When the king was gone, it seemed as if a hush had fallen over the
country of the Squatooks. When the old pine beneath the toppling peak of
Sugar Loaf had stood vacant all the long golden hours of the morning, two
crows flew up from the fir-woods to investigate. They hopped up and down
on the sacred seat, cawing impertinently and excitedly. Then in a sudden
flurry of apprehension they darted away. News of the great eagle’s
mysterious absence spread quickly among the woodfolk,—not by direct
communication, indeed, except in the case of the crows, but subtly and
silently, as if by some telepathic code intelligible alike to mink and
wood-mouse, kingfisher and lucifee.
When the noon had gone by, and the shadow of Sugar Loaf began to creep
over the edge of the nest, the old mother eagle grew uneasy at the
prolonged absence of her mate. Never before since the nestlings broke the
shell had he been so long away. Never before had she been compelled to
realise how insatiable were the appetites of her young. She flew around
to the pine-tree on the other side of the peak,—and finding it vacant,
something told her it had been long unoccupied. Then she flew hither and
thither over all the lakes, a fierce loneliness growing in her heart.
From the long grasses around the mouth of the thoroughfare between third
and fourth lakes a heron arose, flapping wide bluish wings, and she
dropped upon it savagely. However her wild heart ached, the nestlings
must be fed. With the long limp neck and slender legs of the heron
trailing from her talons, she flew away to the eyrie; and she came no
more to the Squatooks.
[Illustration: “THEY FLOCKED BLACKLY ABOUT WITH VITUPERATIVE MALICE.”]
The knowledge of all the woodfolk around the lakes had been flashed in
upon her, and she knew some mysterious doom had fallen upon her mate.
Thereafter, though the country of the Squatooks was closer at hand and
equally well stocked with game, and though the responsibilities of her
hunting had been doubled, she kept strictly to her old hunting-ground of
the Tuladis. Everything on the north side of old Sugar Loaf had grown
hateful to her; and unmolested within half a mile of the eyrie, the
diligent fish-hawks plied their craft, screaming triumphantly over every
capture. The male, indeed, growing audacious after the king had been a
whole week absent, presumed so far as to adopt the old pine-tree under
the peak for his perch, to the loud and disconcerting derision of the
crows. They flocked blackly about with vituperative malice, driving him
to forsake his seat of usurpation and soar indignantly to heights where
they could not follow. But at last the game palled upon their whimsical
fancies, and they left him in peace to his aping of the king.
Meanwhile, in the village of Edmundston, in the yard of a house that
stood ever enfolded in the sleepless roar of the Falls of Madawaska, the
king was eating out his sorrowful and tameless heart. Around one
steely-scaled leg, just above the spread of the mighty claws, he wore the
ragged ignominy of a bandage of soiled red flannel. This was to prevent
the chafing of the clumsy and rusty dog-chain which secured him to his
perch in an open shed that looked out upon the river. Across the river,
across the cultivated valley with its roofs, and farther across the
forest hills than any human eye could see, his eye could see a dim
summit, as it were a faint blue cloud on the horizon, his own lost realm
of Sugar Loaf. Hour after hour he would sit upon his rude perch,
unstirring, unwinking, and gaze upon this faint blue cloud of his desire.
From his jailers he accepted scornfully his daily rations of fish,
ignoring the food while any one was by, but tearing it and gorging it
savagely when left alone. As week after week dragged on, his hatred of
his captors gathered force, but he showed no sign. Fear he was hardly
conscious of; or, at least, he had never felt that panic fear which
unnerves even kings, except during the one appalling moment when he felt
the falling net encumber his wings, and the trapper’s smothering blanket
shut out the sun from his eyes. Now, when any one of his jailers
approached and sought to win his confidence, he would shrink within
himself and harden his feathers with wild inward aversion, but his eye of
piercing gold would neither dim nor waver, and a clear perception of the
limits of his chain would prevent any futile and ignoble struggle to
escape. Had he shown more fear, more wildness, his jailers would have
more hope of subduing him in some measure; but as it was, being back
country men with some knowledge of the wilderness folk, they presently
gave him up as tameless and left off troubling him with their attentions.
They took good care of him, however, for they were to be well paid for
their trouble when the rich American came for his prize.
At last he came; and when he saw the king he was glad. Trophies he had at
home in abundance,—the skins of lions which he had shot on the Zambesi,
of tigers from Himalayan foot-hills, of grizzlies from Alaskan cañons,
and noble heads of moose and caribou from these very highlands of
Squatook, whereon the king had been wont to look from his dizzy gyres of
flight above old Sugar Loaf. But the great white-headed eagle, who year
after year had baffled his woodcraft and eluded his rifle, he had come to
love so that he coveted him alive. Now, having been apprised of the
capture of so fine and well-known a bird as the king of old Sugar Loaf,
he had brought with him an anklet of thick, soft leather for the
illustrious captive’s leg, and a chain of wrought steel links, slender,
delicate, and strong. On the morning after his arrival the new chain was
to be fitted.
The great eagle was sitting erect upon his perch, gazing at the faint
blue cloud which he alone could see, when two men came to the shed beside
the river. One he knew. It was his chief jailer, the man who usually
brought fish. The other was a stranger, who carried in his hand a long,
glittering thing that jangled and stirred a vague apprehension in his
heart. The jailer approached, and with a quick movement wrapped him in a
coat, till beak and wings and talons alike were helpless. There was one
instinctive, convulsive spasm within the wrapping, and the bundle was
still, the great bird being too proud as well as too wise to waste force
in a vain struggle.
“Seems pretty tame already,” remarked the stranger, in a tone of
satisfaction.
“Tame!” exclaimed the countryman. “Them’s the kind as don’t tame. I’ve
give up trying to tame him. Ef you keep him, an’ feed him, an’ coax him
for ten year, he’ll be as wild as the day Gabe snared him up on Big
Squatook.”
“We’ll see,” said the stranger, who had confidence in his knowledge of
the wild folk.
Seating himself on a broken-backed chair just outside the shadow of the
shed, where the light was good, the countryman held the motionless bundle
firmly across his knees, and proceeded cautiously to free the fettered
leg. He held it in an inflexible grip, respecting those knife-edged
claws. Having removed the rusty dog-chain and the ignominious red flannel
bandage, he fitted dexterously the soft leather anklet, with its three
tiny silver buckles, and its daintily engraved plate, bearing the king’s
name with the place and date of his capture. Then he reached out his hand
for the new steel chain.
The eagle, meanwhile, had been slowly and imperceptibly working his head
free; and now, behind the countryman’s arm, he looked out from the
imprisoning folds of the coat. Fierce, wild, but unaffrighted, his eye
caught the glitter of the chain as the stranger held it out. That glitter
moved him strangely. On a sudden impulse he opened his mighty beak, and
tore savagely at the countryman’s leg.
With a yell of pain and surprise the man attempted to jump away from this
assault. But as the assailant was on his lap this was obviously
impossible. The muscles of his leg stiffened out instinctively,—and the
broken-backed chair gave way under the strain. Arms and legs flew wildly
in the air as he sprawled backward,—and the coat fell apart,—and the
eagle found himself free. The stranger sprang forward to clutch his
treasured captive, but received a blinding buffet from the great wings
undestined to captivity. The next moment the king bounded upward. The air
whistled under his tremendous wing-strokes. Up, up he mounted, leaving
the men to gape after him, flushed and foolish. Then he headed his flight
for that faint blue cloud beyond the hills.
That afternoon there was a difference in the country of the Squatooks.
The nestlings in the eyrie—bigger and blacker and more clamorous they
were now than when he went away—found more abundant satisfaction to their
growing appetites. Their wide-winged mother, hunting away on Tuladi,
hunted with more joyous heart. The fish-hawks on the Squatook waters came
no more near the blasted pine; but they fished more diligently, and their
hearts were big with indignation over the spoils which they had been
forced to deliver up.
The crows far down in the fir-tops were garrulous about the king’s
return, and the news spread swiftly among the mallards, the muskrats, the
hares, and the careful beavers. And the solitude about the toppling peak
of old Sugar Loaf seemed to resume some lost sublimity, as the king
resumed his throne among the winds.
[Illustration: WILD MOTHERHOOD]