When I awoke, all the glory of the naked world was aflame with the early sun. The red mud of our moleskins blended in harmony with the tints of the great dawn. The bullocks were busy with their breakfasts and bore us no ill-will for the wrong which we had done them the night before. Two snails had crawled over Joe's coat, leaving a trail of slimy silver behind them, and a couple of beetles had found a resting-place in the seams of his velvet waistcoat. He rubbed his eyes when I called to him and sat up.
The snails curled up in mute protest on the ground, and the beetles hurried off and lost themselves amid the blades of grass. Joe made no effort to kill the insects. He lifted the snails off his coat and laid them down easily on the grass. "Run, you little devils!" he said with a laugh, as he looked at the scurrying beetles. "You haven't got hold of me yet, mind."
I never saw Joe kill an insect. He did not like to do so, he often told me. "If we think evil of insects, what will they think of us?" he said to me once. As for myself, I have never killed an insect knowingly in all my life. My house for so long has been the wide world, that I can afford to look leniently on all other inmates, animal or human. Four walls coffin the human sympathies.
When I rose to my feet I felt stiff and sore, and there was nothing to eat for breakfast. My mate alluded to this when he said bitterly: "I wish to God that I was a bullock!"
A crow was perched on a bush some distance away, its head a little to one side, and it kept eyeing us with a look of half quizzical contempt. When Joe saw it he jumped to his feet.
"A hooded crow!" he exclaimed.
"I think that it is as well to start off," I said. "We must try and pick up something for breakfast."
My mate was still gazing at the tree, and he took no heed to my remark. "A hooded crow!" he repeated, and lifting a stone flung it at the bird.
"What about it?" I asked.
"Them birds, they eat dead men," Moleskin answered, as the crow flew away. "There was Muck Devaney—Red Muck we called him—and he worked at the Toward waterworks three winters ago. Red Muck had a temper like an Orangeman, and so had the ganger. The two of them had a row about some contract job, and Devaney lifted his lyin' time and jacked the graft altogether. There was a heavy snow on the ground when he left our shack in the evenin', and no sooner were his heels out of sight than a blizzard came on. You know Toward Mountain, Flynn? Yes. Well, it is seven long miles from the top of the hill to the nearest town. Devaney never finished his journey. We found him when the thaw came on, and he was lyin' stiff as a bone in a heap of snow. And them hooded crows! There was dozens of them pickin' the flesh from his naked shoulder-blades. They had eat the very guts clean out of Red Muck, so we had to bury him as naked as a newborn baby. By God! Flynn, they're one of the things that I am afraid of in this world, them same hooded crows. Just think of it! maybe that one that I just threw the stone at was one of them as gobbled up the flesh of Muck Devaney."