Neighbors Unknown

One of these scarlet monsters, dragged by its horses, swerved off toward the farther side of the meadow. The other started straight down through the deep grass along the edge of the stream. Into the grass, belly-deep, the big horses plunged, breasting it like the sea. Instantly the scarlet machine, which was ridden by a man, set up a new cry. It was a harsh, strident, terrifying cry, as if a million twanging locusts had found one voice. Before it, to the amazed horror of all the furry, scurrying grass-dwellers, the grass went down flat in long ranks. The peril of the floods was as nothing to this loud uncomprehended peril. Marsh-mice, water-voles, shrews, with here and there a foraging musk-rat, here and there a murderous and ravaging weasel, all fled frantically before it. A few, a very few, fled too late. These never knew what happened to them, for great darting knives, dancing unseen through the grass close to the earth, caught them and slew them.

The high cry of the deadly scarlet thing, however, gave warning fair and sufficient. As the big brown marsh-mouse heard it approaching, he dived straight to the bottom of his burrow and lay there trembling. His companion, on the other hand, holding different views as to the proper place of safety, darted from the burrow, wriggled through the thorny stems of the rose-thicket, and plunged into the water, where she hid herself close under the opposite bank. The noise and the darting knives glided almost over the mouth of the burrow, and the thumping heart of the brown mouse almost burst itself with terror. But they passed. Slowly they marched away. And when they had grown comparatively faint, far down at the foot of the meadow, beside the dike, the brown mouse, recovering himself, dared to peep forth. He was astonished to see a long breadth of grass lying prostrate, with bewildered bumblebees and grasshoppers striving to extricate themselves from the ruins. Having a valiant heart and a quick eye for opportunity, he sprang out of his hole and began pouncing on the confused and helpless insects. This, for a few minutes, was a profitable game, and a safe one, too, for the strident noise, with the presence of the men and horses, had driven hawks and crows to a discreet distance. But presently the cry of the scarlet thing, which had turned at the dike and was moving straight up the middle of the meadow, began to grow loud again, and the brown mouse whisked back into his burrow.

All through the time of the haying the meadow-folk lived in a turmoil of alarm and change. At first, under the heavy prostrate ranks of the slain grass, they ran bewildered but secure, for their foes could not easily detect them. For another day they were comparatively safe under the long scented lines of the dying “windrows,” full of grasshoppers and wilted clover-heads. When the windrows were tossed together into innumerable pointed hay-cocks, they crowded beneath the ephemeral shelter, to be rudely bared next day to the blinding sun as the cocks were pitched into the rumbling hay-carts. It was a day of horrors, this, to the meadow kindreds, for a yellow Irish terrier, following the hay-makers, would run with wild yelpings under the lifted cocks, and slay the little people by the hundred. But as for the brown mouse, all this time he and his temporary mate dwelt secure, keeping to their burrow and to the barren but safe tunnels which they had driven amid the roots of the rose-thicket.

When the hay was gone – part of it carted away to upland barns, part built cunningly into high conical stacks – the meadow-dwellers found that they had fallen on evil times. The naked meadow, all bare close stubble, open to the eyes of hawk and crow by day, and of the still more deadly owl by night, had become their worst foe. Some drew back to the fringes of the uplands. Some colonized along the winding edges of the stream. Some returned across the dike to the salt meadow, where the broad-leaf grass was not yet ripe for mowing; while the remnant huddled precariously under the bases of the stacks, an easy prey for every foraging weasel. In a little while, however, the short thick herbage of the aftermath thrust its head above the stubble. Then new tunnels were run, and life for the scurrying and squeaking meadow-folk once more began to offer its normal attractions. It was now more perilously insecure, however, for the herds of cattle turned to pasture on the aftermath kept it eaten down; and the shrewd crows learned that their beaks could pierce the fragile and too-open roofs of the tunnels.

At last the snow came, the deep snow and the hard cold, enemy to almost all the other kindred of the wild, but friendly to the mouse-folk. The snow, some two feet deep all over the meadows, over the dikes, and to the eating edges of the tides, gave them a perfect shelter, and was exactly suited to the driving of their tunnels. Food was abundant, because they could subsist very well on the nutritious root-stalks of the grass. And none of their enemies could get at them except when they chose to seek the upper air. In the daytime they kept to the glimmering blue light of the tunnels, but at night they would slip forth and play about the firm surface of the snow. It was then that they suffered, for though the hawks were gone, and the crows asleep, the icy winter night was alive with owls; and foxes, weasels, and minks would come prowling hungrily down from the uplands. The owls were the worst peril by far – marsh-owls, barn-owls, the darting little Acadian owls, swift as the sparrow-hawk; and now and then the terror of the winter wilds, the giant snowy owl of the North, driven down by storm and famine from his bleak Arctic wastes. The revels of the mouse-folk over their dim-lit playgrounds were varied with incessant tragedy. But the memories of the little people, fortunately, were short. Their perilous diversions went on unchecked, while their furry battalions thinned amazingly.

But through all these dangers the brown marsh-mouse went his way secure. He kept every exit of his tunnels perfectly hidden among the thorny tips of the wild rose-bushes, which stood up some five or six inches above the top of the snow. The successive families which were born and grew up in his safe burrow passed out into the maze, to be merged in the precarious and passing legions. His first mate disappeared mysteriously, and as he had no facilities for pressing an inquiry among the hawks or weasels, he never knew the details of her disappearance. Her place was speedily filled in the burrow. But to the brown mouse himself nothing happened. He confined his nightly revels beneath the moon to the region of the rose-thickets, and so eluded effectually the eyes and claws of the owls.

It was along toward the end of winter, however, when the brown mouse met with his most dangerous adventure. Shunning, as he did so craftily, the games on the open snow, he was wont to amuse himself – and incidentally seek variations in his diet – beneath the ice of his threshold stream. An expert swimmer and diver, almost as swift as his cousin the musk-rat or his hereditary enemy the mink, he would swim long distances under the water, finding fresh bits of lily-root, tiny clams, water-snails, half-torpid beetles, and many kinds of larvæ. As the stream had been high at the time of freezing, and had afterwards shrunken in its channel, letting the ice down with it, there were many air-chambers along the brink, between ice-roof and water surface; and slanting downward to the nearest of these he had dug himself a tunnel from the roots of his thicket. Even here, to be sure, there were perils for him. There was one big mink which loved to hunt along these secret and dim-lit air-chambers, taking long swims beneath the ice. But he was an autocrat, and kept all rival minks away from his range; so the wise brown mouse knew that as long as he kept a sharp enough lookout against that foe, he was secure in the air-chambers. Then, in the stream itself, there was always the peril of the great pike, which had its lair at the bottom of the deep pool down by the abat-d’eaux. The brown mouse had seen him but once – a long, straight, gray-green, shadowy shape in the distance – but that one sight gave him counsels of caution. He never forgot, when in the water, to keep watch for that great darting shadow.

One day, when the brown mouse had swum far downstream, and was hurrying back home, he was alarmed by loud sounds on the surface of the ice, a little below his back door. Some one with an axe was chopping a hole in the ice. The brown mouse swam away downstream again as fast as he could, and the jarring noise of the axe-strokes, carried by the ice and by the water, seemed to follow him with terrifying concussions. Hiding himself in a remote air-chamber, he waited for the noises to cease. Then, with mingled trepidation and caution, he swam upstream again.

As he neared home, he saw a round beam of light pouring downward to the stream’s bed through a hole in the ice. In the midst of this light there hung, moving softly to the slow current, a big lump of fat pork. The brown mouse did not know it was pork, but he knew at once it was something very good to eat. Very cautiously he swam up to investigate it. There seemed to be no reason why he should not nibble it. In fact, he was just going to nibble it, when, just a few feet farther upstream, those terrifying sounds began again. The brown mouse took them as a warning, and fled back downstream in a panic.

In a few minutes the noise stopped, and the courage of the brown mouse returned. As he swam once more homeward, firmly resolved that he would taste that delectable mystery on his way, a chill in his spine made him remember the great pike, and look back.

There was the great pike, a long dreadful shadow, gliding up behind him.

The brown mouse, as we have said, was a wonderful swimmer. He swam now as he had never swum before – a brown streak cleaving the dim-lit current; and as he went tiny water-bubbles, formed by the air pressed out from under his fur, flew up till they broke against the ice. But, with all his speed, the great pike swam faster, and was slowly overtaking him. Just as he passed that strange dangling lump of pork, he realized that this was a race which he could not win. The entrance to his burrow was still too distant. But he remembered a tiny air-chamber under the bank close by. It had no exit. It was so small that he might not find room there to haul himself clear out of the water, beyond reach of his enemy’s jaws, but he had no choice, and in frantic suffocating desperation he dashed for it.

Even as he turned, however, the sense of doom descended upon him. Was he not already too late? The long awful shape of the great fish was close upon him. With a convulsive effort that almost burst his heart, he gained the air-chamber, scrambled half-way out of the water, and then, in that cramped space, turned at bay, game to the last gasp.

To his amazement, the great pike was not at his tail. Instead, he was still some three or four feet away, out there just in the descending beam of light from the hole in the ice. The mysterious lump of pork had disappeared, but the gasping brown mouse did not notice that. His attention was engrossed in the amazing and terrifying performances of the pike. The long gray-green body was darting this way and that, in and out of the beam of light, but never any great space out of it. The great jaws shook savagely from side to side, and then the mouse saw that from between them a slender gleaming cord extended upward through the hole. A moment more, and the pike sprang straight up, with a heavy swirl of the water, and vanished above the ice.

It was incomprehensible; and there was something altogether appalling about it. The brown mouse shivered. For several minutes he crouched there quite still, more utterly panic-stricken than he had ever been before in all his precarious little life. At last, with hesitation, he worked his way up along the bank, beneath the ice, to his own tunnel, and scurried in all haste to hide himself in the deepest corner of his burrow. And never thereafter could he comprehend why nothing more was seen, or heard, or rumored of the great pike.

A TORPEDO IN FEATHERS

The blue kingfisher, flying over the still surface of the lake, and peering downward curiously as he flew, saw into its depths as if they had been clear glass. What he hoped to see was some small fish – chub, or shiner, or yellow perch, or trout, basking incautiously near the surface. What he saw was a sinister dark shape, elongated but massive, darting in a straight line through the transparent amber, some three or four feet below the surface. Knowing well enough what that meant – no fish so foolish as to linger in such dread neighborhood – the kingfisher flew on indignantly, with a loud clattering laugh like a rattle. He would do his fishing, according to his usual custom, in the shallower waters along shore, where the great black loon was less at home.

Darting straight ahead for an amazing distance, like a well-aimed torpedo, the loon came to a point where the lake-bottom slanted upward swiftly toward a bushy islet, over a floor of yellow sand that glowed in the sun. Here he just failed to transfix, with his powerful dagger of a bill, a big lake trout that hung, lazily waving its scarlet fins, beside a rock. The trout’s golden-rimmed eyes detected the peril in time – just in time – and with a desperate screw-like thrust of his powerful tail, he shot aside and plunged into the shadowy deeps. The heavy swirl of his going disturbed an eight-inch chub, which chanced at the moment to be groping for larvæ in a muddy pocket beneath the rock. Incautiously it sailed forth to see what was happening. Before it had time to see anything, fate struck it. Caught in the vice of two iron mandibles, it was carried quivering to the surface.

All power of escape crushed out of it by that saw-toothed grip, the victim might safely have been dropped and devoured at leisure. But the great loon was too hungry for leisure. Moreover, he was an expert and he took no risks. With a jerk he threw the fish into the air, caught it as it fell head first, and gulped it down. For a moment or two he floated motionless, his small, fierce and peculiarly piercing eyes warily scrutinizing the lake in all directions. Then, lifting his black head, which gleamed in the sun with green, purple, and sapphire iridescence, he gave vent to a strange wild cry like a peal of bitter laughter. The cry echoed hollowly from the desolate shores of the lake. A moment or two later it was answered, in the same hollow and disconcerting tones, and from behind the islet his mate came swimming to meet him.

For a few minutes the two great birds swam slowly around each other, uttering several times their weird cry. As they floated at their ease, unalarmed, they sat high in the water, showing something of the clean pearly whiteness of their breasts and under parts. Their sturdy, trimly modelled bodies were about three feet in length, from the tips of their straight and formidable green beaks to the ends of their short stiff tails. Their heads, as we have seen, were of an intense and iridescent black, their necks encircled by collars of black and white, their backs, shoulders, and wings dull black, with white spots and bars. Their feet, very large, broadly webbed, and set extraordinarily far back, almost like those of a penguin, glimmered black as they fanned back and forth in the clear amber water.

Suddenly some movement among the bushes along the near shore, perhaps two hundred yards away, caught their watchful eyes. In an instant, by some mysterious process, they had sunk their bodies completely below the surface, leaving only their snaky heads and necks exposed to view. This peculiar submerged position they held, it seemed, without difficulty. But whatever it was that alarmed them, it was not repeated; and after perhaps five minutes of cautious watchfulness, they slowly emerged and floated on the surface. Presently the female swam back again behind the islet, laboriously scrambled out upon the shore, waddled to her nest, and settled herself once more to the task of brooding her two big gray-green, brown-blotched eggs. It was the first week in June, and the eggs were near hatching.

The pair of loons were restless and annoyed. Their lake, set in a lonely valley, which was drained by a branch of the Upper Quah-Davic, had seemed to them the perfection of solitude and remoteness. For three years now they had been coming to it every spring with the first of the northern flight. But this spring their solitude had been invaded. A pioneer, a squatter, with a buxom wife and several noisy children, had come and built a cabin on the shore of the lake. To be sure, the lake was large enough to overlook and forget such a small invasion, but for the loons it was a great matter. That cabin, those voices, and laughter, and axe-strokes, and sometimes gun-shots, though almost a mile away from their nesting-place, were a detestable and unpardonable intrusion.

The loon was just about to resume his fishing – a business which, on account of his phenomenal appetite, took up most of his time – when once more a movement in the bushes caught his vigilant eye. At the same instant a flash of white fire jetted through the leafy screen, a vicious report rang out, and a shower of shot cut the water into spurting streaks all about him. But he was not there. Inconceivably swift, he had dived at the flash itself. The lead that would have riddled him struck the empty swirl where he had vanished. A lanky youth with a gun stepped out from behind the bushes, stared in sulky disappointment, and presently strolled off down the shore to look for less elusive game.

The shattered calm of the lake surface had time to rebuild itself before the loon reappeared. A hundred yards away from the spot where he had dived, his head thrust itself above the water, a tiny black speck on the silvery sheen. It disappeared again instantly. When it once more came to the surface, it was so far out from shore that its owner felt safe. After a few moments devoted to inspection of the hunter’s retreating form, the loon arose completely and sent a long derisive peal of his wild laughter echoing down the lake. The lanky youth turned and shook his fist at him, as if threatening to settle the score at a later day.

The loon had come by this time to a part of the lake where the depth was not more than six or seven feet, and the bottom was of rich firm mud, covered with rank growths. Here and there a solitary lily-plant, a stray from the creamy-blossomed, nectar-breathing colony over in the near-by cove, lifted to the surface its long pipe-like stems and flat sliding disks of leaves. It was a favorite resort, this, of almost every kind of fish that inhabited the lake, except, of course, of the minnows and other little fry, who would have been promptly made to serve as food for their bigger kinsmen had they ventured into so fatal a neighborhood.

Floating tranquilly, the loon caught sight of the silvery sides of a fat chub, balancing just above the bottom, beside one of the slender pipes of lily-stalk. The fish was lazily opening and closing its crimson gills, indifferent and with a well-fed air. It hung at a depth of perhaps six feet, and at a distance of perhaps sixteen or twenty. So smoothly as scarcely to leave a swirl on the surface, the loon dived straight down, then darted for the fish at a terrific pace. His powerful feet, folding up and opening out at each lightning-swift stroke, propelled him like a torpedo just shot from tube, and tiny bubbles, formed by the air caught under his feathers, flicked upward along his course.

The chub caught sight of this shape of doom rushing upon him through the golden tremor of the water. He shot off in a panic, seeking some deep crevice or some weed-thicket dense enough to hide him. But the loon was almost at his tail. There was no crevice to be found, and the weed thickets were too sparse and open to conceal him. This way and that he darted, doubling and twisting frantically around every stalk or stone. But in spite of his bulk, the loon followed each turn with the agility of an eel. The loosed silt boiled up in wreaths behind his violent passage, and the weeds swayed in the wake of the thrusting webs. In less than a minute the chase – the turmoil of which drove every other fish, large or small, in terror from the feeding-ground – came suddenly to an end. Rising abruptly with the fish gripped in his great beak, the loon burst out upon the surface, sending shoreward a succession of circling ripples. Without ceremony he gulped his meal. Then, swimming rather low in the water, and with head thrust out before him, he hurried to his nesting-place on the islet, as if he thought he had been too long away from his domestic duties.

The spot on the islet where the loons had their nest was almost unconcealed. It was in a grassy cup within four or five feet of the water’s edge, and sheltered only by a thin screen of bushes on the landward side. Toward the sky it was quite open. There had seemed to be little need of concealment before the intruder, man, came to the lake. The islet was too far from the main shore to be in danger from the visits of foxes or bears, fishers or raccoons. And as for the sky – well, the loon had little fear of anything that flew. Because of this lack of apprehension from skyward, even his coloring was not very protective, his glossy black, barred and mottled with pure white, being fairly conspicuous against the grays, and greens, and browns which surrounded the nest. Neither he nor his mate had any particular objection to being seen by any marauder of the air. Even the murderous goshawk, or the smaller but even more fearless duck-hawk, would know better than to swoop down upon the uplifted dagger of a nesting loon. And as for the eagle, though doubtless strong enough to master such an antagonist in the end, he is wise enough to know that the loon’s punishing beak and bulldog courage in defence of the nest would make the victory an expensive and painful one.

But there was one enemy besides man whom the loons had cause to fear, even on their secluded islet. They hated the mink with a well-founded hate. He could easily swim out to discover and rob their nest; and if he should find it for a moment unguarded, his agility would enable him to keep well clear of their avenging wrath. On the nest neither male nor female feared to meet the mink’s attack, their lithe necks and unerring quickness of thrust being sufficient defence even against so formidable a robber. But their movements on land – an awkward, flopping series of waddles – were so slow that, in the case of a mink arriving, the precious eggs would be safe only while actually covered. A big mink had been seen that very morning, prowling down the opposite shore, and both birds were uneasy. They seemed now to be taking counsel upon that or some other equally important matter.

For the next few days, however, the life of the loons was tranquil, with good fishing to content their appetites and no untoward event to make them anxious. Then came a day when the patient mother on her nest could not conceal her happiness and her excitement, when the male, forgetful of meals, stood for hours at a time in interested expectancy beside the nest. The strong chicks within the eggs were beginning to stir and chip the shell. It was not the day that the big mink should have chosen for his expedition to the islet.

For several weeks the mink had been on the point of swimming out to explore that little patch of rocks and grass and bushes, sentinelled by one dark fir-tree. Such a secluded spot, out of reach of most forest prowlers, might well afford something special in the way of good hunting. Hitherto one thing or another had always diverted him from his purpose, and he had gone off on another trail. But to-day nothing intervened. His long, lithe, black body curving like a snake’s, he ran down the bank, lifted his triangular vicious-looking head for a survey of the lake, and plunged into the water with a low splash.

Now, the vision of the mink, though sharp enough at close quarters, has nothing like the power and penetration of the loon’s. The mink could see the islet, the rocks, the bushes, the sentinel fir-tree, but he could not make out the figure of the loon standing beside the nest. The loon, on the other hand, could see him with absolute distinctness, as if not more than fifty feet away.

As has been already noted, the day was not well chosen for the mink’s trip to the islet. The loon stiffened himself with anger, and his round bright eyes hardened implacably. The mother settled down closer over the stirring eggs, and turned her head to stare malevolently at the long pointed trail which the swimmer’s head was drawing on the lake surface. Her mate stood for some seconds as motionless as a charred stump. Then, slipping noiselessly down the bank, he glided into the water and dived from sight.