Neighbors Unknown

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

The game was at its height. Down a long aisle of the forest the high moon poured a flood of unobstructed light. Athwart this lane of brilliance the flying-squirrels went passing and repassing. On a sudden, as one of them was sailing gayly across, it was as if a fragment of black cloud fell upon him noiselessly out of the whiteness, blotting him out. Somewhere in the cloud burned two terrible round eyes, and beneath it reached forth two sets of rending talons. The life of the gay little glider was clutched out of him with a strangled scream, and the cloudy shape, its eyes blazing coldly, drifted away into the shadows with its prey.

The game came to a full stop—for that night at the least. As luck would have it, the squirrel who had been through the adventures of the morning—the encounter with Jabe Smith’s missile and the interview with that would-be mesmerizer, the black snake—had been sailing just below his unhappy playmate at the moment of the great wood-owl’s swoop. He had seen the whole tragedy, and it made him distrustful of aeroplaning for the moment. He decided to emulate his cousin the red squirrel, and trust to running and climbing, to the solid trunks and branches, rather than to the treacheries of the air. After hiding in a crotch till his palpitations had somewhat calmed down, he descended the tree in a cautious search for food. He had had his fill of nuts and cones; he wanted juicier fare. He went on all the way down to earth, his appetite set on the ripening partridge-berries.

Now, as it chanced, the boy had taken to heart that suggestion of the lumberman’s in regard to the cage-trap. His appetite for knowledge of all the wild creatures of the woods was insatiable. He was eager to know the flying-squirrels more intimately than he could know them from the plates and text of his natural history books. His idea was to catch one, keep it a while, win its confidence, study it, and then give it back its freedom before it had time to forget how to take care of itself among the perils of freedom. That very afternoon, therefore, he had returned to the “squirr’l tree,” carrying a spacious trap-cage of strong wire—a cage of two chambers, in which he had already kept with success both red squirrels and ground squirrels. The second or inner chamber was the regulation revolving wire cylinder, designed to give the little captive such strenuous exercise as it might crave, and to divert its thoughts from its captivity. The door was a wide trap, opening upwards and outwards, and shutting with a powerful spring at the least touch upon the trigger within. Beyond the trigger the boy had fixed a varied bait, cunningly calculated to the vagaries of the squirrel appetite. There were sweet nut-kernels securely tied down, a fragrant piece of apple, a bit of green corn-ear, and a crisp morsel of bacon rind.

The boy had no means of knowing whether the flying-squirrel was like his red cousin or not in the matter of a taste for meat. But he felt sure that some one or another of these scented dainties would prove too much for the prudence of anything that called itself a squirrel. Near the great trunk of the blasted tree he found another giant, half fallen, its top still upheld by the embrace of its stout-armed neighbors. The long gradual incline he rightly judged to be a favorite pathway of the flying-squirrels as they raced upwards from their excursions to the forest floor. So, upon the slope of the trunk, some six or seven feet above the earth, he fixed his trap securely, and left it to show what it could do.

For a long time, however, it did nothing. It was a new strange thing on the familiar path, and all the little people of the wild avoided it. Till near the first gray of dawn not a flying-squirrel had dared approach its neighborhood.

The forest powers seem to have sometimes a mischievous trick of selecting some particular one of their children for special trial, of following up that one for days with a kind of persecution. So it came about that the same adventurous little aeronant who had fallen foul of both Jabe Smith and the black snake, and had so narrowly escaped the pounce of the brown owl, had the misfortune to be sighted, as he was feasting on the partridge-berries not far from the sloping tree, by a weasel which had had bad luck in his night’s hunting.

Sinuous as a snake and swifter, his cruel eyes glowing like points of live flame, the long yellow form of the weasel darted forward. With a faint squeak of terror the squirrel sprang for the sloping trunk, his own hope being to get high enough to launch himself into the air. But the flying-squirrel is less nimble on his feet than the red or the gray. He was much slower than the weasel. He gained the sloping trunk, indeed, but the foe was almost at his heels. It looked as if the doom of the wild was upon him. By a frantic effort, however, he evaded for a second the weasel’s rush. Desperately he raced up the well-known trail. He came to the cage. There was no time to go over it or to go around it. He hurled himself straight in and brought up with a shock against the wires of the partition. At the same instant there was a loud click behind him. The door snapped down tight. And the weasel, unable to check himself, bumped his nose against the wires with a violence that brought the blood and stirred his hunting lust to a madness of fury.

Both pursuer and pursued recovered themselves in a second. It was well that the boy, an exact, methodical soul, had lashed the cage securely to the trunk, otherwise the mad assaults of the weasel would have torn it loose and dashed it to the ground. He was all over it and around it every moment, flinging himself viciously this way and that in the effort to catch his quarry against the wires. And the quaking squirrel at the same time dashed himself frantically from side to side, keeping ever as much space as possible between himself and those relentless blood-seeking jaws. He had not the wit or the coolness to crouch in the centre of the cage, where he might securely have chattered derision at his foe. He had not yet, perhaps, even arrived at the truth that his prison was his citadel, his tower of safety. But at length, as luck would have it, in one of his desperate bounds, he shot himself clean through the round opening into the second chamber, and, before he knew it, he was racing at a breathless pace in the vain effort to climb the wall of the spinning cylinder.

For a moment or two the weasel was nonplussed. He stopped short and stared at these amazing tactics of his victim, his thin lips wrinkled back from his pointed jaw and muzzle in a sort of soundless snarl. Then, apparently coming to the conclusion that such a farce had gone on long enough, he sprang with all his strength upon the top of the cylinder, in the direction in which it was spinning. It was a great mistake. The cylinder did not stop. It spun on and shot him off indignantly, head-first, into space, and brought him with a stupefying thud upon the roots of the nearest tree. Very sore and disconcerted, he picked himself up, gave one look at the spinning mystery, and slunk off behind the tree, in a humbleness of spirit such as few of his irrepressible tribe have ever known.

All but paralyzed by exhaustion and by the utter extremity of his fear, the flying-squirrel stopped racing with his wheel. With all four hand-like paws, and even with his teeth, he clung to the wires, till presently his weight brought it to a standstill. Then he crept through the exit and crouched, trembling and panting, on the floor of the outer chamber. Here, soon after sun-up, the boy, who was an early riser, found him. He was puzzled, was the boy, over that smear of blood on the cage door; but, finding no clew to the events of the night, he was obliged to lay the matter away among the many insoluble enigmas wherewith the ancient wood so continually and so mockingly provokes the invader of its intimacies.