Page:Wild folk - Samuel Scoville.djvu/120

98 long, black forked tongue played in and out like the flicker of a flame.

Suddenly the snake shot into Nippy's burrow. Over a third of its length had disappeared from sight when Chippy showed a flash of that instantaneous, unreckoning courage which carries man or beast into the front ranks of his kind. Perhaps what he did was to save himself from future danger. Yet who can say that it was not a spark of the same divine fire which glows in the heart of man that made him risk his life for another? As he saw the fatal head disappear down the burrow, with a lightning-like spring he leaped upon the disappearing body, casting out his cherished nuts from his cheeks in mid-air. Opening his wide-set jaws, he clamped them shut where the supple, flexible spine of the snake ridged the smooth skin. The back of a blacksnake is a mass of tough muscles, and its spine has the strength of a steel spring. Yet the tremendous jaw-muscles of the chipmunk drove the needle-pointed teeth deep into the twisted, over-lapping fibres.

The black column stiffened like an iron bar. Bracing his paws against the sides of the hole, the chipmunk gnawed away desperately Suddenly the keen teeth grated, and then locked in the sinuous spine itself. As they met, the great body surged forward and dragged the chipmunk into the burrow. Once deep underground, there was danger that the snake might find space to double back on its length and gain a fatal head-hold with its sharp slanting teeth. Yet Chippy never loosed his grip for an