Finally, one morning, as the sun came up over the pines, the little masked death flashed out of the burrow with the same pattering rush with which he had entered, and hurried toward a near-by brook, to quench an overpowering thirst. As he approached the bank, he passed one of his larger brethren, the blarina, or mole shrew, whose track in the sand was like an uncovered tunnel filled with zigzag paw-prints. Although both were blind, each felt the other’s presence, and it was fortunate for the smaller of the two that the blarina had also just fed, since shrews allow no ties of blood to interfere with their eminently practical appetites.
Just before the little blind runner reached the bank, he encountered another wanderer, whom few of the smaller animals meet and live. It was that demon of the woods, the short-tailed weasel, going to and fro in the earth, seeking whom he might devour. Behind him, as always, was a trail of dead and dying animals. Into every hole large enough to admit his slim body, he wormed his way like a hunting snake, and passed, swift and silent as death itself, through brush-piles, hollow logs, and up and down trees, to peer into the round window of a woodpecker’s home or a squirrel’s nest. Meadow-mice, deer-mice, chipmunks, rats, rabbits, and even squirrels in their trees the slayer ran down to their death; for, unlike the shrews, a weasel kills from blood-lust and not from hunger.
Like some great inch-worm, the weasel looped its way along, until its path crossed that of the shrew pattering toward the brook. Even in the face of this incarnate terror of the wild folk the little shrew showed all the stubborn courage of his race and, refusing to turn aside, passed within an inch of the deadly jaws of the red killer. Nothing in nature, save the stab of one of the coiled pit-vipers, is swifter than the pounce of the weasel. In his grip the shrew, despite all of his fierce courage, would have had no more chance than a man ground by the frightful teeth of a killer whale. Against the larger mammals, however, this fierce fragment of flesh and blood has one last defense, which saved him that day.
As the weasel caught a whiff of the pungent, evil odor of the shrew’s fur, he drew aside, his lips curled back over his sharp teeth in a grimace of disgust, and the masked beastling passed unscathed. At a little cove by the edge of a stump, the shrew drank deep. The pointed snout had just come to the surface, when his quick hearing caught from overhead a tiny flutter of sound. Long ages of sudden death from the air for the shrew-folk made the next movement of this one automatic. As if this sound-wave from overhead had touched some reflex, he dived into the water at the first vibration, like a frog, and swam deep down under the overhanging bank. A fraction of a second later a pair of sharp, cramped talons sank deep into the bank where he had stood, printing in the sand the “K” signature of the hawk-folk, and a buff-waistcoated sparrow hawk swooped into the air again, with a shrill disappointed, “killi, killi, killi!”
As the little fugitive swam along the bank something long and sinuous passed him like a flash in the golden water. For a land animal a shrew is no mean swimmer; but the banded watersnake outswims the fish on which it feeds. This one went past the speeding mammal so fast, that it showed only a blur of dingy brown markings on its back and a gleam of marbled red blotches on its belly, as it disappeared in a hole which sloped under the bank. Although not venomous, the banded watersnake has within its flat triangular head a mouthful of sharp teeth which it is always willing to use, and is an exceptionally active, powerful serpent. Even one of the larger mammals might well have hesitated before attacking one in its own den.
THE KILLERS
Not so the shrew. By the swirl and suction of the water, he knew that something large and living had gone by. That was enough. Food meant everything, size and odds nothing, in his life. The snake had scarcely time to turn around in its dark burrow, before its cold unwinking eyes saw a dark little figure come out of the water and rush up the long slope that led to the hollow under the bank. Although less than two feet long, the watersnake was more than ten times the size of the shrew, and it seemed as unequal a combat as would be one between a man and any of the vast monsters spawned of the primeval ooze. The serpent threw itself into the figure-of-eight coil from which it fights, and to the advantages of size, weight, and strength added that of position, since the shrew had to fight uphill. Yet, like the meadow-voles, the snake never had a chance. As the wide-open jaws touched the whiskered muzzle, the shrew swerved, and escaped the snapping teeth by the width of a hair, while the crooked crocodile jaws clinched in the large muscles at the angle of the snake’s jaw. The barred serpent hissed fiercely, throwing off the sickening effluvium like decayed fruit, which is one of the defenses of a fighting watersnake, and threw its thick body into swift changing loops and coils, hurling the shrew back and forth. The little animal held on with its death grip, and the crooked jaws burrowed deeper and deeper, bringing into play the long rows of sharp cutting teeth.
A watersnake is not a constrictor, and the sandy sides of the den were too soft and narrow to enable it to dislodge the shrew’s grip by battering the animal against the walls of the burrow; but again and again it tried to throw its coils over its opponent’s rigid body, so as to afford leverage enough to tear the punishing jaws loose. Each time, by a swift movement, the shrew would escape the changing loops, and never for an instant ceased to drive its teeth deeper, until they cut clear through the snake’s temporal muscles, and its lower jaw dangled limp and useless. Freed then from any fear of attack, the shrew sank his long curved teeth deliberately into the reptile’s brain, and although the snake still struggled, the battle was over.
Once more the ever-hungry little mammal claimed the spoils of victory. Only when there was nothing left of the snake but a well-picked skeleton, did he leave the den. Then again he drank deeply, plunged up through the water, and landed after dark on the same little beach from which he had dived days before. As he scurried across an open space in the woods, a dark shadow drifted down from the tree tops and two great wings hovered over him, so muffled by soft feathers that not even the shrew heard a single beat or flutter from them. A second longer above ground, and all his fierceness and courage and swiftness would have availed him nothing against the winged death that overshadowed him.