chocolate, golden-brown, wedge-shaped mass of feathers, perched on a
lonely pinnacle of rock, and, his appalling, razor-edged claws being
hidden under the overhanging feathers of his legs, he was scarcely
striking. Next moment he opened his eyes, and was no longer mean, for he
was a golden eagle, and the eyes of a golden eagle are terrible. In them
are written hauteur, pride, and arrogant fierceness beyond anything on
this earth; there is also contempt that has no expression in speech. He
shot out his neck, clapped his talon-like beak, and gazed out, over the
mist that hid Loch Royal, to the south shore of the loch, where lived his
son. The loch was, as it were, their frontier, the boundary-line that
divided the hunting-grounds of father and son, and it was seldom crossed
by either bird.
A little wind rose somewhere in a mountain gorge, and went shrieking
down, rending the mist asunder, as a man rends carded wool. And behind
the wind slid Chieftain, who know the value of a hidden descent. He shot
through the rent, racing down with the sun's rays to earth, and surprised
a cock-grouse at his breakfast, nipping off the tender heather-shoots
daintily one by one. So swiftly did Chieftain fall that the grouse never
knew what had killed him; he was dead--in a flash. The great eagle swept
on with the grouse in his claws, and, without stopping, beat upwards
again.
Suddenly, without any warning, a bullet came singing over the rolling
heather, and passed, with a whine, close to Chieftain's head. Later came
the blasting report of a rifle. As for Chieftain, he gave one amazed
scream of outraged and startled dignity, dropped his grouse, and went;
and when an eagle goes in that way, it is like the passing of a rocket.
A few minutes later Chieftain was whirling round high up among the crags,
calling imperiously for his wife, as a king might call. And she came,
she came, that huge, fierce bird, with a trickle of blood dripping down
her neck, and a fire in her eye that was unpleasant to behold. She, too,
had been fired upon and grazed by a bullet, and she said so in no
measured tones. Now, the laird of Loch Royal deer forests had never
allowed his eagles to be fired at or killed. They were part of the
family possessions, as it were--always had been for generation upon
generation; and, moreover, they kept down the grouse on the deer
forests--which was useful, since the grouse is the red deer's unpaid
sentinel, and give him warning of the crawling, creeping stalker.
Wonderfully the two eagles circled round one another in mighty,
still-winged glidings, effortless, majestic, masterly, sometimes
together, sometimes apart, drawing ever away northward with scarcely a
wing-flap, without, it seemed, any visible force to drive them, till they
swam, like specks on the eye-ball, miles away and upwards round the
white-mantled peaks.
Here, so easily can birds pass from scene to scene, they were in another
world, an Arctic land, silent as the Arctic, bare as the Arctic, cold as
the Arctic, and, at first sight, desolate and uninhabited as the Arctic
appears to be. But this was only an example of Nature's wonderful magic.
Desolate it was. Uninhabited--no.
So far as the eagles could see, there was only a raven, cursed with a
far-advertising blackness, who sat upon a splintered fang of rock and
mocked them hollowly. But he was not the only creature there.
Sweeping down with a hissing rush over a giddy slope of shale that looked
perpetually upon the brink of a general slide down _en masse_, with their
immense shadows underrunning them, the eagles startled suddenly by their
unexpectedness a great red beast into motion. There was a clatter of
antlers, a click of hoofs, a little shower of stones, and away went a
superb stag, a "royal," a "twelve-pointer," lordly and supercilious,
picking his way without a slip on that awful incline. But until he
moved, even he had been quite invisible, bang in the open though he was.
The eagles, following him and swooping at him with imperious savagery,
because they were still angry and upset, though never really coming near
him, bustled him into taking that awful path at a loose hand canter, not
so much, I think, because he, the king of the forest--and this, this
lost, lone scene, was part of the local conception of the word
"forest"--cared the sweep of a "brow-tine" for the eagles, as because he
was startled and uncertain as to what was supposed to be happening. And
the stones spurned by his neat hoofs--he seemed to kick most of them down
behind him as he finished with them, each making for itself its own
miniature avalanche--helped to add to the sudden confusion.
Then it was as if a shell burst in front of him--right under his haughty
nose--and he moved exactly eight feet one inch without touching the
ground; also, in doing it, he cleared a five-foot-seven-inch bowlder, so
absolutely without the slightest sign of an effort that he seemed to have
been blown upwards. It is worth noting, because twenty seconds before he
had been too lazy to clear a four-foot heather-bush, and had gone
_through_ it.
The "shell" had been a party of ptarmigan very much flustered and upset
by being all but galloped over; not the white and frozen ptarmigan of the
cheap poultry warehouse, but the "live" proposition of that name in their
gray, or usual, disguise, posing as stones among many thousand that lay
around the summits.
Wild horses would not have put the ptarmigan on wing in face of those
terrible, sliding, underrunning shadows of death--indeed, one had been
lying within two yards of the Chieftain, as he slid back low to ground
after stooping at the lordly stag--but this crashing avalanche of shale
with the king of the forest atop was too much for them, and they went
down the "hill" into the nothing and the far distance that lay, so to
speak, almost at one's feet, like a spatter of shrapnel.
At the same instant two gray shadows evolved themselves out of the very
ground, and slid away, swift as scudding clouds, up the slope; and a
third gray form, also apparently sprung from nowhere, rose from before
them, and dropped like a spent projectile into the low-lands. They were
two mountain hares and an old sinner of a gray crow; but the thing that
caught the Chieftain's stabbing eye most was none of these.
Both eagles had, with half-shut wings, dropped like mighty barbs towards
the dim, blue distance of the vale, after the hurtling ptarmigan; but in
an instant their great vans respread, their big, wedged tails swiftly
fanned, and with every available brake on, as it were, they fetched up
almost short. Then they both described a single, gliding, calm,
lazy-looking half-circle, and settled upon a turret rock that shot
fifteen feet up from the mountain's shoulder.
Above them, the snow shimmered and glistened blindingly. Below, the warm
mists of the dales steamed off under the beating sun. Loch Royal lay
like a mighty, burnished shield to the southward; and northward, peak
rose behind peak in everlasting grand perspective.
Near them was only the lonely slope, bare now, it seemed, of all life.
But they thought otherwise. Their unspeakably fierce gaze was focused
upon what looked like a grained slab, like any other grained slab, if it
had not all at once begun to twitch, and so--even then one could only
make out the faint outline of a body--turn gradually into a wild cat
asleep on his side. The twitching was not the result of a fit, but of
dreams. Probably he had not meant to go to sleep at all--in a land of
golden eagles! He had merely meant to bask in the sun, within instant
spring of a handy hole between the stones if anything in the enemy line
turned up. That very sun, however, had conspired with drowsiness to
betray him, and--something in the enemy line _had_ turned up.
Even so, I doubt if the golden eagles, with all their wonderful prismatic
binocular vision, made out the cat, as man could. Birds have not that
power, as man has. The twitching they were instant to see. The cause of
it they must have, equally instantly, suspected. Certainly, however, was
a long time coming to them. Precisely when it did, no man knoweth. They
remained like carvings or very fine figures cast in bronze, and as
immovable as the same, for the best part of an hour, if you please; and
during that time all the sign of life that either of them gave was to
wink a yellow eyelid, as quickly as an instantaneous shutter winks,
several times.
At the end of that period a rain-squall came racing and howling round the
summit. It passed in a few seconds, and left mist--cloud, if you
like--damp, dank, and chilly, and a dead calm, in its wake, and--the
Chieftain had vanished (I told you he knew the value of a hidden
descent). But goodness and his own arrogant self alone knew when or
where; in the squall, most likely. But he had certainly vanished.
The Chieftain's mate sat on, as stolid, and as solid, and as statuesque
as ever. She had not moved when he evaporated, or given any sign
whatever.
With the coming of the mist, the cat woke up. The cold probably awoke
him. He was not pleased. He had come to get warm, not cold. He arose
and stretched himself, baring all his claws and fangs with lazy
insolence, for any whom it might concern to see.
Then--he collapsed, falling as if the slab on which he stood had slidden
from under him, and remained--flattened tense, wide-eyed, and dangerous.
The Chieftain's wife had jerked her head and sneezed. At least, she had
yanked her cranium quick as quick, and made a noise. It seemed like a
sneeze. For the rest, she remained as motionless and expressionless as
bronze Buddha, her wonderful orbs scowling at the wild cat.
Then that cat got off that slab of rock. I say got off, but it would be
more correct to say that he slid off sideways on his tummy--flat. One
had difficulty in seeing that he moved. His inscrutable, wide, sinister,
yellow-green eyes were fixed upon the Chieftain's wife. The whole of his
attention was fastened, focused, concentrated upon the Chieftain's wife.
And there he made his mistake. He forgot about the Chieftain himself,
but the Chieftain had not forgotten about him. In fact, the Chieftain
was there, on the spot, or over it, rather, exactly above the wild cat's
head, five hundred feet above, and very slowly revolving upon wide,
outstretched pinions, as if hung by invisible, slowly swung wire from
heaven.
If the cat had looked up! But, then, the cat would not have been a wild
four-footed animal if he had. In all the aeons four-footed wild-folk
never seem to have learnt to look up, and, for the omission, die some
painful deaths that might otherwise be avoided. I do not say that none
of them _ever_ look up--they do, but it is seldom.
Indeed, finally this wild cat did look up; he could not well help it.
There was a sound like the swift descent of a smiting sword above him.
But he was seconds too late.
Seconds before, the Chieftain had vanished again. Nay, he had changed.
His wings had shut, and--he had turned into a line, a dark streak drawn,
almost as lightning draws itself, from heaven to earth,
thus--wh-r-r-r-ssss-sh!
It was then that the cat looked up--just in time to receive the
Chieftain's black tiger-talons, upon brilliant yellow claws, clashing
against his own ivory fangs, and--well, in his eyes.
The Chieftain's wife flung from her strange self her immobility, flung
out a scream, flung open her pinions, and--shifted. She could not have
arrived upon the scene more than three seconds after her lord--but not by
any means master. She was certainly not half that time getting to work.
I am not going to describe the struggle that followed, in deference to
certain good, kind, and well-meaning people who are unable to face the
stern realities of life, or--to save their country. Such things,
however, must be; and they would not happen if it were not for a hard,
though very sound, purpose, among beasts as among men. Nature is
far-seeing and very wise. Moreover, she hates hypocrisy, and--well, we
may not all be butchers, but most of us eat meat.
It was certainly a very great confloption, for, of course, that wild cat
fought like a--like a wild cat, which is like a Welshman, and I cannot
say more than that. And in the end the whole inferno, being upon a very
sharp slope, began to slide, and slid, dragging a welter of dust and raw
earth and feathers and fur after it, in an avalanche of its own, till it
fetched up in a tangle of mountain-ash roots and furze two hundred feet
below, where it furiously and fearfully, in one wild, awful, whirling
flurry, ended.
After that the Chieftain dragged what was left of that wild cat out of
the bushes, where he had tried to jamb and crawl and burrow himself, out
into the open--well into the open--so that the eagles could look all
round, which they like to do, being birds of high degree--also vermin, or
counted as such by gamekeepers of low degree.
The pair--Heaven and the laird alone know how long they had been good and
faithful partners in life--thereupon set to hooking at one another with
their horny, dragon-like beaks, gripping with black-taloned yellow claws
that even a Hercules would shake hands with just once, beating with
monster wings that would knock you or me silly, snapping horny,
resounding snaps, and generally "not 'arf a-carryin' on" in the approved
and correct modern matrimonial manner. So it appeared, at least; but
among eagles--within the royal circle, that is to say--such things might
be their way of paying compliments, for you cannot expect feathered
couples of the royal blood to behave like a pair of mere love-birds.
Then came the bullet.
It was a neat, long, nickel-jacketed, lead-nosed bullet of some
.300-caliber, and its own report was chasing it. It sang a high-pitched,
plaintive little song all alone to itself as it traveled along through
the fine, champagne-like mountain air, at about thirteen hundred feet per
second, and it was aimed to hit the Chieftain exactly in the full of the
chest. That was why, I suppose, it hit the wild cat smack in the
backbone, and killed that poor beast all over again. But you can never
tell with bullets.
It might be mentioned here that just as turtle-soup is to their worships,
so is wild cat to golden eagles--a _bonne bouche par excellence_, so to
say. They do not get it every day, or every month, for the matter of
that--at least, not in these islands of enlightenment, for the wild cat
shares with them the honor of being a martyr of Fate, and it is on the
_index expurgatorius_ of the gamekeeper also.
But, I give you my word, those two mighty birds left that wild cat
uneaten. I say "left" him advisedly, for it was rather a matter that
they had left him than that they did leave him. Anyway, they were not
near him, not anywhere near him, and I suppose they went. There had
arisen a noise as if all Regent Street had at that moment rustled its
combined "silk foundations," and--there were our eagles far, far away,
and in opposite directions, melting quicker than real sugar-knobs in hot
grog into the haze of the distant sky.
And after that the Chieftain and his wife glided up into the setting sun
till it swallowed them in a red glory, and when the sun had burnt itself
out, swam--swam stupendously and wonderfully--through ether down to bed.
Bed with them that night consisted in sitting, regally enthroned among
clouds, upon a black, rock bastion exactly above a clean drop of not much
more than six hundred feet, and rocked by "the wracked wind-eddies" of
the mountain-tops. The good God who made all things--even the animal
that had fired at them--alone knows what they dreamt about, that superb,
intolerant, fierce, haughty, implacable couple.
* * * * * *
Now, the man, the--er--lord of creation, who had fired that shot--in
fact, all those shots that day--was Pig Head, the back-to-the-lander from
the South. Pig Head argued that deer forests are farms lying idle. And
the laird had offered to rent him a farm at one-and-nothing-three the
acre to disprove it. Pig Head had taken the offer. He disapproved of
lairds as unrevolutionaries. He hated red deer because they were too
smart for him to kill wholesale, and he loathed golden eagles because
they were the pride of the "hills." But he kept his opinions to himself,
because he valued his neck. The People of the Hills would have stretched
it very much longer than his own long tongue if he hadn't. In his heart
he also hated the "oppressed" People of the Hills for that they loved
their laird, regarded deer-stalking as a religious rite, and--wore kilts!
As a matter of fact, Pig Head's farm never grew anything more than some
clinging heather, a little cross-leaved heath, patches of furze, a clump
of storm-bent Scotch firs or so, and rock--mostly rock.
Pig Head had only been able to get what he thought was his own back upon
that day by firing at the eagles, because the laird and the stalkers, the
gillies, the keepers, and the People of the Hills, were away, all away,
at a sheep-dog trial, or a clan meeting, or something. After that he had
to work in silence, and he did.
There are always people who will buy a golden eagle "British caught," and
those who don't want live ones will take 'em dead, and have them stuffed.
They like to be able to set 'em up in the hall among other stuffed birds,
and boast that they shot 'em. Other people of it like decayed mind come
and look at them, and offer money for them at sales out of jealousy.
That's collecting.
Now, somewhere, somehow, sometime during his checkered career, Pig Head
had heard, or read, of a way of catching golden eagles. He proceeded.
Upon an unholy and cold shaly slope well up among the clouds, the mist,
and the ptarmigan, Pig Head had hollowed him out a hollow, roomy enough
for himself to crouch in. He was the sort of man that crouched--and
"grouched." Over the top he put a nice big slab; the walls were of piled
stones, and at one end was an aperture eight inches or so long by about
one foot. Being made of its surroundings, the hiding-place did not look
at all suspicious--from a bird's point of view.
Finally, upon the morning after the unsuccessful shooting, and before it
was light--this was necessary, for there is no knowing how far the eyes
of eagles can see--Pig Head ensconced himself in this hiding-place. It
was perishing cold, and Pig Head, who did not smoke, and never drank
whisky--only gin--was blue of nose and numb of hand. A good plaid would
have helped him, but he abhorred plaids.
* * * * * *
The dawn came up over the mountains, the mists sank down to the vales,
and the dawn wind, lean and searching, went whispering over the hills.
Then a speck grew out of the heights, out of the west and the dark, and
growing and growing momentarily, became a rustling, sinister, untidy,
heavy shape, which anon settled upon a rock, and croaked, "Glock! glock!"
twice, almost like a bark, in a deep and sepulchral voice. To it was
added another sable form, coming down from the lonely stony heights, and
the two sat together, remarking, as they looked--but their wonderful eyes
must have seen it very far away--at the bait. It was the wild cat turned
inside-out, and other things, on a slab outside the aperture before
mentioned, that was at one end of Pig Head's hiding-place. And the black
specters were ravens.
"Ou!" they said; then "Aw!" then again "Ou!" One remarked "Augh!" and
the other agreed--or, it may have been, disagreed--with an "Au!"
Evidently the wild cat, in a disguise in which he would not have known
even his own self, looked very enticing, and he and the situation
generally were being discussed from all points of view.
I say from all points of view advisedly, because, although the ravens
discoursed much over their council of war, they would not come within a
hundred yards, and it was a voice from the semi-dark, or western, side
which finally stayed them in the very act of unfolding their big, rounded
wings to fly away.
"Krar-krar-krar!" rasped the voice; and the ravens folded their wings
again to wait and see!
It was a gray crow, and the ravens knew that never was gray crow an
innocent lost in the wilderness.
If the gray, or hoodie, crow--always remembering that crows, gray or
black, are servants of the Devil, just as ravens are, and very
cunning--if the crow, I say, thought that here was food without some
horrible form of hidden death lurking behind it, then the chances were
the gray crow was right. They knew "hoodie," you see. Anyway, if they
let him go first, and he was wrong, then it would be _his_ funeral, not
theirs.
Wherefore the gray crow went first to the bait, and Pig Head, half-dead
with cold and peering out of a tiny peep-hole, called down blessings of a
weak and watery nature upon his black head. And well he might, for if
the gray crow had shied at the bait, then everybody else would have taken
his tip.
They took his tip now, for in a few minutes there was a "hurrr-hrrr-hrrr"
of wings, and, one after the other, down came the ravens.
Anon the ravens were joined by a third, volplaning from some
cloud-covered peak, where he must have been watching all the time; and
the crow was joined by four accomplices, who just drifted up from nowhere
special, as gray crows have a habit of doing when there is carrion afoot.
But Pig Head had not come there to entertain ravens, nor was he at that
moment laying up a store of lumbago for the purpose of gratuitously
feeding disreputable gray crows. He had other quarry in view. The gray
crows, however, were his best asset. They quarreled, and were
loquacious, and, in fact, they made a most infernal noise; and he had
stated that the noise was necessary to his success. This would seem as
if eagles hunt by sound as well as by sight. Pig Head was the first
person I ever heard that suggested so. But, be that as it may, the
racket increased as the sun, robed in purple, gold, and crimson splendor,
rose over the mountain-tops; and with the sun came the only bird, so the
ancients tell us, who can look the sun full in the face without
blinking--_Aquila_, the eagle.
But--make no mistake about this point--he who came then, grandly, proudly
sweeping over the blue, dim ridges, was not the Chieftain himself, for
this was not the Chieftain's territory, but the Chieftain's son; he who
lived, as you will remember, upon the other, or south, side of Loch Royal.
Haughtily, statelily, as a king might go to his throne, so did the
Chieftain's son let himself down, in stupendous hundred-foot spirals, to
a pinnacle of rock, jagged, saw-edged, and perpendicular, about two
hundred yards away; and the ravens and the gray crows, who saw him
coming, made great and sudden hostile outcry at first, and then, as he
folded, foot by foot, his immense pinions about him, and sat there erect,
with his piercing, scowling gaze bent upon _them_, they were dumb.
And Pig Head, aching with cramp and cold in his hiding-place, knew that
_the_ quarry was at hand. But if you think, because the eagle was at
hand, that the time was at hand too, you don't know eagles. They may be,
upon occasion, as quick as the spring of death, but they can also be as
slow as the wrath of Heaven. And that bird there, the great, grand,
haughty, unbending _Aquila chrysoetus_, that golden eagle, sat. I say,
he sat. And there, so far as he was concerned, appeared to be an end of
it. He might have been a carven copestone of the very granite fang he
sat upon, for all the appearance of life he gave, except that
occasionally--say at fifteen-minute intervals--he winked a yellow-lidded
wink. And the wink was almost as unlifelike and uncanny as the bird.
And the gray crows and the ravens gulped and quarreled, with one eye upon
the eagle and one upon their job; and Pig Head--Pig Head sat and cursed
that eagle, from his horny beak to his barred tail, through
chattering--and aching--teeth. But the eagle never moved a feather.
* * * * * *
We are told that Alexander sighed for other worlds to conquer. So it was
with the Chieftain, who was not Alexander.
After his wife had gone a-hunting eastward--a wonderful and gigantic
silhouette floating and dwindling into the furnace of the rising sun--the
Chieftain sat upon his ledge of rock, staring across the gleaming,
painted, glassy expanse of Loch Royal, southward, to the dominions of his
son.
He had seen his son, a speck in the dawnlight, invisible to our eyes,
sailing from peak to upflung peak. He had seen him suddenly check and
circle downwards. And then--he had not seen him.