Children of the Wild

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

"Oh, I see," muttered the Child feelingly. He was himself a good deal afraid of spiders, and he meant that he understood now why it was less dangerous for little bats to go swinging wildly through the twilight clinging to their mother's necks than to stay at home alone.

But Uncle Andy paid no heed to the interruption.

"On the following night," he continued, "Little Silk Wing and his sister found themselves once more alone in the crevice at the end of the beam. They knew nothing of the peril from which they had been saved the night before, so they had learned no lesson. On this night they were restless, for their mother had fluttered away, leaving them both a little hungry. Hunting had been bad, and she had somewhat less milk for them than their growing appetites demanded. When once more that slender finger of moonlight, feeling its way through a chink in the roof, fell upon them in their crevice, it was the little sister this time that stirred and fluttered under its ghostly touch. She stretched one wing clear out upon the beam, and it was with difficulty that she restrained herself from giving vent to one of her infinitesimally thin squeaks, tiny as a bead that would drop through the eye of a needle.

"There was no great prowling spider to catch sight of her to-night. But a very hungry mouse, as it chanced, was just at that moment tip-toeing along the beam, wondering what he could find that would be good to eat. A lump of toasted cheese, or an old grease rag, or a well-starched collar, or a lump of cold suet pudding would have suited him nicely, but inexorable experience had taught him that such delicacies were seldom to be found in the roof of the barn. Under the circumstances, any old moth or beetle or spider, dead or alive, would be better than nothing.

"How his little black, beadlike eyes glistened as they fell upon that frail membrane of a wing fluttering on the beam! He darted forward, straight and swift as a weaver's shuttle, seized the delicate wing in his strong white teeth, and dragged the baby bat from her hiding place. Baby as she was, she was game. For one moment she sat up and chattered angry defiance, in a voice like the winding of a watch, but so thin and high-pitched that only a fine ear could have caught it. Then the mouse seized her, bit her tiny neck through, and dragged her off, sprawling limply, along the beam."

The Child nodded vigorously. He needed nothing more to convince him of the superior security of a life of travel and adventure, as compared with the truly appalling perils of staying at home.

"I see you take me!" said Uncle Andy approvingly. "But this, as you will observe, was not Little Silk Wing, but his sister. For Little Silk Wing life became now more interesting. Having only one baby left, his mother was able to carry him with her wherever she went. And she would not have left him alone again for the world, lest the unknown but dreadful fate which had befallen his sister should overtake him also.

"He was old enough and wide awake enough by this time to appreciate his advantages. He could feel the thrill of his mother's long, swinging swoops through the dewy coolness of the dusk. He could thrill in sympathy with her excitement of the chase, when she went fluttering up into the thin pallor of the upper air, following inexorably the desperate circlings of some high-flying cockchafer. When she dropped like lead to snap up some sluggish night moth, its wings were not yet quite dry from the chrysalis, as he clung to the swaying grass tops, his tiny eyes sparkled keenly. And when she went zigzagging, with breathless speed and terrifying violence, to evade the noiseless attack of the brown owl, he hung on to her neck with the tenacity of despair and imagined that their last hour had come. But it hadn't, for his mother was clever and expert. She had fooled many owls in her day.

"This adventurous life of his, of course, was lived entirely at night. During the day he slept, for the most part, folded in his mother's wing membranes, while she hung by her toes from the edge of a warped board in the warm goldy-brown shadows of the peak of the old barn. Outside, along the high ridge pole, swallows, king birds, jays, and pigeons gathered under the bright blue day to scream, chatter or coo their ideas of life, each according to the speech of its kind. And sometimes a cruel-eyed, hook-beaked, trim, well-bred looking hawk would perch there on the roof—quite alone, let me tell you—and gaze around as if wondering where all the other birds could have gone to! And once in a while also a splendid white-headed eagle would come down out of the blue, and wing low over the barn, and scream his thin, terrifying yelp, as if he were hoping there might be something like spring lambs hidden in the barn. But none of these things, affairs of the garish, dazzling, common day, moved in the least the row of contented little bats, all drowsing the useless hours of day away as they hung by their toes in the soft gloom under the roof. They would wake up now and again, to be sure, and squeak, and crowd each other a little. Or perhaps rouse themselves enough to make a long and careful toilet, combing their exquisitely fine fur with their delicate claws, and passing every corner of the elastic silken membrane of their wings daintily between their lips. But as for what went on in the gaudy light on the outer side of the roof, it concerned them not at all.

"But Little Silk Wing seems to have been born to illustrate the dangers which beset the life of the stay-at-home. For two days there had been an unwonted disturbance in the deep-grassed meadow that surrounded the barn. There had been the clanking of harness, the long, shrill, vibrant clatter of the scarlet mowing machine, the snorting of horses, and the shouting and laughter of men turning the fresh hay with their forks. Then came carts and children, with shrill laughter and screams of merriment, and the hay was hauled into the barn, load after load, fragrant, crackling with grasshoppers; and presently the mows began to fill up till the men with the pitchforks, sweating over the hot work of stowing the hay, came up beneath the eaves.