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 wary sniff, did not seem to think the rat worthy of a journey to the sea-bank and decent burial, and passed on, the richer for a drink of rat’s blood, perhaps, but very hungry.  He came upon a redshank’s nest in a tuft of grass.

The redshank, who has much the cut of a snipe, plus red-orange legs, must have heard or seen him coming in the new, thin moonlight, and told all the marsh about it with a shrieking whistled, “Tyop! tyop!” But the nest contained four eggs, which the polecat took in lieu of anything bigger, carrying two—­one journey for each—­all the way to the sea-bank, to yet another hole he had previously scraped, or found, therein.  One of the other two eggs he consumed himself, and was just making off with number four, when something came galloping over the marsh in the moonlight, splashing through the pools, and making, in that silence, no end of a row for a wild creature.