Gray Eagle (Sass collection)/The Golden Wanderer
IN THE thick woods of chestnut and oak at the foot of Slanting Pasture, wood thrushes, rose-breasted grosbeaks and blue headed vireos were singing, each heedless of all the rest. Abruptly their music lulled. A low humming sound, which seemed to come from all directions at once, filled the air. Low as the sound was, thrush, grosbeak and vireo fell silent. A sudden stillness hung over the high upland pasture, sparkling with dew and starred with innumerable daisies—a hush heavy with expectation, laden with peril.
Possibly some finer sense than that of hearing had warmed the singing birds along the forest's edge. Not until the bird chorus had lulled did the bearded, blue-shirted mountaineer, hidden in a coppice of alder near the middle of the pasture, detect that vibrant hum. At the same moment a bunch of twenty sheep grazing fifty yards to the right of the coppice caught the sound and huddled. One of their number left the flock, ran forward a few paces, then stopped, staring stupidly.
In the brief interval which had elapsed the hum ming sound had sharpened to a hiss. A great dark shape was falling from the sky like a huge arrowhead—a big brown bird, its wings half closed, its curved beak pointing downward, its feathered legs, armed with long hooked talons, thrust straight beneath it. The hiss became a loud rustling noise like the rushing of wind; and in another half-second the golden eagle, suddenly checking her descent in a smother of buffeting wings, struck her grappling hooks into her prey.
The blue-shirted mountaineer in the alder coppice swore vehemently as he jumped to his feet. Of the three young lambs in Slanting Pasture, the eagle had chosen the one farthest from the hunter's ambush and least conveniently placed for his present purpose, which was, briefly stated, to kill the daring freebooter that had been raiding his flock. For an hour he had been awaiting his chance, and now that it had come it was not so sure a thing as he had hoped for, since the raider had selected a victim behind the alder thicket and not in front of it, and was thus hidden from him at the moment most favorable for a shot. It took the man only a fraction of a minute to dart around the edge of the thicket; yet by that time the eagle, alarmed by a movement of the alders, had already risen forty feet above the ground.
High above Slanting Pasture, a black speck moved across the pale-blue face of the sky. For ten minutes this speck had been swinging there, describing wide circles and long ellipses; and for seven minutes of that ten it had looked down upon another bird of the same species soaring and circling at a lesser altitude. Then, of a sudden, the lower bird had plunged, rushing down through the hissing air straight for the green surface of Slanting Pasture, where, as usual, a flock of white sheep were grazing.
The male eagle knew that his mate had spotted her victim. Instantly he half closed his wings and slid swiftly down a steep incline, descending several hundred feet before he checked his fall with a sudden stiffening of widely extended pinions. With fierce, eager eyes he watched the familiar drama—a drama which these two tyrants of the air had reenacted again and again in this same spot during the past several weeks. Even at that great height his eyes could distinguish every detail of the scene spread beneath him. Before his mate fell upon it, he saw the lamb at which she was aiming and knew that its fate was sealed.
Suddenly his gaze shifted to an alder thicket near the middle of the pasture. A man had emerged from this thicket arid was darting around its rim. The soaring eagle's muscles tightened; his head swung lower as his dark eyes, fiercer than ever now, measured the distance between his mate, just rising from the ground, and the unlooked-for intruder who had burst from his ambush in the alders.
The big bird knew what was coming, knew the menace of the rifle which the man had whipped to his shoulder, knew that another moment would decide the outcome. He saw the flash of the rifle, saw his mate collapse in the air and pitch heavily downward. For ten minutes after the man had carried her body away toward his cabin below the pasture the male eagle continued to sail round and round in great circles. Then he turned his bill northward toward the high summits of the Smokies, and, driving forward swiftly with powerful beats of his pinions, vanished behind a dense white cloud drifting down the long valley from the upper peaks.
Some two weeks later, an hour after sunrise, a bald eagle passed over a saddle of the highest ridge of the Smokies, traveling eastward. Though of full size, he was evidently a young bird, for he wore the uniform dark-gray livery characteristic of the bald eagle in its second year, before the head and tail have acquired the white plumage which denotes maturity. A squirrel hunter, resting for a few minutes on a flat sunny rock near the summit of the ridge, saw the big bird pass over well beyond rifle range and shook his fist at it. In the dark plumage of youth the bald eagle is virtually indistinguishable from the golden eagle at a little distance. The squirrel hunter took this bird to be one of the pair of golden eagles which for many years had nested somewhere amid the high peaks of the Smokies and had levied tribute not only upon the wild creatures of the upland forests but also upon the little flocks and herds of the mountain farms.
Keener eyes than those of the squirrel hunter were deceived. A male golden eagle, sunning himself on a narrow ledge of a southward-facing precipice, suddenly dropped off into the abyss. For twenty feet or so he dropped, his wings half open. Then, spreading his pinions to the utmost, he planed outward from the face of the cliff, shot upward with the impetus thus gained, and swinging around a half circle, set a straight and slightly ascending course to the eastward. A mile or more away, and perhaps a hundred yards higher, the bald eagle which had just passed over the ridge between the peaks pursued his journey, his long, wide wings steadily and strongly smiting the air. On that dark form, cleaving the thin atmosphere high above the wooded ridges and valleys slanting down from the upper Smokies, the deep-set eyes of the golden eagle were fixed with an eagemess almost terrible in its intensity.
If the bald eagle was aware from the outset of the grim pursuer speeding in his wake, he gave no sign of apprehension or even of interest. He, too, was a king in his own right; and, young though he was, he knew his own powers and acknowledged no overlord among all the tribes of the air. With the other eagles of his own kind he had lived in peace. The big, booted, ring-tailed eagles of the mountain country he had never happened to meet.
Late that spring, seized by the wanderlust which sometimes attacks young bald eagles that have not yet chosen mates, he had left the barrier islands of the Low Country coast, the ancient home and hunting ground of his race, and had traveled far inland, crossing the middle country and the hill country and even passing beyond the highest ranges of the Blue Ridge. There, for a while, he had maintained a difficult existence in a region of high forested mountains and green cultivated valleys—a region of strange and unfamiliar aspect, ill suited to his needs. Now, his wanderlust gone, he was on his way back to the Low Country which was his proper home, a country where swamps, marshes and barrier islands abounded with game, and where sounds, creeks and rivers teemed with fish.
With that shining goal before him, the bald eagle was traveling not at the highest speed of which he was capable, but at a steady gait which he could maintain without fatigue for hours at a time. The golden eagle, on the other hand, having no long journey in view and intent only upon overtaking the big bird ahead of him, was exerting his powers to the utmost. In less than half an hour he had drawn up to within a hundred yards of the other and at the same time had mounted to approximately the same level. Not until then did the bald eagle betray knowledge of his pursuer's approach; possibly not until then was he aware that he was being pursued. Suddenly he swerved from his straight course, swinging to the right in a wide circle and spiraling upward, at the same moment uttering a fierce, cackling scream.
For several seconds the golden eagle held his onward way. Then he, too, swung to the right and circled upward. But he did not answer the other's challenge, and he did not, as a human onlooker might have expected, hurl himself at once upon the stalwart stranger whose piercing eyes, no less arrogant than his own, denoted a spirit by no means averse to a battle in the air. For a few minutes the two regal birds, equals in size and martial bearing, circled and sailed in close proximity, each watching the other narrowly and each evidently prepared for any hostile move that the other might make. Then the bald eagle swung sharply to the left and, passing within ten feet of the golden eagle, resumed his journey.
Yet as though not quite sure that he would not have to enforce his right of passage through the territory ruled by this tawny-headed monarch of the peaks, the wide-winged traveler kept a watchful eye on the air road behind him; and presently he saw that the tawny-headed one had ceased soaring and circling and was trailing him again at a distance of four or five hundred yards. He saw also, however, that his pursuer was no longer rushing forward at full speed as though bent upon attacking him. The golden eagle's wings fanned the air no more rapidly than those of the bald eagle, and the distance between the two birds was not diminishing. The bald eagle, watchful and unafraid, but too intent upon reaching his far-off home to pick a fight by the way, held his straight eastward course.
Hour after hour the two great birds traveled thus in company, the bald eagle leading, the golden eagle following in the other's wake. All that forenoon they sped on, high above gunshot range, mile after mile, league after league, until they no longer saw mountains or even hills beneath them, but a rolling, undulating country dotted with farms and with towns. Their course was now decidedly south of east, and gradually the land under them was growing flatter and the wooded areas more extensive.
When, in late afternoon, the leader turned off at right angles from the winding sluggish river which for several hours he had been following as a guide, the cleared spaces had grown fewer and smaller, the farms were more widely scattered, and forest covered most of the face of the land. Down to this forest the bald eagle slanted toward dusk, coming to rest in the top of a tall cypress surrounded by other cypresses, black gums and magnolias; and after him the golden eagle swung down also to a perch in another great moss-bearded tree near by.
In this way the golden eagle of the high Smokies came to the Low Country of the coastal plain after the death of his mate. Probably loneliness more than anything else was responsible for the whim which had caused him to follow for hundreds of miles the big dark-gray stranger whom he had at first mistaken for his lost consort. The eagle, when he chooses a mate, is wedded to her for life. For fifteen years these golden eagles of the Smokies had lived together, and when on that morning in Slanting Pasture their long comradeship came to an end, there had begun for the survivor a period of incessant restlessness and gnawing discontent.
Somehow he knew what had happened, knew that his mate was lost to him. Yet, incapable of comprehending the significance of death, day after day he had looked for her, ranging far and wide over the ridges and valleys. In all the blue and purple wilderness of mountain and sky, he was alone. No other golden eagle lived within fifty miles of his aerie; for he and his consort had kept their kingdom against all corners, and year after year the two young eagles which they reared each spring were no sooner able to shift for themselves than their jealous sire gave them to understand that their presence was no longer desired.
Hence when his mate was killed he had found no other of his own kind to keep him company. For two weeks he had patrolled his familiar hunting ground, winging restlessly from peak to peak, killing his prey where he found it, his eyes ceaselessly searching the mountain-rimmed horizons and the blue emptiness of the upper air. Then came the morning when, as he dozed at one of his favorite lookout stations near the summit of a towering peak, he roused suddenly to see a great royal bird, of somber plumage and as wide of wing as his mate, journeying eastward a mile or so away. For a brief interval he had believed that his long quest was over.
The disillusionment which doubtless came to him long before he had overtaken the newcomer could not dispel altogether the impulse which had sent him instantly in swift and eager pursuit; and even after he had found the dark-gray stranger to be a male bird of another species bold enough to challenge him to battle, the loneliness which oppressed him caused him not only to ignore the challenge but even to follow where the other led. This was not the companionship which he desired without understanding that he desired it. But it was companionship of a sort; and mile after mile slipped past beneath him, and before he realized it he had traveled beyond the frontiers of his own domain.
Having journeyed so far, it was perhaps only natural that he should follow his new comrade throughout the rest of that day. Hence when dusk fell and the bald eagle, still some forty miles short of the barrier island which was his ultimate goal, sought a lodging for the night in a great swamp well within the bounds of the Low Country, the wanderer from the Smokies found himself, a few minutes later, at rest in a dense wood of tall straight-stemmed trees not utterly unlike the familiar balsams of his mountains.
If the feathery-foliaged cypresses, in spite of their ghostly draperies of gray Spanish moss, faintly recalled the fir forests of his upland home, all else was new and strange. Darkness quickly shut the surrounding woods from his view; but these woods were full of night noises such as he had never heard before; noises which oppressed even his bold spirit with a sense of vague disquiet. The noises—sometimes low and guttural, sometimes hoarse and loud—came from tall trees fifty yards to his left, where the dry floor of the swamp sloped gently down to the edge of a small lagoon; and the eagle did not know that those trees held the bulky nests of a company of great blue herons which still used the spot as a roosting place, although the breeding season was long past.
The intermittent clamor of the herons waked him at frequent intervals during the night; and being thus wakeful, he heard other sounds also, only a few of which he recognized. Some of these came from tree-tops near at hand; others floated up from the blackness directly beneath him—faint rustlings as of large animals moving through brush or reeds, occasionally a stamping as of hoofs on hard ground, once a shrill scream followed by a short scuffle amid leaves or rushes.
Dawn found him alert and eager, his strong muscles rested, his appetite keen. Amid the distractions of his new surroundings he had forgotten his fellow voyager. It did not occur to him to look for the bald eagle in the neighboring tree-top, and he did not see the latter leave his perch shortly after dawn and head away to the southward on the last lap of his journey. More interesting sights engaged the attention of the mountain-bred golden eagle, looking about him for the first time in the big Low Country swamp.
While the light was yet faint he heard the swish of wide wings above him and saw a dim shape sail overhead in the gloom. Presently came another and another, until the air seemed alive with the sound of wings; for the tall blue herons in the roost at the eagle's left were early risers and most of them were off for their fishing grounds in the river marshes and the wet rice fields before day had fairly come. A little later, a whitetail buck followed by two does walked slowly along a winding trail through a bed of reeds almost directly beneath the eagle's perch, and he knew then the meaning of the faint rustling sounds which he had heard in the night. A barred owl, returning from his hunting, winged silently past. Two wood ducks shot by like bullets, heading for the lagoon beside the heron roost. Many squirrels, some of which were much larger and of a darker gray than those of the mountain woods, moved about in the trees on every side. These big iron-gray, white-nosed squirrels he watched with especial interest. He had never seen their like before, but he knew that they were savory meat, and his hunger was growing more and more insistent. Motionless on his perch near the top of the cypress, he awaited his chance.
Close to the foot of a big black gum a long, thickbodied, black-and-red snake emerged from a hole under a root. One of the smaller gray squirrels saw it and ran chattering down the trunk of the gum, lying there head downward, scolding excitedly. Presently, as the snake glided slowly on, the squirrel leaped to the ground, to be joined there by three others which came running from as many directions. The eagle waited and watched. But the big white-nosed squirrels upon which he had set his heart kept to the trees; and the eagle, more adept at striking his prey on the ground, finally picked one of the smaller grays as his target and poised himself for the plunge.
In the nick of time fate intervened to save the furry busybody. A twig cracked behind a tangle of grapevine and smilax and the squirrels scampered in all directions, each making for the nearest tree. The eagle, his neck stretched downward, his wings half opened, saw a tall bronze bird step into view from behind the vine tangle and recognized it instantly—a wild turkey gobbler, taller and bigger than any that he had ever seen among his native mountains.
Without a sound he dropped from his perch, fell like a plummet half-way to the ground, then, half opening his wings, slid swiftly down a steep incline, his body slanting sideways, his widespreading claws open beneath him. Next moment the wild gobbler's big wings were beating the grass in the death agony.
The eagle, busily plucking the great bronze carcass, did not know that delicate pointed ears, alert to catch all woods sounds, had heard the convulsive threshing of those powerful wings. A hundred yards down the wind two gray foxes, hunting together, halted abruptly at that strange, sudden commotion, listened eagerly and wonderingly, then trotted forward, sniffing the air. From behind a fringe of low canes they surveyed the situation. Then in some subtle, soundless way known only to foxes, they agreed upon the strategy which the problem demanded.
The male trotted boldly forward, heading straight for the spot where the eagle stood upon the turkey's body. The female circled to the left and approached the eagle from that side. Two minutes later the big bird, his hooked bill full of turkey feathers, saw two foxes—not rusty-red like those of the mountains, but gray with white and russet markings—leaping toward him with bared fangs. One fox he might have defied, but with one assailant in his front and another at his flank the odds were too heavy. With a scream of anger he rose and, circling upward, left his prey to the wily schemers of the swamp woods who had schemed their way to a feast.
One taste of juicy flesh, torn from the breast of his victim just before the foxes had appeared, served only to sharpen his hunger. As he spiraled upward above the woods his eyes searched the tree-tops and the sky and swept the distant level horizon. To the eagle of the Smokies, all that they saw was bewilderingly strange; for here was no tumbled terrain of ridge and valley, but a flat expanse clothed for the most part with pine forest. Athwart this pine forest lay the cypress and gum swamp where he had spent the night, a green belt four or five miles wide and many miles long; while scattered here and there were houses and cultivated clearings and larger areas, of vivid green bordered and blotched with olive, which he took to be pastures, but which were really wet prairies of tall rushes and abandoned rice fields. In a dozen places he saw the glint and glimmer of water; and far away to the southward a river wound like a gigantic glittering serpent through sunny verdant flats walled in by luxuriant woods of oak, hickory, magnolia and other broad-leaved trees.
But the strangeness of the panorama, so utterly unlike his mountain home, engaged the eagle's attention only momentarily, if indeed he was really conscious of it all. He was hungry, and what chiefly interested him was the life which he saw around him in the air. Whereas in his mountains the air was nearly always empty except perhaps for a solitary buzzard, hawk or raven, here in this new hunting ground the golden eagle saw big birds soaring on every side or flying at lower levels with measured, deliberate wing strokes.
Some of these birds were turkey vultures precisely like those that he had always known. Others, though he had never seen them before, he recognized as belonging to the vulture kind, and to these he paid little attention. But circling higher than any of the vultures were three long-necked, long-tailed birds which he watched with lively interest; while at frequent intervals other large wide-winged wayfarers, some of them snowy white, others gray-blue and white and reddish-purple, passed back and forth beneath him.
Perhaps a little bewildered by so great an abundance of life, the eagle continued for nearly half an hour to sail idly in great circles. Then he seemed suddenly to reach a decision. For no definite reason, he followed the course of the river, winding between wet rice fields overgrown with lotus, cattails and other water plants, and flanked with woods. In the rice fields scores of herons were feeding, while many gallinules floated on little ponds and creeks bordered with wampee and reeds. About midday he killed a wood duck; then, when he had eaten it, he rested for a while in a tall pine beside the river, and in mid-afternoon resumed his journey, still traveling southward. In that direction lay the salt marshes of the coast, the long wooded barrier islands, and beyond this chain of islands the sea. In sight of the ocean, he turned northeastward, flying up the coast high above the marshes; and he slept that night in a stunted live oak in a dense junglelike island forest, with the thunder of the Atlantic rollers booming in his ears.
About five o'clock of a sultry August afternoon, Capt. Mat Norman, daydreaming at the wheel of his little motor freighter, was roused suddenly by the swish of many wings. Kicking over the stool upon which he had been sitting just aft of the low cabin, he reared his stocky body to its full height, muttering an exclamation of surprise. At the same moment a red Irish terrier, which had been sleeping on top of the cabin, scrambled to his feet and began to bark. With a brief command Norman quieted the dog.
Then he stooped and called through the open door of the cabin, "Look here, York, if you want to see something."
A tall negro in grease-stained blue overalls emerged, glanced quickly around and ahead, then plunged into the cabin again. In a moment he reappeared, a rusty single-barreled shotgun in his hand. Norman spoke sharply, peremptorily:
"Nothing doing, York. In the first place, I don't like it, and in the second place, it's against the law. You can shoot plover and curlew now and then, but you can't shoot those."
The negro grinned sheepishly, accepting the inevitable, and for a few moments the two men stood in silence, watching.
What they saw was a sight familiar enough to both of them, yet in certain respects unusual. At a bend of the winding creek, brimful with the rising tide, a flock of more than a hundred wood ibises had risen from the marsh directly ahead of the boat and hardly more than fifty feet from her bow. The air ahead and above was full of great birds as big as geese, their wide, white, black-edged wings laboring mightily, their long, curved bills and slender necks outstretched, their slim legs dangling grotesquely or trailing behind. Norman, a lover of birds, watched them eagerly. He knew the wood ibises well. From June to October they abounded on the salt marches, and every summer he saw them almost daily as he plied the marsh creeks in his launch. But it was rare good luck to get so close to a flock, and this flock was larger than most. Norman tried to count the birds as they sailed and drifted about in the air, rising higher and higher, then floating lazily toward the woods on the barrier island a mile to the eastward. York Hawley, his newly hired deck hand, interrupted his calculations.
"Look yonder, Cap'n," said the negro, pointing to the west. "Dat eagle comin' mighty fast."
Norman, looking where York pointed, watched the eagle come on, noting with a thrill of admiration the speed at which it was driving through the air. Yet for some moments he did not suspect the big bird's design. The bald eagles of the coast lived at peace with most of the feathered tribes. They killed some ducks in winter, and in the fresh-water country of the mainland they often dined on coots; but on the salt marshes and about the barrier islands they subsisted mainly on fish. The birds of the marsh creeks and the island inlets—ibises, herons, egrets, terns, skimmers, curlews and pelicans—they seldom molested. Norman never guessed that this eagle—which he took to be a one-year or two-year-old bird, since it lacked the white head and tail of the fully adult bald eagle—was about to show him something that he had never seen before.
Most of the wood ibises were flying in loose array toward the barrier island woods. Three of them, however, had left the main flock and were sailing in circles about three hundred feet above the marsh. The eagle, perhaps a hundred feet higher in the air, was heading toward these three; and suddenly, when he was almost but not directly over the highest of them, he half closed his wings and plunged, his body tilting forward, his tail spread like a fan, his hooked bill and widespread talons thrust downward. Mat Norman, wide-eyed and breathless, saw him strike the ibis with terrific force on the back where neck and body joined, grapple with his prey for a brief instant, then release it. The ibis dropped like astone. The eagle swung down in a wide spiral to the spot where his victim had fallen into the tall marsh grass.
Mat Norman, a thoughtful man like many of his kind, brooded long over what he had seen. He had witnessed what to him was almost a miracle. He had seen a law of the wild reversed, a rule of Nature broken. All his life he had known the eagles of the coast and never had he seen one of them do what this eagle had done. For two hours, as he steered his launch along the sinuous placid marsh creeks, he turned the problem over in his mind, and gradually a suspicion which had dawned in him took more and more tangible form as affording the only possible solution.
He determined to keep an especially sharp lookout for a big dark eagle which at a distance appeared to be a bald eagle in the somber plumage of youth, but which, upon closer examination, might prove to be something else—something so rare on the Low Country coast as to be practically unknown there. And although he was not in the habit of killing eagles, he decided to conduct this search with a gun.
A month passed before he had an opportunity to test his theory. Meanwhile tales came to him which strengthened his belief in his own reasoning. On two mainland plantations lambs disappeared mysteriously, and the ground showed no tracks of either man or wildcat, while the best hounds could strike no trail. Of greater concern to Norman was the fact that on the marshes wood ibises seemed to be growing shyer and rarer. One morning he saw a flock scatter and break with every evidence of panic as a big, dark, wide-winged bird sailed into view; and some days afterward a negro fisherman told him that he had seen an ibis killed in mid-air. Then another lamb was taken, and this time the owner saw the slayer—an eagle. The word went forth; and Norman knew that the bald eagles, which he admired for their strength and kingly bearing, must now expect sterner persecution at the hands of man. His resentment grew. On his trips along the marsh creeks he watched the sky with increased vigilance, and whenever he visited the wooded barrier islands his double-barreled gun went with him.
Mat Norman made his living by hauling freight in his launch through the maze of tidal waterways threading the wide wastes of marsh between the Low Country mainland and the chain of islands along the edge of the sea. Sometimes when business was slack he landed on one of these islands to fish in the breakers or to search for turtle eggs in the sands; and when, one crisp September morning, York Hawley, the colored marshman who was serving him temporarily as deck hand, suggested that the big channel bass were probably running in the surf, he merely expressed a thought which was already in Norman's mind. A half-hour later the launch lay at anchor in a deep narrow inlet separating two islands of the chain; and Norman, bidding Rusty, his Irish terrier, make himself comfortable in the cabin, went ashore, with York at the oars.
Landing on the steep sandy bank, they walked a quarter of a mile up the inlet strand, heading away from the ocean beach. The first necessity was to catch some mullet for bait, and for this purpose York carried a cast net slung over his shoulder. Norman, in accordance with his custom of the past few weeks, had brought his shotgun, and also, as an afterthought, the field glasses which he kept on the launch. Walking briskly along the inlet shore toward the back beach of the island where a small creek abounding in mullet swung in from the marshes, Norman was a little in the lead. Suddenly he halted, groped for the binoculars hanging from his shoulder by a leather thong and looked long at some object around the curve of the beach.
"York," he said, when his companion had come up, "the bass can wait a while. I think that's our friend the enemy over there." And he pointed to a big dark bird perched in a lone dead oak perhaps a third of a mile away.
The tree stood on the marshy back beach close to the edge of the island woods. It required less than twenty minutes to circle back amid the sand dunes above the inlet beach and then steal silently through the junglelike woods to a point within easy range of the dead oak. Lying behind a myrtle bush on a low dune, Norman again trained his glasses on the big bird in the tree.
Almost at once he gave a grunt of satisfaction. His theory was proved. This was no bald eagle in the dark uniform plumage of immaturity but a splendid adult golden eagle. He could see plainly the great bird's tawny crown and cowl, the dark band at the top of its tail, and, most conclusive of all, the booted legs, feathered clear down to the toes, which distinguish the golden from the bald eagle in any plumage phase.
Norman dropped his glasses and reached for his gun. His quest was over. This slayer of ibises and of lambs, this bloody-clawed wanderer from some distant mountain top, had been run down at last. Norman, fiercely exultant, knew that he could not miss.
York Hawley, lying on the sand beside him, whispered hoarsely, urging haste. The marshman's practiced eye had detected a slight movement of the eagle's head, an almost imperceptible quiver of his folded wings.
Norman, bending his neck to sight along the gun barrel, swore with vexation. The eagle had launched forward from his perch and was flapping directly away from them over the marsh, the trunk and branches of the tree screening him from a wing shot.
Of the two, Hawley, an inveterate hunter, was the better woodsman. He was confident that the eagle had not detected their presence; and knowing the ways of bald eagles, he believed that this eagle, though of a different species, might presently return to the lone dead oak, which was probably one of his regular lookout stations. It was at York's suggestion that the two hunters remained in their ambush for a while and presently saw something which Mat Norman would not have missed for worlds.
The golden eagle of the Smokies did not know, as he spiraled upward over the marsh plain, that he had escaped death by a hair. He had not seen the hunters in the myrtle clump behind him. What he had seen was a dark speck against the bright blue sky bent above the marshes—a dark speck which swung round and round in interweaving circles, gradually drawing nearer.
His keen eyes told him that it was an eagle. Long ago he had learned that these eagles of the coast were not of his kind; yet, urged on by that vague discontent which had troubled him ever since the death of his mate, he seldom saw one of these eagles in the distance without flying close enough to it to make sure of its identity. Possibly, if birds can hope, some dim, half-formed, uncomprehended thought of again finding his mate burned in him. More probably it was simply loneliness which impelled him, a desire for the companionship of his kind.
But always one of two things happened. Either he turned away disappointed when he was yet at a distance from the stranger, or if he approached too near, he was met with an angry scream which was plainly a warning and a defiance. Fearless though he was, and accustomed to rule the air, at first he felt no impulse to fight; as on the occasion of that first meeting above the ridges of the Smokies, the longing for companionship overcame his natural pugnacity. But gradually, though the longing was as strong as ever, something within him began to rebel at these rebuffs. At last, challenged by a young bald eagle in the dark-brown plumage of the first year, sudden rage flamed up in him, and in a short sharp combat five hundred feet above the woods he taught the inexperienced youngster a lesson.
Scarcely three days had passed since that encounter. As he now circled upward, his gaze fixed on the big bird soaring on motionless wings a mile Again it was York Hawley, the marshman, who first realized that something was about to happen. Norman, skeptical of his quarry's return, was dozing on the sand, his head pillowed on his arm; but Hawley had followed the eagle's upward flight and his eyes were fixed upon it when another eagle, whose white head and tail gleamed like silver in the sunlight, sailed into the field of his vision. He saw the tawny-headed bird swing close to the silver-headed one and he heard the latter scream his challenge. York roused Norman just in time for him to see the beginning of the battle.
It was the golden eagle that attacked. From above and behind he shot down upon his foe, his wings half closed, his talons spread. But this time his opponent was no raw novice of untested courage and skill. Quick as light, the bald eagle dodged the blow, poised for a brief instant, then plunged for his assailant, whose swift descent had carried him down some fifty feet. In his turn, the golden eagle swerved as adroitly as his enemy, hung momentarily motionless, dropped like a falling spearhead on his antagonist.
To Norman it seemed that the bald eagle, despite the disadvantage of his position, deliberately awaited this attack—that he threw himself on his back in the air, his talons thrust upward, and met the shock gallantly and squarely. At any rate, the two big birds came together and grappled; but just before the impact, the golden eagle, spreading and flattening his wings, checked the speed of his descent so that the collision was not of stunning force. For a space the combatants fell swiftly, apparently locked in close embrace. Then somehow they righted themselves, and bill to bill and claw to claw, came down rather slowly, lunging and parrying, turning round and round, their pinions churning the air.
Suddenly it seemed to Norman that the wings of one of them—he could not tell which—stiffened, then sagged. Next moment they were falling again. faster and faster, still locked together, madly whirling. They struck on hard sand just where the inlet shore curved around to the marshy back beach—sand packed almost as hard as concrete by the tides. Norman knew before he reached them that both were dead.
Yet he was curious to learn which one of them it was that had died in the air when those battling wings had stiffened and drooped. The bald eagle's curving claws were sunk in his enemy's throat and breast. They must have been entangled in tough sinew or embedded in bone, for it was only with an effort that Norman could release them. They had made a mortal wound. But the great yellow talons of the golden eagle were clasped about his enemy's white head, and one long black claw had struck deep into the brain.
Mat Norman was a man of odd fancies. He would not leave the dead warriors on the sands to become prey for the vultures or for some nocturnal prowler from the island woods. York took the cast net and went after mullet in the creek, for he was keen to feel a big channel bass tug at his bait in the surf. But Norman found a piece of plank washed ashore by the waves, and with it he scooped out a grave on the sunny slope of a dune under a tall tuft of sea oats. These two were chiefs of the air, he said, and deserved an honorable burial.