Part 12

At the snarl of the fisher, the cat looked up, and at the sight of the gliding black figure gave a low spitting growl and contemptuously dropped his great head to the marten's bloody throat. For a moment the big black weasel and the big gray cat faced each other. At first sight, it did not seem possible that the smaller animal would attack the larger, or that, if he did, he would last long. The fisher was less than half the size and weight of the lynx, who also outwardly seemed to have more of a fighting disposition. The tufted ears alert, the eyes gleaming like green fire, and the bristling hair and arched back, contrasted formidably with the broad forehead and round, honest face of the fisher.

So, at least, it seemed to young Jim Linklater, who, with his uncle Dave, the trapper, lay crouched close in a hemlock copse. Long before daylight, the two had traveled on silent snowshoes up the river bank, laying a trap-line, carrying nothing but a back-load of steel traps. At the rasping growl of the lynx, they peered out of their covert only to find themselves not thirty feet away from the little arena.

"That old lucifee'll rip that poor, little, black innocent to pieces in jig-time," whispered young Jim.

Old Dave shook his grizzled head. He pulled his nephew's ample ear firmly and painfully close to his mouth.

"Son," he hissed, "you and that lucifee are both goin' to have the surprise of your lives."

Unwitting of his audience, the weasel approached the cat swiftly. Suddenly with a hoarse screech, the lynx sprang, hoping to land with all his weight on the humped-up black back, and then bring into play his ripping curved claws, while he sank his teeth deep into his opponent's spine.

It was at once evident that lynx tactics have not yet been adapted to blackcat service. Without a sound, the pekan swerved like a shadow to one side, and almost before the lynx had touched the ground, the fisher's fierce cutting teeth had severed the tendon of a hind leg, while its curved claws slashed deep into the soft inner flank.

The great cat screeched with rage and pain and sheer astonishment. As he landed, the crippled leg bent under him. Even yet he had one advantage which no amount of courage or speed on the part of the pekan could have overcome. If only the lynx had gripped the dead marten, and sprung out into the deep snow, the fisher would have had to fight a losing fight. Like the hare, the lynx is shod with snowshoes in the winter, on which he can pad along on snow in which a fisher would sink deep at every step. In spite of his formidable appearance, however, the lynx has a plentiful lack of brains. As his leg doubled under his weight, this one in a panic threw himself on his back, the traditional cat attitude of defense, ready to bring into action all four of his sets of ripping claws, with his teeth in reserve.

Against another of the cat tribe such a defense would have been good. Against the pekan it was fatal. No battler in the world is a better in-fighter than the blackcat, and any antagonist near his size, who invites a clinch, rarely comes out of it alive. The pekan first circled the spinning, yowling, slashing lynx more and more rapidly, until there came a time when the side of the gray throat lay before him for a second unguarded. It was enough. With a pounce like the stroke of a coiled rattler, the pekan sprang, and a double set of the most effective fighting teeth known among mammals met deep in the lynx's throat. With all of his sharp eviscerating claws, the great cat raked his opponent. But the blackcat, protected by his thick pelt and tough muscles, was content to exchange any number of surface slashes for the throat-hold. Deeper and deeper the crooked teeth dug; and then with a burst of bright blood, they pierced the jugular vein itself. The struggles of the lynx became weaker and weaker, until, with a last convulsive shudder, the gray body stretched out stark in the snow. The weasel lay panting and lapping at the hot, welling blood, while his own ran down his black fur in unconsidered streams.

It was young Jim who first broke the silence.

"Those pelt'll bring all of twenty-five dollars," he remarked, stepping forward.

"Help yourself," suggested old Dave, not stirring, however, from where he stood.

At the voices the black weasel sprang up like a flash. With one paw on the dead lynx and another on the marten, he faced the two men in absolute silence. The eyes under the mild forehead flamed red and horrible and the dripping body quivered for another throat-hold.

"Seems like Mr. Blackcat wants 'em both," murmured the old man, discreetly withdrawing from the farther side of the copse. Jim gazed into the flaming eyes a moment longer and then followed his uncle.

"He don't look so blame innocent after all," he observed.

VIII

LITTLE DEATH

For three long months the blue-white snow had lain over the gold-white sand among the dark-green pitch pines standing like trees from a Noah's Ark. To-day the woods were a vast sea of green, lapping at the white sand-land that had been thrust up, a wedge from the South, into the very heart of the North. A crooked stream had cut its course deep through the forest. On its high bank the ghost-like glory of a mountain laurel overhung the dark water. Close to the water's edge were clumps of the hollow, crimson-streaked leaves of the pitcher plant, lined with thousands of tiny teeth all pointing downward, traps for unwary insects. All the winter these pitchers had been filled with clear cone-shaped lumps of ice; but to-day, above the fatal leaves, on long stems, swung great blossoms, wine-red, crimson, aquamarine, pearl-white, and pale gold.

From overhead came the trilling song of the pine warbler, like a chipping sparrow lost in the woods; and here and there could be caught glimpses of his pale yellow breast and white wing-bars. Below, among the tangled scrub oaks, flitted the brilliant yellow-and-black prairie warbler, while everywhere the chewinks called "Drink your tea," and the Maryland yellow-throat sang "Witchery, witchery, witchery," while jays squalled in the distance, and crimson-crested cardinals whistled from the thickets. In the sky, like grim black aeroplanes, wheeled the turkey buzzards, sailing in circles without ever a wing stroke. Gray pine-swifts, with brilliant blue patches on their sides, scurried up and down tree trunks and along fallen logs, and brown cottontail rabbits hopped across the paths, showing their white powder puffs at each jump. A huge, umber-brown-and-white pine snake, with a strange pointed head, crawled slowly through the brush while rows of painted turtles dotted the snags which thrust out here and there above the stream.

Earth, air, and water, all swarmed with life at this dawn of the year. The underground folk were awake, too. Down below the surface, the industrious mole, with his plush fur and spade-like hands, dug incessantly his hunting-tunnels for earthworms. Above him, in wet places, his cousin, the star-nosed mole, whose nose has twenty-two little fingers, drove passages through the lowest part of the moss beds and the soft upper mould.

Still nearer the surface, just under the leaf-carpet, sometimes digging his own way, sometimes using the tunnels of the meadow-mice and deer-mice, and occasionally flashing out into the open air, lived the smallest mammal. Of all the tribes of earth, of all the bat-folk who fly the air, or the water-people who swim the seas and rivers and lakes, no mammal is so little. From the tip of his wee pointed muzzle to the base of his tiny tail, he was just about the length of a man's little finger, or about two and a half inches. Nature had handicapped her smallest child heavily. Blind, earless, and tiny, yet every twenty-four hours he must kill and eat his own weight in flesh and blood; for so fiercely swift are the functions of his strange, wee body, that, lacking food for even six hours, the blind killer starves and dies.

To-day, near the edge of the stream, in the soft, white sand, his trail showed. It looked like a string of tiny exclamation points. Suddenly, from a patch of dry leaves there sounded a long rustling, like the crawling of a snake. Nothing could be seen, yet the leaves heaved and moved here and there, as something pushed its way under the surface of the leaf-carpet. Then, the masked shrew--for so we humans have named this escape from Lilliput--flashed out into the open. His glossy, silky fur was brown above and whitish-gray underneath; and between the hidden, unseeing eyes and the holes which took the place of ears was a dark smoky-gray mark, like a mask. His head angled into a long whiskered snout, so pointed that from above the shrew looked like a big pen. This flexible muzzle he twisted here and there, sniffing uncertainly, for the shrew has but little sense of smell. In fact, he seems to have traded the greater part of his other senses for a double portion of two--touch and hearing. Not even the long-eared rabbit can detect the faintest shade of a sound quicker than the shrew, and only the bat equals his sense of touch. Like that flyer, the shrew can detect an obstacle in time to avoid it, even when running at full speed, by becoming conscious of some subtle change in the air-pressure.

Among the great throng of little wild folk playing at hide-and-seek with death among the fallen logs, and in the labyrinth of passageways in the beds of sand and moss and fern, no one was swifter than this one, the smallest of them all. A flash here, a glimpse farther on, and he was gone, too fast to be followed by human eyes. In one of his rare pauses he might have been mistaken for a tiny mouse by reason of his general coloration; yet the shrew is as different from the mouse as a lynx from a wolf. No mouse has long, crooked, crocodile jaws, filled with perhaps the fiercest fighting teeth of any mammal; nor does any mouse have the tremendous jaw muscles which stood out under the soft fur of this beastling.

To-day, as the shrew sniffed here and there, trying to locate trails which a weasel or a dog could have followed instantly, his quick ear caught some tiny sound from the near-by burrow of a meadow-mouse. With a curious pattering, burrowing run, unlike the leaps and bounds of the mice-people, he started unerringly toward a narrow opening almost hidden under an overhanging patch of yellow-green sphagnum moss. Disappearing down the tunnel, he dashed along furiously, while his long widespread whiskers gave him instant notice of the turns and twists of the tunnel, which he threaded at full speed.

Ahead of him fled a young meadow-mouse, on his way to join other members of the family who were having a light lunch on what was left in the storehouse of their winter's supplies. Hearing the rapid pattering and sniffing behind him, the mouse made the fatal mistake of keeping on to the storeroom--a large chamber underground, where three grown mice were feasting. Confident in the fighting ability of his family, he had yet to learn that odds are nothing to a shrew. In spite of his speed, the mouse dashed into the round room only a little ahead of his pursuer. The storehouse was large enough to make a good battleground, but, unfortunately for the mice, contained only one entrance.

Then followed a battle great and grim. The mice were on their own ground, four against one and that one only a tiny blind beastling less than half the size and weight of any one of them. It did not seem as if the shrew had a chance against the burly, round-headed meadow-voles, who are the best fighters of all the mice-folk. Yet the issue was never in doubt. The shrew attacked with incredible swiftness. No one of his four foes could make a motion that his quick ear and uncanny sense of touch did not at once detect. Moreover, throughout the whole fight, he never for an instant left the exit-tunnel unguarded. Time and again, from out of the whirling mass of entangled bodies, a meadow-mouse would spring to the door to escape. Always it ran against the fell jaws of the little blind death, and bounded back from the latter's rigid steel-like body. Again and again the mice leaped high, and like little boxers thrust the shrew away from them by quick motions of their forepaws. At times they would jump clear over him, slashing and snapping as they went, with their two pairs of long curved sharp teeth. The shrew's snout, however, was of tough leathery cartilage. Its tiny hidden and unseeing eyes needed no protection, while its thick fur and tough skin could be pierced only by a long grip, which he prevented by his tactics. Never using his forefeet like the mice, he stood with feet outspread and firmly braced, head and snout pointing up, and constantly darted his jaws forward and downward with fierce tearing bites. With each one he brought no less than six pointed fighting teeth into play. These, driven by the great muscles of the shrew's neck and jaws, made ghastly ripping cuts through the thin skins of the mice. The latter kept up a continual squeaking as they moved, but the little killer fought in absolute silence. His wee body seemed to have an inexhaustible store of fierce strength and endurance, and throughout the battle it was always the shrew who attacked and the mice who retreated. Like the raccoon, the shrew is perfectly balanced on all four feet, and can move forward, backward, or sidewise with equal readiness. With swift little springs this one constantly tried for a throat-hold; yet amid the tangle and confusion of the struggle, never once did he fail to guard the one way out.

Round and round the storehouse the battle surged for a long half hour, with the shrew always between the doorway and his struggling, leaping opponents. The grain-fed mice lacked the blood-bought endurance of their opponent. The young mouse who had led the shrew to the storehouse was the first to go. In the very middle of a leap, he staggered and fell at the feet of his enemy. Instantly the long curved jaws closed on his head, and the fierce teeth of the shrew crunched into his brain.

It was the beginning of the end. One by one the others fell before the automatic rushes and slashes of the little fighting-machine, until only one was left, a scarred, skilled veteran, who had held his own in many a fight. As he felt his strength ebbing, with a last desperate effort the mouse dodged one of the shrew's rushes, and managed to sink his two pairs of curved teeth into the tough muscles of the other's neck. Then a horrifying thing happened. Without even trying to break the mouse's grip, the shrew bent nearly double, and buried his pointed muzzle deep into the soft flesh below the other's foreleg. Driven by the cruel hunger which ruled his life, he ate like fire through skin and flesh and bone. The mouse fought, the shrew ate, and the outcome was certain, as it must be when a fighter who depends on four teeth dares the clinch with one who uses twelve. Even as the mouse unlocked his jaws for a better hold he tottered and fell dead under the feet of the other.