The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

No mother-rabbit came to the "stop"—which the cat knew to be there—to feed her babies, which the cat, thanks to her nose, knew to be there, too. No baby-rabbits came out to be fed—or to feed the cat either. "Stops" are secrets, kept from the rest of rabbitdom by the wise mothers, and, they hope, from other inquisitive people also. The little short holes in the middle of the field are plugged up by the old does with grass and fur when they are away, which is pretty often.

Then the silver tabby heard a thump come out of the night—a thud, hollow, resounding, and noticeable. It was repeated after an interval, and again repeated. There was a certain note of insistence about it—like a signal. And if the cat had been a wild creature she would have thrown up the sponge, or gone away, and returned secretly later, or, anyway, not persisted in crouching there; for those thuds were a signal, and they meant that the game was up. In other words, some wily old mother circling the approach, or some wandering back-eddy of wind, had given the cat away; she had been scented, and rabbit after rabbit, squatting invisible in the night, was thumping the ground with its feet to say so and warn all off whom it might concern. The silver tabby, however, neither wild nor satisfied to be tame, did not know. She sat on, and in doing so wondered, perhaps, at the scarcity of rabbits thereabouts.

She sat, or hunched, or crouched, or couched, or whatever you call that precise position of cats, which is neither lying down nor sitting up, for some time longer—for another twenty minutes, to be precise; and all the while the thuds of mystery serenaded her from nowhere in particular out of the dark—and from down-wind.

Then she must have come to the conclusion that she was being made a fool of, for she got up, stretched herself lazily, with arched back and bared claws, and yawned a bored feline yawn. And even as she did so she was aware of a sudden final flourish of thuds, and then dead-silence. Next moment, in that same dead-silence, she distinctly heard something coming towards her, and that something was taking no pains to conceal the fact.

Now, in the wild it is not the custom to go towards anything and take no pains to conceal the fact. The unhealth of such a procedure is swiftly borne in upon such rash ones as make the experiment, and they seldom live long enough to pass their folly on. Only the mighty can afford not to walk circumspectly, and they are very few, and, with man about, even they have learnt wisdom. That is why the wild is so guarded, and why self-effacement becomes almost a religion therein.

Even the cat knew this, I fancy. Anyway, she looked surprised as she crouched again, and quickly.

Now, of all the wild-people, probably one of the most brazen is the pig; it is also one of the bravest. I mean, the wild pig. And it would seem that he, or she, who came that way was a pig, only a precious little one. You know the ways of a pig? How you can hear him coming long before he comes; how he must snuffle, and grunt, and poke dead leaves, and snort, and tread on things, and snore. Very good. So it was here; and these things did this new-comer, who approached through the mist—only all in a dwarfed way, as if they were done by a tiny grown-up pig. Its gruntings were almost to itself; its snortings, snorings, and sniffings quite small; and its snorts little miniature ones. Only, in the profound silence of the night, and in comparison with the furtive noises of all the rest of the night-wild, they sounded quite loud.

The cat, as she crouched, passed from supercilious surprise to amazement. You could tell that by the roundness of her eyes. She had no knowledge of pigs, and had never met any of the wild-folk gone mad; yet it seemed that one must have done so now, and that one—to her growing uneasiness—was coming straight towards her. I fancy that in that moment she thought of the warm fire, the singing kettle, the saucer of milk, and Miss Somebody's best arm-chair.

The thing, whatever it was, came straight on in a more or less zigzag line, till the cat could make it out dimly in the moonlight, a blotched, roughly egg-shaped form, less than a foot long, so low to the ground that it appeared to be running on wheels, and covered all over with prickles, like a Rugby ball into which tin tacks had been driven head first, the sharp ends pointing outwards and backwards. Its head was the small end, and much lower than its back. Its eyes, little and pig-like, set in a black cowl, gleamed red in the tired moonlight; and its face was the face of a pig, nothing else—just pure pig; insolent, cunning, vulgar, and blatant. Occasionally men name a wild beast correctly, and this little beast could only have one name—hedgehog: It was obvious on the face of it.

But the cat, being a cat and an aristocrat, knew, as has been said, nothing about pigs, real or only so called. She had killed a shrew once, and spat it out for tasting abominably and smelling worse; and shrews are cousins of the hedgehogs, of the same great clan, Insectivora—far removed from the pigs, really—and that is the nearest she had got.