The Race of the Swift

by Edwin Carlile Litsey

It was a night which the wood-dwellers never forgot. Birds were killed by the dozens, and the lives of many of the four-footed kind were given up as well. The secret trails were obliterated and blocked, and the runways of the weasel and the rabbit became a trackless wilderness.

Long before the sun arose the next morning, an old raccoon cautiously poked his black nose out of a hole in a maple tree, near the first fork. This raccoon was the oldest and the wiliest of the wood-folk that lived in the forest. An old boar coon was he, and many years had passed over his wise little head. Once before, in his youth, such a storm as this had swept over the forest. His mother had him out teaching him how to stalk ground sparrows, and the storm came so suddenly that they had no time to reach home, so had taken shelter under a shelving rock on the bluff by the river. He had weathered that storm successfully, and in later years had paid scant heed to nature’s bursts of anger. A raccoon, of all things, was surely smart enough to keep out of the way of a falling limb. The whiskers about the muzzle of the old coon were gray; his eyes were black and beady, and some wonderment was expressed in them as he rolled them around on the once familiar scene. He had not slept the night before, for his house had shook and creaked its warnings hour after hour, and the hungry voice of the wind had howled down at him from the hole above his head. Everything was changed outside. A neighbor tree lay prostrate at the foot of his own; a broken limb sagged at the side of his door, and everywhere was disorder and destruction. A trifle dazed by it all in spite of his superior wisdom, the old fellow slid back into his den and fell to crunching the bones of a chicken he had captured two nights before.

Though the storm had hopelessly tangled the secret ways which had been nosed out and trodden with so much care, and had been the death of many of their kind, yet it had brought its blessing, too, in that it had conquered for the people of the wild their enemy, the river. It was in this way.

At a certain point on the southern bank of the river an old elm tree grew, quite near the edge of the water. The bank had crumbled and the tree had leaned, until at length its top hung almost over the center of the stream. Nothing but its great roots twined about hidden rocks kept it from falling. Directly across from the elm, close to the shore on the other bank, an ancient sycamore had stood, leaning very slightly towards the river. Now when the storm came down from the north the sycamore’s roots gave way and it swayed and fell, its top, by some strange freak, lodging in the fork of the elm, and the force of its fall wedged it in firmly and snugly. And behold! here was a bridge for the feet of the wood-folk, and they could pass high and dry and laugh down at their baffled foe.

There was but one passageway for the many members of the many tribes, and naturally trouble arose sometimes, and there were nights when the river smiled placidly and opened its arms and waited. Sometimes one victim came; sometimes two, for the bridge became the scene of many a midnight tragedy and moonlighted fray, and in the end it was the river which was the victor, after all. It did not have to seek its prey. It simply waited, and took its tribute very much as of old, though in a different manner.

So the years went by. Mates were chosen; families were born; battles were fought. The strong devoured the weak, much as the human folks do in another way. The old raccoon still lived in his maple. Though others of his kind often harbored by threes, fours, or even sixes in a single tree, this aristocrat was not sociable, and preferred a hermit existence except once a year, when the sap of spring renewed his youth and sent him a-courting. Then a sleek, mild-eyed little mate would come and keep house for him until the children were old enough to hear a dog running half a mile away. Then quite abruptly, upon the return of mother and offspring some day, they would be met by a white-fanged visage and ordered to go elsewhere for a bed.

The forest was the abode of little people. Nothing larger than the raccoon found a home there. He was practically lord of the demesne, partly because of his age and sagacity, partly because of his might as a warrior. His record was three dogs whipped in single fight. He did not fear any dog so long as the men did not come poking around with their blinding lanterns and their guns. And it might be told, further, that when he set foot upon one end of the tree-bridge, he usually went to the other end.

In a field at the edge of the smaller forest was a negro cabin, where lived the black people with a horde of tattered children and two dogs. One was a shepherd; gentle, calm-eyed, intelligent. The other was a coon-dog; little, muscular, aggressive. A coon-dog is as distinctive a breed as is the collie or the spaniel. It is true he is an ignoble mixture of many, but it takes the certain and correct blending of various strains to make a coon-dog. He must have the nose of a pointer, the speed of a greyhound, the strength of a mastiff, and the stubbornness of a bull-dog. The model coon-dog is low, short, and heavy-set; his back and sides are nearly black, and his throat, belly, and feet are a reddish brown. Such was the dog which hung about the negro cabin till hunger sent him nosing along the floor of the forest. He had trailed coons long enough to know that they never touch earth in the day, and that the scent is freshest in the early part of the night, just after a light rain. So that night in spring when the soft, balsamic odors rose strata above strata, the coon-dog, impelled by the pain in his stomach, which was like a hundred tearing claws, set off at a smart trot through the sassafras bushes and the dewberry vines, heading for the smaller forest on the southern side of the river. His keen nostrils revealed a trail before he had gone a dozen yards in the wood, and with a low whine he followed it with amazing swiftness and accuracy. In and out it led, and the smell which the traitor feet had left grew stronger. Almost the dog gave tongue, so close he knew his quarry must be, when he stopped, confused, with his fore feet resting on the slanting trunk of a tree. He had come to the bridge of the forest-people, and the hot trail led up the incline before him. Off in the shadows near to one side something called—a sharp, barking cry. The dog cocked his ears and jerked his head around, but quickly decided that he had nothing to do with whatever it was that had temporarily engaged his attention, and again turned to the bridge, restless and eager. He had never attempted its passage, but its surface was broad and the bark rough, and hunger is a stern master. Quickly he squatted and leaped, thrust out his claws so that they caught and held, and in another moment he was creeping warily up the tree with the scent still warm beneath his guiding nostrils.

But other ears had heard that low mating call which the dog had ignored. The old boar coon of the maple tree, driven by loneliness and the magic of the season, was ambling in his humpbacked, awkward way along a narrow path curving down the bluff on the northern side of the river, bent on securing a bride for perhaps the twentieth time. He stopped and listened alertly at the Circe-sound, then moved swiftly towards the tree-bridge to respond in person. With remarkable agility for his years he gained a footing on the sycamore trunk, showing his teeth with a low growl of displeasure as the strong odor of opossum told him that one had just passed that way. A few feet further on his ears detected a scratching sound on the other end of the bridge. Some impudent cousin had dared to risk his anger—for was not this his bridge when he chose to set his royal foot upon it? He would make him give way and retreat, or cast him off, for he had done the like before. On up the ghostly white trunk of the fallen sycamore he glided, his fur rising in wrath as the scratching beyond grew louder and louder and came closer and closer. Gaining the apex of the bridge first, the raccoon thrust his black muzzle over the fork where the two trees touched, and not five feet away came the coon-dog, timorously but steadily. The ring-tailed warrior did not attempt to choke the fierce snarl which rasped between his white fangs. What was this upon his bridge! A four-footed thing which disgraced his shape by living with and serving the human-people—a dog!