Then the two, cornered at last, with one last desperate rush, shot up through a hole in the boards, out into the middle of the room on the first floor, and stopped dead.

Ah! they stopped. Good reason, too. Good reason had the five brown rats, excited with blood-l.u.s.t, hard on their tails, to stop also.

They found themselves suddenly revealed in the middle of a big room, furnished mainly with a few sacks, and flooded with a dazzling, blinding glare of electric light, that seemed brighter than the very sun.

There they were, all seven, black and brown, struck rigid, plain and clear for any to see. And four men and two dogs stood there seeing them. They, those men and dogs, had just come quietly for their evening rat-hunt, turning on the light suddenly, for the place was a mill as well as a farm, making--from the mill-wheel--its own electricity.

There was a strained, aching pause for about as long as a man takes to gasp. Then the dogs sprang in, and one of the men jumped to the only hole in the room they had not previously stopped up.

But the black rats! The brown rats died, at intervals, fighting horribly, as cornered brown rats do. In five minutes they were, all five, dead--that is, all that had come into the room and been cut off.

The black rats, however, in five minutes, were not dead. n.o.body seems to have seen them, after the hunt had once begun, till the others were killed. Even then all four men aver that they could never rightly swear that they saw them. They saw lines, and streaks, and flashes, and whirls, and halos of black, which might have been rats--and the dogs said they were--but no one could swear to it. At times these giddy phenomena were among the rafters, at other times they were on the floor, and yet again they were going up or coming down the walls; but all the while both men and dogs seemed to be everlastingly too late, and hunting them where, half-a-second before, they had been. In fact, they perpetually had been, and were always where snapping jaws and beating sticks were not.

At the end of half-an-hour the men, mopping their foreheads, even in that cold, gasped, "Lor' love yer! Did yer ever see th' like?"

At the end of three-quarters of an hour the men flung themselves, gasping, on to the sacks of flour, and the dogs, panting, on to the floor--done. And the black rat and his mate, lively as ever, perkily watched them from the rafters.

Then the men and dogs went away, the light went out, and presently great sounds of war below suggested that the brown rats on the ground-floor were having the time of their lives. So were the two black rats, but a different sort of time. They were feasting upon meal and grain. And there, so far as I know, as they were like birds, flying among the rafters like black lightning if molested, they live to this day.

IX

LAWLESS LITTLE LOVE

She rolled over and regained her feet in a flash, to find herself facing a dark beast, with a huge, bushy, white tail, held up straight like a pleased cat's--but this was a sign of warning, not pleasure--that shone ghostily in the gloom of the mysterious, dread thorn-scrub. And the face of the beast was the face of a black and grinning devil, and its eyes shone red.

She stood there, shivering a little, with the tiny young thing crawling weakly away from almost under her feet, and the long, vivid, raw gash that the white-tailed beast, coming from nowhere special out of the night, had set upon her shoulder--a murderess caught in the act.

On three legs--her left hindleg had been bitten off by a trap set for a hyena--emaciated, with all her natural buoyant courage gone out of her, her wonderful agility gone too, she felt instantly in her heart that she could neither face this diabolical-faced foe, nor yet get away from it.

This same crippled condition had spoilt her hunting forays, and, driven by hunger, had made her nose into other people's nurseries, and be caught just on the point of slaying somebody else's baby, when the owner had come home, like a streak out of the night.

But that was not the worst of it, for she was longer than the enemy, a bit, and might have put up a good fight--she had fought for her life, as a matter of course, ever since she left her mother's side--if the enemy had not brought with her an ally. It was not visible to the eye, that ally, but it was to the nose--a most distinct and appalling stink, and it could be felt, for it made her nostrils smart. Apparently, then, that white tail was intentional, was as a red flag, insolently displayed, warning all to beware of the stink. Well, there is more than one way of holding your own in the wild, and a most unholy smell is not such a bad way, either, when you come to think about it.

The owner of that nameless odor was a polecat--not our polecat; worse than that--and--well, you know the breed. Fear they know not; neither is pity with them a weakness, especially where the lives of their young are concerned. This one did not wait. She attacked quicker than you could cry "Knife," taking off with all four feet together, in a peculiar and patent way of her own.

The would-be murderess, who was long, and absurdly short in the leg, too, just like her opponent, only with a more graceful and not such a thick-set body, turned on herself in a snaky fashion, and her neck, that the fangs had aimed at, was not there when the polecat arrived, but her teeth were, and they closed on the polecat's cheek.

The latter gibbered horribly at the spark of pain, and set herself really down to fight.

The intending murderess said nothing at all, but, unbalanced with her game hindleg, having no force to push or spring with, and being very weak, she knew she was done for directly they closed to the clinch.

In a few seconds the polecat had her down, and only an awful, mad, desperate clashing of fang against fang kept the attacker off her throat.

It could not last.

Then it was, at that moment, that a sharp little, gray little, dark-spotted, clean-cut, close-cropped, intelligent head, on a snaky, long neck, peeped out of the shadows, and peered about, as if to see what in whiskers all the pother was about. The head might have been there by chance, but it wasn't. Its owner had been running her trail for hours, and looking for it for days, and didn't mean to let her go, now that he had finally come up with her, polecats or no polecats, smells or not.

But he was not a fool. He knew the game, the bitter, cruel game of death, as it is played throughout the wild. With man the inexorable law is, "Get on or get out." In the wild they phrase it another way: "Kill or be killed." Man puts it more politely, perhaps, but it's all the same old natural law, I guess.

The head and snaky neck developed a long, creamy, tawny-spotted body, and the body a long, banded, tapering tail--all set on legs so short, they scarcely kept the owner off the ground; and the name of that beast was genet. The same are a sort of distant relation of the cats, a fourth cousin once removed; but it is necessary to tell you, because you might think they were beautiful weasels, otherwise. _And she was a genet_, too--the murderess that might have been.

Then the new-comer moved. Then he began to move, and--here! It was just like the buzzing of a fly in a tumbler. Certainly you could say that he was still there, but you could not swear that you actually saw him.

The first that the polecat knew of him was that red-hot fork-like feeling that means fangs in the back of your neck. The polecat spun on herself, and bit, quick as an electric needle, at the spotted thing, that promptly ceased to be there, and, to use the professional term, she "made the stink" for all she was worth. She forgot all about the long female would-be slayer of her children, and the genet was mightily thankful to drag herself clear, but she would not have been she if she had failed to get her fangs home, as a parting shot, before she went.

Then, I fancy, she was ill; and, upon my soul, I don't wonder. It was enough to asphyxiate a whale-factory hand. But the male genet was not ill, or, if he was, he was moving from place to place too quickly to give the fact away; and by the time he shot up a tree, like a long, rippling, cream and tawny-dappled, banded line, he left that polecat considerably redder than when he found her, and weak, as if she had been bitten by leeches. The polecat had certainly saved her young, or thought she had, although I cannot swear that the female genet had really meant them harm; but she did not look as if she had saved much else. However, she held the field of battle, and the foe had fled, and that is supposed to be the sign of victory; but that had been done by her "ga.s.sing" methods, so to speak, not by fighting alone.

Rippling about among the branches, an incarnation of grace personified, and hunting for her by nose alone, for in the moonlight her exquisite creamy, dappled coat was invisible--a real piece of magic, this--the male genet quickly found her for whom he sought. She remained low, lying along a bough, line for line, shadow-patch for shadow-patch, flat as the very bark, and as undulating, until she felt sure that he would run over her; then she rose, spitting and snarling in his face, cat-like and vicious.

It was a poor kind of thanks for having saved her life, perhaps, but it was her way--_then_. And, anyway, who can blame her? She had never met any living creature that was not a foe or an armed "unbenevolent" neutral in all her life, and she did not know that any other category or creature existed, the recent fight notwithstanding.

But the male genet neither ran nor fought. He dodged her snap, by a tenth of an inch, almost without seeming to move, and there he stood looking at her meekly. She leapt to him, and he shot off, as she arrived upon, the place where he had been. Perhaps she knew that only a genet, or a mongoose, could do that trick in a manner at once so machine-like and precise; and after that she merely sat, bent in a curve, with her lips up. But her spring had given her away, and he saw that she was lame. Perhaps he saw, too, the gleam of hunger, the wild, cruel gleam that forgets all else, in her eyes; but who am I to say whether he understood it?

Be that as it may, the male vanished suddenly and without explanation, doubling on his trail and going out like a snuffed candle. He was in view, as a matter of fact, several times during the next few minutes, climbing quietly; but the dark blotches of the leaf-shadows magicked him into invisibility, and no one could tell where he was, till suddenly the silence was smitten by one piercing squawk somewhere among the greenery above. Then a crash, wild flutterings, a hectic commotion, and he and a terrified guinea-fowl came down together, more nearly falling than he liked. Indeed, he must have let it fall, or gone himself with it, as he slid past, grabbing for holds, if she had not dropped quickly to the next bough and taken a hold, too. Then, side by side, they hauled the warm, feathery, fluttering thing up, and he slew swiftly, in order to silence the noisy prey, who foolishly kicked up such a noise, as if maliciously; for he knew--and perhaps the gleany (guinea-fowl) did, too--how quickly a crowd may gather to interfere in an advertised "killing" in that wild.

The female genet, however, was past caring about risks. She had reached a stage of hunger when no risks can overshadow the risk of starvation, and she had the guinea-fowl by the throat, and was sucking its blood before the other had time to realize what she was at. Then, with fine discrimination, she ate the breast and thigh, and later might, or might not, have let him have a look in, if some blotched shape had not slid up, without sound, across the blue black night sky, and, halting in the tree, begun, apparently, to crack nuts very sharply and very quickly.

Whereupon, without saying anything, the genets faded out.

It was nothing much, really--only the noise she makes when the giant eagle-owl is angry; but when you are a genet, with a body under two feet long, you may find it rather a bore, if nothing else, to remain cheek by jowl with an angry eagle-owl three feet or so across the wings, with the feline temper of an owl, and armed, owl-like, to the teeth, if I may so put it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "An angry eagle-owl"]

Now the question came as the two genets arrived at the ground--would she follow him, or would he have to follow her? He was determined, anyway, that nothing short of calamity should part them. Yet I don't see, since he never uttered a sound, how she understood him to say that if she would follow him he would find her food, even though she was still hungry, for she had not yet got to trusting him much more than she trusted any other beast, and seemed to think that he was half as likely to eat her as to get her something to eat. Such a thing as another creature finding her food for only just friendliness--love was out of the question yet, or out of her question--was an idea her suspicious nature could not yet grasp.

However, she followed.

Twining and twisting, turning and tripping, in and out among the bush and the tree-trunks, soundless, and quite invisible, except when they crossed a moonbeam--and then nearly so, because the moon has a trick of, as it were, dissolving the colors of even fairly conspicuous creatures--they crept on their low way. There was not a sound that they did not crouch for, often flat as a whip-lash--and that wild is full of sounds by night, too--not a puff of air that they did not throw up their sharp little muzzles to test, not a movement or the hint of a movement which their eyes did not fix with a suspicious stare.

They pa.s.sed a hippopotamus feeding--a sheaf at a mouthful--upon long gra.s.s; they came upon three wild dogs eating an antelope and gibbering like gnomes; they beheld two striped zebras stampeding from a lion; they got into the middle of a herd of elephants--but what must those giants have seemed to them, almost at ground-level?--and did not know it, so silent can the mighty ones be, till they heard the unmistakable digestive rumblings; they happened on the tail of a leopard, observing a young waterbuck antelope, and retired therefrom without his suspecting them; they watched some bush-pigs rooting in a clearing, hoping they might turn up some insects worth eating; they heard a mother-lion grunting among some reeds, and were nearly run over by the stampede of zebras that followed; they chased a rat that ran into a hole in which was a snake, and it never came out again; they went up a tree after a weaver-bird's nest, but, from the way the bottle-shaped structure was hung, could not get at it; they investigated a hare's hole, and found a six-foot mamba snake, with four-minute death-fangs, in possession; they risked the thousand spikes of a thorn-bush to get at a red-necked pheasant roosting, only to find the branch he was on too slender to hold their weight; they were stalked by a wild cat, and hid in a hollow tree; and were pounced upon by a civet cat--who was their big cousin--and dodged him most wonderfully; and were chased by a jackal, whose nose they bit when it followed them into a hollow log. Finally, they came to the wall, and stopped.

Their noses told them it was not the wall of a native village, for no one, not even a man, could possibly make any mistake about _that_. Also, their noses may have told them other things. Anyway, the moon saw them, in the form of two gray lines, slide over the wall and drop silently into the shadow on the far side.

A wild cat was courting a domestic cat of the bungalow close by, at the corner of the compound, but, flat as strips of tawny-spotted cloth, they got past him all right.

A black-backed jackal was gnawing a bit of old hide at the angle of the wall, and they were forced to make a detour up to the veranda of the bungalow to avoid that sharp-eared, sharp-eyed one.

Here, on the veranda, they discovered a chair, and the male genet, standing on hindlegs to see what was in the chair, found himself looking straight into the electric-blue, purplish b.a.l.l.s of light that betokened another cat, which had been asleep, but was now very wide awake.

He went round that chair in the form of a hazy, wavy, streak, as the cat shot out of it. The female genet faded from publicity behind a palm in a pot. But the genet's tail was so long that, with the cat and himself going round and round that chair like a living Catherine-wheel--both he and the cat spitting no end--the cat was touching his tail, while he was snapping at the cat's. Wherefore he moved across the veranda as an arrow flies, and round the corner, and as he turned the corner he--leapt.

It was a beautiful leap, and it cleared the danger that he seemed bound to run into, as it lifted in his path, by about an inch. As he sprang he heard the cat's claws sc.r.a.ping loudly, as she madly endeavored to stop--too late.

Then the head of the eight-foot python that had been creeping up round that corner in the process of stalking that cat whizzed by beneath him like a hurled poleax.

As he landed the genet heard the cat make one sound--only one--and it was indescribable, and he dropped off the veranda into the shadow of a bush, where the female genet presently joined him.

There was a small mongoose (my! what a lot of hunters do collect about the bungalows at night, to be sure!) under the bush, engaged in eating that precise reptilian form of poisoned death known as a night adder, which it had just killed. But the genets had other and private business, and they parted from the mongoose with no more than a snarl, the two genets to appear next--or, rather, to be no more than guessed at--crossing the last stretch of moonlight between them and the fowlhouse.

As they did so, a blurred, vast-winged, silent, dark shadow pa.s.sed overhead, and a peculiarly piercing whistle stabbed dagger-like through the waiting, listening silence. Both genets jumped, as if the whistle had really been a dagger and had stabbed them, and vanished into hiding before the sound had ceased, almost. They knew that shadow--the owner of the whistle; they had met her earlier that night--the giant eagle-owl.

But what the fangs and claws was she doing here? After rats, perhaps.

They hoped so, and tried to think she was not after them.