Children of the Wild

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

"I know very well, Uncle Andy," said he with a judicial air, "that Bill loves to yarn, and often pretends to know a lot of things that aren't so. But I think he's telling the truth this time. He said he was. It's a little owl that lives out West on the big sandy plains. And it makes its nest in holes on the ground. It knows how to dig these holes itself, you know; but it can't dig them half, or a quarter, so well as the prairie dogs can. So it gets the prairie dogs to let it live in their big, comfortable burrows; and in return for this hospitality it kills and eats some of the rattlesnakes, the very small ones, I suppose, of course, which come round among the burrows looking for the young prairie dogs. Well, you know, Uncle Andy, Bill has been out West himself, and he's seen the villages of the prairie dogs, and the little owls sitting on the tops of the hillocks which are on the roofs of the prairie dogs' houses, and the rattlesnakes coiled up here and there in the hot, sunny hollows. There were lots and lots of the prairie dogs, millions and millions of them, Bill said."

"There'd have been still more if it hadn't been for the little owls," said Uncle Andy with a grin. But seeing a grieved look on the Child's face, and remembering that he himself was none too fond of having his narratives broken in upon, he hastened to add politely, but pointedly, "I beg your pardon for interrupting. Please go on!"

"Well, as I was going to say," continued the Child, in quite his Uncle's manner, "Bill saw—he saw them himself, with his own eyes—these millions and thousands of prairie dogs, and quite a lot of the little owls, and only just a very few of the rattlesnakes. So, you see, it looks as if the owls must have eaten some of the snakes, and, anyhow, I think Bill was telling the truth this time."

"Well," said Uncle after puffing at his pipe for a few complimentary moments of reflection, "there's one important thing which Bill appears to have neglected. He doesn't seem to have inquired the views of the prairie dogs on the subject. Now, if he'd got their opinion—"

"But how could he?" protested the Child reproachfully. He was always troubled when Uncle Andy displayed anything like a frivolous strain.

"To be sure! To be sure! You couldn't have expected that of Bill," agreed Uncle Andy. "Still, you know, the opinion of the prairie dogs would have been interesting, wouldn't it? Well, I'll tell you a story just as soon as I can get this old pipe to draw properly, and then you can judge the opinion of the prairie dogs as to whether the Little Burrowing Owl is 'good' or not. If their opinion does not agree with Bill's, why you can choose for yourself between the two."

"Prairie Dog Village was of considerable size, covering as it did perhaps a dozen acres of the dry, light prairie soil. Its houses were crowded together without any regard to order or arrangement, and so closely as to suggest that their owners imagined land was scarce in the neighborhood. It wasn't. For hundreds of miles in every direction the plains stretched away to the dim horizon. There was room everywhere, nothing much, in fact, but room, with a little coarse grass and plenty of clear air. But the population went in for crowding by preference, and didn't care a cactus whether it was hygienic or not.

"The houses were ail underground, each with a rounded hillock of earth beside its front door; and the size of these hillocks was an indication of the size of the houses beneath, for they were all formed by the earth brought to the surface in the process of excavating the rooms and passages. On the tops of these hillocks the owners sat up in the sun to bark and chatter and gossip with their nearest neighbors, always ready to dive headlong down their front doors, with a twinkling of their hind feet, at the approach of danger,

"But if the village was large, the Little Villager himself was decidedly small. Some twelve or fifteen inches in length from the tip of his innocent-looking nose to the end of his short and quite undistinguished-looking tail, he seldom had occasion to stretch himself out to his full length, and therefore he seldom got the credit of such inches as he actually possessed. His ears were short and rounded, his eyes were large, softly bright, and as innocent-looking as his nose. His body was plump and rounded, and he looked almost as much a baby when quite grown up as he had looked when he was still a responsibility to his talkative little mother. In color he was of a grayish-brown on top, and of a dingy white underneath, with a black tip to his tail to give a finish which his costume would otherwise have lacked.

"Except for unimportant variations in size, there was perhaps some hundreds of thousands of others, just like the Little Villager, sitting on their hillocks, or popping in and out of their round doorways, and chattering and barking in shrill chorus under the pale blue dome of a lovely sky. But on the hillock next door to the Little Villager sat no garrulous, furry gossip like himself. That mound top was deserted. But at its foot, curled up and basking in the still blaze of the sun, close beside the doorway, lay a thick-bodied, dusty-colored rattler, the intricate markings on his back dimmed as if by too much light and heat. His venomous, triangular head, with the heavy jaw base that showed great poison pockets, lay flat on his coils, and he had the lazy, well-fed appearance of one who does not have to forage for his meals. Here and there, scattered at wide intervals throughout the village, were to be seen other rattlers, of all sizes, from foot-long youngsters up to stout fellows over a yard in length, either basking in the hollows or lazily wriggling their way between the hillocks. They seemed to pay no attention whatever to the furry villagers; for a rattler likes to make a huge meal when he's about it, and therefore does not bother often about the, to him, rather laborious process of dining. The villagers, on their part, also seemed to pay little attention to the snakes; except that those who chanced to be foraging on the coarse herbage which grew between the hillocks always got out of the way with alacrity if a wriggling form approached, and not one of the coiled baskers ever woke up and shifted its position but that a hundred pairs of bright, innocent eyes would be fixed upon it until its intentions became quite clear.