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And all the time father-peewit, who had just come back from dinner, swooped, and stooped, and dived, and rocketed, and shot down and around, his wings humming through the still air above as he went clean mad, and seemed like to break his neck and the polecat's back in any and every one of his demented abysmal plunges, but somehow never did quite.
Moreover, she was spitting up blood, result of friend polecat's neat and natty strangle-hold on her throat, and felt more in need of the egg which she had won, at any rate than a wild-goose chase.
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.
Its great size showed that it was a male, and the colour of its fur was to all appearance not the rich brown common to the polecat and the polecat cross in the ferret, but a glossy black. This, according to Mr. W.E. de Winton, perhaps the best authority on the British mustelidae, is the normal tint of the male polecat's fur in summer.
They needed it, for, though clean, the punctures from the otter's canines had gone deep, and a red trail of drops marked the polecat's route to his lair one of his lairs. Not, be it noted, that he was entirely ignored. Blood-trails are always items of interest in the wild, especially in the dark hours while man sleeps.
The would-be murderess, who was long, and absurdly short in the leg, too, just like her opponent, only with a more graceful and not such a thick-set body, turned on herself in a snaky fashion, and her neck, that the fangs had aimed at, was not there when the polecat arrived, but her teeth were, and they closed on the polecat's cheek.
It was only the eye that was deceived, not the nose at least, not the polecat's nose by motionlessness.
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.
A gentleman coming to have his corns or warts charmed away would be naturally assisted towards faith by the aspect of the polecat's skeleton, the skulls of two or three local criminals, and the shrivelled, mummified dead things which hung about the walls or depended head downwards from the ceiling. These decorations apart, the wizard's home was a little commonplace.
When he did, it was to the accompaniment of varied and assorted howls, and at about the biggest thing in the speed line he had ever evolved. He was no end glad to get out, and the distant haze swallowed him wonderfully quickly, still howling every yard of the way for, mark you, that polecat's teeth, once felt, wore nothing to laugh at or forget.
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