The Fourth Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  But until the very end, she kept away from the man’s cabin. She knew about the dog, and she knew about guns, and she knew that for a fox to have anything to do with man’s possessions is death. But there came a day when she found no food at all save grubs and beetles. She could not take that to her pups, and there was not enough to keep her from starvation. The day after, in fourteen hours of desperate endeavor she found only two wood mice. Two mouthfuls. The day after that she found literally nothing. And all the time the woods grew dryer and even more dry, and half-starved creatures’ tempers grew brittle to deadliness. On this last day the vixen went back to her pups with her body one vast ache of weariness and hunger. It was not possible to imagine her as growing more emaciated. If she did, she would be too weak to hunt.

  HER pups were skinny, too. Their little bones had lengthened even at the cost of their own tissue. And on this third day, when she came back with her feet sore and bleeding, her eyes sunk deep in her head and sheer despair in her heart, she found her four pups backed into four corners of the den, snarling at one another with a deadly, purposeful intentness. They were still small. They were still pups. But puppy teeth are sharp and puppy skin is tender and they were almost hungry enough.

  The vixen growled at them with terrifying ferocity. But she was terrified, herself. She went off into the dark night once more. She had thought herself unable to hunt again. There was one place where she knew she must not hunt. But the ultimate necessity had come upon her.

  She returned to her pups with a fat chicken, still warm. Blood drops oozed from its neck when she put it down in the den.

  The man did not miss the chicken for days. He kept no such exact account of his flock as a woman would have done.

  Men came to inspect the dog’s litter. As each went away a gangling puppy went with him, later to be trained as a hunting dog and to share all weal and woe with the man.

  The man took the money for the puppies and sent for his new gun, the gun his heart longed for. It fired an absurdly small bullet at an incredibly high velocity and the man did not pay much attention to the number of his chickens while he was waiting. He did not notice what the vixen had done.

  But she knew. She brought the first chicken to her young ones because she had to. But it was desperately dangerous to meddle with man. After that first foray she went farther afield than ever, searching fiercely for game among the more distant hills where even she had never been before. But it became necessary to capture another chicken. Later, still another.

  She made those captures with infinite caution and with infinite reluctance. But her pups simply had to be fed.

  One morning the man counted his flock when he fed it. It was short. Not many fowls, but enough to notice. The man’s new gun had just come. He wanted to try it. He shot at a mark, and marveled. He was as pleased as a child with a new toy. But the matter of the chickens annoyed him almost as much as the scarcity of game.

  He rummaged inside his cabin. He sat on the porch, presently, with a trap in his hand. It was a small trap. Not big enough. The man squirted tobacco juice meditatively. A fox could drag this trap, and if it were anchored firmly might even tear free by a sufficient mangling of its paw. The man debated vexedly. Presently he went to the woodpile behind the house. He chose a stick of oak wood. Not too large. He considered again and deliberately stapled the chain of the trap to the firewood. The fox could move this drag, but not get enough purchase to pull itself loose.

  He rummaged in the house again and found a bottle full of oily stuff. He carried everything to the place where the vixen had been killing chickens. He set the trap, using a new-killed chicken as bait.

  The man did various unimportant things during the rest of the day. The dog slept most of it. That night the man kept the dog inside the cabin.

  And that night the vixen stole out again. A mere furry skeleton, she came to the vicinity of the man’s cabin. She listened with straining ears to the small noises of the night. She smelled the chickens. Saliva welled up in her mouth at the heavy smell of the chicken house. But she had pups to think of. She could not think of anything but her pups.

  She crawled forward with infinite caution. A new smell reached her nostrils. It was the fox-lure from the greasy bottle the man kept for his winter trapping. The moon was bright. In its clear light the vixen found the baited trap. She saw the rumpled feathers of the chicken. But she was suspicious. She was more than suspicious. She hesitated for a space of seconds in soul-wrenching indecision. But she was also desperate. Her pups. She made a swift, darting snatch, as if by the flashing speed of her attempt to defeat all possible danger.

  But the trap bit viciously—and held!

  There was no noise to waken the man. Even the dog, grown fat and lazy and very respectable, did not hear the sound of the trap’s snapping. The vixen did not cry out. She knew agony, and when she tried to free herself she knew despair. But even at this time she thought still of her pups.

  The man slept on in his cabin.

  And the vixen struggled frenziedly to free herself. She could not. She found only that the trap was not made completely fast. She could drag it away. And there were the pups.

  The moon moved past the zenith. A dry night wind moved over the mountains and rustled the parched leaves of the trees. The rare small creatures of the night went fearfully about their nocturnal affairs. Bats flitted here and there…

  The vixen started home. She moved a yard and was sick with pain and hunger. At every movement the trap ground into the flesh—what flesh was left—of her forepaw. The drag trailing behind made it worse. When she had moved two yards the agony drove her to sheer frenzy and she tried to pull her paw away from her body that the agony might cease. But it only increased. Presently, with little whimpering noises in her throat, she dragged the trap another yard. Toward her pups.

  The night was very long.

  The man woke soon after sunrise and lay in bed, yawning. The dog got up and stretched. When the man spoke to her, she wagged her tail in greeting and went into the kitchen and lapped at the pan of water that always stood ready for her.

  The man got up. He cooked his breakfast. He ate it, tossing occasional morsels to the dog. She caught them in mid-air and wagged her tail briefly for each one. The man got out a pan and dumped corn into it and went out to feed his chickens. The dog accompanied him as a matter of course.

  He remembered the trap and went to see what had happened. He found the ground scuffed up by the frantic struggles of the vixen to escape. There were a few feathers scattered here and there. A plain, dragged trail moved away from the spot where the trap had been set. The stick of firewood left clear signs of its movement.

  THE man grunted and sternly ordered the dog to heel at her first sign of excitement. Her nose was not keen because she had just been fed, but she could tell what had happened. The man hastily scattered the corn in his pan and went back to the house. He put the restless dog upon a leash. He took his gun—the new gun—and started to follow the trail left by the vixen and the trap and the stick of firewood.

  The dog grew vastly excited. She had not hunted since before her puppies came, and her manner was not professionally keen and intent, now. Instead, she was vastly indignant and tremendously important. She made noises. She barked and yelped and tugged insistently at the leash. The man grunted and held her fast. He held his new gun easily. He had loose cartridges in his pocket.

  A hundred yards. Two hundred yards. The man spat surprisedly. He saw a feather on the ground beside the trail. Three hundred yards. Four. There was the gouged track of the drag. By its plain indications, the man could see that it had not been pulled smoothly, but in little jerks. A forepaw had been caught in the trap, which made its dragging vastly more difficult and vastly more painful.

  There was another feather on the trail.

  The man’s expression grew more and more surprised as he followed ever farther while the she-dog yelped and barked menacingly at the trail ahead. Half a mile. Three-quarters.
The man looked amazed. He saw another feather and an expression of curiosity became more firmly fixed upon his face. When the she-dog’s yelpings suddenly became frantic and triumphant, the man stood still and stared almost respectfully at the vixen.

  She had dragged the trap and a good-sized chunk of oakwood more than a mile during the dark hours! At first the man saw only the flash of her hide among brushwood, and then he was admiring. But he tied the she-dog fast to a stout sapling. The dog went into hysterics of indignant barking. He slipped a cartridge into the breech of his new gun. He moved to one side where he could see the small tumult of the vixen’s struggle clearly.

  WHEN he came into plain view, the struggle stopped. The vixen faced him despairingly. She looked at death and she knew it. She stared at the man with burning, desperate eyes, her paw—it was almost bloody pulp by now—still held fast by the toothed jaws of the trap. She was emaciated; starving. Her ribs stuck out gauntly. Her shriveled dugs showed that she was no longer able to nurse her pups. But in her mouth, at the instant when she looked for death, she still held the dead chicken that had been the bait in the trap. She had not eaten one morsel of it.

  She had been taking it to her young.

  The man stared at her. The she-dog screamed and howled and barked and yelped in a frenzy of frustration because she was tied fast. The vixen snarled savagely—still holding the chicken.

  The man said harshly to the dog: “Shut up!”

  The dog continued to raise a din of frustrated ferocity. The man raised his gun. The vixen snarled again. She knew. The man said disgustedly: “Hell!”

  He steadied the gun more carefully. He sighted with infinite pains, while the vixen snarled at him and the she-dog pranced and barked and yelped hysterically.

  He fired.

  The report was sharp and crackling. But through it there was an odd metallic sound, as of a bullet striking metal instead of flesh and bone. It did strike metal. It struck the trap. It shattered the trap. The metal jaws suddenly gave way. The vixen’s paw was loose.

  Like a flash she darted off into the brushwood. Once she trusted to her injured foot and toppled. But she scrambled to her remaining three feet again and vanished.

  She still carried the dead chicken in her mouth. To her pups.

  The dog fairly screamed. She flung herself crazily about, trying to break her leash, barking and yelping and howling.

  The man went over to her, scowling. Slowly he unknotted the leash about the sapling. He jerked at it. The man spat scornfully.

  “You damn’ women,” he said scornfully. “You damn’ women! Come on home!”

  He dragged the dog toward the cabin.

  There was a rain two days later. Then another. The woods ceased to be parched and dry almost as if by magic. And it was like magic, too, to see how the game came back. Almost as if it had migrated from some unknown place. It was amazing how soon game ceased to be hard to find that year.

  White Man’s Burden

  THIS is the story of Tomi, who is the white man on Opahiki, though his grandmother was daughter to a Rutiaro cannibal chief. His real name is probably Thomas, of which Tomi is a logical variation, but nobody knows. On Opahiki nobody cares, because Tomi has a vast, an enormous, an incredible reputation there. And anybody on Opahiki would explain the reverence accorded Tomi by saying simply:

  “He is a white man.”

  It is almost true, to be sure. But there is something more than lack of pigmentation behind Tomi’s eminence on Opahiki. He landed there without trade guns or weapons—indeed, with-out strength to walk a hundred yards. He was practically naked, and three parts starved, and so weary that he had to crawl across the beach to shelter, once he had emerged from the surf. But now-adays the old men listen respectfully to his words, and the young men envy him his scars, and the women—well, they envy Tehina.

  His coming, though, was not intentional. It resulted from the explosion of the gasoline tank on a trading schooner whose name is not recorded. The exon explosion blew four native sailors to bits and killed the white skipper outright, but it flung Tomi clear and, swimming, he watched the schooner burn and sink. Then he floated to a charred spar for two nights and a day, suffering, before he saw the loom of land below the horizon. And he knew that if he did not make that land he would be carried on by the current which had borne him here and die leisurely in the open sea beyond. So he made it.

  This is not the story of that struggle. It meant prodigious exertion when he had lost all his strength from hunger and thirst and long immersion. It meant calculation of the most precise and accurate sort, with no data to speak of. And when his calculations turned out to be reasonably correct—he found himself on the windward side of the island, outside of a spouting barrier reef. There was no opening in that reef on this side of the island. He had to go in over it. And he did.

  Monstrous rollers heaved him up. Breakers buried him out of sight in their unsubstantial, strangling foam. He had tied himself to the one charred spar, and he was a spinning mote, a helpless, suffocating atom, as the combers played brutally with him. But he was lucky, at that. Presently he came dazedly to realize that he no longer fought for breath. The swells were lessened. Live coral branches had flayed strips of flesh from him, but he was alive. More. Presently he felt sand bottom bumping his feet. Which was more than any man would have had reason to expect.

  He was too far gone to walk across the beach, though. He crawled out of the water on his hands and knees, tottering with weakness and exhaustion, and just inside the first line of palm trees he collapsed. He was not a pretty sight just then. His clothes were reduced to shreds by fire and soaking and his journey through the surf. His skin was shriveled and bleached by the water. His body was shrunken by privation so that the beating of his heart made visible pulsations between his ribs.

  He had collapsed. He rested. Presently he even slept after a fashion. Some strength came back to him. He was still weak when he woke. He was weak and ravenous and tormented with thirst. But there were coconut palms about him, and green nuts for drinking and maturer ones for food. He saw them at once, but even as he crawled feebly in quest of food he was realizing that there should not have been any land in this place.

  THEN he saw Tehina.

  She was he all saw slim golden shapeliness. She was staring at him with a lively, amazed excitement. She wore flowers in her hair and nothing else of much importance. She had been swimming, and she had seen the dragging, reptilian trail of Tomi’s crawling across the beach. She’d followed that trail out of curiosity.

  She came nearer, staring, and then seemed to realize that he was half-starved and weak and—with increasing excitement—that he was a stranger. She made astonished noises and fled. And Tomi stared after her, watching her brown body twinkle in the speckled sunshine underneath the trees. She did not run like one who was frightened. She was going for help.

  Tomi was still on his hands and knees. He was too weak to stand. But the sight of Tehina had told him much. Her manner had told him more. No white man had ever been seen on this island. Tomi’s skin was practically white. And a great change came over Tomi as Tehina vanished in the distance.

  He crawled to the scarred base of a great palm tree and set his two hands upon it. He ground his teeth and drew upon the last reserves of his strength. He managed, sobbing with the anguish of exertion, to drag himself erect. The girl had gone to bring others here. And Tomi—because his skin was practically white—wished to be erect when they came.

  He was. He wavered on his feet, and he stood upright only by the help of the friendly palm trunk. But when Tehina came back he was standing, and the whiteness of his skin was plainly to be seen. The startled folk of Opahiki had followed Tehina to see the prodigy she described. They now uttered inquiring, placatory words. Tomi fumbled out their meaning. He knew more than one of the island dialects. This was not impossible to understand.

  “I am a white man,” he said firmly, though his head reeled with his weakness.“And therefore you
must bring me food and drink—”

  And then the horizon slanted crazily and the earth came up and struck Tomi in the face. He had fainted. But he had created a desirable first impression.

  Later, when he came to and Tehina held his head cradled in her lap while she fed him just as much and just as swiftly as she dared—later, Tomi came to be definitely convinced that fate had called him to this island for the fulfillment of a delectable destiny. Because he was a white man on Opahiki. The white man on Opahiki.

  So a very great peace descended upon Tomi.

  There was no suitable timber nor any tools with which a boat could be built to take him back to civilization. Fed and rested, Tomi went all over the atoll and made sure. He visited each of the many motus in turn, with Tehina swinging along beside him and watching him openly or covertly every moment and frankly delighted at the find she had made. To her, Tomi was at once heroic and infantile. He was still weak, but he was handsome enough, even though his skin was practically white. He was to be marveled at, and admired, and undoubtedly he needed to be coddled into full strength and vigor again. Every woman feels such instincts when she has once seen a man lie helpless.

  To Tomi, Opahiki was at once a refuge and a blessing. It is not remarkable to the eye, to be sure. It is a succession of motus—lesser islets—about the rim of a vast, sapphire lagoon. It is like ten thousand other atolls, from the green palms with their angularly graceful fronds, to the wide white beaches of dazzling coral sand. It is surrounded by ocean of a quite incredible blueness; but one degree less preposterously blue than the cloud-flecked sky overhead. There is a soft, sad, booming noise perpetually in the air from the surf upon the reef or on the beaches, and there are clouds of sea birds to blend their cries with that booming. It is immensely lonely and impossibly beautiful, and no man should need lotus leaves to make him content on Opahiki.