As the wolves realized what was happening, the two hindermost whirled about, just in time to leap savagely at the old bull’s neck, one on each side. But they had no room to act effectively, no chance to choose their hold. As he charged with head down and the full impetus of his bulk, their fangs gashed him to the shoulder, but slantingly, so that the wounds were not deep. In his rage he never felt them. The next moment his two assailants were borne down, gored and trampled, by the frantic cows, while he lurched onward into the hideous mêlée at the centre. A second more, and the churning, snorting mass became wedged almost solid. Snapping silently at whatever was in reach, the wolves were overborne, trodden down with the dead or dying calves. The leader of the pack, with two of the more astute of his followers, succeeded in dragging himself forth upon the packed shoulders of his adversaries, ran over the heaving sea of backs, and raced away through the storm, gored and streaming. Soon there was no sign of a wolf anywhere to be seen. But still the packed herd went on with its trampling and churning, sullenly resolute to make an end of the matter, till even the sturdy unwounded calves were in danger of being downed, and the weaker ones perished miserably. At last, in some way, the old bull managed to make his orders understood. The milling slackened, the pressure relaxed. Ponderously he shouldered his way out, and started off once more toward the northeast. Instantly the herd followed, lumbering at his heels. A few, badly wounded, limped and staggered in the rear, and three cows, their eyes rolling wildly, remained standing over certain shapeless masses that lay trodden into the red snow. For some minutes they stood there, mooing disconsolately; then, one after the other, they shook their shaggy heads and galloped away in pursuit of the herd, appalled at the solitude and the sight of so much death.
THE TIGER OF THE SEA
Through the broad, indolent, green-purple swells, ruffled and crisped along their tops by a mild breeze, the cow-orca went wallowing contentedly, her calf swimming close at her side. From time to time it rubbed against her, as if apprehensive in face of the vast and perilous spaces of the ocean, and seeking covert behind her short powerful flipper. And from time to time, being one of the most devoted and assiduous of all the mothers of the wild, she would gather it caressingly to her side with that great flipper, or, whirling half around, touch it inquiringly with her enormous rounded snout.
She was a good nineteen or twenty feet in length, the great orca—or “killer whale,” as she would have been dubbed by any sailor or fisherman who might have chanced to cast eyes upon her. She would have been recognized at once, from all the other members of her whale-and-porpoise tribe, by the immense dorsal fin, not far from five feet high, rising erect from the broad and massive black curve of her back, by the two conspicuous white streaks on her black flank, and by the sharply defined line of her cream-white belly as she rolled lazily on the slope of a swell. All these were danger signals, which the knowing would have taken care to heed.
Little cause for apprehension had the calf of the orca, as long as it kept near its mother. For this most swift and savage of all the cetaceans feared nothing that swam, except her giant cousin, the cachalot or sperm-whale. Though but twenty feet long, she would attack and kill, through the sheer ferocity of her fury, the great whalebone or “right” whale, of fully four times her length and many times her bulk. Man she might have feared, had she ever learned his power; but, being poor in blubber, her tribe had never tempted man to so difficult and perilous a hunting. There were sharks, to be sure, that might equal or surpass her in size, but none to even approach her in savagery, speed, or cunning. It was in care-free content, therefore, that she lazed onward through the bland, untroubled sea, heedless alike of the surf on the yellow cliffs to her right, and of the empty spaces of ocean to her left. Such attention as she could spare from the baby charms of her calf was given to searching the transparent deeps below her, where lurked the big squid and sluggish, bottom-feeding fish on which she habitually preyed.
Suddenly, with no sound but a vast sucking gurgle as the waters closed above her, she dived. Far down in the obscurity she had caught sight of a pallid, sprawling form. It was an octopus, which had been so ill-advised as to leave its customary home among the rocks of the bottom and seek new feeding-grounds. Before it had time even to attempt escape, the great jaws of the “killer” engulfed it. For one moment its eight long tentacles writhed desperately, clutching at its captor’s lips. Then they vanished, sucked in and swallowed at a gulp. Thereupon the orca sailed leisurely back to the sunlit surface, met on her way up by her anxious calf, which had not been quite quick enough to follow its mother’s lightning descent. She had not been two minutes absent, and never for an instant out of sight, but the youngster’s instinct warned it well that the mild blue element in which it dwelt was full of dangers.
The octopus, though a large one, had been but a mouthful for the great killer, a stimulus, merely, to her vast appetite. She journeyed now with a keener eye upon the depths. Presently the deep blue-green of the water began to change to a lighter, beryl hue, where a line of making reef came up to within some thirty feet of the surface, and caught the sun. Here, basking, lay a broad, flat, bat-like creature, with wing-fins a dozen feet across, and a long whip-like tail. Its cold moveless eyes, staring upward, caught sight of the killer’s body, slowly cleaving the surface. With an almost imperceptible movement of the black wings, it slid from the reef and plunged for refuge in the depths.
But the giant ray had not been quick or stealthy enough to evade its enemy’s eye. Again the orca dived, this time without heed of silence, and so swiftly that her broad flukes, rising straight into the air, came down upon the water with a report that resounded all the way in to shore. Her descent was straight as a plummet. The ray, seeing it, was seized with panic. It darted to one side, and shot upward again, at a terrific pace, on a magnificent sweeping curve. With the force of that uprush it hurled its whole black, shuddering bulk clear into the air, where it turned, and for one instant hung flapping darkly, as if the very madness of its terror had driven it to the conquest of a new element. To the nervous calf it was a prodigy of horror, blotting out the sun. But this violent excursion into the air was of only a second or two’s duration, and futile as it was brief. As the flat black wings came down again, with an enormous splash, the pursuing orca arose almost beneath them, seized them, and dragged them under. There was no fight, the ray being powerless against its mighty adversary—only a moment’s blind, frantic struggle in the foaming swirls, and then a spreading stain of red on the green sea.
This, now, was a fully sufficing meal, even for such an appetite as the orca’s; and many neglected fragments of it went spreading and sinking away to feed the innumerable scavenging crabs that lurked in the weeds and hollows of the sunken reef. The orca, for the next half hour or so, remained where she was, rolling contentedly in the bright water above the reef, nursing and caressing her calf, and digesting her meal. Then she slowly continued her journey, but slanting in toward shore till she was not more than half a mile from the chain of precipitous islets and broken promontories which fringed this dangerous coast.
It was now full noon, and the unclouded sunlight, striking almost straight downward upon the surface of the sea, revealed the bottom at an amazing depth. Poised about half-way down the glimmering transparency, a large squid, or cuttle-fish, was swimming at leisure. His narrow, tapering body was about six feet in length, and perhaps twelve or fourteen inches in diameter at the broadest part, which was the head. From this formless head, seeming to sprout from it as leaf-stalks from a carrot, grew a bunch of tentacles, ten in number, and of about the same length as the body. Body and tentacles alike were of a pallid, dirty yellow-gray, with brownish spots—a color that made its wearer almost invisible in that sun-penetrated sea. The progress of the squid was backward; and he achieved it, not by moving his tentacles, but by sucking a volume of water into a great muscular sac beneath the tentacles and forcibly expelling it again. It looked as if he were breathing water and using it to blow himself along.