From all of this it may be gathered that the penguins made a bad move when they came back to their old breeding-place; but the stupid birds never seemed to be aware that they could at any time save themselves by flight if they liked, although they must have been somehow or other acquainted with the deplorable fact—in a bird-like way—that their rookery was becoming rapidly depopulated! No, notwithstanding that they saw their friends and relatives repeatedly slaughtered before their very eyes—their penguin parents, children, godfathers, godmothers, and first cousins thus perishing at the hands of miscreants in human form, and subsequently converted into food and clothing and to other “base uses” by those who took their innocent lives—they never appeared to make an effort in self-defence, either by executing a “strategical movement” or otherwise!
The spirit of penguinism, so to speak, was dead, the bird colony contenting themselves by grumbling, an infallible resource for all similarly constituted creatures—in which respect, as Mr Lathrope was pleased to put it, they resembled a class of modern politicians who need not be alluded to here.
Amongst those included in the list of penguin slayers was one who pursued them to the death—although rather through a desire for malicious sport and self-gratification than from any actual necessity—and this vindictive enemy was Master Maurice Negus.
The young gentlemen had developed many pleasing traits of character during the comparatively short period during which he was brought into public notice as one of the passengers of the ill-fated Nancy Bell; but in none of these had he so well exemplified his natural and ingenious bias of mind as in the little predilection, if it may be so termed, for bird slaughter in ovum, which first saw the light in Kerguelen Land.
Soon after the penguins came to breed there, Master Maurice noted them carefully, and it pleased him much thereafter to go “bird-nesting,” as he called it. He would go by himself and remain away for hours, no one knowing what “the imp,” as all spoke of him, was up to; but one day it was discovered that the fancy for “collecting eggs,” according to his own explanation, consisted in swallowing as many raw ones as he could get hold of unseen—he being observed on the occasion in question to get rid of a round dozen of the eggs deposited by the penguins, just as he would have done so many oysters, saying afterwards when taxed with the gluttony that he felt delicate, and had heard that eggs were recommended by doctors for consumptive patients!
But, later on, the young gentleman “caught a tartar.”
On his last bird-nesting excursion he happened, fortunately or unfortunately, to shove a half-hatched egg down his throat; and, the embryo bird nearly choking him, his poultry-fancying propensity was transformed into an inveterate dislike towards the entire penguin tribe—a slightly lucky mistake for the creatures in question, as thereby the list of their enemies became decreased by one.
Time thus slipped by with the inhabitants of the house on the creek.
Melting by degrees, the vast piles of snow began to vanish from the valleys and low-lying lands, although still clothing the distant hill-sides and mountain-peaks, from the loftier ones of which it probably never entirely cleared away even in the height of summer; but, the ground around was naturally so damp and marshy, and had become so soddened now with moisture, that it was almost as impracticable for Mr Meldrum or any other of the party to get away from the vicinity of the hut, as it had been during the heavy storms of August when the snow had drifted up the gullies and levelled the country.
In fact it was more so, for, the accumulated water, proceeding from the thaw and the rain, which came every now and then to aid it, had swelled the fresh-water tarn near them so greatly that it had overflowed its banks, which now extended on the right to the base of the furthest hills at the head of the valley that penetrated the creek; while, to the left, the water was pouring down, a foaming torrent, into the sea—the house being almost surrounded and separated by the newly-made river from the little building in which the jolly-boat had been housed on the beach.