The lantern was lighted now and the pipe was out; the poacher, flabby and out of condition, was deaf to the call of his tired limbs. Passion sustained him in the pursuit of a task that few sane men would have attempted. The task would have been relatively easy if additional assistance had been to hand, but the poacher had no friends. He had reached the bedroom now, the soil had responded to the sharp spade edge, and with savage glee he broke up the soft couch of ferns and grass, and then set the lantern down and mopped his forehead and thought deeply. Two passages led from this chamber, without counting the one he had followed; he piled the dry bed by one of them and set it alight, in hope that the smoke might enter and make the fugitive bolt. But though the material was dry and burnt well the air was windless and the fumes ascended.
“Curse you,” he cried, as though he knew Brock was in hearing and thought he could follow his words. “I’ll dig till I find you, if I dig up the whole earth.”
Once again the spade work was resumed, the eerie silence of the night was broken by the recurrent thud. The poacher was drunk with passion; the impenetrable dignity of the night and the silence of his foe seemed to set his blood on fire. All sense of fatigue had gone; he hardly knew how his temples were throbbing or realised that his breath was coming in short painful gasps until, after another frenzied spell of work, he turned to survey the long trench that marked his progress, and shout out a gibe at the unseen badger.
At that moment his light was extinguished, the candle had burnt itself out, the darkness enveloped him almost with a sense of physical force. By the junction of the two paths some ten feet away Brock heard the sound of a heavy fall, the following silence was long and deep. For some quarter of an hour the badger did not move, then he moved cautiously to the right along a seldom-used passage and came to a forgotten crossway. Down one side of it a current of air came clean and pure. He followed it, along a track he had not used before until he reached an opening under a bank. All seemed safe. His sharp ears could not catch the sound of human breath, there was no taint of humanity by the bush that hid the entrance. The night was still profoundly dark. He slipped noiselessly into the shadows.
BADGER [Photo by C. Reid]
The old snake-catcher passing down the woodland clearing in the morning found the poacher lying at peace, his spade gripped tightly in one hand. A coroner’s jury was told by the doctor that sudden and unaccustomed exertion had brought about a failure of the heart’s action and a painless death. And twelve good men and true wondered greatly that the deceased should have exerted himself so greatly. Trained terriers had been put into the earth under the various nets and had returned quite silently to their owners. “He must have been insane,” said the enlightened jurymen.
But the snake-catcher, who believed in fairies, knew better. “He tried to dig a badger by night,” he said, “and that disturbed the little people. So they killed him.”
THE STORY OF A CAMEL
When Abdullah, the slave dealer, led the long file of loaded camels towards the desert on the bright April morning, only one of his animals remained in the fandak. Within a week she had a companion, her little baby camel who came into the world as though to give her his company during the long, hot months of summer when, at the sun’s bidding, the caravan that had just set out would cease from its labours and rest in the far-off city of Timbuctoo.