The Way of the Wild (Sass)/The Prisoners of Half-Acre
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TIDE would be high at Little Inlet an hour after sunrise. Shortly before dawn Jen Murray walked from his cabin at the edge of the marshes to the creek landing where he kept his boat. On his shoulder rested a rusty single-barreled shotgun. In his right hand he carried a surf line neatly coiled and a battered bait bucket half full of six-inch mullet. He walked briskly, because the November air was cold.
Jen welcomed that bite in the air. Among the dusky marshmen of the Low Country few could read more skillfully the signs pertaining to fish and ducks. This, to Jen's way of thinking, would be a perfect morning—chill and gray, with a rising tide sweeping on to high flood and a light offshore wind from the north. The combination was excellent. There would be bass in the surf at Little Inlet; the bluebill flocks would be winging in from the sea to the rivers and creeks of the marshlands; though the season was early, he might even find a few squadrons of black mallards.
The flooding tide lapped about the worm-eaten posts of the landing. Jen's square-headed, flat-bottomed bateau, tied to the outermost piling, was already afloat. With a grunt of satisfaction the marshman lowered his light wiry body into the boat, leaned the gun against a thwart where he could reach it in an instant, picked up his heavy homemade oars and began the long row down the winding march creek which would bring him to the back beach of the barrier island between the marshes and the sea.
Another fisherman was astir early that morning, and another hunter. Ten minutes after Jen's bateau had vanished in the gloom, a great blue heron, standing hump-backed and motionless on a limb of a water oak a hundred yards from the landing, suddenly straightened his slim body, craned his sinuous neck and launched into the air on wide, slow-beating pinions. Almost at the same moment a large black lump at the top of a tall dead pine fifty yards beyond the heron's oak came suddenly to life and assumed the shape of a bulky, dark-bodied, white-headed bird—a male bald eagle.
The eagle's keen ears had caught the swish of the heron's wings and the faint sound had awakened him. He saw the shadowy form of the heron sweeping past, and having thus explained the slight noise which had disturbed him, he lost all interest in the matter, and after stretching first one wing and then the other, set about preening his feathers with his strong, hooked, yellow bill. For perhaps a quarter of an hour he devoted himself to his toilet, while the dawn brightened round him. Then he, too, spread his dark pinions and began the active business of the day.
Jen, halfway to Little Inlet now, saw a great blue heron winging with measured strokes across the marshes to his left. He paid no attention to the bird, for it was only one of many herons inhabiting the marshes, though this one seemed larger than most. Just before landing on the back beach of the barrier island, the marshman saw a bald eagle circling high in the air. To Jen the king of birds was a familiar spectacle. Lager to cast his bass line into the surf beside the inlet's mouth while the flood tide was still running fast, he gave the soaring bird scarcely a second glance.
Scanning the sunlit eastern horizon in search of bluebill flocks coming in from the ocean to the sheltered waters behind, he walked briskly across the sandy flats toward the front beach. When, about an hour and a half later, he returned to the boat, he did not know that the eagle was still circling almost directly overhead, but much higher, so high that it was now a mere spot against the pale-blue dome of the sky.
The marshman plodded across the soft sands toward the bateau, his gun across his shoulder, three spotted-tailed surf bass from four to eight pounds in weight trailing by a cord from his left hand. Suddenly he halted. A quick glance behind had shown him a small black speck still far away over the ocean, a black speck which grew swiftly larger. Instantly he crouched close to the sand, then crawled hurriedly to a tuft of grass ten feet to his left. There he waited, his gun ready, his eyes fixed on the lone duck rushing straight toward him at the speed for which the bluebill is famous.
Other eyes marked that oncoming speck. The soaring eagle, though almost invisible from the ground, could see both duck and hunter with a distinctness which revealed nearly every detail; but for a time the eagle paid little attention to either, because he did not realize that far below there was about to be enacted a little drama from which he might profit. Not until smoke leaped from the muzzle of Jen's gun and the duck swerved sharply and seemed for a fraction of a second to stagger in the air did the eagle betray the slightest interest in what was taking place a thousand feet beneath him.
Then, however, he became in an instant a thing of amazing and almost terrible energy. His yellow eyes, under their frowning white brows, glared as though fire burned behind them; his powerful feet, armed with curved blue-black talons, opened and closed, opened again, then clenched more tightly than ever; his hooked beak gaped momentarily as his harsh, fierce challenge rang unheard through the solitude around him. Next moment he was shooting at terrific speed down a long steep incline, his wings half closed, his tail half spread, his head and neck thrust forward so that his body was like a great arrowhead cleaving the air.
The duck, mortally wounded yet even in its dying moments strong of wing, had passed a hundred yards beyond the marshman before it fell. Jen, grumbling a little because it had fallen not on the sands, where he could have recovered it more easily, but into the water beyond a fringe of marsh, was in the act of picking up his bass when a swift shadow sped across the sand close by him.
Instinctively he glanced upward, then dropped his fish and ran toward the marsh, breeching his gun as he ran and fumbling in his pocket for another cartridge. He found it and jammed the gun shut just as the eagle, abruptly checking his descent, hung for a moment twenty feet above the spot where the duck had fallen, then dropped out of sight behind the tall salt grass.
The big bird remained invisible for perhaps ten seconds. When he rose, the dead bluebill clutched in his talons, Jen threw the gun to his shoulder and fired. For some moments the marshman stood peering along the barrel; then he cursed with all the vehemence at his command. Above the marshes the eagle flapped steadily onward, still holding his booty, his wide wings beating swiftly and strongly. Jen turned and plodded back through the mushy sands toward the spot where he had left his three bass. Just before stooping to pick them up, he breeched his gun, threw out the empty shell, inserted a new one and closed the weapon with a vicious snap which was an accurate indication of his temper.
His humor did not improve during the long row homeward. The morning had proved bitterly disappointing. True, he had three bass; but he should have had half a dozen. The flocks of bluebills from which he had expected to glean a few victims had not materialized—perhaps because the sky, instead of remaining overcast, had cleared just after sunrise. Finally the one duck that he had shot down had been stolen from him.
Jen grumbled and swore as he tugged at the heavy oars. His small eyes scanned the marshes and the sky as he rowed, seeking a victim, some living thing upon which to vent his disappointment. Eagerly he watched the gulls winging slowly above the marsh tideways. Once he snatched up the gun just too late to draw a bead on a yellowlegs which flew over him, sounding its mellow whistle and flashing its white rump. With a splashing of webbed feet in water, a loon rose just around a bend of the creek, and Jen, reaching hastily for the gun, barked his knuckle against a tholepin. He was still sucking the bloody finger when a tall gray-blue bird, which had evidently taken alarm at the loon's hurried flight, flapped upward out of a small gully behind a peninsula of salt grass.
It was a long shot for one of Jen's cheap blackpowder shells, but the great blue heron, even larger than most of its kind, was a tempting target. The marshman jerked the gun to his shoulder, aimed carefully and fired. The heron collapsed in the air and, whirling round and round, fell into the marsh a hundred feet from the edge of the creek. Jen picked up his oars and continued his journey, his mood somewhat less savage than before. He would have been better pleased if he had killed the big bird outright; but there was satisfaction in the thought that he had smashed its wing and brought it down crippled and helpless to become prey for the marshland minks.
Jen's temper would have been still further improved if he could have seen at that moment the result of the shot which he had fired perhaps a half hour before—the shot fired at the bald eagle which had robbed him of his duck. He had not missed as he supposed. One duck shot had struck the eagle's body near the base of the right wing. It must have pierced or torn some muscle or tendon essential for the operation of that wing; for, although for some minutes the great bird had continued to drive forward and upward with strong steady strokes, each wing beat brought a stab of pain which rapidly became intolerable. Had Jen followed the eagle's flight a few moments longer he would have seen the bird waver in the air before it had flown a mile, then turn and sail with set, rigid wings down to a small hummock in the marsh known as Half-Acre Island.
Tall large-leaved weeds, yellow and drooping now that summer had passed, interspersed with tufts of stiff-stemmed, gray-green grass, covered the hummock's surface. Here and there stood small dense clumps of evergreen cassena bushes, salt-water myrtles and sword-bladed, needle-pointed yuccas. Near the middle of the little island an ancient live oak, stunted but vigorous and green, cast a shade so dense that neither weeds nor grass grew within the circle of its branches. In the cassenas a small colony of Louisiana herons had reared their young. Their abandoned platforms of sticks were scattered everywhere through the evergreen thickets, which supported also the deserted homes of scores of boat-tailed grackles. In spring and early summer the hummock had been a populous bird city clamorous with the cries of nestlings, alive with the quiver of wings. But now, as the wounded eagle planed toward it on pinions which seemed to have lost the power of movement, he detected no sign of life on the hummock, no stirring among the thickets, no sound of beast or of bird.
The silence and stillness of the place reassured him. He knew that he was in trouble and he would have sought a more remote retreat if that had been possible; but he had turned toward Half-Acre Island because his wings would bear him no farther and he must land there or fall into the open marsh. Perhaps it was some deep-seated instinct, perhaps it was mere chance which caused him, wounded though he was, to retain his hold upon the duck; but the added weight of this burden pulled him lower and lower as he neared the hummock so that he could not land in the live oak as he had intended, but came to rest on the ground close to the island's muddy shore. He stood for some moments on the duck's body, looking about him and listening. Then suddenly he turned his head, faced quickly about and crouched with half-opened wings, his bright eyes glaring defiance under their frowning brows.
Creeping toward him through the grass, inch by inch, foot by foot, a female gray fox dragged her body forward. Already she had crept within leaping distance of the eagle; and the big bird, conscious of his inability to use his pinions, stiffened his muscles for the onset. But the sudden assault which he expected did not come. The fox, perceiving that she had been discovered, abandoned her effort to approach unseen. But she did not leap to the attack; she did not circle the eagle swiftly and lightly to get within his guard and frighten him into abandoning his prey. She advanced more rapidly than before; but it was a slow, pitiful advance, painful and laborious; for behind her, as she dragged herself onward, her hind legs trailed limp and useless.
The paths of the bald eagle and the gray fox do not cross. They inhabit separate kingdoms: the eagle, the kingdom of the air, the marshes, the lonely sea-island beaches; the fox, the kingdom of the woods, the thicket-grown broom-grass fields, the moss-curtained swamps. Never before had this fox of Half-Acre Island attacked an eagle, nor would she have done so single-handed under ordinary circumstances. Never before had the wounded eagle which had sought Half-Acre as a refuge found himself confronted by an enemy like the one that faced him now. His was the bolder, more arrogant spirit; his, too, perhaps, the more formidable armament. But in this encounter the decisive factor was the crippled fox's gnawing insistent hunger—hunger so terrible that to assuage it she would have faced almost any odds.
Two weeks before, at the edge of a broom-grass field on the mainland, a charge of turkey shot from Jen Murray's gun had ripped the muscles of her back above the haunches. Hard pressed by Jen's dog, she had been forced to take to the salt marshes and plunge into a marsh creek. In the ice-cold water the torn muscles of her back had stiffened suddenly and her hind legs had grown numb. She had become almost helpless, and the ebbing tide had carried her downstream far out into the marshlands. The creek swung close to Half-Acre Island, and by a desperate effort she had dragged herself out of the water and had reached the hummock.
There she had eked out a precarious existence, a prisoner on Half-Acre, because, with her hind legs useless to her, she could not cross the surrounding waste of boggy, treacherous marsh. Crippled though she was, she had managed to find food from time to time, while a small sink-hole near the island's center, deepened some years previously by plume hunters who had camped on the hummock, provided enough water to relieve her thirst. But the problem of existence had grown more and more difficult. She had fasted for nearly two days when she saw a great white-headed bird sail in from the marshes, bearing a duck in its claws; and the scent of that duck in her nostrils filled her with sudden frenzy which counted no cost.
There was no similar compelling motive to inflame the eagle's spirit. He was not particularly hungry. Wounded and in pain from his wound, aware that his wings were useless to him, apprehensive of other enemies in the thickets surrounding him, he struck once with his long curved claws at the fox's head as it came within reach, then hopped awkwardly sideways and backward, retreating, but keeping his face to his foe. One claw raked the fox's nose and drew blood; but, insensible to the pain, she seized the duck in her jaws, crunched it, tore it and devoured it on the spot, paying no further attention to the big bird which she had driven from his prey.
The eagle did not wait for her to finish her meal. Walking awkwardly through the grass, he made his way around the island's shore, keeping as far as possible from the thickets. On the other side of the hummock the grass and weeds were less dense, the cassena clumps more widely separated. Presently he turned inland for perhaps a dozen yards to the foot of a small dead cedar half uprooted by a gale, clambered up its stout slanting stem and, passing with some difficulty from branch to branch, took his stand at the top of the little tree perhaps fifteen feet above the ground. There he remained throughout the rest of the day, and there night found him.
Another cripple came to Half-Acre Island that evening—another victim of Jen Murray's gun. The great blue heron which Jen had shot down had fallen perhaps three-quarters of a mile from the hummock. His left wing was shattered; it dangled useless and limp. But no shot had entered the heron's body, and he had no sooner struck ground than he was on his feet, striding swiftly up the muddy bed of the small gully into which he had fallen.
All day he wandered about the marshes or rested beside the little pools and rivulets left by the tide, in dreadful pain yet rousing himself now and then—for the heron is a voracious feeder—to catch a mullet or shrimp in the teeming shallows. Toward evening, when the throbbing of his broken wing had begun to pass into a sort of numbness, he fished for a while at the mouth of a small marsh brook emptying into a larger creek not more than two hundred yards from Half-Acre Island. His appetite satisfied, he bethought himself of a roosting place for the night. Near at hand he saw the lone live oak on Half-Acre and, following the bank of the creek which led in that: direction, he soon reached the hummock. He could not get up into the oak; but by utilizing his bill and his long muscular neck, as well as his feet, he managed to clamber to the top of a cassena bush, where he would be safer than on the ground. On this perch he passed the night, unmolested by any foe.
So it happened that by an odd whim of fate three victims of Jen Murray's gun were gathered at the same time on a little hummock in the marshes—three wild creatures of widely different kinds, each rendered partly helpless by the marshman's powder and shot. To these three prisoners of Half-Acre the next few days brought varied fortunes. For the heron life grew somewhat brighter. His wing was smashed beyond repair; he would never fly again. But after that first day the pain which he suffered was comparatively slight; and he was a prisoner in only a limited sense, for he could roam widely over the marshes on his long legs.
His field of activity was greatly circumscribed, since, instead of flying from one fishing ground to another, he had to walk; but at that season, when all the tideways teemed with life, the fruits of the summer's increase, the heron did not have to travel far in order to find abundant food. He spent his days on the marshes surrounding the little island, fishing in the creeks and gullies for mullet and shrimp; but whereas before his wing was broken he frequently continued his fishing long after dark, and on moonlight nights was often as active as in the day, he now abandoned night fishing altogether and invariably returned to the hummock before evening. There were dangers of the dark which he did not care to face crippled as he was, and always the going down of the sun was his signal for retirement to his safe perch in the top of the cassena thicket.
To the gray fox, on the other hand, the darkness which followed swiftly upon the gorgeous autumn sunsets frequently brought a revival of activity and energy, perhaps a renewal of hope. Always the night had been her friend and ally. It was then that she had tasted the keenest joys of living; it was then that the world in which she had lived became her world, hers to be enjoyed to the utmost in freedom and easy security from the dangers which abounded by day but vanished with the shutting down of the dark.
That freedom was hers no longer. Her useless hind limbs chained her to the hummock and she now sought food by day as well as by night, since the problem of getting enough to eat was so desperately difficult that it required all her time except brief intervals spent in sleeping. Yet when the darkness spread across the marshes and enveloped Half-Acre like a cloud, new strength seemed to come to her, her faculties grew keener, the weariness and numbness of her spirit in large measure passed away.
Most of what little food she found was found at night. Small as the island was, it was considerably larger than its name implied and it supported a surprisingly numerous population of marsh rats whose shallow burrows still contained young. The fox, an old hand at digging out these burrows, subsisted largely on their inhabitants until she had depleted the supply. Occasionally she captured an adult rat by lying perfectly still, as though asleep, and crushing the animal with a sudden blow of her paw; and once in this same manner she had the good luck to kill a mink which was so much absorbed in following a trail that it failed to see her.
Insects grubbed out of the mold and little fiddler crabs captured along the muddy edges of the hummock helped to allay the cravings of her stomach. Some slight nourishment, too, was provided by long, slender green snakes and rather thick-bodied glass snakes, which had a queer habit of breaking themselves in two when her forepaw descended upon them. The supply of these was soon exhausted, however, and but for the coming of a series of abnormally high tides she must have starved before the arrival of the eagle and the heron which now shared her captivity on Half-Acre.
The marshes at that season abounded with clapper rails. When the rising waters flooded the low-lying grass plains and bathed the margins of the hummock itself they not only brought many big blue crabs, which the fox soon learned to capture and eat with relish, but they also drove scores of rails from the submerged marshes to the hum mock's shore. These noisy, rather stupid birds had little knowledge of any four-footed enemy except the mink. They moved about freely and boldly, although they were at a disadvantage in the darkness; and night after night the crippled fox, crouching motionless in the tall weeds close to the island's margin, dined on rail which had almost walked into her jaws.
But with the waning of the moon the tides went back to normal, filling the marsh creeks and rivulets, but no longer spreading across the grassy flats. Only rarely was the fox able to capture an unwary rail; the big crabs came no more; the marsh-rat burrows had nearly all been emptied of young; the scanty reptilian population of the hummock had ceased to exist. The blackbirds, grackles and fish crows, which often visited the place, were too wary to be captured. The fox was hungrier than she had ever been before when chance and her own desperation put her in possession of the bluebill duck which the wounded eagle had brought to the hummock in his claws.
This was the best meal that she had enjoyed since becoming a prisoner on Half-Acre, and it gave her new energy and strength. Her torn muscles were healing, though her hind legs were as yet incapable of bearing her weight; and that night she contrived to capture another rail. The following day, too, brought a stroke of good fortune in the shape of a full-grown rat so badly wounded by another of its combative race that it could hardly move; and some hours later she managed to ambush a wandering marsh rabbit. For a while the gray fox, except that her hind legs were still pitifully weak and stiff, was almost herself again, still hungry, but no longer mad with hunger—a cool, keen, careful schemer, sharper of wit than any other wild thing of the woods.
It was then that her wits, endowed once more with all their native cunning, began to plan the destruction of the other captives of Half-Acre, the wounded eagle and the wing-broken heron which were her fellow prisoners on the hummock and which would help to keep her alive if she could contrive to kill them.
The heron's plight she understood the moment she saw the bird. His left wing, matted with mud, dangled at his side; and she knew that he could not fly, though he could walk on his long legs much faster than she could drag her maimed body. But for a time the eagle puzzled her. At first she paid no attention to him; but suddenly it dawned on her that he never stirred from his perch in the dead cedar sapling, that he had remained there all of one day and part of the next without spreading his wings.
She kept close watch on him during the rest of the second day and never once saw him move; and it may be that she knew then—for a fox's cunning is much more than instinct—that he, too, had lost the use of his wings and was a prisoner on Half-Acre. She realized, at any rate, that all was not well with the big white-headed bird standing stern and immovable in the dead cedar, watching the marshes and the sky with piercing yellow eyes which seemed always to be fixed on something infinitely far away.
With long, grim, confident patience the gray fox bided her time. Somehow she seemed to understand that a moment would come when the great bird in the dead cedar must topple from his perch.
If the eagle also had foreknowledge of that moment it was with a sort of regal resignation, a kingly fatalism that he awaited its coming. He was at once the most fortunate and the least fortunate of the prisoners of Half-Acre. His injury was slight and would heal completely if he could keep himself alive in the meantime. But his broad pinions, which had never failed him before, were utterly useless now; and those pinions were essential to his life, an indispensable part of his hunting equipment. Without their aid he could not catch food; and although, like most birds of prey, he could endure sustained fasting, he must find sustenance sooner or later, or perish.
The heron, whose wings were not necessary for his fishing, was in no danger of starvation. The unfailing bounty of the marsh creeks would support him indefinitely. The fox's lot was harder. Yet she, too, could struggle against the fate that threatened her; she could fight with what weapons she still possessed to keep life in her body until she could use her legs again. But the eagle, so long as his wings were paralyzed, was utterly impotent; and from the first he seemed to comprehend the fact and to accept it grimly as one against which it was useless to contend.
Those piercing eyes looked always into the hazy distances and seemed to take no account of things near at hand. Their gaze rested on the white clouds which had been the eagle's companions on calm, windless mornings when he swung round and round on motionless wings in the high air, taking his ease in the upper solitudes where he had reigned. They swept the wide expanses of the marshlands, golden brown now that autumn had come—vast plains of tall salt grasses watered by numberless winding creeks and tideways and filling all the broad spaces between the narrow barrier islands along the sea's edge and the mainland behind.
Hour after hour he followed with his eyes the comings and goings of the feathered peoples of the marshes—the big blue herons moving with stately deliberate wing beats; the long-tailed marsh harriers quartering the grassy plains; the ospreys circling and poising above the creeks, then plunging like feathered spearheads upon the fish which they had spied from above; the white crimson-billed terns winnowing the air, swooping and swerving with the grace of swallows, darting down at intervals with lightninglike swiftness upon their prey.
With a strange absorption, which must have had some deeper source than the cravings of appetite, the wounded eagle watched the wild duck hosts come in from the sea. Although in fall and winter, bluebill and mallard, teal and widgeon had formed part of his diet, fish had been his staple food. Yet always in the late afternoons he awaited with undiminished eagerness the coming of the fast-flying feathered regiments.
He saw them first, far away over the ocean beyond the barrier islands, as long faint streaks like wisps of smoke above the horizon, or else as dim gray clouds which moved and shifted and changed, darkening as they drew nearer and presently thinning out into black lines or irregular wedges shooting across the sky. Some of the smaller flocks passed near at hand, coming in above Little Inlet and flying comparatively low. But the larger flocks, many of them containing hundreds of ducks, passed for the most part farther to the southwest, where a river came down from the rice lands to the ocean. These were not bluebills, but mallards heading for the old ricefields and fresh-water marshes a few miles back from the coast; and as the days passed their numbers increased, so that sometimes toward sunset the eagle, gazing into the dim distance, could see thousands of them at the same moment as the long armies winged inland high in the air like trailers of cloud against the glowing sky.
His eyes fixed on these far-off things, his thoughts ranging the air and the marshes miles distant from the hummock which was his prison, the eagle may have remained for a long while unaware of the watcher waiting for him to die. Yet a time came when he saw the fox, and it may be that he understood somehow the significance of her vigil. At any rate, after some days had passed, the fox noted for the first time that the big bird was watching her from his perch, calmly, coolly, yet with a certain fierceness gleaming in his yellow eyes.
Probably she did not understand clearly the meaning of that intent, steady gaze. She had had no experience with eagles and it did not occur to her to regard this one as a possible menace; yet the chances are that the eagle was now watching her for the same grim reason which had caused her to watch him—that the hunger which had begun to torture him was focusing his thoughts upon her as a possible source of food.
She was the one living thing that ever came within his reach, spending a part of each day lying half hidden in the grass not more than thirty feet from his perch. The habit of a lifetime was strong in him. Every morning before dawn he preened his feathers and went through his regular stretching exercises; and whereas at first he could not move his wings without acute pain, the injured muscle had now so far healed that he could open his pinions to more than half their accustomed spread. He knew that he was not yet able to fly, that he could not flap his wings strongly or ascend into the air. But he could easily glide down to where the fox lay and land squarely upon her; and more and more intently, as his hunger sharpened, he watched her lying there; more and more definite became the prompting to launch himself forward and downward.
The fox, though she watched the eagle closely, seldom remained long in her grassy bed near his perch. Except when sleeping, she was generally moving about in her search for food, and she was able to carry on this search somewhat more actively because her hind legs, though very far from normal, were no longer totally useless to her. Her increased mobility offset to a certain extent the inroads which she had made upon the food resources of the hummock. Food was scarcer, but she could seek it more effectively; and though seldom free from the pinch of hunger, she found enough sustenance to keep going. She never forgot the eagle, but her war against him was a waiting game in which she could do nothing but wait. Against the other prisoner of Half-Acre she could proceed more vigorously.
Again and again she tried to capture the wing-broken blue heron. She knew the tall bird's habits well; knew that each morning well after daylight he came down from his safe perch in the cassena, strode across the hummock and disappeared in the marshes, and that each afternoon well before dark he returned. Three times she tried to ambush him, lying concealed in the grass or weeds near the hummock's edge; but each time the heron chose another route. One afternoon she hid herself near the foot of his cassena, but the heron saw her in time and spent the night in another bush. Mere chance gave her the opportunity which she had so often sought vainly.
She was lying half asleep, about an hour before sunset, in her bed near the eagle's cedar. Suddenly the heron, returning to his perch earlier than usual and striding through the high grass with less than his accustomed caution, stepped almost upon her. In an instant her jaws clamped upon his long leg just above the toes.
With a hoarse cry the heron sprang upward, his uninjured wing beating the air and buffeting the fox's head. But those long, strong jaws held fast, crunched tighter and tighter on the black slender leg, then with a sudden effort crushed: the bone. The eagle, watching from his perch, his yellow eyes glowing more fiercely than ever now, saw the fox lurch awkwardly forward, striking with her forepaw to beat the big blue-gray bird to the ground. He saw the heron, forced backward so that he was half standing, half sitting, stab fiercely again and again at the fox's face with his bill, his long neck thrusting like a striking snake, his straight, javelinlike beak darting in and out, in and out with triphammer swiftness.
The eagle's head dropped lower; his wide dark wings unfolded. A moment he poised on his perch. Then, with a scream, he planed swiftly down through the air, his talons spread, his hooked bill partly open. Already he seemed to taste the life-giving meat that he craved. Coming from above and behind, he would strike the fox just forward of the shoulders and sink his long claws into her nape.
By a tenth of a second he was too late to strike the spot at which he aimed. The fox, her hindquarters too stiff and weak to permit of swift maneuvring, had been compelled to take her punishment. She lay on her chest, her jaws clamped on the heron's leg, one furry forepaw raised as a shield against the tall bird's blows. But that slim foreleg was an ineffectual buckler. She could not parry thd darting snakelike thrusts that followed one another with frenzied rapidity. Before the fight had lasted twenty seconds the heron's long sharp-pointed bill had stabbed her in half a dozen places. Yet these wounds, though most of them were in the face, were comparatively slight; and in spite of the blinding blood and stinging pain, she kept her grip on the heron's leg, striving meantime to force her body forward upon her captive.
Then, a fraction of a moment before the eagle struck his quarry, the heron's javelin found the mark it had been seeking. Driven with all the force of that sinewy neck, the needle point of the heavy tapering bill, fully seven inches in length, pierced the fox's right eye, penetrated deep into the cavity behind it and remained there, too tightly wedged to be withdrawn.
The fox shivered, writhed, twisted over on her flank; and the eagle, falling upon her at that instant, struck her, not upon the nape but upon the side of her neck, so that the curved claws of one of his powerful feet were buried in her throat. The big bird's weight held her down. She struggled desperately, but crippled as she was, she could not rise; and meanwhile, with the fury of famine, the eagle plied beak and talons.
Toward the last, when the fox had ceased struggling, the eagle, as though suddenly reminded of the presence of another victim whose body would provide food, reached out with one great clawed foot and, grasping the heron's neck just behind the head, at one wrench tore out the tall bird's life.
There was meat enough then for one of the prisoners of Half-Acre, meat enough to keep him for many days; and before those days had passed the torn tendon of his wing would have healed and he would be free again.
Five nights later a brisk northeaster set in. Tide was at high flood shortly after sunrise; and Jen Murray, rising with the sun, looked out of the one window of his hut and observed with satisfaction that the water was well up in the marshes so that only the tips of the tall grasses showed above the surface. It was a perfect morning for rail shooting—the kind of morning when he could kill two or three dozen marsh hens, as he called them, before the tide dropped. The law forbade the selling of game birds, but Jen had never been a stickler for the law. In fall and early winter the marketing of clapper rails was one of his regular sources of income.
Poling his light bateau across the flooded flats, within an hour he had bagged twenty birds. Some he shot in the water as they swam from one raft of floating sedge to another; others he knocked over in the air as they rose in slow, fluttering flight before his boat. Then, though the water was still high, there came a lull in the shooting. Jen, finding no more birds in the open, turned his punt toward Half-Acre Island. Always when the big tides came many rail took refuge on that little hummock in the midst of the marshes. A walk around its edge should net Jen a dozen or more.
The marshman poled to the hummock and stepped ashore, holding his gun ready. Slowly he worked his way around the island's margin, knee-deep in the tall grasses and weeds. A rail flushed well ahead of him, but Jen, his finger on the trigger, Judged the distance to be too great. Suddenly, as he rounded a low clump of myrtles close to the island's edge, he jerked the gun to his shoulder. A great, dark-bodied, white-headed bird had launched itself out of a small dead cedar, a magnificent bald eagle.
Even as he aimed the marshman noted a strange clumsiness in the eagle's flight, a slowness of wing beats, a certain heaviness, an appearance of labored effort, as though the big bird's pinions were scarcely equal to their task. The range was short; Jen, remembering that his shot were small, aimed for the head. The eagle dropped like a stone.
Jen turned away from the marshy rim of the hummock and strode through the grass and dead weeds toward the spot where the bird had fallen. Something in the grass a little to his right attracted his attention. For several minutes he studied the objects that he found there—the mangled carcass of a female gray fox and, close by it, the carcass of a great blue heron.
In the cold weather the bodies had suffered comparatively little change. Plainly the eagle had been feeding on them and had kept the vultures off; but Jen found two questions which puzzled him: How came this fox and this heron to be lying side by side in the grass? And what was a gray fox doing on that little hummock in the marsh?
He turned away presently and dismissed these problems as of no practical importance. Before resuming his hunt for more marsh hens, he found the eagle's carcass and cut off the great dark-brown wings. There was a girl on a neighboring plantation who wanted a hawk-wing fan, and it occurred to him that these eagle pinions would please her. Later, however, he threw them into the mud, deciding that they were too troublesome to carry.