Gray Eagle (Sass collection)/Gray Eagle
THE tyrant was coming. He was coming like a tyrant—announced by the tribute of thousands. A mile away that tribute might have been heard; a throbbing, reverberant, surging roar that filled the air and quelled all lesser noises.
In the heart of a myrtle thicket in the swamp woods, a big whitetail buck, lying half-asleep on a bed of dry dead leaves, heard the tumult and flicked an ear carelessly. He knew what it was, and he dozed on dreamily, listening, yet scarcely conscious of the distant turmoil.
A female gray fox, trailing a rabbit along a narrow bush-grown peninsula extending far into a wilderness of marsh, halted and crouched close to the ground as that air-shaking hubbub rolled swiftly down upon her. She was directly in its path, and, lover of silence that she was, for an instant the clamor startled and disconcerted her. But her fright was only momentary. Her sensitive ears, accustomed to the faint, furtive sounds of the woods, throbbed with the mighty din of the tyrant's vassals; but already her cool, keen, calculating brain was occupied once more with the pressing business of the moment, the stalking of the little brown marsh hare whose scent was strong in her nostrils.
These, however—the whitetail buck and the fox—were exceptions. To them the coming of the tyrant meant nothing, because he was not their ruler and over them he exercised no sovereignty. But they were two among many. Under the white blanket of mist hanging over the watery flats that winter morning huddled a vast multitude of living things—ducks and coots in regiments and legions, mallard and pintail and blue-winged teal and widgeon; and all these were vassals of the tyrant, subject to his will and his power. To all these his coming brought not merely fear but overwhelming panic; and that hollow, drumming thunder, which rolled along the flats and filled the air and seemed to shake the mist blanket spread above the marshes, was the roar of their myriad pinions as, regiment after regiment, they rocketed upward and fled on swiftly whirring wings before the great gray eagle who was their scourge and sovereign.
He came on rather slowly, sailing on set, rigid Pinions just under the opaque stratum of vapor which veiled the marshes from the morning sunlight. Ahead of him the shallow waters of the marsh lagoons were packed and jammed with life. Under him they were empty, for no duck in all those thousands was bold enough to await the tyrant's arrival. Once they were fairly launched in flight they were comparatively safe, for they had learned that this gray eagle, like most others of his kind, seldom undertook a straight-away chase. They had learned also, however, that to delay their start one instant too long might be fatal. Hence that thunder of wings, which was the tribute of the tyrant's subjects to their lord, rolled down the flats well in advance of the eagle as he swept on just under the smooth white sheet of mist; and long before they saw him the hundreds of mallards, pintails and coots, dabbling and feeding in a certain long, marsh-encircled lagoon bordering the river, had warning of his approach.
To all those hundreds that warning brought terror which in nearly all of them was instantly manifest. The squadrons of big, green-headed mallards ceased their busy dabbling for food and, with low, excited quacks and apprehensive upward glances, bunched closer together in preparation for flight. The high-riding, swanlike pintails settled lower in the water and bent their long necks over their backs, searching the air for the enemy. A black fleet of coots, which a moment before had rested almost motionless upon the surface, split suddenly down the middle, half the fleet making for one side of the lagoon and half making for the other. In all the feathered multitude floating on the placid, shallow waters spreading outward from the river only a gaudy shoveller drake, more brilliantly colored than the mallards and more beautiful even than the pintails except for his broad, ungainly looking bill, remained, to all appearances, indifferent to the peril.
The shoveller, an adult male already attired in full nuptial plumage of green and shining white and rich russet, floated near the middle of the lagoon in open water, free from weeds and sedge. A moment before he had been surrounded by the legions of the coots; but now the coot regiments had melted away around him, hastening toward the reedy margins with an awkward bobbing of blue-black heads and a flashing of gleaming white bills. The mallards were massed toward the northern end of the lagoon, the pintails toward the southern end and along the eastern edge. For a space of yards around the shoveller the water was empty. An enemy looking down from the air could not fail to see the lone drake floating quietly and seemingly unconcerned almost in the middle of the lagoon.
It was not indifference that held him there. Instinct wrestled with terror in the shoveller's brain Instinct bade him be still. Terror urged him to flee. It was because instinct prevailed at first that the shoveller for some moments made no move.
A week before, a charge of duck shot had broken his right wing. The shattered bone had not yet knit. He could not fly, and more than once, since the power of flight had thus been taken from him, instinct had saved his life by freezing him into utter immobility in the presence of danger. This same instinct gripped him now, held him motionless as an anchored billet of wood on the glassy surface of the lagoon. But little by little, as the seconds passed, and the surging thunder of wings rolled nearer along the flats, and the panic of the ducks and coots in the pool around him flared higher and higher, the grip of instinct weakened and terror gained the upper hand.
Suddenly terror triumphed. From a marsh pond a quarter of a mile away another great flock of mallards had vaulted into the air. As the throbbing roar of their pinions smote the shoveller's ears, he leaped forward in the water and began swimming desperately toward the margin of the lagoon.
Fifty yards behind him, a squadron of pintail took wing with a sibilant noise as of wind rushing through bare tree-tops. In front of him a regiment of a hundred coots rose and scurried across the water with a mighty clatter of lobed feet pattering on the surface. Next moment, to the right, to the left and ahead, the whole lagoon heaved thunderously upward, as the main body of the pintails and the vast array of the mallards rose in a solid, opaque mass.
For a space of seconds the air glittered and swirled with the flash of their whirring wings, while the water falling from their bodies shimmered in the pale morning light like rain. Then, above and behind him, dark against the mist blanket hanging over the marsh, the crippled shoveller saw the wide-pinioned shape of doom for which, even as he swam, his round, brilliant, golden eyes had been searching.
If the keener eyes of the gray eagle had already picked out the lone duck swimming across the surface of the lagoon ahead of him, and perhaps a hundred feet below him, for some moments he seemed to give no heed to it. Possibly he mistook the shoveller for a coot, many hundreds of which dotted the pools and ponds within range of his vision. Possibly his attention was distracted momentarily by the great twin armies of pintails and mallards which had surged upward from the long lagoon bordering the river and were racing off through the air, the mallards swinging to the right and the pintails to the left. At any rate, some seconds elapsed before the eagle, with a slight motion of his tail, altered his line of flight so that he would pass directly over the center of the lagoon; and not until he was nearly over its center did he show unmistakably that he had found a victim suited to his fancy.
Until that moment he had sailed onward rather indolently, with no appearance of haste, his long, marbled wings fully extended and apparently as rigid as the lifeless wings of a monoplane. Then, all at once, the dark, broad pinions bent slightly upward and curved sharply so that they seemed half-closed, the long, stiff-shafted tail opened like a fan, the burly body of the great bird tilted forward, the strong, yellow feet were thrust forward and downward with widely opened claws. Next moment the cloven air sang the wild, keen song of the royal eagle plunging for his prey.
The shoveller drake, swimming desperately, was now some twenty feet from the lagoon's eastern margin. There a willow-grown bank, bordered with a dense growth of tall reeds springing from the marginal water, extended between the lagoon and the river. The close-growing reeds would provide a respite and perhaps safety if the drake could reach them; but that sanctuary seemed as unattainable now as if it were twenty miles instead of twenty feet away.
The drake had made one serious mistake, a mistake which seemed certain to prove fatal. Minutes before, he should have sought safety beneath the surface where he could cling to some submerged grass root or reed stem until his breath failed or the eagle had passed on. It was too late for this expedient now. His broken pinion hampered him sadly whenever he tried to force his buoyant body under water; and only an infinitesimal moment was left to him. If he tried to dive now those trenchant talons, already yawning for their prey, would sink deep into his back before the water closed over him.
In that final infinitesimal moment a strange chance intervened. The shoveller did not know that, in the densest growth of reeds close to the water's edge, round yellow eyes, set in a long, narrow, snakelike head, had watched, at first with languid interest, this drama of the river flats. He did not know that, at the moment when the gray tyrant half-closed his wings and shot downward through the singing air, sudden fear had flamed in those eyes, and the long javelin-bill in front of the snakelike head had sagged open with fright. Neither the fleeing duck nor the plunging eagle was aware that a great blue heron had been standing motionless in the reeds, until, with a terrified squawk, the tall bird spread its ash-blue wings and, with craning neck and trailing legs, flapped upward.
The heron had been facing the lagoon. Either there was no time to change his position before taking flight, or else the stiff, dense stems, hedging him in on every side, governed the direction of his take-off. At any rate, when he flapped upward above the reed-tops with a hoarse, long-drawn croak of panic, the first hurried strokes of his pinions placed him squarely in the plunging eagle's path.
For a hundredth of a second his ash-blue bulk, the wings spread wide, the long neck stretched to its utmost extent, loomed almost directly over the swimming shoveller and not more than fifteen feet above him. Next moment the eagle, hurtling downward at cannon ball speed, crashed full into the heron.
The great, loosely-knit bird crumpled, collapsed—a broken, shapeless mass of blood-spattered, ashy feathers. Before the gray tyrant, lashing the air furiously, had recovered from the surprise and shock of the collision, the shoveller drake was hidden amid the crowding reed stems.
With the wild things, as a rule, fear is a shadow which comes suddenly and passes quickly. For perhaps ten minutes the shoveller remained in the cover of the reeds, resting quietly in the shallow water lapping amid the smooth, straight stems. Then he turned, paddled back to the open, and heading out toward the center of the lagoon, resumed his interrupted breakfast.
Already a small squadron of pintails had returned, and already the great fleets of coots had moved out again from the marginal waters so that they covered the lower part of the lagoon practically from shore to shore. There was no need for the shoveller to search the air in order to assure himself that the danger had passed. The careless confidence of the coots and pintails was a sufficient assurance, and, the danger having vanished, the fear which it had inspired had vanished also.
Yet the surface of the lagoon bore evidence of how real that danger had been, how well-founded was that fear. Twenty feet from the belt of reeds fringing the bank floated the carcass of the great blue heron which had met death by so strange and so dramatic an accident. The shoveller, after he had made out what it was, never glanced at it again. But if a man had examined the carcass, he would have found it smashed almost to a pulp by the terrific impact of that strange encounter in the air; and he would have noted, too, that the eagle, disappointed in his quest for choicer meat, had not fed upon the heron, but had left it contemptuously where it fell.
These details, however, were of no interest to the crippled shoveller, or to the other feathered denizens of the lagoon, and none of them paid more than momentary attention to the floating mass of tousled feathers and shattered flesh and bone which afforded such impressive proof of their enemy's power. Swiftly the population of the pool increased. From the open water where he was feeding, surrounded by squadrons of boisterous, quacking mallards and gentle, soft-voiced teal, the shoveller drake could view a vast expanse of sky. He saw against the bright blue of the heavens, no longer obscured by mist, thousands of ducks of many kinds, not only the more abundant species like those feeding near him, but also widgeon and green-winged teal and blue-bills even more numerous this morning than the mallards. Buffleheads, too, he saw in small numbers, lovers of the saltwater bays and inlets but questing inland to-day because a winter gale was sweeping the coast.
Flock after flock of all these varied forms shot at express-train speed across the field of his vision, to swerve, wheel, circle and finally settle in some one of the innumerable ponds or lagoons scattered everywhere over the broad river marshes and the watery flats. Yet in all that feathered concourse the shoveller drake saw not one duck of his own kind.
No hunter could tell why in some winters shovellers were common, while in other years scarcely a shoveller could be found among all the legions of ducks congregated along the Low Country rivers. This winter was of the latter sort. Countless thousands of other ducks fed in the freshwater marshes and the flooded rice lands, but the shoveller regiments had chosen a different feeding ground.
At first the lone drake's searching of the air had no more specific motive than a vague but persistent longing for the companionship of his own species. Of late, however, this longing had become more definite, more poignant. Though winter still had many weeks to run, already he had donned his nuptial dress, already the mating instinct was strong in him. When he scanned the sky now, he was not looking for a flock of shovellers but for a female shoveller, for a mate whom he might woo and win in anticipation of that joyful honeymoon journey in the spring to the far-off northern lake where they would build their nest and rear their young.
Day after day the crippled drake had awaited the coming of that mate. Day after day he had waited and watched in vain. On this day also his search seemed doomed to failure. The sun reached and passed its zenith. The short winter afternoon faded and the night shut down. For hours the drake slept, his head resting on his back, his wide, spade-like bill half buried in his plumage. A large part of the night, however, he spent in feeding, paddling swiftly along, his head half-submerged, straining water and mud through the comb-like teeth of his bill.
All about him in the darkness he heard the voices of feathered myriads, the hoarse or nasal tones of other ducks of half a dozen kinds, the incessant, infinitely varied conversation of the coots. Dawn came, and the mists of morning, then rosy sunlight melting the mists. Again the lone shoveller heard, far away across the marshes, that rolling thunder of innumerable wings which announced that the tyrant was abroad. But on this morning the thunder came no nearer. The big gray eagle was seeking his prey a little farther to the northward where the flats were wider and even more populous.
The morning hours passed quietly with no hint of notable developments in store. Then, just before noon, the great event befell.
The crippled drake saw her when she was half a mile away, a mere speck against the sky, seemingly indistinguishable at that distance from the hundreds of other ducks dotting the air. Instantly the pupils of his eyes contracted and their golden circlets glowed like flame. Straight onward she came, flying almost as fast as a teal, guided by chance or fate to the one pool in all that wilderness of marsh where another of her kind awaited her. Probably she saw the drake before she actually alighted, for suddenly she swerved in the air and came to rest close beside him where he floated in a little open space in the midst of a great raft of coots.
Much as he had longed for her, impatiently as he had awaited her, he took her coming very calmly. With a low guttural "konk, konk," he swam slowly up to her, his head and neck held high, jerking his bill upward. She acknowledged his greeting by bobbing her head, and for some minutes the pair swam slowly in circles. Then, without further demonstration, the shoveller drake led his demure gray-brown sweetheart towards a shallow spot near the lagoon's margin where the soft, slimy mud was particularly rich in snails.
Within an hour of their meeting death struck close by them, so close that they could almost feel the wind from his wings. The tyrant was abroad again. Straight towards their pool that ominous thunder of pinions rolled across the flats as flock after flock of ducks rose and fled from the path of the eagle. The crippled drake, remembering suddenly his narrow escape of the day before, began swimming rapidly towards the reeds, while around him the coot fleet scattered and broke, and with a hiss and a roar of whirring pinions the duck squadrons bounded upward. Close behind the drake swam his mate, bound to him by an instinct even stronger than the terror which urged her to spread her wings and fly.
This time the tyrant came more swiftly, driving through the air with powerful surging strokes which forced his big body forward at high speed. Ten feet behind the two swimming shovellers a coot gave a shrill cackling cry, opened his wings and struggled to lift himself from the surface. A dead weight pulled him back, a weight which clung to his right foot and held him fast. Desperately his wings beat the water, making a mighty commotion; and the tyrant, poising at that instant fifty feet above the pool, half closed his broad marbled pinions and plunged.
The female shoveller dived; the crippled drake, hampered by his broken wing, got himself under water a last. But the fierce eyes of the tyrant had not been fixed upon either of the shovellers. His target was the struggling coot; and the latter, unable either to dive or to fly because of the big terrapin which had fastened itself to his foot, was gripped and crushed in an instant by the tyrant's long curved claws. A moment the eagle's dark-gray wings labored mightily, their serrated tips brushing the water. Then the terrapin's hold gave way and the tyrant heaved upward with his prize.
Day followed day in the long, marsh-encircled lagoon beside the river: days of placid enjoyment of the lagoon's rich stores of food: days of sudden alarms and thrilling adventures. Often the two shovellers saw the gray tyrant. Three times in as many weeks the crippled drake narrowly escaped those lethal talons. But his injured wing was healing; though he could not fly, he could dive more easily and he had learned to thwart the hunting eagle by disappearing promptly beneath the surface. His mate, too, seemed to understand that he could now fend for himself in his own way. Generally when the tyrant appeared she took wing with the other ducks, returning after the eagle had passed on.
There were other enemies besides the tyrant. Once, as the two shovellers dabbled for tiny molluscs close to the reed-bordered bank between the lagoon and the river, a mink sprang at them from a clump of jocko bushes. Wildcats, raccoons and foxes walked this bank by night, and more than once the shovellers heard in the darkness a shrill, tragic, choking cry which told them that some unwary coot, venturing ashore after nightfall, had met a bloody end.
When the tyrant himself did not come, there were wide-winged haunters of the marshes who could frighten although they could not harm. The great blue herons passing from time to time over the lagoon; the turkey vultures sweeping and soaring against the sky; the long-tailed marsh harriers searching the reedy plains for the small furred and feathered game on which they fed—all these, as they swung over, cast swift-moving shadows upon the waters, shadows which spread sudden fright because they might be cast by the tyrant's wings.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly the mild Low Country winter changed to spring. Along the edges of the woods far away across the marshes swamp maples flamed a brilliant red; a mist of green clothed the willows on the old ricefield banks; in the high air tree swallows swarmed like gnats; still higher, a mere speck against the sky, the first water turkey of the season drew circles between white pinnacles of cloud.
The frog choruses swelled louder and louder; the thicket edges rang with the songs of birds; golden jessamine, dogwood and Cherokee rose glowed and glimmered in the swamps. The first ospreys came, the first martins, company after company of migrating white herons. These and many other travelers from the lower South brought new life to the river marshes; but as these lovers of warmth increased, the duck legions diminished.
Flock after flock took wing and returned no more. The hardy mallards went first; then the pintails and the green-winged teal. One by one the squadrons of widgeons and bluebills began their long journey. In a single night all the marsh lagoons and flooded rice lands bordering the river were almost emptied of coots. Soon, of all the myriads of ducks which had spent the winter along the river flats, only a few small flocks of blue-winged teal, a half dozen belated widgeons or baldpates and the two shovellers remained.
The wind, which for days had blown from the east, swung southward. Suddenly the air grew languid and warm. The lagging baldpates disappeared. Coral-billed gallinules supplanted the rear-guard of the coots. An hour after the next sunrise the last flock of teal mounted as though at a signal, circled high, then headed away to the north. The shoveller drake and his mate watched them go; and just before they disappeared in the distance, the female shoveller, without a glance at her partner or a sound of farewell, bounded upward and whirred away in pursuit.
From a dead cedar at the edge of the pineland, far away across the marshes, a hawk pitched forward, opened long pointed wings, and shot northward at amazing speed—the speed of the peregrine falcon on the track of his prey. He passed like a winged projectile not more than a hundred yards from the lagoon of the shoveller drake. The latter did not see him, did not know that at the very out set of her journey his mate must run a race with death. He knew only that his mate had left him and that she would not return—that, joyously, eagerly, exultantly, she had mounted at last to that broad blue road of the sky which for weeks had beckoned her, a road which led northward and ever northward to the far-off sloughs and prairie lakes where the wild duck myriads bred.
The golden circlets rimming the crippled drake's pupils glowed a brilliant orange. Rearing his body upward, he stood for an instant upon the surface of the water, his wings fanning the air. Not for weeks had he tried his pinions, dreading the burning agony which he had learned to associate with every effort to fly; but now his wings fanned faster and faster, and suddenly they lifted him. For a hundred yards he flew on, barely topping the taller reeds and sword rushes. Then he slumped abruptly downward, plunging with a splash into a flooded ricefield separated by a strip of marsh from the lagoon where he had spent so many weeks.
A month passed; a month of gnawing loneliness and incessant restlessness, spent dabbling in flooded ricefields and shallow marsh ponds which he shared with noisy gallinules, long-necked water turkeys, stately milk-white egrets, herons of several kinds and tall white and black ibises. He seldom saw the tyrant now because, with the departure of the duck armies, the gray eagle had devoted himself to other prey. Day followed day uneventfully. Then, one still sunny morning as the lone drake feasted on water snails along the edge of a little peninsula of reeds, a black log lying half submerged near the margin came suddenly to life.
As the 'gator rushed, the drake, with a hoarse startled cry, opened his wings and launched upward from the surface. On and on he flew, rising higher and higher; on and on for fifty yards, a hundred, five hundred. His wings beat evenly and strongly. No sudden weakness or numbness assailed him. At first he flew due south, the direction in which he happened to be headed when the 'gator charged him; but gradually he swung in a wide half-circle until his long bill and slender neck pointed north.
The green marshes and the shimmering blue lagoons slid past beneath him. Far in front, a thousand miles away, a placid prairie lake, where perhaps his mate was swimming with her little ones, beckoned and lured him on.
The tyrant was taking his ease. In the frosty, windless upper air, so far above the earth that to the eyes of a man he would have appeared no larger than a gnat, he floated on outstretched wings as lightly as the white wisps of cloud drifting near him. This was his true kingdom, this lofty illimitable solitude; and it was there, "in those blue tracts above the thunder," that he had his throne.
He was most regal, most kinglike, when, as though contemptuous of the earth and of all earthbound creatures, he soared to heights unattainable by vulture or hawk or heron and from that dizzy altitude looked languidly down upon the varicolored world of green forests, blue lagoons and silvery serpentine rivers and creeks. It was then that he was like a throned monarch; for it was then that he was most completely at his ease, most secure in the strength that could lift him to such heights, most arrogant in the assurance of undisputed sovereignty. On earth there were enemies against whom he must be always on guard. At the lower levels of the air there were those who, while they could not injure him, might annoy him as a buzzing insect may annoy a lion. But the upper air was his. None ventured there except certain ones of his own royal race, and with these kindred kings he lived in peace.
Often it was peace that the tyrant sought when he mounted to these lofty fastnesses—the peace of boundless silence, of freedom from all possible danger, of complete mental relaxation. There was no need for watchfulness amid the clouds. There all his senses could rest; and there his wide wings, motionless except for occasional slight quiverings of their flexible tips, could perform their function almost automatically, without direction from his brain. Without fatigue, almost without effort, he could remain aloft for hours, sailing in great circles or wide ellipses, keeping the same level or, if the air currents were favorable, spiraling gradually upward until he approached the invisible upper frontier of his airy kingdom beyond which even the eagle cannot soar.
On this bright mid-spring morning drowsiness possessed him. Spring was a season of plenty when his unwilling purveyors, the ospreys, were numerous and industrious, yielding him a rich tribute of finny spoils. Although in winter he varied his fare by catching unwary coots or wounded ducks, fish had always been his favorite food; and now, with fish plentiful and easily obtained and with the labors of the nesting season behind him, the tyrant had abundant time for idleness and rest. Shortly after sunrise he had breakfasted upon a large mullet which an indignant osprey had surrendered to him. Then, languidly, lazily he had climbed to his high kingdom to spend the rest of the morning circling somnolently just under the motionless white clouds.
For nearly two hours the gray eagle had been soaring thus, more than half-asleep. Suddenly, his drowsiness fell from him. Far below him and to the south, a black speck was moving swiftly through the air. To his far-sighted eyes that speck had the form of a duck, a duck whose wide, flat bill and slender neck identified it at once as a shoveller. Its course would bring it in a few minutes directly under the eagle; and apparently not until it was directly under him did the tyrant reach his decision.
Until that moment the eagle, though he watched the oncoming duck keenly with eyes that glowed fiercely under their beetling brows, continued his placid soaring. Then, as though he had become suddenly aware of something unperceived or unrealized until that instant, he half-closed his wings and slid downward through the hissing air.
The golden eyes of the shoveller drake, speeding northward at last on his long-delayed journey to the distant Canadian lake which all his life had been his summer home, searched the air lane ahead of him and the sky spaces above. Yet those eyes had not seen a certain sinister dark spot which had been moving slowly in wide circles perhaps a thousand feet or more above the line of the drake's flight.
The shoveller had missed that dark spot soaring just under the billowy white clouds because at the moment his attention was otherwise occupied. A half-hour had elapsed since he had begun his journey; and although at first the swiftness and evenness of his wingbeats seemed to prove beyond all doubt that his injured pinion was now as strong and serviceable as ever, it was already evident that this appearance of completely restored strength was deceptive.
No human eye could have detected at this stage anything abnormal in the drake's manner of flight. But the drake himself knew that all was not well with him, that he could not fly as he was accustomed to fly; and the marvelous eyes of the gray eagle, looking straight down upon the drake as the latter passed far below him, perceived immediately that this was a duck whose powers of flight had been impaired. It was this discovery which of a sudden had determined the tyrant's course of action, and brought him shooting down like a feathered meteor from the upper air.
Possibly it was sound, not sight, which first apprised the shoveller of his peril. Possibly he heard, above the rush of the wind through his own pinions, a high, thin, wailing note the meaning of which he knew—the keen, wild song which the wind sings when it is smitten and cleft by the hard edges of the eagle's wings as the king of birds plunges upon his prey. More likely the drake's golden eyes first warned him of the danger, flaring orange-red with terror as they lit suddenly upon the dark down-rushing bulk behind and above him.
If, until then, that distant prairie lake where perhaps his mate dabbled with her little ones had beckoned him, the vision was instantly blotted out. Panic swept over him like a wave, gripped and stabbed him like death's claw. Yet even in his panic he did the one thing that might save him.
Directly beneath him lay a wide plain of river marsh; but not more than a quarter of a mile to his right a long loop of the wide, winding river glittered in the sun. This was his haven if he could reach it; and instantly he wheeled in the air and, tilting his body sharply forward, drove with all the strength of his pinions directly towards the river's smooth expanse. Beneath that silvery mirror-like surface life awaited him. Towards that goal he ran his race with death.
It was a brave race. Until its final tenth of a second, its issue was in doubt. The drake's swift maneuver, his sudden wheel to the right, gained him some twenty yards. For a moment he no longer heard that thin, keen, wailing note behind and above him. But almost instantly he heard it again, and swiftly it sharpened to a hiss which in turn became a loud, angry, rustling noise like the rushing of wind through bending tree-tops.
Fifteen feet above the surface of the river the race ended—ended with a savage downward thrust of widespread blue-black talons and a smother of great gray wings furiously lashing the air. The gray tyrant swept buoyantly onward and upward, gripping in his claws the white and russet body of the drake, the long green neck dangling limply. Three miles away, in a tall pine on a wooded island in the marsh, there was an abandoned eagle nest which the tyrant sometimes used as a storehouse for food. Towards this nest he set his course.