"No," said Alec. "I mean, yes. I mean, that's great, just what I wanted. Thanks a million, Grandpa, for all that stuff. I really understand now, I think. Well, I got to go." He ran for the door. Just as he got there, however, another thought sprang into his mind. From somewhere, the strange word, the mysterious name of the "other helper" flashed across his mind. He stopped and came slowly back to the desk, where his grandfather still sat looking at him.
"Forget something, son?" Professor March said to him.
"I saw a funny word the other day," said Alec, choosing his words carefully. "It was written in a book, I guess, but I don't remember. Maybe I heard it. It was Mowheen. Do you know who it is?"
"Mowheen," mused his grandfather. "No, doesn't ring a bell. Wait, though, I do remember something, but very dimly. It's an Indian word, by gum. What the devil does it mean? I heard it years ago, or read it. Alec, you ought to take up my profession. You ask the darndest questions and they're hard to answer."
The boy waited silently.
"Mowheen, Mowheen. Algonquin, maybe?" The old man ruminated, chewing on his short mustache with his lower lip and teeth. Then he stared out of the open window at the sunlit lawn in front of the house.
"Got it," he said suddenly. "The old boy's not senile, not yet, he's not! Now, I wonder where did you see that word?"
"I can't remember, Grandpa. Who is it? Is it a man?"
The Professor shook his head. "No, son. Not a man. Mowheen is the old Indian name for the great black bear."
Chapter Six
ALEC PICKED his way cautiously over boulders and rotting logs, through wet laurel bushes and clumps of fern. Indian pipes poked through the leafmold, skunk cabbage spread all around, and beautiful scarlet-and-tan mushrooms showed here and there in shadowed nooks. The birds called all about them, and he could hear crows cawing in the distance. To his right, the brook, swollen from the recent rain, babbled and gurgled as it raced through tussocks and around great rocks, straining to reach the distant pond in the marsh.
He soon saw the clump of seven big firs ahead, so dark that they made a menacing blot in the sunlit forest. They were huge old trees and their needles were so dense that he could see nothing through them, even when he had drawn quite close. Other eyes, looking out, could see better, however, assisted by keen ears and noses.
"We all got here, Watcher," came the now familiar voice of Scratch, "and you're even earlier than we hoped. Do you have any ideas? We're under this first tree."
Alec got to his knees without answering and crawled under the prickly outer branches. The ground, although completely dry, was rather prickly, too, with all the twigs, needles and cones which had fallen. Inside it was just like being in a tent. When his eyes grew adjusted to the dim light, he could see the black mask of the big raccoon, the grizzled head of the woodchuck and the black-and-white skunk, all sitting at the base of the tree waiting for him. On a low branch, about three feet above the carpet of needles, sat Soft Wing.
"Get your breath back, Watcher," said the big raccoon. "We were worried that they wouldn't let you out if it was raining. I've noticed that humans don't like to get rained on."
"I was worried, too," said Alec. "The rain stopped though, so there was no trouble. But Whisperfoot arranged about the messengers to come from town, not me. Whisperfoot, you tell them, because you did it all."
"I did some work, but Watcher thought of it all, really," she said, jumping from his body to a low branch nearby. There she began to groom herself, continuing to talk. "I went to see the meadow mice. It's working out fine, at least so far. They have sent out messengers to contact the house mice and other meadow mice all the way into town. By tonight, we'll have a chain of mice passing news back and forth regularly."
The pretty deermouse tried to give the credit to Alec, of whom she had come to be very fond, but she didn't really mind being the center of attention. She asked the other animals to pass the word that no house mouse was to be molested or killed if it was seen out of doors. This was necessary, because house mice had not been included in the truce the forest animals had arranged.
"I'll do my best," said Scratch. "Some of the bad elements aren't going to like it, but they'll just have to agree. I have a complaint about one of the meat-eaters chasing one of our local rabbits. I finally found him and gave him a real going over, but you can't trust any of them except Slider and his family. They're good people and with us all the way, but the others, well, you have to keep bearing down on them." His mind had formed a sort of mass picture of a whole jumble of different animals and Alec couldn't understand what the raccoon was talking about.
"What do you mean," he said. "Are some animals not being peaceful around here? Who's Slider, any way?
"Here he is, coming up the stream right now," said Stamper the skunk. "He wanted to meet you, but he and his family were fishing miles away until today and he couldn't get back in time for last night. Shake yourself off outside, will you? I don't want to get soaked." This last was addressed not to Alec but to someone else.
A long, brown, slick-furred body wormed into the tent made by the tree and sat up on short hind legs, balancing on a long, heavy tail. A bluntly-pointed head with small, sleek ears and large, brown eyes faced the boy at his own eye level. It was a big dog otter.
"Hello there, Watcher. Glad to see you." The mind voice was almost noisy, quite hearty and rolling, and it told quite as much about the animal talking as the quiet tone of the skunk or the argumentative, gravelly impression given by the raccoon.
"Sorry I missed the meeting the other night," said Slider. "You know how it is, had to go check out a trout farm over to the east a few miles. Sure enough, the netting was loose. The humans will be plenty annoyed when they look at some of the tanks. Still, I have seven to feed, counting myself. What's going on here? Anything been decided yet?" His whole manner was confident, breezy, and yet extremely alert. Alec decided on the spot that this was a very valuable ally.
"We were about to tell Watcher about all the bad elements, the hold-outs, when you arrived," said Scratch. "Since most of them are relatives of yours, why don't you take over?" Here again was a sample of animal politeness. If anything rude had to be said, it ought to be kept in the family, so to speak, and not said by other, unrelated animals.
"Right," said Slider. He inched closer to the fascinated boy, who could now detect a distinct odor of fish about him, not really too unpleasant but still noticeable.
"The fact is," said the otter, "some of my smaller relatives are just not easy to keep in line. No sense of humor, no responsibility, no team spirit. Fill your own belly and never mind tomorrow, or anyone else either. Can't think ahead. I'll show you some of them."
Into Alec's mind came the picture of a small, brown animal with white underparts. It was long and slim and darted around the ground on tiny legs, bending like a furry snake to get around obstacles. He recognized it as a weasel. Before he could say so, another animal projection appeared, this time of a larger beast, so dark brown as to be almost black, but shaped very similarly. The boy had no trouble with this one either, identifying it as a mink, a fact made even more evident because it was shown swimming gracefully in the picture. Then came still another picture of a large brownish spotted cat with tufted ears and a short, stub tail, bounding through the forest on big furry pads.
"That last one, he's no relative of mine," added the otter, interrupting the pictures. "Fortunately, he's the only one of his kind around and we told him to plain get out, and come back in a moon or so, or we'd all get after him, all of us at once. He's a big coward and he left, spitting and snarling. He knew we meant it, though. I don't think he'll be back for awhile."
Alec had recognized the bobcat by this time, and he asked if there were any more animals still to come.
"That's about it," said Slider. "Wait, there's another, or I should say, others. They're the worst killers of the whole bunch because there are so many of them. There's probably one around now, out under the leaves. Wait her
e a bit, I'll see if I can find a sample."
With a graceful, looping motion, like a giant brown inch worm, he was out of the tree tent in a flash.
Alec heard a brief scuffle in the leaves outside and nearby. Then, whisk, the otter bounded back in, carrying something small in his mouth. At the same time a tiny, shrill mind-voice began to shriek and scream.
"Bite, kill, eat, fight, bite, kill, fight, eat," it went on, over and over. Small though it was, the mind-voice exuded sheer savagery and hatred to an astonishing degree. Alec could see that Slider was holding in his iron otter's jaws a tiny, brown animal, like a small mouse, which had a sharply-pointed nose but invisible ears and eyes. The otter held the little thing delicately by the scruff of its neck, but as Alec watched, it turned around and tried to sink its tiny fangs into the larger animal's lip. Slider snarled and shook it once, then flipped it over in front of the raccoon. Scratch instantly moved one of his long-clawed front feet in a hard-smashing blow. The savage little mind-voice in Alec's brain stopped abruptly and the tiny animal lay there, limp and unconscious on the bed of brown needles.
Alec had never seen or heard of a shrew before, but the assembled animals managed to make it plain to him that these common, tiny creatures were impossible to talk to and never stopped either killing or eating except when asleep. They also fought each other and were cannibals, attacking anything they could smell or hear. There were hundreds of them in the forest, but fortunately they were solitary creatures and did not combine in groups. Whisperfoot, as a mouse, dreaded the tiny killers, for mice were a favorite prey of theirs.
"That's the whole crowd," said Slider. "That last little one and his kind are no harm to us big ones. They're too small. They get so hungry they have to eat every second they're awake, that's their trouble."
"What about the others, though, Slider?" said Alec, sending pictures of the mink and the weasel to the otter's brain. "Can't you make them see what it means to have thousands of rats coming in here? They could be a great help. Aren't they great fighters and don't they often kill rats anyway?"
"Yes, they do, but they won't do it for or with anyone else," replied the otter. "Always act for themselves, that crowd. They said, when I spoke to them (and they listen when I speak) that they'd kill all the rats by themselves, when and if they came—the rats, I mean. I tried to tell them that odds of fifty to one were too much and they'd find it out later, but it made no impression. It was all we could do to get them to hunt away from the woods for a while. That was absolutely all they would agree to, and the rest of us had to get pretty rough before they would even do that. No, I'm afraid we'll have to plan without them. Too undependable, if not plain untrustworthy."
"Yes," added the skunk. "Now who else is there? Do you think Soft Wing's big cousin means it and will really help?"
"All he said was, 'Let me know the time and place,' " said the owl. "But he should come. He's reliable enough even if he makes you all nervous. As a matter of fact," he confided, "he makes me a little nervous, but I never heard him break his word."
"What about the foxes I saw?" said Alec. "And there was a 'possum too, wasn't there, and more skunks? And what about the deer? They could crush a lot of rats under their hooves and spear them with their horns, couldn't they?"
The animals looked at each other, rather dismayed. Things that were plain and obvious to them apparently had to be explained to this young human in detail, and yet he was now supposed to lead them.
It was the big raccoon who restored their confidence.
"Look," he said, addressing not Alec, but the animals, "there's no reason why he should know everything about life down here. After all, he only came here a few days ago. It's no discredit to him that he wasn't taught more about all of us and how we live. We need him and we have to do the teaching.
"He's already picked up quite a lot," Scratch continued, "and we just have to keep on letting him see how it goes out in the wild."
He turned back with his mind to Alec and he sensed at once that Alec had caught the feeling of doubt and distress at his ignorance and he felt that he had somehow let his friends down.
"Now, don't worry," said Scratch. "You just have to learn a lot in a short time. We should be worried, not you, because we ought to know that you can't have learned everything about us—not yet, you can't. Stamper, tell him why the deer are no good to us."
The skunk promptly took up the tale in his quiet, calming mind-voice.
"First, though, you asked about the foxes. Well, there are about six of them and they may help and they may not. Funny, twitchy, changeable folk, the red foxes. They want to know everything anyone else does and they say they'll think about it, and go off laughing to themselves. At least they aren't hunting around here, which is something, and they may end up helping. Mark them as possible, not certain.
"There are fourteen of us skunks and we'll all help. There's one family of opossums and what they'll do is beyond any of us. They really are the strangest animals in the whole forest. They can actually stop thinking thoughts, so you can't hear them at all! You can talk to one all day and never get him to admit he's even heard you. Then he'll finally say something that has nothing to do with anything you said before, and walk away. We find them a puzzle. Their minds don't seem to work like ours. More like a frog's or turtle's, really."
The skunk went on. "Finally, there's the deer. Well, forget them. I don't know why they bothered to come the other night, except to eat grass. You mentioned the sharp stickers on their heads, Watcher. Well, only the male deer have them, and they only get them in the fall. Those things are soft and tender now and no good for anything. And what do they use them for, I ask you? Fighting with each other over females, that's all.
"Their hooves are sharp and they can fight with them all right, but they only use them when they're attacked. We could probably murder the whole rat army if we had them on our side, but there won't be a chance of that."
"Silly idiots! I asked one of them to help," cut in the owl suddenly. "What do you think he said? 'Who, we deer? We can't fight. We'll just move to another wood. Ask us to mess around with a lot of grubby, little animals and get our hooves all dirty with blood? Really!' "
"Yes," said the otter in agreement. "That's the deer for you. Forget them. They can't think of anything but green leaves and running around at night jumping over things. And they think they're better than anyone else. Won't even say 'hello' if you pass one, just look the other way and pretend no one's there. They're hopeless."
"What about squirrels and chipmunks and those animals?" said Alec. He was trying to draw up a list in his mind of how many creatures he could depend on, and it didn't look very good so far.
"They are all my relatives," broke in the slow, bumbling voice of Stuffer. As usual, he had simply been sitting up and staring, pop-eyed, so that only an occasional twitch of his nose prevented his looking like a dead, stuffed animal. "Some aren't so bad. The gray squirrels are all right, but they don't like coming down on the ground, at least not to fight. They say they may come and they may not. They change their minds all the time, just like the foxes. We can't count on them. The chipmunks are too small. You can't ask them to fight brown rats. They're like Whisperfoot up there willing to help, but no good for fighting.
He ruminated a moment, then went on. "There's a few red squirrels around, and they might fight. Goodness knows, they fight with each other enough. But they hate leaving their trees worse than the grays. They're pretty small, too. So don't plan on them. That leaves us woodchucks. There's only six of us grownups and we'll all be there when we're needed." Stuffer sat back in silence again, having nothing more to add.
Nor did anyone else. Alec was counting up in his mind. Six woodchucks, fourteen skunks, one raccoon—"Four raccoons," cut in Scratch—four raccoons, seven otters—"Four, I'm afraid," said Slider, "three are cubs"—four otters, one owl—"Don't forget my big cousin with the ears," said Soft Wing—two owls. That was it. Plus some foxes and squirrels who were fairly go
od chances, and some 'possums who were pretty bad ones. If the doubtful animals showed up, perhaps between thirty and fifty were available for the actual fighting line. This small number against what might amount to thousands of big, tough rats. The boy's heart sank. These were grim odds!
"What about the birds?" he asked Soft Wing. "Are you and your big cousin the only ones who will help? Aren't birds afraid of a lot of rats eating their eggs and babies?"
The barred owl ruffled his feathers and blinked several times. Even in the deep shadow of the giant fir tree, he seemed to feel there was too much light. It also appeared he was thinking hard. Finally he reached a decision on what he was brooding over.
"I'm afraid they mostly won't be any good. Most birds aren't very organized, not in the same way we are here, except for crows. And they wouldn't help anybody who had an owl on their side. They hate owls worse than anyone else. I'd drop out and leave the woods, and I could persuade my big cousin too, I think, but it wouldn't do any good.
"You see, the rats are coming at night. That's the only thing we're sure of. They can't come in daylight because even the humans would see them then. If that happened, it would be the end of them and they know it. So it means night work. Well, there's only me and cousin Death Grip for that. The other night birds are small and eat insects. They couldn't do a thing. If it were daytime fighting, we could get a few hawks, maybe even old White Head, the eagle from over east at the big river. But not at night. We two are the only birds who can do much for you."
The War for the Lot Page 9
