They continued the duel upon the dry gravel below--the finest and the whitest gravel ever you did see--and they would apparently have gone on for goodness knows how long if a gray-white, thin, worn post a couple of yards away had not turned into a heron and stalked an ungainly stalk towards them.

Then they fell apart, and one of them, at any rate--the brown one--ran away in the shape of a water-vole--water-"rat," if you will--the heron making spear-lunges at him with his bill as he ungainlily skipped at the other's tail all the way up the bank. The other fighter, the black one, could not rightly be said to have turned into anything very much--at least, not anything that any one could swear to. It just seemed as if a dark blur whizzed about--more bird-like than beast-like--around the astonished and prancing heron, and then into nowhere. It was like watching a blue-bottle in a tumbler, and very extraordinary. The heron never even professed to follow it or lunge at it. He preferred the water-vole, whose agility was not too fast to see.

At the place where it had come from, the mouth of the hole, it stopped--this beast that could move quicker than eye could follow--stopped so suddenly and completely that its change from almost lightning motion to stony motionlessness in the fraction of a second was nearly as amazing as its first marvelous exhibition. It stopped, I say, and became a--a rat.

To nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand, the word "rat" conveys only one impression. This rat did not fulfill that impression. In fact, there is more than one kind of rat, and though fate and their fathers' Kismet has cursed them all with a name of shame, they are not all the kind of people that made it so. There is the foreigner, the invader, the common brown rat, who is accursed; there is the old English black rat, whom the accursed one has nearly wiped out into little more than a ghost; and there is the water-rat, who is not a rat, but a vole, and would thank you to remember the fact.

And this rat was a black rat, as black as jet, shark-jawed, star-eyed, elfin-eared, snake-tailed, lean, long-legged, and graceful--a very greyhound among the rats. He was there, in that dancing-floor of the winds by the estuary, because no common or sewer rats were there. They were anathema to him, and they were worse--death in many horrible forms. He had been there all the summer, all the autumn, and all the---- No, by whiskers! he was not going to remain there all the winter. He had his limit, and he hated cold; and here, down by the flat, sodden, mud-choked sh.o.r.e of the estuary, it was so cold that if you didn't jolly well mind what you were up to and keep your tummy always full, you went to sleep, and--never woke up any more.

A little pile of mussel, winkle, and sh.o.r.e-crab sh.e.l.ls, and the backbone of what had been a stranded fish, close to the mouth of the hole, showed the rat's account-book to date; but there was a line to be drawn even in this trade. That dawn--if you could call the gray dark of a snowstorm dawn--he, wondrously adventurous, had gone sh.e.l.l-fish collecting, away out upon the freezing wet mud-ooze. He had got three mussels; a muddy face; muddier feet; nearly an eye pecked out by a mighty, great black-backed gull; three chivyings from herring-gulls; one nip from a crab who ought to have been dead; two winkles under big stones that took half-an-hour to shift; one dead pigmy shrew--length two inches--with a hole in its skull, no brains, and a horrible smell; nearly his life removed by the swoop of a kestrel falcon and the javelin-stab of a heron's beak; and twenty minutes' hard cleaning to remove the mud-stains that were not properly off--to his nice liking--yet. And, to add to that, he had no sooner finished than he found that some clumsy fool of a water-rat--vole, I mean--with a mania for mining, had run a shaft into his hole, and brought the whole roof crumbling down upon his scrupulously neat and tidy nest of fine hay and carefully shredded rush--the only approximately warm corner he possessed in all that biting cold--so that days of labor would not repair the silly damage; and he had had to enter into a free fight with and turn the fool out, nearly losing his life, for the fourth time that short, dark, bitter day, in the process. And now he had to clean himself all over again!

No wonder he was fed-up, and decided to quit. He loved the dank marsh, the brackish channels, the long, lone wind blowing through the tamarisks, and the smell--salt, seaweed, mud, and fish--of it all; but in this--weather, when the cold here, even in shelter, was greater than the cold in any other spot--and the unchecked wind cut like swords of ice--he realized that one must be an eider-duck or an Iceland gull, a northern diver or an Arctic owl, to stand it, and he was none of these.

Wherefore, though the dusk had made the dull day only a little more dark as yet, and the pink, luminous frost-haze still hung in the west, he called down his hole to his wife--his one and only wife, but that was not his fault--and quitted.

Ten minutes later you behold our black rat--if you had eyes quick enough, but it was a matter of momentary glimpses, anyway--trekking up a ditch. You have pretty well got to take my word for it, because, though sometimes you saw him for the half of a second, mostly you didn't, and couldn't tell whether there was his wife only, or he only, or both. Really there were both, but our black friend with the embarra.s.singly, the abnormally, long tail and the genteel head--Mr.

_Mus rattus_ on Sundays, if you please, and in nowise to be confused with that _canaille_, Citizen _Mus dec.u.ma.n.u.s_, the common brown rat--had not the slightest intention that any one should see him, if he could help it. His wife might be trusted to look out for herself. And for this reason, perhaps, his march was a progress to wonder at.

Did a flock of wild-duck come over from the sea with whistling wings, he did not so much get under the over-hanging gra.s.s as _be_ there. Did a "gaggle" of wild-geese go by high over, clamoring like hounds, he went out like a blown candle. Did a party of teal--for it was the magic hour of "flight," when all wildfowl shift their quarters to feed, or not to feed--fairly hissing with speed, like masterless bullets, dash over, he--well, he was not before you could realize that he had moved.

Then up and flew round them a shape, and the name of that shape was death. It might have been a gull with hawk-like form. It might have been a hawk in gull-like light-gray uniform. And it might have been an owl with gull-like dress and hawk-like lines. Whatever it was, it was clipper-built, swift, and in fighting trim. As a matter of fact, it was neither gull nor hawk nor owl, but a harrier, a hen-harrier--that's its name, not its s.e.x, for it was a c.o.c.k--and the same is a half-way house, so to speak, between hawk and owl. Possibly because they are crepuscular, harriers may be thought more rare than they are. This one was "crepusculing," and--the black rat did not like it. They had met before, and Mr. Ratus had gained a lively dislike for this hawk-owl combination, greater than his respect--which itself was not small--for owl or hawk.

Seeing nowhere to go, and nothing to hide in when he got there, our Mr.

Ratus shifted from one spot to the other when the harrier made his cat-like pounce--yes, he was something cat-like, too--and had the pleasure of seeing the harrier's uninviting talons grab a clawful of gra.s.s, which, by all powers of judgment, ought to have been black rat's fur.

A mere hawk, or even an owl, might have considered this rebuff enough, but not the harrier. _He_ wafted himself ten feet aloft on his long narrow vans, and, flapping owl-like, or almost b.u.t.terfly-like, began to beat, and the beating of the harrying harrier, up and down, is one of the most trying ordeals, for the game beaten for, in the wild.

Mrs. Ratus sat where she was, he presumed, playing the same bluff.

But both were without cover, and the black rat, I fear, devoutly hoped that she would be fool enough to move and give herself away first; whilst she, on her part, was cursing him for many kinds of a fool for starting their "flitting" before it was dark.

While she sat and froze--in both senses--however, the black rat, rigid as a beast cut out of coal, with one bright, shining eye upon the harrier beating up and down, was probing the dusk with the other eye.

And presently he thought he saw his chance. He would have had to move, anyway, I fancy, for the strain of sitting there bang in the open was unendurable. His nerves would have snapped. So he went to his chance--a hole in the bank of the ditch.

I say he went, but I only take it to be so because he got there. One could not actually see him go. One had only an idea, quite an uncertain idea, that something, most like a swift bird, had pa.s.sed up the ditch, and one could not swear even to that. It seemed impossible that the flying something had been a four-legged animal.

It was the black rat. Nor did he go straight. He went, if I may so put it, every way at once, ending up with a merry-go-round dance with death--the harrier was pouncing savagely--round a tuft of gra.s.s, at such a speed that he looked exactly like the rim of a quickly spun bicycle-wheel--a halo, that is to say, and nothing else.

And then--he was crouched, panting, inside the hole, wondering whether his heart or his lungs would be the first to burst. And then? Oh, and then he--cleaned himself, naturally and of course. What else did you expect? He was the original black rat of Old England, and one of the cleanest animals on earth.

Mrs. Ratus, having vanished past finding while the hunt to the hole was on, presently scented her lord out, when the night had come and the harrier was gone, and together, starting like antelope at every hint of a sound, they traveled up the ditch, and up the bank of a stream that the ditch folded into.

Once an owl--the nomad, short-eared owl of the marshes--let forth a hoot that would have sent a nervous lady into "astericks," and sent _them_ into no-where, as if it had detonated a charge of that lively mystery called T.N.T. under their dainty feet. Once, just as they were lapping like dogs at the edge of the ice that was conspiring to span the brook, an otter shot up his head--jaws wide and dripping--almost under their long and pointed noses, and they, with one accord, and driven by their long tails acting as a spring, leapt simply into s.p.a.ce.

At any rate, they could not be followed by mortal eye, wherever they did leap to.

And once they met a wandering cat. And that cat seemed to go mad, for she shifted about the steep bank of that stream, and up, and about--here she swore because the spikes p.r.i.c.ked her--and down a holly-bush, as if she had got a rocket tied to her tail. She had not, of course. She was hunting black rats. I suppose she saw them. If so, she was the only person who did, and I feel sure that, instant as she was, when she was up the bank or the holly-bush they were down it, and when she was down they were up. Finally, when her lost temper had completely run her out of breath, she slouched away, spitting like a worn sparking-plug, and very much disgusted. And--the black rats cleaned themselves!

That night was not a profitable one. The sh.e.l.l-fish of the estuary were gone, and there was little instead on the stream--only snow, and the snow fell quietly at intervals throughout the night, hiding everything. Rats, too, are creatures of warmth. They hate cold as much as the writer, and these two black rats became very miserable.

They had no home, and did not know where to go; and, save for a few berries, they had nothing to eat. Mercifully, they had plenty to drink, and that is an item with rats, who die in a very few hours if they cannot get a drink.

A bitter, dull paling of the sky, which by courtesy we will call dawn, found them cleaning again, with their hand-like forepaws, exactly like cats, inside a water-vole burrow. The owner had been out, bark-chipping, all night--it was the only thing he could find to keep body and life from parting company--and was not over-pleased, on his return, to find that he had company at home. A short two-round contest ensued, during which the water-vole must have felt as if he had taken on a bit of black lightning. Then the water-vole went away, somewhat bewildered, to turn some smaller water-vole out of his winter bed; and the rats curled themselves up, heads between hindlegs, tail encircling all, with only their ever-ready, elfin ears poking out to give the alarm, and they slept. And, by the way, it was a saying in the wild that no one had ever seen them asleep, or knew if, or how, they did sleep.

Nothing came to disturb them during the day--which was a wonder, for all the wild was hungry and looking for food--and at the hour when

Night, busy with her dawn, begins it with a star,

they came out, after a prolonged, starry-eyed stare, from their fastness, and continued their journey.

Things were serious now. They had not fed, and could find nothing to feed upon but two hawthorn-berries, dropped by the wasteful fieldfares; but they drank, _and_ cleaned, and proceeded up-stream, with that caution one only learns in a world full of enemies and empty of friends.

Another six hours of this cold on an empty stomach would send them into that sleep--the dread, drugged slumber of the cold--from which there is no awakening in this world, and they seemed to know it. They were desperate, and their eyes burnt in their sharp heads like gimlet-holes of light. Desperate they were, as the poor, little, brilliantly resplendent, and tropic-looking kingfisher had, no doubt, been, whom they found, frozen into a dried, huddled heap, under the stream-bank, and so emaciated that, after they had picked his bones, they scarcely knew that they had touched him.

But anon the face of the snow changed--meaningly for them. Whereas before they had been alone, almost, in a frozen world, scarcely crossing a trail but the quadruple track of water-voles or the chain-pattern impression of a moorhen--nor had seen a living thing but the square-ended, squat, little, black form of a water-vole out upon an alder-branch, gnawing bark--they now began to be aware of gradually increasing company. Not that the company advertised itself, mark you.

Being wild company, it would not; but they knew it was there.

The chain-trail of the moorhen reduplicated itself. It was joined by that of a water-rail--they saw his ruby eyes and rat-like form in pa.s.sing. The fourfold track of a rabbit led the way ahead of them, as if pointing the path, to be joined by the broken footprints of another rabbit, and then by the track made by the longer leap of a hare, fourfold also. The delicate lined marks left by a wood-mouse now kept company with the others, and anon the little fairy imprints of two field-voles--short-tailed field-mice, if you prefer. They crossed the track of another rabbit going, at right-angles, down to the water to drink, and then the little, busy tattoo of bank-voles. Another hare's trail, and more rabbits' tracks, began to meander about, but all heading more or less one way--the way they were going. And then they stopped dead at the smudged groove and ancient and fish-like scent of an otter. Moreover, they had scarcely got over that than they came upon the dog-like tracks, and the smell, like nothing else, of Reynard, the fox; and, with nerves fairly tingling now, and eyes everywhere at once, they arrived at last--as the converging trails seemed to say they would--at the towering, smudged blur against the sky, which was the farm-buildings.

The black rat peered under the lower rung of a gate into a straw-yard, and heard the rustlings of little folk--field-vole, bank-vole, and wood-mouse--who had gone before him. There was no sign of the others; but that was not strange, for the hares and the rabbits had probably gone round to the kitchen-garden, for which they were making in their extremity of hunger; and the otter and the fox were, most likely, keeping each other off the fowlhouse.

Wherefore, plucking up courage, the black rat skipped into the yard, and made straight for the manger, where, in the inky blackness under the open-sided roofs, he could hear the long-drawn blowing and sigh of fat cattle lying down.

A pale moon came out behind him, and showed him tripping lightly over a bullock's broad back. Then he was up on the manger-edge, had paused to make sure, and was down in the manger, picking up crumbs and dust of linseed-cake and chaff. Three mice were doing the same thing, but fled at his approach; but he did not trouble about that, for the cattle had not left even him and his wife a full meal, having blown what was left of the chaff away, and licked up practically all of the cake-crumbs and dust. However, it was better than nothing.

The rat's natural curiosity was awakened, and his comparative warmth in this place, out of the razor-edged wind--oh, what a relief to be out of that infernal sawing blast!--made him explore. And he ran along the edge of the manger to a hole in the wall, which led--the peculiar and indescribable smell said so--through to the pig-sties. But here he stopped, and his wife behind him stopped. Some one was coming through from the opposite side--some one who smelt very much worse than any pig.

Next instant both black rats had gone off together like sparks--if ever sparks were black--and the brown rat, coming through the hole, wondered what on earth had happened. Then he sniffed at their trail, tried, but found it impossible, to follow, and pa.s.sed on. He would have felt great pleasure in slaying them if he could, and they knew that.

The black rat now essayed to cross the yard to the stable. He could not very well stop there--up among the rafters, that is--all night, so he came down, and, with his wife following him, gingerly rustled out upon the partially snow-covered straw.

Then he got a shock that turned him into a winking series of black streaks.

Then he got another shock which turned him, literally, into--well, into black lightning. You never saw anything like it in all your life. You never would have believed that any living beast could have so frantically and so furiously got itself about from place to place so instantaneously. It was--dazzling. It made you blink. It was It in the agility line, and no mistake.

Firstly, the brown rat, having hidden up in some black corner, with brown-rat cunning, came hopping out instantly--nay, charging--on the black rat's trail. And there was murder in his wicked, little, glinting eyes at he came.

Secondly, a white eider-down quilt--at least, that was what it seemed like--descended lightly as--as an eider quilt, and as soundlessly, out of the blue-black sky, and covered the brown rat up. You could hear his horrid, m.u.f.fled screaming of rage and fear under the quilt; you could see the quilt--but they saw that it looked pale brown on top--lifting about, and feeling for that murder-child of a rat underneath. Then the quilt got him--you could hear the unspeakably beastly death-squeal reverberate m.u.f.flingly--and then the quilt rose, still utterly without sound, and one saw it was a big barn-owl, with a rat--a brown rat--twitching in its white-mittened claws.

But do you think that made any difference? If so, you don't know the cruel devil of perseverance that is the brown rat.

As the black rat, at the end of his amazing lightning display, reached the barn, with his mate behind him, he leapt--he could not stop--clean over the back of one great twenty-inch, glitter-eyed brown ghoul, called by the death-scream of his colleague--other rats usually answer it--coming out of a hole. The black rats dashed into the hole like flickering streaks, but the brown rat had instantly spun upon himself, and was after them.

The barn was an unfortunate choice. It seemed full of brown rats, and four of them, in the darkness, instantly took up the pursuit of the now fairly hunted black couple. Nothing but their miraculous agility saved those two from being eaten alive, but they came out of the barn on to the spotless snow on the far side, with only a foot to spare between their long tails and the mangy, scarred head of the leading brown fiend behind them.

Straight across the open, like a drawn black bar, they shot, to a towering building of wood, and along this--here they lost six inches of the precious twelve by which they led--looking for a hole. They found it, whizzed in, five brown rats close behind them, nine brown rats hard behind the five.

They discovered themselves in a great room half-filled with sacks and the sweet smell of corn, and in and out among these sacks they led their hunters such a dizzy chase as no man ever witnessed, or could witness, for the matter of that, since human eyes could not follow it.

But the end seemed positive, anyway. It was only a question of tiring the black sparks out, for the four brown rats in the place, engaged upon lowering the weight of the flour in the sacks--one of those rats a dreaded cannibal of twenty-one and a half inches--joined in the mobbing, and soon the black rats found themselves in such a position that there was no escape--no escape for any but a black rat. For them there was one way. And those two living electric sparks on four feet took it. They went up the wall!

I don't know, but I guess that, as the black rats' upper jaws were longer and sharper and more shark-like than the brown rats', and their tails very much longer, they got a spring off the tail--and legs, too--and had an agility in hanging on to knots and crannies above that possessed by the brown ghouls. Be that as it may, they did it, and got a respite under the floor of the room above, before their enemies, traveling more normally, and by holes, could swarm up after them.