The beautiful, fan-like, exquisitely soft wings flapped and beat frantically. There came a peculiar musky sort of smell into the air.

She rose, all lopsidedly, perhaps two yards, flapping, flapping, flapping with frenzied desperation, before toppling suddenly, helplessly, pathetically, as the big pinions stopped, and she collapsed sideways back to earth again, where, blood-smeared and glaring, lit by the merciless, cynical moon, she crouched and coughed--as I live, coughed and coughed and coughed, a ghastly cough like a baby's, till it seemed as if she would cough her heart up.

Then silence--that wonderful, mysterious, waiting, echoing, listening silence of the woods at night--shut down, and darkness swept over all.

When dawn came stealing westward silently over the still canopy of leaves, both combatants were still there; and they were still here, too, when the sun, silting in through a rift in the foliage, found and bathed them. The owl was crouched as she had been when the moon left her--crouched, and with her wings just a little open, like a bird about to take flight; but she had already taken wing on the longest flight of all. The hedgehog was, too, just as the moon had left him, rolled up in a spiky ball, apparently asleep; but his sleep, also, was the longest sleep of all. And over them both, in the heavy silence, could be distinctly heard that horrible "brr-brr-brr" of flies that told its own story.

Now, that was in the morning, soon after sunrise; but long before that, indeed the moment the hedgehog had first attacked the owl and forced her to turn her attention to him, the little female bank-vole, who by some mischance or miscalculation, had evaded the first terrible handshake of the owl which spells death, had rolled clear of the fight, and dashed for her life to the nearest tussock of gra.s.s that offered shelter; and the first thing she fell over there was our bank-vole, "frozen" motionless. He was there because the scene of the fight was between him and the holes in the bank, and for the life of him he could not muster up courage to run the gauntlet past those dread, struggling forms.

In the end, there being scarcely sufficient room in the tussock for both to hide effectually, and there seeming to be some danger of the combatants trampling them flat where they lay, he led the way up a tree, whose gnarled bole took the ground barely six inches away. It was one of those great-great-great-grandfather oaks, which, if it had been in a more public spot, would certainly have been raised to the dignity of one of the few hundred trees that hid Prince Charlie. It was not, however; but it had another peculiarity, as the voles found out later on.

Scared out of their little wits by the fury of their enemies below, and afraid to go down and bolt across the open, even after the cessation of hostilities, past those appallingly still, crouched bodies, who, for all they had guarantee to the contrary, might be in fiendish, alliance crouched there, waiting for them to descend, the two voles explored gradually, in their own dainty, little, deprecating, creeping way, branch after branch of the great spreading patriarch, till suddenly, at the very tip of the longest and biggest limb of all, they vanished--into ivy. What had happened was quite simple, however.

There was no trick in it. It was all above-board. It was simply that the mighty tree at this spot grew close to one of those outcrops of cliff that formed, as it were, broken-off pieces from the main cliffs which bordered the river and the valley on one side farther up, and one of the oak boughs had gradually been annexed by the ivy--itself of great age--that clothed the face of the cliff.

Climbing steadily upwards through the network of ivy-stems--he had no wish to go down now, for he could hear the river talking to itself directly underneath him, and a false step meant a clean drop into the swirling black depths thirty feet or so below--the bank-vole, with his companion in close and trusting attendance, presently came out on top of the cliff. He found himself upon a s.p.a.ce all clothed with vegetation, bushes, and stunted trees, some hundred yards long.

Beneath him, as he peered over, he could see the roof of the wood, all laid out like a green tablecloth, and here and there, through gaps, the river, now shrunk to no more than a stream, by reason of the fact that men, for their own purposes, had dammed its waters about a mile farther up the valley, and constructed a reservoir there.

The voles knew nothing about any dam--then. They were satisfied to explore the cliff-top and the crevices, to discover the tiny eggs of a coal-t.i.t, and remark on their flavor; to nose into every crook and corner that came in their way; to learn the excellent facilities the place offered for setting up housekeeping; and to discover that no other bank-voles appeared to have found their way up there.

This took time, for they naturally had to flirt in between, and so it happened that the sun had been up some while before they finally set to improvising a home, in a partially earth-filled rocky cleft, with their own st.u.r.dy forepaws. They had got so far as to dig in out of sight, turning every few seconds to push out the loose earth, when the dam up above broke, and a few hundred, or thousand, for all I know, tons of water dropped into the valley--crash!

And thus it happened that, when the sun set, those two little, big-headed, blunt-nosed bank-voles, looking out upon an endless sea of water, above which the top halves of the trees in the wood rose like mangroves, were, save for a few that had climbed into trees and would starve, the only bank-voles left alive, to repopulate that valley with bank-voles, out of all the teeming thousands whose burrows had honeycombed every bank in the vicinity. Verily, how strange is Fate, "who makes, who mars, who ends!"

XVI

THE EAGLES OF LOCH ROYAL

He makes a solitude, and calls it--peace.--BYRON.

He comes, the false disturber of my quiet.

Now, vengeance, do thy worst.--SHERIDAN.

The rising sun came striding over the edge of the world, and presented the mountain with a golden crown; later it turned the rolling, heaving mystery of the mists below into a sea of pure amber. A tiny falcon--a merlin--shot up out of the mist, hung for a moment, whilst the sun transformed his wings to purple bronze, and fell again, vanishing instantly. Next, a c.o.c.k-grouse, somewhere below the amber sea, crowed aloud to proclaim the day, and a raven mocked at him hoa.r.s.ely.

Then, and not till then, the Chieftain awoke. The Chieftain showed as a chocolate, golden-brown, wedge-shaped ma.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e 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 c.o.c.k-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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s 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 ma.s.se_, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 "sh.e.l.l" had been a party of ptarmigan very much fl.u.s.tered 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 pa.s.sed 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.