Neighbors Unknown :: THE TUNNEL RUNNERS

THE TUNNEL RUNNERS

The deep copper-red channel of the little tidal river wound inland through the wide yellowish levels of the salt marsh. Along each side of the channel, between the waving fringes of the grass and the line of usual high tide, ran a margin of pale yellowish-brown sand-flats, baked and seamed with sun cracks, scurfed with wavy deposits of salt, and spotted with meagre tufts of sea-green samphire, goose-tongue, and sea-rosemary. Just at the edge of the grass-fringe an old post, weather-beaten and time-eaten, stood up a solitary sentinel over the waste, reminder of a time when this point of the river had been a little haven for fishing-boats—a haven long since filled up by the caprice of the inexorable silt.

Some forty or fifty paces straight back from the mouldering post, a low spur of upland, darkly wooded with spruce and fir, jutted out into the yellow-green sea of grass. Off to the left, some hundred yards or so away, ran a line of round-topped dike, with a few stiff mullein stalks fringing its crest. Beyond the dike, and long ago reclaimed by it from the sea, lay basking in the sun the vast expanses of sweet-grass meadow, blue-green with timothy, clover, and vetch, and hummed over by innumerable golden-belted bumblebees. Through this sweet meadow wound the slow curves of a placid and brimming fresh-water stream, joining itself at last to the parent river through an abat-d’eaux in the dike, whose sunken valves protected it completely from the fluctuation of the tides.

The dividing line between the tall, waving, yellow salt grass and the naked mud-flat was as sharp as if cut by a diker’s spade, and it was fringed by a close brown tangle of grass-roots, which seemed to feel outward over the baked mud and then curl back upon themselves in apprehension. Close to the foot of the mouldering post, where this fringe half encircled it, appeared suddenly a pointed brownish head, with tiny ears and a pair of little, bright, bead-like eyes set very close together. The head was thrust cautiously forth from the mouth of a narrow tunnel under the grass-roots. The sharp, overhung muzzle, with nostrils dilating and quivering, interrogated the perilous outer air; the bead eyes searched the sky, the grass-fringe, the baking open of the flat. There was no danger in sight; but just in front, some five or six feet distant, a gaudy caterpillar on some bold venture bent was making his slow way across the scurfed mud, from one goose-tongue tuft to another.

The pointed head shot swiftly forth from the tunnel, followed by a ruddy-brown body—straight out across the bright naked space, and back again, like a darting shuttle, into the hole, and the too rashly adventuring caterpillar had disappeared.

A little way back from the edge of the flats a mottled brown marsh-hawk was flying hither and thither. His wings were shorter and broader than those of most members of his swift marauding race, and he flew flapping almost like a crow, instead of gliding, skimming, and soaring, after the manner of his more aristocratic kindred. He flew close above the swaying grass-tops, his head thrust downward, and his hard, unwinking eyes peered fiercely down between the ranked coarse stems of the “broad-leaf” grass. He quartered the meadow section by section, closely and methodically as a well-handled setter. Once he dropped straight downward into the grass abruptly, as if he had been shot; and when, an instant later, he arose again, with a great buffeting of the grass-tops, he was clutching some tiny gray object in his talons. Had one been near enough to see, it would have proved, probably, to be a young shrew. Whatever it was, it was too small to be worth carrying off to his high perch on the dead pine-tree beyond the ridge of the uplands. He flew with it to the open crest of the dike close by, where he devoured it in savage gulps. Then, having wiped his beak on the hard sod, he dropped off the dike and resumed his assiduous quartering of the salt grass.

About this time the little brown, pointed head with the bead eyes reappeared in the mouth of the tunnel by the foot of the post. Everything seemed safe. The samphire and the goose-tongue tufts, palely glimmering in the sun, were full of salt-loving, heat-loving insects. Warily the ruddy-brown body behind the pointed head slipped forth from the tunnel, and darted to the nearest tuft, where it began nosing sharply and snapping up small game.

The marsh-mouse was a sturdy figure, about six inches in length, with a dull chestnut-brown back sprinkled with black hairs shading downwards through warm gray to a delicate fawn-colored belly. Its shoulders and short forelegs were heavily moulded, showing the digger of tunnels, and its forepaws moved with the swift precise facility of hands. The tiny ears were set flat and tight to the head, and the broad-based skull over the triangular muzzle gave an impression of pugnacious courage, very unlike that of the wood-mouse or the house-mouse. This expression was more than justified by the fact, for the marsh-mouse, confident in his punishing little jaws and distrustful of his agility, had a dangerous propensity to stay and fight when he ought to be running away. It was a propensity which, owing to the abundance of his enemies, would have led speedily to the extermination of his race but for the amazing and unremitting fecundity which dwelt in his blood.

For all his courage, however, there were some foes which he had no inclination to meet and face—even he, one of the biggest and strongest of his kind. As he glanced aside from his nosing in the samphire tufts, he caught sight of a broad black splotch of shadow sweeping up the baked surface of the flat at terrific speed.

He did not look up; he had no need to. Only too well he knew what was casting that sinister shadow. Though agility was not supposed to be his strong point, his movement, as he shot across the open from the samphire tuft to the mouth of his tunnel, was almost too quick to follow. He gained the root-fringed door just in time. As his frantic, cringing hind quarters disappeared into the hole, the great talons of the pouncing hawk plunged into the root-fringe, closing and clutching so savagely that the mouth of the tunnel was obliterated. Grass-roots, however, were not what those rending talons wanted, and the great hawk, rising angrily, flapped off to the other side of the dike.

Within the tunnel the brown mouse ran on desperately, as if he felt those fatal talons still reaching after him. The tunnel was not quite in darkness, for here and there a gleam of light came filtering through the roots which formed its roof, and here and there a round opening gave access to the yellow-green world among the big stiff grass-stalks. The floor was smooth from the feet and teeth of countless other marsh-mice, water-voles, and marsh-shrews. To right and left went branching off innumerable side-tunnels and galleries, an apparently inextricable maze. But the brown mouse raced straight on, back from the waterside, deep into the heart of the marsh, anxious only to put himself as far as possible from the scene of his horrid adventure.

Running thus suddenly, he bumped hard into a little wayfarer who was journeying in the opposite direction. The tunnel was so narrow that only by the use of a certain circumspection and consideration could two travellers pass each other comfortably. Now the stranger was a mole-shrew, much smaller than the brown mouse, but of a temper as unpleasant as that of a mad buffalo. That the mouse should come butting into him in that rude fashion was an indignity not to be tolerated. Gnashing his long, chisel-like teeth, he grappled blindly, and rent the brown mouse’s ear to ribbons. But this was a mistake on his part, a distinct error of judgment. The brown mouse was no slim timorous barn-mouse or field-mouse, no slow and clumsy mole. He was a fighter and with strength to back his pugnacity. He caught the angry shrew by the neck, bit him mercilessly, shook him limp, trod him under foot, and raced on. Not until he reached his snug nest in the burrow at the foot of the dike did he quite regain his equanimity.

Just about this time there came a succession of heavy southwest gales, which piled up the water into the funnel-like head of the bay, dammed back the rivers, and brought a series of high tides. Tides as high were quite unseasonable, and caught the swarming little tunnel runners of the salt marsh unprepared. As the first flood came lapping up over the sun-baked flats, covering the samphire tufts, setting all awash the root-fringes of the grass, and sliding noiselessly into the tunnels, there was a wild scurrying, and a faint elusive clamor of squeaks came murmuring thinly up through the grass. Myriads of brown-and-orange grasshoppers, beetles black and green and blue and red, with here and there a sleek grub, here and there a furry caterpillar, began to climb the long, stiff grass-stalks. The battalions of the mice and voles and shrews, popping up indignantly through the skylight of the tunnels, swept unanimously toward the barrier of the dike. Every one of them knew quite well that to the sweet meadows beyond the dike the peril of the tide could not pursue them.

The big brown marsh-mouse, as it chanced, was asleep at the bottom of his burrow. Stealing up between the grass-stems, a chill douche slipped in upon him. Startled and choking, he darted up the steep slope of his gallery, and out into the wet turmoil. He was an expert swimmer, but he liked to choose his own time for the exercise of his skill. This was not one of the times. For one second he sat up upon his sturdy little haunches, squeaking angrily and surveying the excitement. Then, shaking his fur free of the few drops of water which clung to it in tiny globules, he joined the scurrying migrant throngs which were swarming through the dike.

Along the dike-top the migrants were running the gantlet with death. With the first invasion of the tide across the flats, all the marsh-hawks of the neighborhood—some four or five—had gathered to the hunt, knowing well just what the flood would do for them. Also many crows had come. At intervals along the crest of the dike stood the hawks, with wings half spread, screaming excitedly, clutching at their victims and devouring them with unlordly haste. Two, already gorged, were flapping away heavily toward the forest-clad inland ridges, carrying limp trophies in their talons. As for the crows, there were perhaps two score of them, all cawing noisily, flying low along the crest of the dike, and alighting from time to time to stab savagely with their dagger-like beaks.

The big brown marsh-mouse, wise with experience and many escapes, took this all in as he mounted the slope of the dike. Marking a hawk just above him, he doubled nimbly back, jumping over half a dozen blindly blundering fugitives. Some ten feet farther along he again ascended. As he came over the crest, in a mob of shrews and smaller mice, he saw a glossy crow just dropping upon him. The eyes of the crow, impish and malevolent, were fixed, not upon him, but upon a small shrew close at his side. Imagining himself, however, the object of attack, the brown mouse fell into a rage. Darting upward, he fixed his long teeth in the black marauder’s thigh, just above the leg joint, and pulled him down into the scurrying stream of rodents. With a squeak of rage and alarm, the crow struck out savagely. His murderous beak stabbed this way and that in the crowd, laying out more than one soft-bodied victim, while his strong black wings beat others into confusion and panic. But in the throng swarming over the dike at that point were many more of the marsh-mice and the shrews, all savage in temper. They leaped upon the crow, ran over and bore down the buffeting wings, and tore vengefully at the hard iridescent armor of close-laid feathers which shielded their foe from any fatal wounds. In spite of this disadvantage, they were wearing him out by sheer fury and weight of numbers, when the other crows came darkly to his assistance. In a moment he was liberated, and the dike-top strewn with gashed furry bodies. Bleeding and bedraggled, his eyes blazing with wrath, he sprang into the air and flapped away to the uplands to recover his composure in the seclusion of some dense pine-top. The brown marsh-mouse, the cause of his discomfiture, darted out from under his wing as he arose, and slipped over the edge of the dike with no worse injury than a red gash across the haunches. Having scored such a triumph over so redoubtable an enemy as the crow, he was not troubled by his wound; but discretion led him to plunge instantly into the deep green shelter of the grass.

Here in the sweet meadow, where the timothy and clover stood much closer than did the coarse stalks of the “broad-leaf” in the salt meadow, the runways of the mice were not, as a rule, underground. They were made by gnawing off the stems close to the firm surface of the sod. The stems on each side, tending to be pressed together, formed a perfect roof to the narrow tunnels, which pierced the grass in every direction and formed a seemingly insoluble labyrinth. The brown mouse, however, knew his way very well through the soft green light, flecked with specks and streaks of pollen-dusty sunshine. The tunnels were swarming with travellers; but beyond nipping them on the haunches now and then, to make them get out of his way or move faster, he paid no attention to them. At last he came to the edge of the stream, and to a burrow beneath the roots of a wild-rose thicket which fringed the water.

This burrow the brown mouse had once inhabited. He felt it was his. Just now it was occupied by an irritable little mole-shrew; but the brown mouse, strong in the sense of ownership, proceeded to take possession. The outraged shrew put up a bitter fight, but in vain. With squeaks and blood the eviction was accomplished, and the brown mouse established himself complacently in the burrow.

After a few days the southwest gales blew themselves out, the tides drew back within their ordinary summer bounds, and most of the refugees returned to their old haunts among the “broad-leaf.” But the brown mouse elected to remain in his burrow beside the rose-thicket. His taste had turned to the clover and timothy stalks, and the meadow was alive with brown crickets and toothsome, big, green grasshoppers. Moreover, in the heat of late July, he loved to swim in the bland waters of the stream, keeping close along shore, under the shadow of the long grass and the overhanging roses, and avoiding the dense patches of weed which might give shelter to the darting pickerel. His burrow was roomy and gave accommodation to a silken-furred brown mate, who set herself without delay to the duty of replenishing the diminished population of the marsh-mice.

In spite of foraging hawks, foxes, weasels, and minks, in spite of calamities, swift and frequent, overtaking this, that, and another of the innumerable kindred of the mice, the summer hours passed benignly over the burrow by the rose-thicket. Then, one sultry scented morning, there came a change. The deep quiet of the meadow went to pieces in blatant clamor. Loud-voiced men and snorting, trampling, clanking horses came to the edge of the grass, and with them two strange scarlet machines which clattered as they moved.

One of these scarlet monsters, dragged by its horses, swerved off toward the farther side of the meadow. The other started straight down through the deep grass along the edge of the stream. Into the grass, belly-deep, the big horses plunged, breasting it like the sea. Instantly the scarlet machine, which was ridden by a man, set up a new cry. It was a harsh, strident, terrifying cry, as if a million twanging locusts had found one voice. Before it, to the amazed horror of all the furry, scurrying grass-dwellers, the grass went down flat in long ranks. The peril of the floods was as nothing to this loud uncomprehended peril. Marsh-mice, water-voles, shrews, with here and there a foraging musk-rat, here and there a murderous and ravaging weasel, all fled frantically before it. A few, a very few, fled too late. These never knew what happened to them, for great darting knives, dancing unseen through the grass close to the earth, caught them and slew them.

The high cry of the deadly scarlet thing, however, gave warning fair and sufficient. As the big brown marsh-mouse heard it approaching, he dived straight to the bottom of his burrow and lay there trembling. His companion, on the other hand, holding different views as to the proper place of safety, darted from the burrow, wriggled through the thorny stems of the rose-thicket, and plunged into the water, where she hid herself close under the opposite bank. The noise and the darting knives glided almost over the mouth of the burrow, and the thumping heart of the brown mouse almost burst itself with terror. But they passed. Slowly they marched away. And when they had grown comparatively faint, far down at the foot of the meadow, beside the dike, the brown mouse, recovering himself, dared to peep forth. He was astonished to see a long breadth of grass lying prostrate, with bewildered bumblebees and grasshoppers striving to extricate themselves from the ruins. Having a valiant heart and a quick eye for opportunity, he sprang out of his hole and began pouncing on the confused and helpless insects. This, for a few minutes, was a profitable game, and a safe one, too, for the strident noise, with the presence of the men and horses, had driven hawks and crows to a discreet distance. But presently the cry of the scarlet thing, which had turned at the dike and was moving straight up the middle of the meadow, began to grow loud again, and the brown mouse whisked back into his burrow.

All through the time of the haying the meadow-folk lived in a turmoil of alarm and change. At first, under the heavy prostrate ranks of the slain grass, they ran bewildered but secure, for their foes could not easily detect them. For another day they were comparatively safe under the long scented lines of the dying “windrows,” full of grasshoppers and wilted clover-heads. When the windrows were tossed together into innumerable pointed hay-cocks, they crowded beneath the ephemeral shelter, to be rudely bared next day to the blinding sun as the cocks were pitched into the rumbling hay-carts. It was a day of horrors, this, to the meadow kindreds, for a yellow Irish terrier, following the hay-makers, would run with wild yelpings under the lifted cocks, and slay the little people by the hundred. But as for the brown mouse, all this time he and his temporary mate dwelt secure, keeping to their burrow and to the barren but safe tunnels which they had driven amid the roots of the rose-thicket.

When the hay was gone—part of it carted away to upland barns, part built cunningly into high conical stacks—the meadow-dwellers found that they had fallen on evil times. The naked meadow, all bare close stubble, open to the eyes of hawk and crow by day, and of the still more deadly owl by night, had become their worst foe. Some drew back to the fringes of the uplands. Some colonized along the winding edges of the stream. Some returned across the dike to the salt meadow, where the broad-leaf grass was not yet ripe for mowing; while the remnant huddled precariously under the bases of the stacks, an easy prey for every foraging weasel. In a little while, however, the short thick herbage of the aftermath thrust its head above the stubble. Then new tunnels were run, and life for the scurrying and squeaking meadow-folk once more began to offer its normal attractions. It was now more perilously insecure, however, for the herds of cattle turned to pasture on the aftermath kept it eaten down; and the shrewd crows learned that their beaks could pierce the fragile and too-open roofs of the tunnels.

At last the snow came, the deep snow and the hard cold, enemy to almost all the other kindred of the wild, but friendly to the mouse-folk. The snow, some two feet deep all over the meadows, over the dikes, and to the eating edges of the tides, gave them a perfect shelter, and was exactly suited to the driving of their tunnels. Food was abundant, because they could subsist very well on the nutritious root-stalks of the grass. And none of their enemies could get at them except when they chose to seek the upper air. In the daytime they kept to the glimmering blue light of the tunnels, but at night they would slip forth and play about the firm surface of the snow. It was then that they suffered, for though the hawks were gone, and the crows asleep, the icy winter night was alive with owls; and foxes, weasels, and minks would come prowling hungrily down from the uplands. The owls were the worst peril by far—marsh-owls, barn-owls, the darting little Acadian owls, swift as the sparrow-hawk; and now and then the terror of the winter wilds, the giant snowy owl of the North, driven down by storm and famine from his bleak Arctic wastes. The revels of the mouse-folk over their dim-lit playgrounds were varied with incessant tragedy. But the memories of the little people, fortunately, were short. Their perilous diversions went on unchecked, while their furry battalions thinned amazingly.

But through all these dangers the brown marsh-mouse went his way secure. He kept every exit of his tunnels perfectly hidden among the thorny tips of the wild rose-bushes, which stood up some five or six inches above the top of the snow. The successive families which were born and grew up in his safe burrow passed out into the maze, to be merged in the precarious and passing legions. His first mate disappeared mysteriously, and as he had no facilities for pressing an inquiry among the hawks or weasels, he never knew the details of her disappearance. Her place was speedily filled in the burrow. But to the brown mouse himself nothing happened. He confined his nightly revels beneath the moon to the region of the rose-thickets, and so eluded effectually the eyes and claws of the owls.

It was along toward the end of winter, however, when the brown mouse met with his most dangerous adventure. Shunning, as he did so craftily, the games on the open snow, he was wont to amuse himself—and incidentally seek variations in his diet—beneath the ice of his threshold stream. An expert swimmer and diver, almost as swift as his cousin the musk-rat or his hereditary enemy the mink, he would swim long distances under the water, finding fresh bits of lily-root, tiny clams, water-snails, half-torpid beetles, and many kinds of larvÆ. As the stream had been high at the time of freezing, and had afterwards shrunken in its channel, letting the ice down with it, there were many air-chambers along the brink, between ice-roof and water surface; and slanting downward to the nearest of these he had dug himself a tunnel from the roots of his thicket. Even here, to be sure, there were perils for him. There was one big mink which loved to hunt along these secret and dim-lit air-chambers, taking long swims beneath the ice. But he was an autocrat, and kept all rival minks away from his range; so the wise brown mouse knew that as long as he kept a sharp enough lookout against that foe, he was secure in the air-chambers. Then, in the stream itself, there was always the peril of the great pike, which had its lair at the bottom of the deep pool down by the abat-d’eaux. The brown mouse had seen him but once—a long, straight, gray-green, shadowy shape in the distance—but that one sight gave him counsels of caution. He never forgot, when in the water, to keep watch for that great darting shadow.

One day, when the brown mouse had swum far downstream, and was hurrying back home, he was alarmed by loud sounds on the surface of the ice, a little below his back door. Some one with an axe was chopping a hole in the ice. The brown mouse swam away downstream again as fast as he could, and the jarring noise of the axe-strokes, carried by the ice and by the water, seemed to follow him with terrifying concussions. Hiding himself in a remote air-chamber, he waited for the noises to cease. Then, with mingled trepidation and caution, he swam upstream again.

As he neared home, he saw a round beam of light pouring downward to the stream’s bed through a hole in the ice. In the midst of this light there hung, moving softly to the slow current, a big lump of fat pork. The brown mouse did not know it was pork, but he knew at once it was something very good to eat. Very cautiously he swam up to investigate it. There seemed to be no reason why he should not nibble it. In fact, he was just going to nibble it, when, just a few feet farther upstream, those terrifying sounds began again. The brown mouse took them as a warning, and fled back downstream in a panic.

In a few minutes the noise stopped, and the courage of the brown mouse returned. As he swam once more homeward, firmly resolved that he would taste that delectable mystery on his way, a chill in his spine made him remember the great pike, and look back.

There was the great pike, a long dreadful shadow, gliding up behind him.

The brown mouse, as we have said, was a wonderful swimmer. He swam now as he had never swum before—a brown streak cleaving the dim-lit current; and as he went tiny water-bubbles, formed by the air pressed out from under his fur, flew up till they broke against the ice. But, with all his speed, the great pike swam faster, and was slowly overtaking him. Just as he passed that strange dangling lump of pork, he realized that this was a race which he could not win. The entrance to his burrow was still too distant. But he remembered a tiny air-chamber under the bank close by. It had no exit. It was so small that he might not find room there to haul himself clear out of the water, beyond reach of his enemy’s jaws, but he had no choice, and in frantic suffocating desperation he dashed for it.

Even as he turned, however, the sense of doom descended upon him. Was he not already too late? The long awful shape of the great fish was close upon him. With a convulsive effort that almost burst his heart, he gained the air-chamber, scrambled half-way out of the water, and then, in that cramped space, turned at bay, game to the last gasp.

To his amazement, the great pike was not at his tail. Instead, he was still some three or four feet away, out there just in the descending beam of light from the hole in the ice. The mysterious lump of pork had disappeared, but the gasping brown mouse did not notice that. His attention was engrossed in the amazing and terrifying performances of the pike. The long gray-green body was darting this way and that, in and out of the beam of light, but never any great space out of it. The great jaws shook savagely from side to side, and then the mouse saw that from between them a slender gleaming cord extended upward through the hole. A moment more, and the pike sprang straight up, with a heavy swirl of the water, and vanished above the ice.

It was incomprehensible; and there was something altogether appalling about it. The brown mouse shivered. For several minutes he crouched there quite still, more utterly panic-stricken than he had ever been before in all his precarious little life. At last, with hesitation, he worked his way up along the bank, beneath the ice, to his own tunnel, and scurried in all haste to hide himself in the deepest corner of his burrow. And never thereafter could he comprehend why nothing more was seen, or heard, or rumored of the great pike.

Clyx.com