole burrow. The owner had been out, bark-chipping, all night--it was the only thing he could find to keep body and life from parting company--and was not over-pleased, on his return, to find that he had company at home. A short two-round contest ensued, during which the water-vole must have felt as if he had taken on a bit of black lightning. Then the water-vole went away, somewhat bewildered, to turn some smaller water-vole out of his winter bed; and the rats curled themselves up, heads between hindlegs, tail encircling all, with only their ever-ready, elfin ears poking out to give the alarm, and they slept. And, by the way, it was a saying in the wild that no one had ever seen them asleep, or knew if, or how, they did sleep.

Nothing came to disturb them during the day--which was a wonder, for all the wild was hungry and looking for food--and at the hour when

Night, busy with her dawn, begins it with a star,

they came out, after a prolonged, starry-eyed stare, from their fastness, and continued their journey.

Things were serious now. They had not fed, and could find nothing to feed upon but two hawthorn-berries, dropped by the wasteful fieldfares; but they drank, and cleaned, and proceeded up-stream, with that caution one only learns in a world full of enemies and empty of friends.

Another six hours of this cold on an empty stomach would send them into that sleep--the dread, drugged slumber of the cold--from which there is no awakening in this world, and they seemed to know it. They were desperate, and their eyes burnt in their sharp heads like gimlet-holes of light. Desperate they were, as the poor, little, brilliantly resplendent, and tropic-looking kingfisher had, no doubt, been, whom they found, frozen into a dried, huddled heap, under the stream-bank, and so emaciated that, after they had picked his bones, they scarcely knew that they had touched him.

But anon the face of the snow changed--meaningly for them. Whereas before they had been alone, almost, in a frozen world, scarcely crossing a trail but the quadruple track of water-voles or the chain-pattern impression of a moorhen--nor had seen a living thing but the square-ended, squat, little, black form of a water-vole out upon an alder-branch, gnawing bark--they now began to be aware of gradually increasing company. Not that the company advertised itself, mark you. Being wild company, it would not; but they knew it was there.

The chain-trail of the moorhen reduplicated itself. It was joined by that of a water-rail--they saw his ruby eyes and rat-like form in passing. The fourfold track of a rabbit led the way ahead of them, as if pointing the path, to be joined by the broken footprints of another rabbit, and then by the track made by the longer leap of a hare, fourfold also. The delicate lined marks left by a wood-mouse now kept company with the others, and anon the little fairy imprints of two field-voles--short-tailed field-mice, if you prefer. They crossed the track of another rabbit going, at right-angles, down to the water to drink, and then the little, busy tattoo of bank-voles. Another hare's trail, and more rabbits' tracks, began to meander about, but all heading more or less one way--the way they were going. And then they stopped dead at the smudged groove and ancient and fish-like scent of an otter. Moreover, they had scarcely got over that than they came upon the dog-like tracks, and the smell, like nothing else, of Reynard, the fox; and, with nerves fairly tingling now, and eyes everywhere at once, they arrived at last--as the converging trails seemed to say they would--at the towering, smudged blur against the sky, which was the farm-buildings.

The black rat peered under the lower rung of a gate into a straw-yard, and heard the rustlings of little folk--field-vole, bank-vole, and wood-mouse--who had gone before him. There was no sign of the others; but that was not strange, for the hares and the rabbits had probably gone round to the kitchen-garden, for which they were making in their extremity of hunger; and the otter and the fox were, most likely, keeping each other off the fowlhouse.

Wherefore, plucking up courage, the black rat skipped into the yard, and made straight for the manger, where, in the inky blackness under the open-sided roofs, he could hear the long-drawn blowing and sigh of fat cattle lying down.

A pale moon came out behind him, and showed him tripping lightly over a bullock's broad back. Then he was up on the manger-edge, had paused to make sure, and was down in the manger, picking up crumbs and dust of linseed-cake and chaff. Three mice were doing the same thing, but fled at his approach; but he did not trouble about that, for the cattle had not left even him and his wife a full meal, having blown what was left of the chaff away, and licked up practically all of the cake-crumbs and dust. However, it was better than nothing.

The rat's natural curiosity was awakened, and his comparative warmth in this place, out of the razor-edged wind--oh, what a relief to be out of that infernal sawing blast!--made him explore. And he ran along the edge of the manger to a hole in the wall, which led--the peculiar and indescribable smell said so--through to the pig-sties. But here he stopped, and his wife behind him stopped. Some one was coming through from the opposite side--some one who smelt very much worse than any pig.

Next instant both black rats had gone off together like sparks--if ever sparks were black--and the brown rat, coming through the hole, wondered what on earth had happened. Then he sniffed at their trail, tried, but found it impossible, to follow, and passed on. He would have felt great pleasure in slaying them if he could, and they knew that.

The black rat now essayed to cross the yard to the stable. He could not very well stop there--up among the rafters, that is--all night, so he came down, and, with his wife following him, gingerly rustled out upon the partially snow-covered straw.

Then he got a shock that turned him into a winking series of black streaks.

Then he got another shock which turned him, literally, into--well, into black lightning. You never saw anything like it in all your life. You never would have believed that any living beast could have so frantically and so furiously got itself about from place to place so instantaneously. It was--dazzling. It made you blink. It was It in the agility line, and no mistake.

Firstly, the brown rat, having hidden up in some black corner, with brown-rat cunning, came hopping out instantly--nay, charging--on the black rat's trail. And there was murder in his wicked, little, glinting eyes at he came.

Secondly, a white eider-down quilt--at least, that was what it seemed like--descended lightly as--as an eider quilt, and as soundlessly, out of the blue-black sky, and covered the brown rat up. You could hear his horrid, muffled screaming of rage and fear under the quilt; you could see the quilt--but they saw that it looked pale brown on top--lifting about, and feeling for that murder-child of a rat underneath. Then the quilt got him--you could hear the unspeakably beastly death-squeal reverberate mufflingly--and then the quilt rose, still utterly without sound, and one saw it was a big barn-owl, with a rat--a brown rat--twitching in its white-mittened claws.

But do you think that made any difference? If so, you don't know the cruel devil of perseverance that is the brown rat.

As the black rat, at the end of his amazing lightning display, reached the barn, with his mate behind him, he leapt--he could not stop--clean over the back of one great twenty-inch, glitter-eyed brown ghoul, called by the death-scream of his colleague--other rats usually answer it--coming out of a hole. The black rats dashed into the hole like flickering streaks, but the brown rat had instantly spun upon himself, and was after them.

The barn was an unfortunate choice. It seemed full of brown rats, and four of them, in the darkness, instantly took up the pursuit of the now fairly hunted black couple. Nothing but their miraculous agility saved those two from being eaten alive, but they came out of the barn on to the spotless snow on the far side, with only a foot to spare between their long tails and the mangy, scarred head of the leading brown fiend behind them.

Straight across the open, like a drawn black bar, they shot, to a towering building of wood, and along this--here they lost six inches of the precious twelve by which they led--looking for a hole. They found it, whizzed in, five brown rats close behind them, nine brown rats hard behind the five.

They discovered themselves in a great room half-filled with sacks and the sweet smell of corn, and in and out among these sacks they led their hunters such a dizzy chase as no man ever witnessed, or could witness, for the matter of that, since human eyes could not follow it. But the end seemed positive, anyway. It was only a question of tiring the black sparks out, for the four brown rats in the place, engaged upon lowering the weight of the flour in the sacks--one of those rats a dreaded cannibal of twenty-one and a half inches--joined in the mobbing, and soon the black rats found themselves in such a position that there was no escape--no escape for any but a black rat. For them there was one way. And those two living electric sparks on four feet took it. They went up the wall!

I don't know, but I guess that, as the black rats' upper jaws were longer and sharper and more shark-like than the brown rats', and their tails very much longer, they got a spring off the tail--and legs, too--and had an agility in hanging on to knots and crannies above that possessed by the brown ghouls. Be that as it may, they did it, and got a respite under the floor of the room above, before their enemies, traveling more normally, and by holes, could swarm up after them.