The old barrel, with the staves battered out on one side in some past encounter with the tides, had stood half buried on the crest of a sand-ridge raised by the long prevailing wind. Under its lee the cat had found a sheltered hollow, full of sun, where she had been wont to lie curled up for hours at a time, basking and sleeping. Meanwhile, the sand had been steadily piling itself higher and higher behind the unstable barrier. At last, it had piled too high, and suddenly, before a stronger gust, the barrel had come toppling over beneath a mass of sand, burying the sleeping cat out of sight and light; but at the same time the sound half of the barrel had formed a safe roof to her prison, and she was neither crushed nor smothered. When the children, in their anxious search all over the island, came upon the mound of fine white sand, they gave it but one careless look. They could not hear the faint cries that came at intervals from the close darkness within. So they went away sorrowfully, little dreaming that their friend was imprisoned almost beneath their feet.
For three days the prisoner kept up her intermittent appeals for help. On the third day the wind changed, and presently blew up a gale. In a few hours it had uncovered the barrel. At one corner a tiny spot of light appeared. Eagerly the cat stuck her paw through the hole. When she withdrew it again, the hole was considerably enlarged. She took the hint, and fell to scratching. At first her efforts were rather aimless; but presently, whether by good luck or quick sagacity, she learned to make her scratching more effective. The opening rapidly enlarged, and she squeezed her way out.
The wind was tearing madly across the island, filled with flying sand. The seas hurled themselves trampling up the beach, with the uproar of a bombardment. The scourged grasses lay pallid, bowed flat in long quivering ranks. Over the turmoil the sun stared down from a deep unclouded blue. The cat, when she first met the full force of the gale, was fairly blown off her feet. As soon as she could recover herself, she crouched low and darted into the grass for shelter. But there was little shelter there, the long stalks being held down almost level as if by an implacable hand. Through their lashed lines, however, she sped straight before the gale, making for the cottage at the other end of the island, where she would find, as she fondly imagined, not only food and shelter, but loving comfort to make her forget her terrors.
Unutterably still and desolate in the bright sunshine, and under the howling of the wind, the house frightened her. She could not understand the tight-closed shutters, the blind unresponding doors that would no longer open to her anxious appeal. The wind swept her savagely across the naked veranda. Climbing with difficulty to the dining-room window-sill, where so often she had been let in, she clung there a few moments and yowled heart-brokenly. Then, in a sudden panic, she jumped down and ran to the shed. That, too, was closed. She had never seen the shed doors closed, and could not understand it. Cautiously she crept around the foundations, but those had been honestly and efficiently constructed. There was no such thing as getting in that way. On every side it was nothing but a dead face, dead and forbidding, that the old familiar house confronted her with.
The cat had always been so coddled and pampered by the children that she had had no need to forage for herself; but, fortunately for her now, she had learned to hunt the marsh-mice and grass-sparrows for amusement. So now, being ravenous from her long fast under the sand, she slunk mournfully away from the deserted house, and crept along, under the lee of a sand-ridge, to a little grassy hollow which she knew. Here the gale caught only the tops of the grasses, bending but not prostrating them; and here in the warmth and comparative calm, the furry little marsh-folk, mice and shrews, were going about their business undisturbed. The cat, quick and stealthy, soon caught one, and eased the ferocity of her hunger. She caught several. And then, making her way back to the house, she spent hours in heart-sick prowling, around it and around, sniffing and peering, yowling piteously on threshold and window-sill, and every now and then being blown ignominiously across the smooth naked expanse of the veranda floor. At last, hopelessly discouraged, she curled herself up out of the wind, beneath the children’s window, and went to sleep.
On the following day the gale died down, and the salt-grass once more lifted its tops, full of flitting birds and small brown-and-yellow autumn butterflies, under the golden September sun. Desolate though the island was, it swarmed, nevertheless, with the minute busy life of the grass-stems and the sand-flats. Mice, crickets, sand-hoppers—the cat had no need to go hungry or unoccupied. She went all over house and shed again, from foundation to roof and chimney-top, yowling from time to time in a great hollow, melancholy voice that might have been heard all across the island had there been any one to hear, and again, from time to time, meowing in small piteous tones no bigger than a kitten’s. For hours at a time when hunger did not drive her to the hunt, she would sit expectant on the window-ledge, or before the door, or on the veranda steps, hoping that at any instant door or window might open, and dear familiar voices call her in. When she did go hunting, she hunted with peculiar ferocity, as if to avenge herself for some great but dimly apprehended wrong.
In spite of her loneliness and grief, the life of the island prisoner during the next two or three weeks was by no means one of hardship. Besides her abundant food of birds and mice, she quickly learned to catch tiny fish in the mouth of the rivulet, where salt water and fresh water met. It was an exciting game, and she became expert at dashing the gray tour-cod and blue-and-silver sand-lance far up the slope with a sweep of her armed paw. But when the equinoctial storms roared down upon the island, with furious rain and low black clouds torn to shreds, then life became more difficult for her. Game all took to cover, where it was hard to find—vanishing mysteriously. It was hard to get around in the drenched and lashing grass, and, moreover, she loathed wet. Most of the time she went hungry, sitting sullen and desolate under the lee of the house, glaring out defiantly at the rush and battling tumult of the waves.
The storm lasted nearly ten days before it blew itself clean out. On the eighth day the abandoned wreck of a small Nova Scotia schooner drove ashore, battered out of all likeness to a ship. But, hulk as it was, it had passengers of a sort. A horde of bedraggled rats got through the surf and scurried into the hiding of the grass-roots. They promptly made themselves at home, burrowing under the grass and beneath old half-buried timbers, and carrying panic into the ranks of the mice and shrews. When the storm was over, the cat had a decided surprise in her first long hunting expedition. Something had rustled the grass heavily, and she trailed it, expecting a particularly large fat marsh-mouse. When she pounced and alighted upon an immense old ship’s rat, many-voyaged and many-battled, she got badly bitten. Such an experience had never before fallen to her lot. At first she felt so injured that she was on the point of backing out and running away. Then her latent pugnacity awoke, and the fire of far-off ancestors. She flung herself into the fight with a rage that took no accounting of the wounds she got, and the struggle was soon over. Hungry though she was, she dragged the slain rat all the way to the house, and laid it proudly on the veranda floor before the door, as if displaying it to the eyes of her vanished friends. For a few moments she stood over it, waiting hopefully. Perhaps she had a wistful idea that so splendid an offering might melt the hearts of the absent ones and persuade them to come back. Nothing happened, however, so she sadly dragged the prize down the steps again to her accustomed lair in the sand, and ate it up all but the tail. Her wounds, faithfully licked, soon healed themselves in that clean and tonic air, and after that, having learned how to handle such big game, she no more got bitten.
During the first full moon after her abandonment, the first week in October, the island was visited by still weather, with sharp night frosts. The cat discovered then that it was most exciting to hunt by night and do her sleeping in the daytime. It was a natural reversion to the instincts of her ancestors, but it came to her as a discovery. She found that now, under the strange whiteness of the moon, all her game was astir, except the birds. And the birds had all fled to the mainland during the storm, gathering for the southward flight. The blanched grasses, she found, were now everywhere a-rustle, and everywhere vague, spectral, little shapes went darting, with thin squeaks, across the ghostly white sands. Also, she made the aquaintance of a new bird, which she regarded at first uneasily, and then with vengeful wrath. This was the brown marsh-owl, which came over from the mainland to do some autumn mouse-hunting. There were two pairs of these big, downy-winged, round-eyed, voracious hunters, and they did not know there was a cat on the island.
The cat, spying one of them as it swooped soundlessly hither and thither over the silvered grass-tops, crouched with flattened ears. With its wide spread of wing it looked bigger than herself, and the great round face, with hooked beak and wild staring eyes, appeared extremely formidable. However, she was no coward, and presently, though not without reasonable caution, she went about her hunting. Suddenly the owl caught a partial glimpse of her in the grass, probably of her ears or head. He swooped, and at the same instant she sprang upward to meet the assault, spitting and growling harshly, and striking with unsheathed claws. With a frantic flapping of his great wings, the owl checked himself and drew back into the air, just escaping the clutch of those indignant claws. But after that the marsh-owls were careful to give her a wide berth. They realized that the black-striped animal, with the quick spring and the clutching claws, was not to be interfered with. They perceived that she was some relation of that dangerous prowler, the lynx. But if they were disturbed by the presence on the island of so dangerous a rival as the cat, they were amply compensated by the coming of the rats, who afforded them fine hunting of a kind which they had never before experienced. In spite of all this hunting, however, the furry life of the marsh-grass was so teeming, so inexhaustible, that the depredations of cat, rats, and owls were powerless to make more than a passing impression upon it. So the hunting and the merrymaking went on side by side under the indifferent moon, and the untouched swarms whom Fate passed by were as indifferent as the moon herself to the mysterious disappearances of their fellows.