The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

He roosted in a great fastness of age-old holly-bushes within a wood, whose branches were packed with his relations—redwings, thrushes, and blackbirds, and also starlings—all tired out, all booked for the south.

Some woods seem to hold a curse of gloom. One cannot say why. And this was one of them. And the tawny owl that nobody saw but everybody heard, and the white stoat that everybody saw and nobody heard, and the amorous dog-fox with the cruel bark that everybody saw and heard, did not, taken together or singly, add to the gayety of the scene.

The thrush was just ahead of the cold when he went to roost in pouring rain. In the night, however, the cold had overtaken him, and the thousand-jeweled beauty of frost-flakes flashed to his waking eye.

He was numbed and puffed out and peevish, and disinclined to move, but anything was better than sticking about in this roosting-place, this casual ward and clearing-house of the wild. The keen starlings were already off, swinging away, regiment by regiment, with a fine, bold rush of wings; the blackbirds were dotting the glades; the redwings were slipping "weeping" away, to find soft fields to mope in; and the pigeon host—what was left alive of it after diphtheria had taken its toll—had streamed onwards, heading southwest.

Turdus philomelus spelt L-u-c-k for our friend that morn, for he had not prospected two hundred yards when he came on a place where a vagrant "sounder" of half-grown, domestic, unringed pigs had been canvassing the wood for beech-mast, acorns, and roots during the night. The soil was all torn up for a space of about an acre, probably the only soil for miles—except along streams and by springs—penetrable by beaks until the sun came out; and the thrush feasted royally upon hibernating caterpillars and chrysalids that would have become moths, beetle larvae all curled up and asleep, and other pests; and he must have done a considerable amount of good in that place during the next hour or so.

But feasts do not go begging long in a frost-bound wild, even if they are hidden; and by the time our thrush had driven several other thrushes away—for he was a jealous feeder—and had been driven away by blackbirds himself more than once, starlings descended upon the place with their furious greed, and our thrush concluded that it was about time to "step off." The crowded place might become a quick-lunch resort for some others, not insect-feeders—hawks, for instance—and was unhealthful for that reason. Indeed, he had not more than moved away into the shelter of the rhododendrons when a shadow with a hooked bill shot round the corner, going like the wind. He had time to see it dive like a dipping kite—but it was a sparrow-hawk—and to hear the death-scream of a feeding blackbird, before he went completely from that place, and it knew him no more.

Soon after that he sighted the sea, wide-stretched and restless, ahead, and turned westward parallel with the coast-line, till, in the afternoon, he came unto "a land where it was always afternoon"—a flat, damp, dwarf-treed, relaxing, gray land, mild, as a rule, and melancholy—a land full of water. But for once it was a cold land, and the thrush realized that the bitter frost had leapt ahead of him, and that he might now never outstrip it again, perhaps. I do not know if he realized, too, that the lead sky, that looked as if it were going to come down and crush one, meant snow.

In a bare orchard he was attracted by the sight of several blue titmice and two robins, feeding upon one or two odd apples that had been left unpicked at the very top of a tree. It seemed strange and out of place to behold apples in midwinter like that; but, for some reason, he took only a few pecks, and his devil prompted him down to peck at some soaked bread among the violets, and to drink at a spring so exquisitely encrusted with moss that it looked as if everything, every floating dead leaf, stone, and root, had been upholstered in plush.

Then Fate struck—hard.

A snap, a thump, and he was bouncing over and over, with an air-rifle bullet in his thigh. It was a blow that knocked him half-silly, and he was down before he knew, but only for a second, because of what he saw. He beheld a boy, with an air-rifle in hand, running towards him; but ahead of the boy was the boy's young cat, who evidently had learnt to look for a meal when the air-rifle went off.