The Way of the Wild Part 25

The Chieftain naturally lost his balance, and before he knew what had happened he was inside Pig Head's "b.o.o.by-hutch."

The Chieftain, however, was not an ordinary bird, not even an ordinary eagle. Moreover, he must have been a great age, older even than Pig Head. Be that as it may, the Chieftain believed mightily in the wild maxim which says, "They should take who have the power, and they should keep who can."

And upon that he acted.

It all happened in a flash. Like lightning his right wing came round with a terrific flail-stroke, and hit Pig Head in the face at the precise instant that the surgical instrument he carried as his beak sank deep into one of Pig Head's calves. The Chieftain was upside-down at the moment, and his legs were tied together, but that made no difference to the savagery of the blow.

Pig Head uttered one howl of agony, and tumbled backwards, and his devil saw to it that he should tumble backwards upon the very sack wherein lay the Chieftain's son, squirming with rage. The Chieftain's son was a son of his father, and hearing the young hurricane of his father's wings, and feeling the intolerable weight of Pig Head sitting involuntarily down upon him, struck for the cause like a good un--struck, with his cruel, hooked bill, through sack, through trousers, through pants, and home through flesh, and Pig Head rebounded into the air considerably quicker than he had gone down, hitting his head against the roof, a resounding whack, and yelling fit to awake all the devils in cinders. And he did not go alone. Upon one calf, and upon--another portion of him, the Chieftain and the Chieftain's son went with him.

Very few men have ever left a powder-magazine on fire in quicker time than did Pig Head leave his hiding-place, and none could have made more noise in the process. The Chieftain stuck to him lovingly, and the Chieftain's son, sack and all, seemed determined never to leave him; and Pig Head was nearly demented with pain as he leapt out, caracoling wildly, into the light of day, and into the arms of--only the laird, the head stalker, four gillies, and two collies.

They had come to find him, these stern-faced, long, lean men, on account of "information received." And they had found him. But they did not speak. They were Scotch. Nor did they screw out a smile among them.

They were Jocks! They acted--being Highlanders.

Four hands like iron claws seized Pig Head, and tipped him on end, even as he had tipped the eagles. Two knives went "snick" as they opened, then "wheep-wheep" as they cut. Several pieces of cord and bits of sacking flew into the air. There was one colossal upheaval of wings, a feathered whirlwind hurling everybody every way--and the Chieftain and his son, released and scandalized, offended and enraged beyond the rage of kings, rose swiftly into the air with mighty, thres.h.i.+ng strokes that simply hurled them aloft like powerful projectiles--into the heavens, as it were terrible avenging spirits of the tempest. A chaos, a rush, a mighty blast of air, and--they were gone!

Then the laird turned to Pig Head, and, "Mon, ye dinna ken th' laird. If ye did--w-e-e-l, Ah'm thinkin' ye'd understand."

XVII

RATEL, V.C.

Between the clumps of the stunted acacias the sun beat down with the pitilessness of a battles.h.i.+p's furnace, and it was not much better in the acacias themselves. Save for a lizard here and there, motionless as a bronze fibula, or a snake asleep with eyes wide open, or the flash of a "pinging" fly, all Nature seemed to have fled from that intolerable white-hot glare and gone to sleep.

But the hour of emanc.i.p.ation was at hand, and the dim caverns of shade--what there was of it--stirred strangely. A hundred yards away a blotch of shadow beneath a group of stunted trees swayed and broke up into several zebra moving off to water. Fifty yards distant the inky shade that carpeted the earth under a bare outcrop of rock gave up a single gnu antelope bull and a Grant's gazelle whose lyrate horns were as wonderful as his consummate grace.

Thereafter came sound. Till then there had been only heat, the first hints at movement, and the terrifying silence of the wilderness. Even the birds had been dumb. Now came "a feathered denizen of the grove"

with a peculiarly arresting, grating chatter, a noise no one could overlook, and few could help investigating. And finally, brazenly, impudently, excitedly flitting from branch to branch, the chatterer evolved slowly out of the ragged bush-choked landscape, a dusky little bird, seemingly a bird of no importance, scarce larger than a lark.

Putting personal appearance aside, however, this feathered one, who dared to shatter the slumber of the everlasting wilderness, seemed to be under the impression that he was of vast importance. Moreover, his business appeared to be pressing and urgent, so that he could neither brook delay nor take "No" for an answer. It was as though he was under a desperate need to take you somewhere or show you something, and YOU must follow him--_must_; there was nothing else for it.

But n.o.body cared. The zebra trooped off without turning their striped heads; the gazelle, weighted under his horns, and the gnu bull stalked away unattending; the lizards remained fixed in a permanent att.i.tude of attention; and the snakes continued to stare at nothing. No one took the slightest notice.

Then came the reply.

It was as if a person or a thing, deep down in the bowels of the earth, hearing the bird, stirred in its sleep, and shouted up, "I come." And it came.

Heralded by a peculiar, quaint, little, chatty, sibilant, hissing, whistling chuckle, there emerged from a regular cave that he, or an ant-bear, or some other burrower had constructed under an ancient bush, a beast--a most remarkable beast.

It was long--about three feet. It was low; it was stumpy, clumpy, st.u.r.dy, bear-like, and altogether odd. It had no ears that any one could find, and it rattled the most murderous armament of claws that you ever guessed at. But that was not all; not by any means. It, or, rather, he, had really been colored grayish white in the first place; but Nature had thoughtlessly dropped him into a vat of black paint on his "tummy," flat, and left him there to swim about, so that by the time he got out he was one half, including chin, black, and the other and upper half, including top of head and back and top of tail, grayish white. And then, for a joke, it seemed, Nature had painted a white band round where black and grayish white met, a sort of water-line, so to speak, and let the poor little beggar go--go, mark you, into a wild where self-advertis.e.m.e.nt is something more than unhealthful for the smaller folks. Afterwards, however, Nature--who is all a woman--had repented, seemingly, and being unable to undo her own jest, had given to the little, slow, conspicuous beast, as compensation, a courage surpa.s.sing the courage of any other beast on earth. The result was rather curious--it was also the ratel, or honey-badger, who had nothing at all to do with rats, but everything to do with honey, and was self-evidently more than three-parts badger.

"Kru-tshee! Kru-tshee-chlk! Krue-tshee-chlk-chlk, whee-tshee-tse-tse, tse-i-who-o-o!" he whistled, and chuckled, and muttered, and fairly sang to himself as he came trotting along towards the cheeky little bird, like a dog that answers a whistle. His gait was all his own, as he, too, was all his own original self, being unlike anything else, although he bore the stamp of the badger people upon him.

With a calm, rolling trot, head down, tail up, back a fraction arched, with something like the slouch of his distant relation, the wolverine, he proceeded, preceded always by that dusky phantom bird that flitted and perched ahead of him, like a yellow-hammer down a country lane--calling, calling, calling. And he, lifting his odd, flat, "earless," sleek head to it, would whistle and chuckle in reply. They had, it seemed, arrived at a perfect understanding, these two, during the centuries. "Lead on, Macduff!" he seemed to say.

They pa.s.sed antelopes anch.o.r.ed in the shade; hartebeest, impala, and roan after their kind. They heard the click of horn and the stamp of hoof, but troubled not. They pa.s.sed the place where a leopard lay asleep up a tree, and saw a devil's whip of a ten-foot mamba snake--and the bite of that same is a sixty-second short cut to the grave--flee before them as if they, and not it, were death incarnate. Once a serval cat, all legs and ears and agility, stood in their path to listen to the funny chuckling, whistling noises, but fled when it saw the little, low ratel as if it had seen a ghost.

But always undeterred by anything in the way, engrossed utterly on the task in view, the dusky bird flew ahead, calling the ratel on with its harsh cry; and always the ratel, unhurried and cool, jogged along in its wake, answering, and whistling, and chuckling away to it, as if convulsed with inward merriment. Perhaps he was. It was a strange procession, anyway, and one you don't look for every day in the week, even in Africa, the land of mysteries and surprises.

Finally, the bird stopped; and the ratel looked, and saw that it was flitting round the base of a big mimosa. Enough! He hurried a little at last. Next moment he was nearly hidden under a continuous stream of earth and dust flying back from his amazing foreclaws, and a whirling, whirring vortex of perfectly demented bees, whose nest, that had been weeks in the building, was dissolving in seconds under the trowel-like scoopings of those fearful claws.

Honey! Honey! Honey!

That was it. That was the magic word the bird, who was a honey-guide by name, had shouted to the ratel, who was a honey-badger, you remember; and honey-bees they were that made the air delirious.

The bird, with the quick eye of a detective, had located the hole of the nest, but having no trowel, forthwith fetched the ratel, who had, and together they fed, the beast on honey, and the bird on the grubs in the combs.

And the bees? Oh, they don't count! At least, they might have been house-flies for all the notice the ratel took of them, save now and then to bunch a dozen or so off his cowled head carelessly. Yet they would probably have nearly killed _us_.

It was about this time that the bull-gnu appeared, tramping steadily towards them; a rugged, rough renegade of the wilderness; a ruffian kicked--or, rather, horned--out of some herd forever, and, for his sins, doomed always to face the risks of life alone, or in the companions.h.i.+p of other male outlaws of soured temper like himself--almost always male; the female wild seems guiltless of law-breaking, or is under a banner of protection if it is not. Such "rogues," as men call them, are not gentlemanly, as a rule. And, by the way, you know the gnu, of course, _alias_ wildebeest? The head of a very s.h.a.ggy buffalo, the horsy mane, the delicate, strong, sloping antelope body, the long, mustang-like tail, and the strange, twisted, unconventional character, half-fierce, half-inquisitive.

He--that lonely one--was going to drink, and he may have been doing it early because he had only his two eyes and ears, and his one nose, to warn him of the dozen or two forms of death that awaited him at the drinking-place, instead of the eyes and ears and noses of all the herd.

The gnu saw neither honey-bird nor badger till he was within a yard of them. Then he stopped as instantly still as if he had been electrocuted.

The ratel, who had himself to feed, and a wounded wife and two young whom he would lead to that honey-feast anon, looked calmly over his shoulder at the form of the antelope towering above him. There was no sign of fear in his straight stare at the s.h.a.ggy, ferocious-looking horned head.

He had no business with it, and would thank it to mind its own affairs.

And the honey-bird didn't care much, either, she having no young to feed, because, cuckoo-like, she left other birds--woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, for choice--to see to that.

Wherefore, for as long as a man would take to select a cigarette with care and light it, there was dead silence and stillness, broken only by the distant, deep "Hoo-hoo, hoo! hoo-hoo, hoo!" of a party of ground hornbills.

Then that devil of meddlesome curiosity which is the curse of the wildebeests fell upon that gnu, and sanity left him.

"Kw.a.n.k!" neighed he. And again, "Kw.a.n.k!"

Next instant he had spun, top-fas.h.i.+on, on all four feet at once, and jumped in the same manner, and was gone, whirling round them, with great s.h.a.ggy head down, and in a halo of his own swis.h.i.+ng tail, at the rate of knots.

It was nothing to be wondered at in that strange antelope that he should then sink from wild motion to absolute, fixed rigidity, broken only by the restless, horse-like swis.h.i.+ng of the long tail, staring hard at the ratel.

Perhaps it was the bees that did it, or perhaps the ratel stood in the gnu's very own path, or in the way of his private dusting-hole. I know not; neither did the ratel--nor care much, for the matter of that. But when the gnu went off again, circling with hoa.r.s.e snorts, and shying and swerving furiously and wonderfully at top speed, he sat up on his hindlegs, the better to get a view of the strange sight. Perhaps he thought a lion was lying somewhere near that he could not see from his lowly, natural position.

Again the gnu stopped as utterly instantly as if he had run into a brick wall, pawed, stamped, snorted, and went off once more into furiously insane caperings--a new set--all the time circling, with the little, black-and-gray, erect figure of the surprised ratel as a pivot.

And then, in a flash, before any one had a second's warning to grasp the truth or prepare, with head down, eyes burning in the down-dropped, s.h.a.ggy head, and upcurved horn-points gleaming in the afternoon sun, he charged, hurling himself, a living, reckless, furious battering-ram, straight at the little ratel.

Did that ratel quit quick? Do ratels ever quit an unbeaten foe? I don't know. They may, once in the proverbial blue moon; but I haven't seen 'em. This one didn't. He seemed to know that it is held to be a sound military maxim to meet an attack by counter-attack, and he did, though he had only the fifth of a second to do it in. Ah, but it was good to see that odd little beast trotting out coolly, head low, tail high, singing his war-song as he rolled along to meet the charging foe so many, many times his own size.

Next moment there was a thud--somewhat as if some one had punched a pillow--and the ratel was flying through the air, high and fine, in a graceful and generous curve. A thorn-bush--what matter the precise name?

there are so many in those parts, all execrable--acknowledged receipt of his carca.s.s with a crash, and for a few seconds he hung, like a sack on a nail, spitted cleanly by at least one thorn, far thornier than anything we know here, before the thing gave way, and he fell, still limply, this way and that, hesitatingly, as it were, as each point lovingly sought to retain him, to a fork near the bottom, where he stayed.

At last he picked himself out of the fork, and--oh my!--with a whistling grunt of rage, coolly, calmly, clumsily if you like, but grandly all the same, trotted forth into the open to look for that bull-gnu again. And that, sirs, was the sort, of animal _he_ was.

The bull-gnu, however, who was not previously acquainted with small beasts that would face his charge--and an aerial journey, _and_ the thorns--and come back for more, had fetched a curve at full gallop, and loped off into the landscape. For the first time since the herds outlawed him, I fancy, he seemed to be quite pleased with himself, and soon, antelope-like, put the ratel from him placidly, and forgot. But he was reckoning without his host. If he had done with the ratel, the ratel had not done with him. No, by thunder--not by a good bit!

Finding no bull-gnu, the slow little black and grayish-white fighter from Fightersville returned at a walk, still whistling with rage, to the unearthed bees'-nest, which looked like a town after a bad air-raid. And the first thing he did was to patter almost on top of a cobra, a five-footer, who, having narrowly escaped death by the gnu's flying hoofs, was what one might call considerably "het" up, or "off the handle," so to say.