An ugly fellow was Baldy, with his great curved beak and his great yellow claws. His body alone was bigger than that of the fawns, and his wings spread out like the wings of an aeroplane. He was mostly a muddy brown, with white head and fan-spread tail, and he smelled horribly fishy, for he isn’t a bit particular about what he eats, and frequently stuffs himself so full of the spoiled fish he finds on the shore that he can’t even fly.
The air hissed to his wings.
He waited now till he felt that Fleet Foot was surely too far away to come to their rescue, should he attack the fawns. For he knew from experience that with her sharp hoofs she could put up a fight he would rather not face.
For a while he wandered if he should just simply drop down upon one of the little fellows and pin his talons into his back, and fly away to his nest. But it would be awfully heavy to carry and of course it would kick and wriggle, ’till like enough he would be unable to manage his feathered aeroplane, and they would run into some jagged rock.
If the fawns had been orphans, he might have killed one right there, and no one would have interfered.
But they were not orphans, and their mother would come racing back and cut him to pieces with those knife-edged fore-hoofs.
Ha! An idea popped into his ugly old head.—He would scare one of the fawns off the edge of the precipice, and it would leap to its death on the rocks below; and then he could wait till Fleet Foot had gone, for his feast.
Swooping lower and lower, while still the foolish fawns stared innocently at the dancing shadow, he suddenly flapped his wings about the tinier fawn, startling him terribly, but not enough to make him back off the cliff.
Stronger measures must be tried,—and there was no time to waste; for at the fawn’s first bleat of terror, Fleet Foot heard and was now leaping like the wind, back the trail to his rescue.
Swooping again, Baldy began beating the little fellow with great heavy blows of his middle wing joints. It hurt dreadfully, and the frightened fawn turned first this way, then that, in his endeavor to get away. Nearer and nearer the edge of the precipice he crowded. Now one hind foot had actually slipped off the rock face, and he had to struggle to regain his balance.