The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

Then the combatants fell out—literally. Up from the solid earth between the twisted roots they seemed to come, but that proved the art of one of them in concealing his front-door from the curious, and down the bank of the sea-wall, over and over and over, squeaking the most murderous language, and grappling like pocket-devils—tumbled a little jet-black and a little dark-brown beast.

They continued the duel upon the dry gravel below—the finest and the whitest gravel ever you did see—and they would apparently have gone on for goodness knows how long if a gray-white, thin, worn post a couple of yards away had not turned into a heron and stalked an ungainly stalk towards them.

Then they fell apart, and one of them, at any rate—the brown one—ran away in the shape of a water-vole—water-"rat," if you will—the heron making spear-lunges at him with his bill as he ungainlily skipped at the other's tail all the way up the bank. The other fighter, the black one, could not rightly be said to have turned into anything very much—at least, not anything that any one could swear to. It just seemed as if a dark blur whizzed about—more bird-like than beast-like—around the astonished and prancing heron, and then into nowhere. It was like watching a blue-bottle in a tumbler, and very extraordinary. The heron never even professed to follow it or lunge at it. He preferred the water-vole, whose agility was not too fast to see.

At the place where it had come from, the mouth of the hole, it stopped—this beast that could move quicker than eye could follow—stopped so suddenly and completely that its change from almost lightning motion to stony motionlessness in the fraction of a second was nearly as amazing as its first marvelous exhibition. It stopped, I say, and became a—a rat.

To nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand, the word "rat" conveys only one impression. This rat did not fulfill that impression. In fact, there is more than one kind of rat, and though fate and their fathers' Kismet has cursed them all with a name of shame, they are not all the kind of people that made it so. There is the foreigner, the invader, the common brown rat, who is accursed; there is the old English black rat, whom the accursed one has nearly wiped out into little more than a ghost; and there is the water-rat, who is not a rat, but a vole, and would thank you to remember the fact.

And this rat was a black rat, as black as jet, shark-jawed, star-eyed, elfin-eared, snake-tailed, lean, long-legged, and graceful—a very greyhound among the rats. He was there, in that dancing-floor of the winds by the estuary, because no common or sewer rats were there. They were anathema to him, and they were worse—death in many horrible forms. He had been there all the summer, all the autumn, and all the—— No, by whiskers! he was not going to remain there all the winter. He had his limit, and he hated cold; and here, down by the flat, sodden, mud-choked shore of the estuary, it was so cold that if you didn't jolly well mind what you were up to and keep your tummy always full, you went to sleep, and—never woke up any more.

A little pile of mussel, winkle, and shore-crab shells, and the backbone of what had been a stranded fish, close to the mouth of the hole, showed the rat's account-book to date; but there was a line to be drawn even in this trade. That dawn—if you could call the gray dark of a snowstorm dawn—he, wondrously adventurous, had gone shell-fish collecting, away out upon the freezing wet mud-ooze. He had got three mussels; a muddy face; muddier feet; nearly an eye pecked out by a mighty, great black-backed gull; three chivyings from herring-gulls; one nip from a crab who ought to have been dead; two winkles under big stones that took half-an-hour to shift; one dead pigmy shrew—length two inches—with a hole in its skull, no brains, and a horrible smell; nearly his life removed by the swoop of a kestrel falcon and the javelin-stab of a heron's beak; and twenty minutes' hard cleaning to remove the mud-stains that were not properly off—to his nice liking—yet. And, to add to that, he had no sooner finished than he found that some clumsy fool of a water-rat—vole, I mean—with a mania for mining, had run a shaft into his hole, and brought the whole roof crumbling down upon his scrupulously neat and tidy nest of fine hay and carefully shredded rush—the only approximately warm corner he possessed in all that biting cold—so that days of labor would not repair the silly damage; and he had had to enter into a free fight with and turn the fool out, nearly losing his life, for the fourth time that short, dark, bitter day, in the process. And now he had to clean himself all over again!

No wonder he was fed-up, and decided to quit. He loved the dank marsh, the brackish channels, the long, lone wind blowing through the tamarisks, and the smell—salt, seaweed, mud, and fish—of it all; but in this—weather, when the cold here, even in shelter, was greater than the cold in any other spot—and the unchecked wind cut like swords of ice—he realized that one must be an eider-duck or an Iceland gull, a northern diver or an Arctic owl, to stand it, and he was none of these. Wherefore, though the dusk had made the dull day only a little more dark as yet, and the pink, luminous frost-haze still hung in the west, he called down his hole to his wife—his one and only wife, but that was not his fault—and quitted.

Ten minutes later you behold our black rat—if you had eyes quick enough, but it was a matter of momentary glimpses, anyway—trekking up a ditch. You have pretty well got to take my word for it, because, though sometimes you saw him for the half of a second, mostly you didn't, and couldn't tell whether there was his wife only, or he only, or both. Really there were both, but our black friend with the embarrassingly, the abnormally, long tail and the genteel head—Mr. Mus rattus on Sundays, if you please, and in nowise to be confused with that canaille, Citizen Mus decumanus, the common brown rat—had not the slightest intention that any one should see him, if he could help it. His wife might be trusted to look out for herself. And for this reason, perhaps, his march was a progress to wonder at.

Did a flock of wild-duck come over from the sea with whistling wings, he did not so much get under the over-hanging grass as be there. Did a "gaggle" of wild-geese go by high over, clamoring like hounds, he went out like a blown candle. Did a party of teal—for it was the magic hour of "flight," when all wildfowl shift their quarters to feed, or not to feed—fairly hissing with speed, like masterless bullets, dash over, he—well, he was not before you could realize that he had moved.