Not long after this another rabbit bounded forth from a thicket just ahead, and darted straight between them. Both sprang at it, simultaneously, but each balked the other; and the rabbit, stretched out into a tense, white line of flying fur, shot unscathed from under their claws. Gray Lynx, as it chanced, had been the nearest to the quarry. Choosing to think that he would have made a kill had his mate’s interference not thwarted him, he gave vent to his wrath in a buffet, which caught her on the flank and sent her rolling over on the snow. Recovering herself, she faced him for a moment or two with eyes that flamed green, half minded to fly at his throat. Then, thinking better of it, she turned away and fell to nosing a mouse trail.
The trail was none too fresh, but neither was it hopelessly stale. She chose to follow it. Thereupon Gray Lynx, hopeful of something worth while, stole nearer to see what she might be trailing.
Now, it chanced that in this particular neighborhood a trapper had been busy. A morsel of frozen fish lay upon the snow. Both prowlers saw it at the same time, and pounced for it. But it was Gray Lynx who reached it first, and he bolted it in one mouthful, while his mate snarled with rage. Sniffing about for other possible fragments, he stepped to one side. There was a muffled click beneath the surface of the snow. Straightway Gray Lynx, doubling himself like a full-drawn bow, and ripping out a screech of panic, sprang into the air, with a steel trap hanging to his left forepaw.
The trap was attached by a chain to a solid wooden balk, too heavy for Gray Lynx to drag. Biting savagely at the strange horror which had clutched him, yowling and spitting, and rolling head over heels, he lost his wits entirely in the madness of his efforts to escape. For a moment the female shrank back, with flattened ears and narrowed eyes, frightened and bewildered. Then, seeming to imagine that there was some treachery to herself in this dreadful and inexplicable performance, she drew nearer, with a menacing growl. The next instant, as if quite beside herself at the sight of such contortions, she gave vent to a mad screech and flung herself at Gray Lynx’s throat.
In a moment the two became, as it were, one ball of clinging, tearing, screeching fur and claws. They rolled over and over in the snow, the heavy trap striking them both impartially, the chain now entangling them, now flying loose with a sharp jangle. Blood spattered in every direction, amid spurts of snow and flecks of torn fur. But Gray Lynx, hampered by trap and chain, and weakened alike by terror of the unknown and horror at the incomprehensible fury of his mate, was overmatched from the first. In a few minutes the tense ball seemed to loosen. The maniacal uproar ceased to affront the night, diminishing to a panting growl. Gray Lynx’s body straightened out. The female continued to worry it for a few moments. Then, as if suddenly coming to her senses, she stopped, drew off, eyed the mangled and twitching form, and slunk away into the nearest bushes. Here she crouched, as if in terror, and peered out fascinated. At last the shape of what had once been her mate lay quite still. Then, after a little, she crept away, hid herself in a remote thicket, and fell to licking her scars and cleansing her fur. And the outstretched body of Gray Lynx, with cruel eyes half open and staring blankly, stiffened little by little in the still, implacable frost.
MOTHERS OF THE NORTH
It was in the first full, ardent rush of the Arctic spring.
Thrilling to the heat of the long, long days of unobstructed sun, beneath the southward-facing walls of the glaciers, the thin soil, clothing the eternal ice, burst into green and flowering life. In the sunward valleys brooks awoke, with a sudden filming of grass along their borders, a sudden passionate unfolding of star-like blooms, white, yellow, and blue. As if summoned from sleep by the impetuous blossoms, eager to be fertilized, came the small northern butterflies in swarms, with little wasp-like flies and beetles innumerable. Along the inaccessible ledges of the cliffs the auks and gulls, in crowded ranks, screamed and quarrelled over their untidy nests, or filled the air with wings as they flocked out over the gray-green, tranquil sea. The world of the north was trying to forget for a little the implacable savagery, the deathly cold and dark, of its winter’s torment.
The great, unwieldy, grunting walruses felt it, too, and responded to it—this ardor of the lonely Arctic spring, astray in the wastes. On the ledges of a rocky islet, just off shore, the members of a little herd were sunning themselves. There were two old bulls and four cows with their sprawling lumps of calves. All were in a good humor with each other, lying with heads or foreflippers flung amicably across each other’s grotesque bodies, and grunting, groaning, grumbling in various tones of content as the pungent sunlight tickled their coarse hides. All seemed without a care beneath the sky, except one of the old bulls. He, being on watch, held his great tusked and bewhiskered head high above his wallowing fellows, and kept eyes, ears, and nose alert for the approach of any peril. One of the unshapely, helpless-looking calves, with its mother, lay in a hollow of the rock, perhaps twenty feet back from the water’s edge—a snug spot, sheltered from all winds of north and east. The rest of the herd were grouped so close to the water’s edge that from time to time a lazy, leaden-green swell would come lipping up and splash them. The cubs had a tendency to flounder away out of reach of these chill douches; but their mothers were very resolute about keeping them close to the water.
Presently the little group was enlarged by one. Another old bull, who had been foraging at the sea-bottom, grubbing up clams, star-fish, and oysters with his tusks, and crushing them in the massive mill of his grinders, suddenly shot his ferocious-looking head above the surface. For all his gross bulk, in the water he moved with almost the speed and grace of a seal. In a second he was at the rock’s edge. Hooking his immense tusks over it, he drew himself up by the force of his mighty neck, flung forward a broad flipper, dragged himself out of the water, and flopped down among his fellows with an explosive grunt of satisfaction.