The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

Then the skua lay down, and thereafter surrendered himself to that utter reaction which birds, who live more intensely in action than almost any other creatures, have brought to an apparently exaggerated pitch. He did not sleep, but he did not move, and every muscle in him, every fiber, every nerve, faculty, organ, was surrendered utterly to rest.

Night came fluttering her sable wings across the scene, breathing and sighing audibly in the first silence that wild landscape of storms and squalls had known throughout the day, and the skua moved. His neck went up straight, and his head turned, looking sharply this way and that, fierce apprehension written upon him.

There was nothing one could see to give cause for this. A flock of curlew were passing, wailing one to the other, across the sunset; a string of late gulls trailed athwart the sky; and a wedge of those beautiful little wild-duck known as wigeon was letting itself down to the shores of the inlet. Far out to sea a black line, which might have been a sea-serpent if it hadn't been scoter ducks, trailed undulating over the waves, and a single great white gannet plunged from aloft into the deep at intervals with a report like a sunset gun. But they were all innocent, except in the opinion of the fish and shell-fish, and no manner of folk to trouble the pirate skua. Set a thief to catch a thief, however. And, besides, there was blood on the bird and around him, or the taint of it, and blood is the devil and all in the wild. There was nothing to be seen. No. That was the worst part of it. It was what was unseen that the skua was thinking about.

Wherefore, then, our friend of the pirate rig rose and walked stiffly to the summit of one of the bowlder-rocks right at the water's edge. He was by no means recovered yet, or in any condition for a fight in that desolate scene, and had to select the most strategic position he could crawl to. He did, and awaited Fate's reply.

The day died, and the moon came out to wink and dodge and play a foolish game of hide-and-seek in and out among the clouds. She showed the skua, a black knob atop of the black blob of his bowlder, apparently fast asleep, invisible if we did not know he was there. She showed black dots bobbing upon silver lanes, which were sea-duck of various kinds—scaup, long tail, scoter, and the rest. She showed a line of old, rotten posts, broken off short by the waves, along a sand-ridge, which were wild-geese; and she showed three big, white swans—wild-swans, wilder even than the geese—floating like ghosts in the enchanted light.

But she also showed other things, indistinctly, 'tis true; but enough—quite enough. She revealed for an instant, as she shone on the spot on the sand where the skua had sat, the fact that the sand seemed to be alive, horribly alive, as if the pebbles had taken legs and ran about. It was a sudden, ghastly flashlight, hidden as soon as seen, and it gave one the shudders. Those pebbles were crabs mad with hunger, as crabs always seem to he.

They had arrived there as if by magic—been creeping in ever since dusk, probably (one of the things that were unseen); but whether blood, or feathers, or taint of blood, or what horrible, ghoulish system of espionage drew them, is not for me to say. They were there, anyway, and—and—well, and then they were not there. The next flashlight of the moon showed that some others had taken their place. This was ghastly, for the others were bigger than any shore crabs, and they hopped, and they sat up hunched, like hobgoblins, and—they scratched! This last identified them, for the soulless, shelled crab-people are not given to scratch much—at least, not in that way. They were rats—shore rats. The last designation is necessary, for there are rats and rats, all bad, but the shore rat is the worst. How many sleeping birds, wounded, tired, or unalert, die at his hands, or, rather, his teeth, in the course of a year would amaze anybody if known, and the shell-fish he relieves of life are legion.

The hard, horny carapace of a retreating crab scraped, in the dead silence, against the rock-bowlder on which the skua sat. He made no move at the sound, the suggestive sound; but his feathers were shut down quite tight, and he looked far smaller than usual. When birds shut down their feathers in that fashion they put on an armor coat, as it were, through which very little can pierce. It showed that he was ready.

And you think that the mere shore crabs could be nothing to him. But a few hundred ravening shore crabs, with their lives for sale—all digging pieces out of you in the dark—are not so easy a proposition to dispose of as people may think. Try it.

One of the rats turned suddenly and faced towards him. The skua could see its little, cruel eyes gleaming like gimlet-holes in the wall of a lighted room. Then another, and another, and another did the same.