May 15, 1915. 
LAND AND ,W^ATEE. 
TALES OF THE UNTAMED. 
rv.— FUSELINE. 
Adapted from the French of Louis Pergaud by Douglas English. 
DEEP gloom and a slow-dripping thaw. But for the 
drip, deep silence. 
A click, a swish of steel. A scream which 
scythed across the gloom; which mowed long 
swath of silence down; which burst torrential on 
the void across the shattered flood-gates of the night. 
The Marten Cat was caught. 
The dainty, nimble Marten Cat; the brown-furred, white- 
frilled Marten Cat; the come-by-chance of last year's fickle 
pairing. 
This night, as most nights, she had roamed afield; had 
left the moss-clad alder-stump in which she wintered solitary. 
The cold had come betimes. The migrants had long since 
winged south, in serried, wedged battalions. 
The food had dwindled, vanished. Puseline, hunger- 
maddened, prowled nightly round the village. 
More prudent than her kin, maybe, maybe less bold, she 
shunned the straw-roofed wheat-stacks, the holes and corners 
of the lofts, the cob-webbed, angled rafters. 
Each morning found her snuggled in her nest, far from 
the village, far from Man. 
Six moons had passed, since, with a moon abetting, she 
dragged her last hen-blackbird from its brood. Few birds 
remained with the forest border; and these were seasoned 
veterans, who clung, despite the snow, to their old haunts; 
whose cunning, equal to her own, was proof against surprise. 
A week of fruitless stalking, of biting, gnawing hunger- 
pangs, steeled her to her first raid on human dwelling. 
Through broken tile, stuffed clumsily with straw, through 
chink, where dry worm-rotted beam shrunk from its mortared 
setting, she crept into the cowshed loft, thence down the hay- 
shoot to the ground, thence by a cat-hole to the whitewashed 
hen-house. 
Lightly she vaulted to the roost on which six melancholy 
birds drowsed with their legs crooked under them. 
She slew them, every one. 
A single cunning bite sufficed, a bite which loosed a jerk 
of blood. Her clawed feet pinned her victim down. She 
pursed her lips and sucked its neck. She dropped its limp, 
lake corpse when it was drained. Blood was good meat, good 
drink. Why trouble to tear bones apart, to mumble throbbing 
flesh? 
Drunk with her meal, her white frill crimson-dotted, 
with matted fur, with belly like a drum, she homed uncon- 
scious of her tell-tale spoor. 
Long hours she slept, and, in those hours. Pate spun 
her silent web. 
Each night she grew m.ore daring. She braved the shut- 
tered houses of the village, within whose courts growled 
watch-dogs tushed like boars. She braved the full moon's 
radiance, when Man lurked in his ambush armed, and spurt 
of flame, and thunder-peal, brought to one luckless prowler 
death, to all that prowled a warning. 
Often the night's excur^rion failed, consumed itself in 
wander-hours, aimless, monotonous wander-hours, past 
garden-walls, through hedgerow gaps, up sloping thatch and 
tiling. 
But one, a gloomy, moonless night, brought welcome 
change of fortune. A sentinel star gleamed through a break 
of cloud, like candle twinkling from a cottage casement, and, 
in the dim half light of it, came Fuseline to the drain-hole 
in the wall. 
She passed down a clear avenue. The road was fenced 
about with littered bavins; dried pea-sticks of the year, whose 
darkened lines converged across the snow to the drain outlet. 
Within this lay an egg, a cracked egg, oozing yellow yoke. 
She leapt at it, and gulped it, and licked her stickled lips. 
A g^at find that. Could there be more ? All night she 
nosed about the wall. 
Next night the same path beckoned. She found another 
egg within the drain. Next night, another. 
The winter's day closed sullenly, under a leaden sky. The 
hummocked snow clung weakly to the boughs. At times, slow- 
melting, water-laden masses sploshed to the earth and ebbed 
away in muddied rills and trickles. Fate brooded on the 
forest, mothering the slow birth of the thaw beneath the un- 
easy rustling of her wings. 
Ro.se to the window-opening of the alder, as tiiough h. 
splash of snow had caught its ledge, a white-frilled, eager- 
questioning, small face. 
On easy, sinuous, gliding feet slid Fuseline to earth. She 
must be quick. The day had dragged, and two days' hunger 
gripped her. She ran her course apace. Her stout-clawed, 
sinewy, splayed feet danced feather-light across the melting 
drifts; her plumed tail balanced after her; down silent sludge- 
scored runs she crept, past rough-set walls of weathered stone, 
past hedgerows blanketed with white, whose endless mea.sured 
dripping marked the hours. 
Hope fired her blood, Hope winged her feet, towards the 
expected meal. 
Straight to the bavin road she came, and found it fenced 
with flanlung baulks of timber. 
Had these been there before ? 
The melting of the snow had blurred her landmarks. The 
egg was there; she smelt it, caught it« whiteness — this time a, 
little deeper in the drain. 
And one road only led to it — between smooth walls of 
wood. 
Had these been there before ? 
A snow-splash fell, and, under it, the end of one wall 
vanished. 
The snow, then, might have hidden them. 
With groping feet, with snuffing nose, she picked her 
dainty, cautious way, and, as she neared the egg, smelt Man. 
She paused, she listened, pricked her ears, half dubious, half 
afraid. 
The scent hung close to ground; it needed but a lift of 
neck to clear it. 
The scent was stale — and she was very hungry. 
Six inches more ! 
The little paw stole venturing out, one inch, two inches, 
three 
And jaws of steel, f anged, murderous, whipped from their 
muddied ambuscade, and snapped across the wrist. 
The Marten Cat was caught. 
Her scream died in a wailing bleat whose echoing 
shuddered down the aisles of darkness. 
Twigs snapped, leaves danced, quick stamps and thuds 
proclaimed the panic flight of thieves four-footed. 
The wrist, the hand was shattered — bone, tendon, liga- 
ment crushed to pulp. Yet her first impulse was to rescue it. 
Vainly she writhed, and tugged, and plunged, and bit the 
pitiless steel. 
Her twists, her stragglings spent themselves — ended ia 
piteous meanings. 
Yet she fought on — five hours she fought. 
From eastward crept a dim half light, a yellowing of the 
cloud bank. 
A shot rang out. That meant a Man abroad. And she 
was in His power, and He was coming. 
She flung her head back, drummed the ground, arched, 
tautened like a bow. 
A cock crew close at hand. 
Backwards she tugged, to right, to left. Forwards she 
plunged, until the chain, with savage jerk, restrained her. 
The teeth bit deeper in her flesh. She licked the welling 
crimson. 
Her head drooped limp; she seemed to sleep. 
But second cock-crow roused her, and clank of chain from 
ox's stall. 
The eastern ridge was yellowing. The dawn was close 
at hand. And Man would come with dawn. 
It was her life against her limb. Her limb must go. 
Writhing, contorted, lashing like a .snake, she flung her hind 
feet off the ground, and twirled and spun her body's weight 
against her arm's cohesion. 
The imprisoned wrist was twisted like a rope. 
The wrist-bones cracked and splintered. The arm-bones, 
snapping like dried twigs, thrust their jagged ends through 
15* 
