o such
horror, and was very obviously a beak--now, by the way, withdrawn.

Followed the harsh rattle and the swish of big feathers and vast
wings--he felt the draught of them--the dim outline, as it were, of a
ghost, of some great shape rising into the gloom, and as instantly
vanishing over the sea-"wall," and he was alone, _and_--there were now
three upright and faded reeds in the clump near which he had sat him
down by the water's edge to scratch, _not_ six. The Thing, the
portent, the apparition, or whatever you like to call it, had been the
_other_ three; yet you could have sworn to the six reeds before it
moved. And the worst of it was that he did not know from frogs and
fresh water what the Thing was. He had never glimpsed such a sudden
death before, and had no burning desire to do so again, for he was
shrewd enough to know that, but for that fling-back of his, the javelin
would have struck him, and struck him like a stuck pig, perhaps through
the skull! Oh, polecat! The bird was a bittern, relation of the
herons, only brown, and if not quite so long, made up for it in
strength and fiery, highly developed courage.

Caution is not the polecat's trump card, as it is the cat's, but if
ever he trod carefully, it was thence onwards, as he threaded the
dike-cut and pool-dotted gloom. He came upon a lone bull bellowing,
and gave him room. He came upon something unknown, but certainly not a
lone bull, bellowing too; it was the bittern, and he gave that plenty
of room. He came upon two moorhens, fighting as if to the death, but
_he_ was the death; and slew one of them from behind neatly, and had to
go back with it, past both bellowings, to a second burrow in the
sea-bank, where he put it; and later he came upon only seven great,
mangy, old, stump-tailed, scarred, horrible ghouls of shore rats, all
mobbing a wounded seagull--a herring-gull--with a broken wing.

The gull lived, but that was no fault of the polecat's, for she managed
to run off into the surrounding darkness what time he was dealing
warily but effectively with one of those yellow-toothed devils of
murderous rats--whose bite is poison--in what dear, kind-hearted people
might have said was a most praiseworthy rescue of the poor, dear,
beautiful bird. (The poor, dear, beautiful bird, be it whispered, had
herself swallowed a fat-cheeked and innocent-eyed baby rabbit whole
that very day, before she was wounded; but never mind.)

The polecat, after one