King of the Bad Lands

I

Two specks swung in the steel-blue sky, slowly circling each other in milewide sweeps. From mere specks they grew to a couple of black smudges, to the outlines of birds, and gradually they dropped nearer the earth. The ponderous ease with which they planed on rigid pinions belied their pace, which left a bubbling wake of churned air behind them. For a second before alighting, both birds swept with floundering strokes of mighty wings, while the splayed feathers of their wedge tails hissed through the air; legs were outthrust as their bodies breasted up, and with a sighing rush of torn wind behind them they dropped to the bare bough of a dead coolibah tree.

They were a pair of wedge-tailed eagles, of Australia, the mightiest of their class in the whole world. As they sat on the bare limb of the tree, the sun shone and was reflected from their bronze bodies, so deep in coloring that they appeared to be black. The golden hackles of their necks glinted yellow, and pin points of light were reflected from the polished cruelty of their eyes. Larger and with a wider wing spread than both the famous golden eagle of Europe and the bald eagle of America, these Australian eagles — misnamed eagle hawks — grow in favored localities with a spread of eleven feet nine inches, and a length from tail to beak of forty inches. Superb creatures that these birds are, their souls are miserable things from which all pity has been cast; their hearts are black and hard with the implacable rigidity of flint, and death itself rides in the grip of those grappling hooks of living steel, their talons.

The two birds sat facing the wind. Beneath them the grass upon the open downs of western Queensland swayed and billowed, and afar a moving blanket weaving through it betrayed a flock of traveling sheep. The smaller and more highly burnished of the pair, the cock bird, sidled along the limb toward the hen. She was a full two inches longer than he, with a correspondingly greater spread of wing, and as the king approached her she opened her horny beak and faced him. A rumbling protest issued from her throat, she snapped her bill together with a noise like the clashing of dry horns; then, as the king still came on, she dropped her head and quivered her wing tips in surrender.

But first she would play. Both birds were old with an age beyond man’s reckoning. They had mated in constancy from year to year. But a bride is always a bride. Though she was the larger bird, the more powerful, and the better fighter, she wanted to be pursued and captured before surrendering. With a ruffling of dry feathers, which sounded like a sheet of iron being dragged over coarse gravel, she sprang into the air. Her mate followed her, and with a hissing of wings they climbed the stairs of the sky again.

Large and heavy as these birds were, they played with the wind as they swept upward, circling in their nuptial dance. They rocked on the air. They floated lightly as a thought. Then up in dizzy streaks and giddy curves they soared till, two tiny specks, now seen, now lost in the higher heavens, they disappeared from sight. . . . Suddenly, with a hissing rush, they returned! With wings held back, with head, neck, body, and tail in one rigid line, they cleaved the air in brilliant flashes and again alighted on their tree.

II

The eagles would build. In the fork of an old boree, about twenty feet from the ground, there was an untidy collection of sticks. This was their eyrie. Each year they added to it. It was a rough inverted cone, the base of which formed a sort of platform eight feet above the fork of the tree. It was six feet across the top, and in it were sticks as long and as thick as a man’s arm.

Both birds busied themselves in making additions to the building. The hen fancied some articles of adornment. She brought part of the shin and fleece of a dead sheep; she broke off light twigs from a near-by tree and added them to the platform. The cock thought the eyrie needed stabilizing. He searched among the sticks that lay on the ground, but either they were too heavy to lift or he considered them rotten. He left them where they lay. At last he flew to the gaunt bough of a dead tree and rested on the far point of it. Nothing happened. He lifted and rested several times. Nothing continued to happen. It may have been telepathy, reason may have come to her aid, or perhaps it was blind instinct; at any rate the hen saw that something was wrong, and she went to help her lord. As ho sat on the dead bough she came to rest beside him, and immediately their combined weights had the desired effect! The dead limb cracked and broke under the strain.

As her perch gave beneath her, the hen spread her wings and flew back to the eyrie, but the cock, gallant bird that he was, battled stupendously. That bough would be too heavy for him to lift, once it fell to the ground; but he wanted it — it was just what his architect’s eye desired. If he could not lift it, at least he could steer it in the air. His talons dug into the wood, his great wings whistled, his tail was spread with every feather splayed, and laboriously, an inch at a time, now rising, now losing, churning the air and hissing, he landed the coveted beam upon the platform. He pulled it into position. He pried it and levered it where he wanted it. He changed its place and tried another, working it about until his exacting requirements were satisfied. All was well.

The birds built on that. They laced other sticks around it and added another large bough, not so heavy as the first, on the other side of the platform to balance it. Little by little the nest was raised another foot, and as they built they worked in any rubbish that suited her lady’s fancy. When the job was finished, the ground beneath was littered with sticks that had been discarded, and the eyrie stood complete in the face of the rising sun.

But while they were building they must feed. The hen rarely went out of sight of the nest, and great was the destruction she wrought among carney lizards and other small game in the neighborhood. Always she took her prey to the platform to devour it. There she carved it, using her hacking bill as a hatchet. Whitened skeletons, the remnants of many feasts, lay strewn about her. If they fell to the ground, she did not trouble to pick them up. If they remained on the platform, neither did she bother to push them over the edge. It was all one to her what happened to the débris after her hunger was satisfied.

The cock foraged afar. He ate at his kill, and returned with a share for his mate. But always he filled himself first. And then, after the hen had finished with what he had brought her, he took another snack of anything that might be left. But when the two great eggs of dirty white, speckled and streaked with brown, were laid, then the cock grew wary of alighting on the platform. He dropped his offerings to his mate as he flew over, and touched nothing she might leave.

All the crevices between the sticks of the eagles’ nest were filled with the tiny homes of waxbill finches. These atoms, beneath the dignity of an eagle to attack, littered the lower stories of the eyrie with their collections of straw and grass. With one grip of his talons the eagle could have crushed a dozen of them to twitching heaps of flesh and feathers; with one buffet of his wing he could have smashed a score; but to his kingly eye they were little better than grasshoppers, and ten times harder to catch. They were n’t worth the trouble. He left them alone. So the little finches lived in peace, safe from the attack of other birds, under the shadow of the king.

But some birds were not so insignificant as the finches. The eagles, kings of the air though they were, had often to defend their crown. Crows and magpies were big enough to be offensive, cheeky enough to be a nuisance, and fast enough to lead even an eagle a merry chase. Crows, of course, were merely a jeering rabble, but magpies were duelists to be avoided, and the eagles beat them by rising above them and ignoring them. Others were also annoying — blue martins, pewits, and willy-wagtails. These had bodies the size of a half-grown threepence, but their hearts were as big as a bass drum, with courage direct from Mars. They attacked on sight, and kept on attacking. They pestered the king, but he made light of it, even when an odd feather was lifted from his back by the darting strike of an impudent wagtail.

III

When the eggs were laid and the hatching period commenced, the hen rarely left the eyrie. Once a day she stretched her wings and went to water. During that time the cock circled on high. Slowly he swept about the tree in huge spirals, now a mere speck in the distance, now, with a great sob of torn air, rushing past and close to the ground. Nothing ever molested the nest. That huge structure was a warning in itself, and crows and other predatory birds gave it a wide berth in their passage. The little waxbills came and went as usual, their sibilant whispers forever stuttering in the air. Only a marauding goanna would have been foolish enough to attempt to ravage that stronghold.

With a harsh rustling of feathers the queen returned. She alighted on the edge of the platform and hopped to her eggs with the awkward motion which is a caste mark of the species. Her breast was wet from her bath, and as she shook her plumage a few tiny specks of water flew from her wings and sprayed about her.

The male, having to provide for his mate as well as himself, returned to his hunting. From five thousand feet aloft he had seen, ten miles away, a flock of ewes and lambs. With rigid wings he dropped toward his prey on a long and hissing slant. He breasted up in the air a scant hundred feet above the sheep, and coolly encircled them to select his victim. At the tail of the flock, feeding as it went, was a ewe with a week-old lamb. She heard the ‘fruffing’ of mighty wings and leaped for safety as the whirlwind unleashed itself above her; in panic-stricken terror she raced for the protection of the flock. Twenty yards she fled, and then she turned in the face of death itself to look for her lamb.

The eagle had dropped on the little fellow’s loins. Those talons had paralyzed it with their vise-like grip, and it had sunk to the ground. Feebly twitching, it made no effort to escape; and even as its mother watched, the lamb’s life went out in a gurgling sob, and it lay still. Across the body a very demon clothed in feathers stood, wings half spread, beak agape, soulless pin points of eyes flashing like twin fires. And to that devilish horror the game little mother returned, stamping her feet and whistling her anger.

Almost with casual indifference the eagle ignored her. He lowered his head and drove his bill into the lamb’s flank. With a ripping tear he opened it from flank to hip; then, slicing great slivers of flesh, he gulped them down. Twice he wiped his beak on the ground with the whetting action of his kind; four times he turned his head back to front; then he tightened his grip with his talons. He gave a slight hop, spread his huge wings, and as he took the air the points of his pinions swept the ground. Beating heavily, yet carrying his load with comparative ease, the eagle headed for home.

He flew lower than usual, and his line of flight took him across a creek where an old crow had her nest high in the limbs of a coolibah tree. Murderer, fiend, filthy eater, and scavenging pest the crow may be, but none may say she is a coward. When the king of the air passed over her, she did not hesitate. She left her nest and fledglings, called once to her mate the S O S of all crowdom, and recklessly hurtled to the attack. Her mate may not have heard her call, or he may have stayed to protect the nest while she was away. At any rate he did not come, but the single crow flew on in her single assault upon the eagle which had invaded her sanctuary.

In loud-called screams of hate and sweeping dives the crow attacked the eagle. Every time she swept for the pinion joint, which corresponds to the wrist in human beings. That was the eagle’s weakest point. A smashing drive from her hammer of a beak would splinter that bone and cripple her adversary. It may only have been hate which drove her on, but perhaps the eagle’s burden prompted her to greater fury. She rose and dived, rose and dived. And every time she missed that vital joint by the narrowest of margins. The crow was growing berserk with rage. In a very abandonment of fury she came hurtling to the attack again. The eagle seemed to falter in his flight as he churned the air, and from beneath his wing as it swept in a downward stroke a black bundle, sadly ruffled, tumbled and tossed and dropped toward the earth.

The eagle passed on. Behind him, after falling about fifty feet, the crow recovered herself, snapped herself together, and flew silently back to her nest. She had had enough. How the eagle had slipped her lead and smashed her she knew not. Perhaps it was only a fluke. The crow, in her cheeky selfconfidence, no doubt thought so; but she was also wise, and not too old to learn. She added the incident to her store of knowledge, and thereafter viewed eagles with a new respect.

The eagle hovered for a second at the edge of the eyrie. He knew better than to attempt a landing. He dropped the limp body of his burden and flew to the bough of an adjacent tree, where he watched his mate peel the skin from the lamb almost as a man might peel a banana. He saw her strip the flesh from the bones in slicing cuts of her beak. Then he shook himself and stepped out into the air. What was a mere lamb to a full-grown eagle? He must look for more.

IV

He betook himself to the higher heavens, where he swept in regal circles, a black dot skimming the blue. Out on a little plain a string of kangaroos were hopping to the shade of a solitary tree. A bachelor buck led the way. Behind him two half-grown does gamboled as they followed. Next came two adult does, heavily laden with joeys in their pouches. After them came another doe with a youngster beside her. Last of all the lordly old man, master of the mob and sire of the youngsters, hopped in muscle-bound jumps indicative of his great strength. Battle-scarred was he, with bulging muscles and a tattered ear. As the others flung themselves in the dirt in the shade of the tree, the old man stood up, licked himself, and gazed about him. Then he too sought repose, first ousting the bachelor buck from a choice spot which he coveted for himself.

Hardly had the kangaroos settled themselves, throwing up clouds of dust with their hand-like paws to keep off the flies, when a rush of wind and a harsh rattle of coarse feathers proclaimed the arrival of the eagle, which, a few minutes before, had been five thousand feet in the air and four miles behind them. He had alighted on a bough of the tree under which they rested. The kangaroos watched him with grave unconcern and continued tossing up dirt to ward off the flies, but the does drew their joeys closer to them. The eagle turned his head first on one side, then on the other, and waited. Nothing happened. Occasionally one of the kangaroos shifted to a more comfortable position.

The eagle grew tired of waiting and decided to try other tactics. He took to his wings, turned, poised, and swept down upon the little band. The timorous youngsters crept nearer their mothers, and the old man drew himself erect to meet the challenge. It was nothing! According to the textbooks of kangaroodom, an eagle may be a slight nuisance to a grown-up, but it cannot be a real danger; an eagle is a threat only to wandering joeys. The mob lay at ease while the old man stood on guard.

But that pestilential eagle would not leave them alone. He flew back and forth above them, buffeting the joeys with his wings and crowding them closer to their mothers. In his presumption he even dared to slash the old man across the face with rigid wing tips. That was too much! The old man drew himself still higher; he smacked vainly at the shadow as it passed; he blinked his eyes and blew his nose. He would take his family to a safer retreat. Under the shelter of a thick mimosa tree they could rest in peace; there the eagle would not have room to spread his wings. Calling his mob to attention, the old man turned and led the way across the plain.

The bachelor buck and the immature does followed immediately. The mothers with young leaned forward and called to their joeys, who sprang, doubled themselves in the air, and dived into their mothers’ pouches. There they were safe. Last came the doe with the joey too big to take in her pouch. She hopped beside her baby, shepherding him, and she seemed reluctant to leave the shelter of the tree.

As the kangaroos left, the eagle swept about them. He encircled them, flying close to the ground, and as he passed behind the straggling column he swung in on the lone joey. But the doe saw that stroke coming. She too swung in, and intercepted the bird with her own body. Baffled, the eagle rose. The mob strung on, the doe and joey at the tail, and the eagle dropped again. The eagle struck at the young kangaroo while it was in the middle of a bound. The great bird paused for a mere flick of time on its shoulders, and, almost without losing the stroke of his wings, he rose again and rested in a tree. His work was done. He could afford to wait.

The young kangaroo hopped on. Slowly it swung in an aimless circle, gradually narrowing its orbit until it spun about on nerveless legs and fell in a quivering heap. The eagle, in one lightning probe, had pierced its spinal column. Now that his prey awaited him, the bird left his perch and flapped to the body lying on the ground. He straddled it, and with wings half spread awaited the doe, which was returning to investigate. On she came. Advancing on four paws, with that curiously wooden expression of a puzzled kangaroo, she approached her baby and the monster astride it. She advanced her twitching nose to smell her young and to lick it. Tap! Across her tender nostrils the eagle dealt her a blow with his wing tips. The doe bounded away, then turned and came again. Always those cutting wings smacked her, always that devil in feathers rebuffed her, and at last she gave up and followed the mob.

She went to the nearest tree, and stood there watching the scene of rapine. When at last the eagle soared away on heavy wings and faded in the distance, the mother went once more to her young. A mutilated carcass lay on the ground. The flank was ripped open, — always the mark of the eagle, — and from one thigh all the flesh was gone, leaving a white strip of glistening bone. Once she smelled her joey, and then as the dread scent of death came to her she bounded away in alarm, to return no more.

For the best part of a week the eagle feasted on the body of the young kangaroo. Crows and other carrion attended it, but when the king would dine lesser ones stood back. He came till nothing but bare bones remained.

V

The day arrived when the hen did not go to water for her drink and bath. The male eagle, circling on high, knew the reason. He was not perturbed. He had been there before. He recognized the symptoms. He dropped her meal on the platform, sheering off from her menacing beak, and sank to slumber on his favorite perch in a near-by tree. Next day, when the hen hopped awkwardly from her nest, she uncovered a fluffy ball of down. It had a bare belly and gaping beak, pink skin and two hideous black bruises which would later develop into eyes. The other egg lay discarded on one side. Not more than once in a thousand times does the eagle hatch two chicks from two eggs.

The king must celebrate the birth of his heir. He foraged wide, and from a high point in the heavens he saw some wild turkeys in flight. He plunged to their level and gave pursuit. He singled out one bird and marked it for his own. Like two great ships sailing under full canvas, those huge birds tacked in the air, the turkey diving and careening, the eagle hotly following. Gripping the air with two pairs of strong pinions, swirling it behind them in eddies and miniature maelstroms, the two birds threw distance behind them. There was a life to sell, and a meal to gain. They engaged in none of the breath-snatching plunges and lightning doubles of smaller birds, none of the dazzling streaks and blasting swoops. These were ships of the line, requiring plenty of room for their manœuvres. Just the same, the turkey put a price on its life, and the eagle did not forget that he had two other mouths to feed besides his own.

In mid-air, with a flurry of beating wings and a whirlwind of feathers, the pirate and merchantman grappled. For one second there was a tangle of pinions interlocked, a heave and twist to break free; then, slowly, like a twirling leaf, both birds fell to the ground. Great as was his wing power, the eagle had been unable to sustain that double load. The turkey was dead; one steel-like talon had sunk through its breast to its heart, and its neck had been broken as the birds wrestled in the air.

Twice the eagle tried to lift his burden. Twice he failed. Standing athwart the limp body, he sank his beak and ripped open the breast of the turkey. Blood spurted from the wound and dabbled his cheek. The eagle turned his head, carefully wiped his cheek on the ground, and went about his feast. When he had fed himself, he tried again to lift the dead bird. Dust and pebbles rose in clouds about him, and his shrieking wings beat like flails as they tried to grip the air. It was too much. But if he could n’t take the whole feast to his mate, at least he could take a part. First he carried a wing. He returned, fed again, and took a leg. In two days all that was left of the splendid turkey was a ring of feathers in the grass, and a few foraging ants still picked hopefully at dried morsels of flesh.

VI

After the hatching, the hen occasionally hunted. While she was away the male bird always hovered on high above the eyrie. Though she was the bigger and stronger bird, her hunting lacked the fire which marked the forays of her mate. She contented herself with carney lizards, goannas, and an occasional lamb. The country in which they nested contained no rabbits or kangaroo rats, else she would have added them to her bill of fare.

The hunting had been bad. The eaglet cried piteously for food, gluttonous little wretch that it was, and the hen was peevish. Across the plain a flock of sheep were stringing. One glance told the eagle that they were all grown wethers with not a lamb among them. Still, one must eat. He swung higher for a better view, and then he dropped on still wings toward the flock. Along the road that skirted the sheep’s pasturage a car was speeding at the head of its rising ribbon of dust; at the wheel was that animate pinhead which the eagle knew for a man.

The great bird circled the sheep for a closer inspection. At the tail of the flock was a lame wether. It was strong and fat, but its bad leg made it labor to keep up with the others. Once the eagle flew around it, brushing it with his wings as he passed. The wether threw up its head and started running to rejoin the flock. But as it ran a weight descended upon it and a devil’s clutch of steel took it across the loins.

The car stopped suddenly. The man got out and came running across the downs, carrying a gun in his hands.

The wether blundered on, the eagle bobbing and balancing on its back with wings apart. The bird lifted himself into the air. He swung round the sheep, buffeting it with his wings and flustering it by his actions. As the wether strove to break past and catch up with its mates, the eagle descended on its loins again, and more surely than before his talons bit in — through wool and skin into shrinking flesh. The wether stumbled and fell to the ground, lying there with the passive resignation of its breed.

Afar, shouting and running, was the man. The eagle gave him one glance, measured the distance, and calmly sank his bill into the sheep’s flank.

That was too much for the wether. It bounded to its feet and raced away. Three times again the eagle pursued it, rode it to the ground, and commenced on its flank. Each time the sheep arose and strove to shake off that horror that would not let it go. The fourth time it fell it lay resigned, with heaving sides and panting mouth, while in the distance the man came on at a steady run. The eagle fell to. In disgusting lengths the bird drew forth the sheep’s entrails, dabbling his face with blood as he tore and gulped great chunks of quivering flesh.

The man came closer, gasping, swearing, and stumbling as he ran. Fifty yards away he paused to look at his gun. The eagle lifted his head and glanced back over his shoulder. His eyes flashed, his beak gaped, his wings half spread as he seemed to challenge the man who dared to interfere with his feast. Forty yards away the man hesitated to fire lest he kill the sheep, of whose fate he was still ignorant. Thirty yards, and the eagle paused in his attack on the carcass. Twenty yards, and he rose reluctantly from the meal to which he considered himself entitled.

As the bird took the air there came the flash of lightning, the report of thunder, and shot rattled on the eagle’s plumage like hail smashing on a tin roof. ‘Bang!’ A second barrel echoed, and again from a distance of less than thirty yards the eagle was sprayed with number-three shot from the chokebore. They salted his legs, they cut a ribbon of feathers from his hackle; the main charge shook him sideways and rocked him in the air. But his armor of feathers could defy a .22 bullet at eighty yards; number-three shot at thirty yards was to him only an inconvenience.

But the eagle wanted no more of it. He soared high and returned to his eyrie, neglecting a carney lizard on a bare claypan that he passed over on his way. He rested on his favorite perch, fluffed his feathers, and apparently sank to sleep, deaf to the pleadings of his hungry son.

VII

Next day the eagle returned to the wether on the plain. Eagles, unlike dingoes and some other Carnivora, always return to a kill. As he circled about it crows called jeeringly to him, and on the ground three kite hawks held high feast. The eagle dropped beside the body. One crow near him was frankly and disgustingly sick, and as the eagle came up the kites moved away on wobbly legs. One tried to fly, which alarmed the others, and with beating wings and sprawling bodies they flapped the earth in an effort to rise. The eagle ignored them. Hopping on his short stumps of legs, with exactly the same motions as those of a man walking on his knees, he approached the dead sheep. The body had been opened up so that all the more tasty portions were exposed, and other birds had taken their cut. The eagle was not finicky. He proceeded to fill himself, as he always did before taking a portion home to his hen and chick.

Even as the eagle ate, a burning thirst seized him. He seemed to be afire inside. It is just possible, too, that he may have tasted an acrid bitterness in the flesh, but if he did he paid no attention to it. He gorged himself more greedily than ever, tearing great slivers of flesh and gulping them furiously before flying away to water. About him the three kite hawks which had tried to rise now lay dead, but the eagle did not notice them. He turned to leave the feast.

He hopped away from it, and his legs moved jerkily, out of control. All his nerves were quivering, his muscles twitching, and a fire raged within him. He must go to water. He tried to rise. His wings flapped feebly, jerking spasmodically. The eagle did not know the meaning of fear, but at this moment rage took possession of him. In fury he smashed his wings, flapping and churning clouds of dust and pebbles from beneath him. Then a new convulsion took him. He bounded wildly, turned half over, and fell on his back. There, with wings outstretched, his beak snapping fiercely, his talons vainly gripping the air, life passed from him and he lay still.

‘That’s one,’ a man said, as he stooped beside the poisoned carcass and cut off the claws of the eagle. ‘Half a crown. If I get his mate, it’ll be five bob.’

VIII

The hen at the eyrie must have known the king was dead. Eagles mate for life. Only one thing prevents them from returning to the nest, and that is a thing which no living creature may overcome. For two days she foraged, always within sight of the eyrie and her young, and then the lack of food took her farther afield. She flew over the body of the wether. About it a ring of dead kite hawks was evidence of its potency. At a glance she may have recognized the mutilated body of her mate lying there, a giant among pygmies, but she passed on. It was not that death had any terrors for her — she was used to dealing in that mystery; the lure which drew her on was the scent of a fresher body wafted to her on the wind.

On the bank of a water hole lay a dead kangaroo. It had been opened appetizingly, and its freshness was enough to attract the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. The eagle hen dropped beside it. She surveyed it for a moment and then hopped toward her favorite place of attack — the flank.

As she hopped, the earth beneath her came suddenly to life and the steel jaws of a hidden trap snapped upon her leg. In this emergency the hen acted first and thought afterward — she sprang into the air. Rising a bare two feet, she was jerked back to earth. Again, again, and yet again she rose, each time to come crashing back with a thudding jar. She floundered along the ground, raising a flurry of dust and sweeping the earth bare about her. She lay and panted with beak agape. In exhaustion she spread her wings upon the ground, but the fire in her eyes dimmed not at all. With a snap like an electric spark she sprang to action again. In a whirling cloud of dust she fought until at last, her strength all spent, she lay where she fell.

At intervals all that long day she fought for freedom. Her spirit was strong, but the strain was too much for even her iron muscles. Each effort was more feeble than the last. As night came on, the horror of being on the ground in the dark moved her to one more supreme effort, which left her with a pounding heart, with panting lungs that wheezed as she sucked air through a parched throat, and with feathers torn and crumpled. But she stood to face the night; she held her head high and her eyes still flashed.

About noon the next day a man rode to the water hole. At his approach the hen made one more valiant attempt to rise, and her beating wings made pebbles and stems of grass fly high in the air. Casually the man knocked her over the head, and as she lay in a heap, pathetic with closed eyes and draped wings, the man apostrophized her: —

’I set that-there trap for a dingo,’ said he. ‘I want that bloke what’s killin’ sheep in this paddock. He’s a quid if I get him. You’re only half a crown! ’

IX

Up in an old boree tree, on the platform of an eyrie which had been used for years by the same pair of eagles, a fluffy chick with pin points of feathers showing through his down lay with his head stretched along the platform.

Above him circled jeering crows, calling to each other and looking for the owners of the nest. While the others kept watch, one of the crows dropped to the eyrie. He stabbed the chick with his pickaxe of a beak. The little fellow, too weak to stand, was the son of kings and as game as was befitting in one of his breed. He rallied himself and hissed.

Again the crow stabbed, and he cawed raucously as a signal to the rest. Swiftly a black blanket descended upon the eyrie, and the eaglet’s life went out amid a babel of profane cries and scuffling feet.