Neighbors Unknown

As the two grim avengers followed the trail, like fleeting shadows, a red doe stepped leisurely into their path before she caught sight of them. For one instant she stood like a stone, petrified with terror. In the next, she had vanished over the nearest bushes with such a leap as she had never before achieved. The female might have sprung upon her neck almost without effort. But she never even raised a paw against this easy quarry; it was a higher hunting that now engrossed her.

When at length the two running beasts came to the edge of the open ground on the slopes of Broken Ridge, they hesitated. The female, though the more deadly in the persistence of her hate, was at the same time the more sagacious. First of all, she wanted to recover her cubs. No mere vengeance could be so important to her as that. She shrank back into deeper cover, and started off to one side to skirt the dangerous open. But noticing that her mate was not following her, she stopped and looked back at him inquiringly.

The male, more impetuous and more bent upon mere revenge, showed himself for a moment beyond the fringe of the woods. In that one moment, though it was impossible that he should have detected the man in his hiding across the open, he nevertheless seemed to receive some impression from the man’s challenging eyes. He felt that his enemy was there, in that dense clump of young firs. Instantly he dropped upon his belly in the undergrowth, flattening himself to an amazingly inconspicuous figure. Then he began creeping, slowly and with infinite stealth, out across the space of peril, beneath the full, revealing glare of the sun. The female gave vent to a low whimper, trying to call him back. Failing in that, she stood and watched him anxiously.

She could just see his tawny back moving through the light green leafage of the scrub. He was crawling more swiftly now. He had covered nearly half the distance. All at once there came a spurt of flame from the fir thicket, and a sharp cracking report. In the next instant she saw her mate rise straight into the air on his hind legs, clawing savagely. Then he seemed to fall together and tumble over backwards.

She knew very well what had happened. This was the power of the man. She knew her mate was dead. A further sullen heat was added to her hate, but it did not make her reckless. She ran away down the slope, skirted the open at a safe distance, and closed in once more upon the man’s trail a good mile farther on. She had got ahead of the fugitive, for even now she heard the faint thud-thud of his loping feet. She hid herself far up a tree, some thirty feet from the trail, and waited.

As the man came up, she eyed him with a mingling of mad hatred and anxious question. She saw the bundle on his back writhe violently, and she caught a little growling complaint which came from it. That settled her policy. Had she thought that the cubs were dead, she might have dropped upon the man from her post of vantage. But the cubs were alive. For their sakes she would take no risks with the man.

When he had passed on, she followed at a safe distance. The strange procession crossed the ridge. It neared the clearing and the cabin. At this point the panther heard, some little way back from the trail, the tonk-tonk of a cow-bell. There was no need of following the man so very closely for the moment. She swerved aside, ran straight, like a cat going for milk, through the thickets, and, with a burst of intolerable fury, sprang upon the cow’s neck. There was not even a struggle, for the animal’s neck was broken before it had time to know what was happening. The desperate mother tore her victim, but ate none of it. Then she hurried on toward the cabin. At least she had tasted some beginnings of vengeance.

As she reached the edge of the clearing, and came in sight of the cabin, the man was just entering the door, with the precious bundle in his hands. She saw the door close behind him. At this she whimpered uneasily, and started around to skirt the clearing and come upon the cabin from the rear.

As she went, she caught sight of the two red steers, feeding in the pasture field close by the fence. She crept up, eying them, but too sagacious to reveal herself in the open. As luck would have it, one of the steers at this moment came up close to the fence, to scratch his hide on the knots. With a snarl the panther struck at him through the rails, and drew a long ragged gash down his flank. Snorting with pain and terror, the steer turned and raced for home, tail in air; and his comrade, taking the alarm, bellowed nervously and followed him.

A few minutes later the man came out of his cabin, followed by his wife. The steers were at the barn door – a place they usually avoided at this season. One of them was shivering and bleeding. The man examined the wound, and understood. Turning to the woman, he said, —

“That there’s the mother’s work. We must hunt her down an’ settle her to-morrer, or she’ll clean out the farm.”

Letting the frightened steers into the barn, he waited anxiously for the tonk-atonk of the black-and-white cow coming home to be milked. When she did not come, that, too, he understood only too well, and his wide mouth set itself grimly. It looked as if those were going to be an expensive pair of cubs.

After dark, late, the mother stole close up to the cabin. Everything was shut up tight – barn, shed, and house alike. At the door-sill she listened long and intently, like a cat at a mouse-hole. Her fine ear made out the heavy breathings of the man and the woman within. It also at length distinguished some faint little growlings and gruntings, such as the cubs only uttered when they were well fed. She prowled around the house all night, the pale flame of her savage and anxious eyes glowing upon it from every direction. Then, at the edge of dawn, she stole away, but not far, to a hiding-place whence she could command a view of the cabin-door. It was within that door that her cubs had vanished.

The sun was not a half hour high when the man set forth, and the woman with him, to hunt down the dangerous adversary whom they had challenged. The woman, who carried a rifle of the same pattern as the man’s, was almost as sure a shot as he. The continued absence of the cow, the wound on the red steer’s flank, the defiant network of tracks all about the cabin, showed clearly enough that the fight was now to the death. The man and woman knew there would be no security for them as long as the mother panther remained alive. Therefore they were in haste to settle the matter. They picked out a distinct trail and followed it. It led them straight to the body of the slain cow, which the slayer had visited twice in the course of the night, just to satisfy her thirst for vengeance.

But at the moment when the two indignant hunters were examining the carcass of the cow, the panther was at their cabin-door, listening. She had seen the man and woman hurry away. Now she could hear quite distinctly the little complainings of her young. She pushed against the heavy door till it creaked, but there was no entrance for her by that way. Close by was the window. Standing up on her hind legs, she stared in. At last she managed to make out the two cubs, lying in a corner in a box of rags and straw. The sight scattered all her caution to the winds. Scrambling up to the window-sill, she dashed her head and shoulders through the glass. That the jagged fragments cut her mouth and muzzle severely, she never heeded at all. Forcing her whole body through, her powerful haunches caught the window-frame, and carried it with them to the floor. Writhing herself free of this encumbrance, she darted to the box of rags, snatched up one of the cubs by the loose skin of its neck, sprang through the window with it, and bore it off into a growth of tall rank grass behind the barn. Returning at once to the cabin, she rescued the other cub in the same way, and brought it triumphantly to its brother in the long grass.

About this time she heard the man and the woman coming back. Instead of trying to get away, she coiled herself flat in the grass and began to suckle the cubs to keep them quiet. Her hiding-place was the most secure that she could have found within miles of the cabin, the man having never any occasion to go behind the barn – as she had seen by the absence of tracks – and the rank growth furnishing a very complete concealment. Crafty woodsman though the man was held to be, it never entered his mind that so shy a beast as the panther would take covert thus within the very stronghold of the foe. At sight of the shattered window he fell into a rage, and when he found the cubs gone, he exhausted ingenuity in consigning to every torment the man who had tempted him into speculating in panther cubs. Storming noisily, he hunted everywhere, except behind the barn. For a time his wife sat composedly on the wood-pile, and cheered him with pointed backwoods sarcasms. At last, however, the two went away over the ridge, to recover the skin of the other panther before it should be spoiled by foxes. During their absence the mother got both cubs safely carried off to a hollow tree some five miles farther along the ridge. That night, while the man and the woman slept, with boards nailed over their window, she bore them far away from the perilous neighborhood. By difficult paths, and across two turbulent streams, she removed them into the recesses of the neighboring county, a barren and difficult region, where the wanderings of the man were little likely to lead him.

THE TUNNEL RUNNERS

The deep copper-red channel of the little tidal river wound inland through the wide yellowish levels of the salt marsh. Along each side of the channel, between the waving fringes of the grass and the line of usual high tide, ran a margin of pale yellowish-brown sand-flats, baked and seamed with sun cracks, scurfed with wavy deposits of salt, and spotted with meagre tufts of sea-green samphire, goose-tongue, and sea-rosemary. Just at the edge of the grass-fringe an old post, weather-beaten and time-eaten, stood up a solitary sentinel over the waste, reminder of a time when this point of the river had been a little haven for fishing-boats – a haven long since filled up by the caprice of the inexorable silt.

Some forty or fifty paces straight back from the mouldering post, a low spur of upland, darkly wooded with spruce and fir, jutted out into the yellow-green sea of grass. Off to the left, some hundred yards or so away, ran a line of round-topped dike, with a few stiff mullein stalks fringing its crest. Beyond the dike, and long ago reclaimed by it from the sea, lay basking in the sun the vast expanses of sweet-grass meadow, blue-green with timothy, clover, and vetch, and hummed over by innumerable golden-belted bumblebees. Through this sweet meadow wound the slow curves of a placid and brimming fresh-water stream, joining itself at last to the parent river through an abat-d’eaux in the dike, whose sunken valves protected it completely from the fluctuation of the tides.

The dividing line between the tall, waving, yellow salt grass and the naked mud-flat was as sharp as if cut by a diker’s spade, and it was fringed by a close brown tangle of grass-roots, which seemed to feel outward over the baked mud and then curl back upon themselves in apprehension. Close to the foot of the mouldering post, where this fringe half encircled it, appeared suddenly a pointed brownish head, with tiny ears and a pair of little, bright, bead-like eyes set very close together. The head was thrust cautiously forth from the mouth of a narrow tunnel under the grass-roots. The sharp, overhung muzzle, with nostrils dilating and quivering, interrogated the perilous outer air; the bead eyes searched the sky, the grass-fringe, the baking open of the flat. There was no danger in sight; but just in front, some five or six feet distant, a gaudy caterpillar on some bold venture bent was making his slow way across the scurfed mud, from one goose-tongue tuft to another.

The pointed head shot swiftly forth from the tunnel, followed by a ruddy-brown body – straight out across the bright naked space, and back again, like a darting shuttle, into the hole, and the too rashly adventuring caterpillar had disappeared.

A little way back from the edge of the flats a mottled brown marsh-hawk was flying hither and thither. His wings were shorter and broader than those of most members of his swift marauding race, and he flew flapping almost like a crow, instead of gliding, skimming, and soaring, after the manner of his more aristocratic kindred. He flew close above the swaying grass-tops, his head thrust downward, and his hard, unwinking eyes peered fiercely down between the ranked coarse stems of the “broad-leaf” grass. He quartered the meadow section by section, closely and methodically as a well-handled setter. Once he dropped straight downward into the grass abruptly, as if he had been shot; and when, an instant later, he arose again, with a great buffeting of the grass-tops, he was clutching some tiny gray object in his talons. Had one been near enough to see, it would have proved, probably, to be a young shrew. Whatever it was, it was too small to be worth carrying off to his high perch on the dead pine-tree beyond the ridge of the uplands. He flew with it to the open crest of the dike close by, where he devoured it in savage gulps. Then, having wiped his beak on the hard sod, he dropped off the dike and resumed his assiduous quartering of the salt grass.

About this time the little brown, pointed head with the bead eyes reappeared in the mouth of the tunnel by the foot of the post. Everything seemed safe. The samphire and the goose-tongue tufts, palely glimmering in the sun, were full of salt-loving, heat-loving insects. Warily the ruddy-brown body behind the pointed head slipped forth from the tunnel, and darted to the nearest tuft, where it began nosing sharply and snapping up small game.

The marsh-mouse was a sturdy figure, about six inches in length, with a dull chestnut-brown back sprinkled with black hairs shading downwards through warm gray to a delicate fawn-colored belly. Its shoulders and short forelegs were heavily moulded, showing the digger of tunnels, and its forepaws moved with the swift precise facility of hands. The tiny ears were set flat and tight to the head, and the broad-based skull over the triangular muzzle gave an impression of pugnacious courage, very unlike that of the wood-mouse or the house-mouse. This expression was more than justified by the fact, for the marsh-mouse, confident in his punishing little jaws and distrustful of his agility, had a dangerous propensity to stay and fight when he ought to be running away. It was a propensity which, owing to the abundance of his enemies, would have led speedily to the extermination of his race but for the amazing and unremitting fecundity which dwelt in his blood.

For all his courage, however, there were some foes which he had no inclination to meet and face – even he, one of the biggest and strongest of his kind. As he glanced aside from his nosing in the samphire tufts, he caught sight of a broad black splotch of shadow sweeping up the baked surface of the flat at terrific speed.

He did not look up; he had no need to. Only too well he knew what was casting that sinister shadow. Though agility was not supposed to be his strong point, his movement, as he shot across the open from the samphire tuft to the mouth of his tunnel, was almost too quick to follow. He gained the root-fringed door just in time. As his frantic, cringing hind quarters disappeared into the hole, the great talons of the pouncing hawk plunged into the root-fringe, closing and clutching so savagely that the mouth of the tunnel was obliterated. Grass-roots, however, were not what those rending talons wanted, and the great hawk, rising angrily, flapped off to the other side of the dike.

Within the tunnel the brown mouse ran on desperately, as if he felt those fatal talons still reaching after him. The tunnel was not quite in darkness, for here and there a gleam of light came filtering through the roots which formed its roof, and here and there a round opening gave access to the yellow-green world among the big stiff grass-stalks. The floor was smooth from the feet and teeth of countless other marsh-mice, water-voles, and marsh-shrews. To right and left went branching off innumerable side-tunnels and galleries, an apparently inextricable maze. But the brown mouse raced straight on, back from the waterside, deep into the heart of the marsh, anxious only to put himself as far as possible from the scene of his horrid adventure.

Running thus suddenly, he bumped hard into a little wayfarer who was journeying in the opposite direction. The tunnel was so narrow that only by the use of a certain circumspection and consideration could two travellers pass each other comfortably. Now the stranger was a mole-shrew, much smaller than the brown mouse, but of a temper as unpleasant as that of a mad buffalo. That the mouse should come butting into him in that rude fashion was an indignity not to be tolerated. Gnashing his long, chisel-like teeth, he grappled blindly, and rent the brown mouse’s ear to ribbons. But this was a mistake on his part, a distinct error of judgment. The brown mouse was no slim timorous barn-mouse or field-mouse, no slow and clumsy mole. He was a fighter and with strength to back his pugnacity. He caught the angry shrew by the neck, bit him mercilessly, shook him limp, trod him under foot, and raced on. Not until he reached his snug nest in the burrow at the foot of the dike did he quite regain his equanimity.

Just about this time there came a succession of heavy southwest gales, which piled up the water into the funnel-like head of the bay, dammed back the rivers, and brought a series of high tides. Tides as high were quite unseasonable, and caught the swarming little tunnel runners of the salt marsh unprepared. As the first flood came lapping up over the sun-baked flats, covering the samphire tufts, setting all awash the root-fringes of the grass, and sliding noiselessly into the tunnels, there was a wild scurrying, and a faint elusive clamor of squeaks came murmuring thinly up through the grass. Myriads of brown-and-orange grasshoppers, beetles black and green and blue and red, with here and there a sleek grub, here and there a furry caterpillar, began to climb the long, stiff grass-stalks. The battalions of the mice and voles and shrews, popping up indignantly through the skylight of the tunnels, swept unanimously toward the barrier of the dike. Every one of them knew quite well that to the sweet meadows beyond the dike the peril of the tide could not pursue them.

The big brown marsh-mouse, as it chanced, was asleep at the bottom of his burrow. Stealing up between the grass-stems, a chill douche slipped in upon him. Startled and choking, he darted up the steep slope of his gallery, and out into the wet turmoil. He was an expert swimmer, but he liked to choose his own time for the exercise of his skill. This was not one of the times. For one second he sat up upon his sturdy little haunches, squeaking angrily and surveying the excitement. Then, shaking his fur free of the few drops of water which clung to it in tiny globules, he joined the scurrying migrant throngs which were swarming through the dike.

Along the dike-top the migrants were running the gantlet with death. With the first invasion of the tide across the flats, all the marsh-hawks of the neighborhood – some four or five – had gathered to the hunt, knowing well just what the flood would do for them. Also many crows had come. At intervals along the crest of the dike stood the hawks, with wings half spread, screaming excitedly, clutching at their victims and devouring them with unlordly haste. Two, already gorged, were flapping away heavily toward the forest-clad inland ridges, carrying limp trophies in their talons. As for the crows, there were perhaps two score of them, all cawing noisily, flying low along the crest of the dike, and alighting from time to time to stab savagely with their dagger-like beaks.

The big brown marsh-mouse, wise with experience and many escapes, took this all in as he mounted the slope of the dike. Marking a hawk just above him, he doubled nimbly back, jumping over half a dozen blindly blundering fugitives. Some ten feet farther along he again ascended. As he came over the crest, in a mob of shrews and smaller mice, he saw a glossy crow just dropping upon him. The eyes of the crow, impish and malevolent, were fixed, not upon him, but upon a small shrew close at his side. Imagining himself, however, the object of attack, the brown mouse fell into a rage. Darting upward, he fixed his long teeth in the black marauder’s thigh, just above the leg joint, and pulled him down into the scurrying stream of rodents. With a squeak of rage and alarm, the crow struck out savagely. His murderous beak stabbed this way and that in the crowd, laying out more than one soft-bodied victim, while his strong black wings beat others into confusion and panic. But in the throng swarming over the dike at that point were many more of the marsh-mice and the shrews, all savage in temper. They leaped upon the crow, ran over and bore down the buffeting wings, and tore vengefully at the hard iridescent armor of close-laid feathers which shielded their foe from any fatal wounds. In spite of this disadvantage, they were wearing him out by sheer fury and weight of numbers, when the other crows came darkly to his assistance. In a moment he was liberated, and the dike-top strewn with gashed furry bodies. Bleeding and bedraggled, his eyes blazing with wrath, he sprang into the air and flapped away to the uplands to recover his composure in the seclusion of some dense pine-top. The brown marsh-mouse, the cause of his discomfiture, darted out from under his wing as he arose, and slipped over the edge of the dike with no worse injury than a red gash across the haunches. Having scored such a triumph over so redoubtable an enemy as the crow, he was not troubled by his wound; but discretion led him to plunge instantly into the deep green shelter of the grass.

Here in the sweet meadow, where the timothy and clover stood much closer than did the coarse stalks of the “broad-leaf” in the salt meadow, the runways of the mice were not, as a rule, underground. They were made by gnawing off the stems close to the firm surface of the sod. The stems on each side, tending to be pressed together, formed a perfect roof to the narrow tunnels, which pierced the grass in every direction and formed a seemingly insoluble labyrinth. The brown mouse, however, knew his way very well through the soft green light, flecked with specks and streaks of pollen-dusty sunshine. The tunnels were swarming with travellers; but beyond nipping them on the haunches now and then, to make them get out of his way or move faster, he paid no attention to them. At last he came to the edge of the stream, and to a burrow beneath the roots of a wild-rose thicket which fringed the water.

This burrow the brown mouse had once inhabited. He felt it was his. Just now it was occupied by an irritable little mole-shrew; but the brown mouse, strong in the sense of ownership, proceeded to take possession. The outraged shrew put up a bitter fight, but in vain. With squeaks and blood the eviction was accomplished, and the brown mouse established himself complacently in the burrow.

After a few days the southwest gales blew themselves out, the tides drew back within their ordinary summer bounds, and most of the refugees returned to their old haunts among the “broad-leaf.” But the brown mouse elected to remain in his burrow beside the rose-thicket. His taste had turned to the clover and timothy stalks, and the meadow was alive with brown crickets and toothsome, big, green grasshoppers. Moreover, in the heat of late July, he loved to swim in the bland waters of the stream, keeping close along shore, under the shadow of the long grass and the overhanging roses, and avoiding the dense patches of weed which might give shelter to the darting pickerel. His burrow was roomy and gave accommodation to a silken-furred brown mate, who set herself without delay to the duty of replenishing the diminished population of the marsh-mice.

In spite of foraging hawks, foxes, weasels, and minks, in spite of calamities, swift and frequent, overtaking this, that, and another of the innumerable kindred of the mice, the summer hours passed benignly over the burrow by the rose-thicket. Then, one sultry scented morning, there came a change. The deep quiet of the meadow went to pieces in blatant clamor. Loud-voiced men and snorting, trampling, clanking horses came to the edge of the grass, and with them two strange scarlet machines which clattered as they moved.