The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

The little pig's eyes of him went red in his funny, bristle-crowned head, and just as a clockwork toy charges, so he charged, with a quick, grunting rustle and far greater speed than any one who knew only his usual deliberate movements would have given him credit for.

The owl had only time to turn her cat-like face and—hiss. But though that hiss would have been good enough as a bluff to frighten creatures who wouldn't upset a snake for anything, she was out of her reckoning upon this occasion. The hedgehog, who dealt in snakes as a game-warden deals in tigers, had no nerves that way. He just sailed in under the baffling, great, flapping wing, and, ere ever the bird of the night could spring aloft, had struck. It was a ghastly form of warfare, this low running in and wrenching snap. It landed right under the armpit, so to speak, and left a nasty round hole. And it is worth noting, by the way, that precisely the same sort of hole, and in the same spot almost, but lower and farther back, was to be seen upon the body of the deceased young rat that Mrs. Hedgehog was even then attending to—the trademark of the hedgehogs, that hole.

All the immediate world of the night wild, watching from grass-tuft and root and burrow, heard the rasping tap of the owl's beak hammering helplessly at the spines on the back of the hedgehog, now beside himself with rage. Not one of them, too, that did not jump with terror—engrained by the bitter experience of hundreds of generations—at her fiendish scream. Then, in a flash, that owl was upon her back, wielding hooked beak and stiletto talons, as only she knew how to use them; and the hedgehog, who had, in the blindness of his rage, run in to finish the job, shot up clean on his hind-legs, taking the clinging, flapping owl with him, while, for the first time that night, he uttered a cry other than a grunt—an odd, piercing little cry, vibrant with rage, or fear, or both. This was rather odd, because ordinarily the hedgehog is a dumb beast, who suffers "frightfulness" in grim silence.

The tables were turned now. The shoe was on the other foot, or, to be precise, the foot was on the underside. That is, the owl had got the foe where he lived, below water-line, if I may so put it, where, like a battleship, his armor did not run, and he was soft and vulnerable as any other beast. Moreover, he had not trained himself in the art of throwing himself upon his back, as the owl, who was like a cat in this particular also, had apparently done, and since he could not prance on his hindlegs, unicorn-fashion, forever, he had to come down again, belly and throat first, on that infernal battery of talons and beak.

And he got it all right enough. I give you my word that spiny one got it; but, save for that one first little cry, he took his punishment in grim and terrible silence, fighting with a blind fury that was awful to behold. What happened to him underneath there in those few brief, terrible seconds no one will ever know—and that, we may guess, is as well perhaps, for there is no sense in dwelling upon horrors. What he did, in the short time he was given by Fate, is a little more clear. Butting madly down, oblivious of all things, even that unspeakable fish-hook beak, grappling like a thing demented—and I think he was nearly that—he bit deep, deep down, through feathers and skin and flesh, home—once, twice, and again.

Then, blindly, brokenly, smothered in blood, red-visaged and horrible, he half-rolled, half blundered free of that frightful clinch, and instantly rolled up! 'Twas his habit, the one refuge of his life, so long as he breathed; his last, and usually, but not always, his first, hope.

The owl struggled somehow, in a cloud of her own feathers, to her feet. The beautiful, fan-like, exquisitely soft wings flapped and beat frantically. There came a peculiar musky sort of smell into the air. She rose, all lopsidedly, perhaps two yards, flapping, flapping, flapping with frenzied desperation, before toppling suddenly, helplessly, pathetically, as the big pinions stopped, and she collapsed sideways back to earth again, where, blood-smeared and glaring, lit by the merciless, cynical moon, she crouched and coughed—as I live, coughed and coughed and coughed, a ghastly cough like a baby's, till it seemed as if she would cough her heart up.

Then silence—that wonderful, mysterious, waiting, echoing, listening silence of the woods at night—shut down, and darkness swept over all.

When dawn came stealing westward silently over the still canopy of leaves, both combatants were still there; and they were still here, too, when the sun, silting in through a rift in the foliage, found and bathed them. The owl was crouched as she had been when the moon left her—crouched, and with her wings just a little open, like a bird about to take flight; but she had already taken wing on the longest flight of all. The hedgehog was, too, just as the moon had left him, rolled up in a spiky ball, apparently asleep; but his sleep, also, was the longest sleep of all. And over them both, in the heavy silence, could be distinctly heard that horrible "brr-brr-brr" of flies that told its own story.

Now, that was in the morning, soon after sunrise; but long before that, indeed the moment the hedgehog had first attacked the owl and forced her to turn her attention to him, the little female bank-vole, who by some mischance or miscalculation, had evaded the first terrible handshake of the owl which spells death, had rolled clear of the fight, and dashed for her life to the nearest tussock of grass that offered shelter; and the first thing she fell over there was our bank-vole, "frozen" motionless. He was there because the scene of the fight was between him and the holes in the bank, and for the life of him he could not muster up courage to run the gauntlet past those dread, struggling forms.