A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

Again, for the sake of the curious, I will give his weight. He turned the scale at five pounds some six hours later. So I imagine he was about five and a half when he came out of the water with the Zulu in his mouth. He was mad; he turned a fierce Bedlamite eye on me.

I dare say I am more impatient than the true fisherman, but when I have cast my fly upon the waters for three hours without a hint of a rise, I sit down, and do not feel it incumbent on me to rise again unless conditions change. So when, at about two o’clock, nothing further had broken the surface of the loch except the cane of the schoolmaster, I felt, after eating my sandwich, that I was not unlikely, without incurring the contempt of Sandy, to prolong the interval. I wanted also, after my mis-tryst with Pan that morning, vaguely also, after that day of bovine observance of Nature which I had spent a week or two ago in the garden at home, to ‘sit up and take notice.’ Instead of nirvanic contemplation, I wanted to focus all that surrounded me, not to see a stag-beetle advance ten yards, and then go back to the place he advanced from, but to see the activity of it all, to be alert and to collect, not to be lazy and to soak.

Yes; it was a wonderful day. Almost immediately I spied two little human figures on the adjoining forest creeping, creeping up a steep brae. A mile below I saw their ponies. They moved so slowly that it was only possible to see they moved at all, because they passed out of the field of my glass; the deer I could not find.

Then, after watching them for ten minutes more, I saw they stopped. Stealthy movements went on. Then came the sharp crack of a rifle, but before the report reached me they had both jumped up, and ran into a hollow of the hills, where I lost them. It was like being at sea, and having news twitched out from the receiver of a Marconi apparatus.

But hardly had that drama been played to its curtain when another started. The call of a startled grouse, ‘Come back, come back, come back!’ sounded close at hand, and it was followed by another and yet another. Sandy had remained by the edge of the loch when I climbed this hillock for my lunch, and since then I had been very quiet, so I could not imagine what had caused this commotion on the hill, as the stalkers were not on this beat at all to-day. I could account, in fact, for the movements of any human being that could have disturbed grouse for a mile or two. Then I looked up to the enormous sky, and saw.

Above me, but close, so that I could see the outspread feathers of the wing, was a golden eagle. As I watched I saw he was not vaguely circling, looking out for prey, but employed in his stalk, even as on the other side of the valley ten minutes ago I had watched another stalk. He was sweeping wide circles of the moor, and driving up towards a gully of the hills behind the fowls of the mountain, flying in low and ever narrowing semicircles, so that it must seem to the terrified grouse and black game that huge-winged danger threatened from every quarter but that. Yet still I could not guess what his plan was when he had driven them there.

And then I saw. Straight down from the grey crag of cliff that rose on the west of this gully, into which he had driven the birds, there dropped his mate, savage and hungry, seeking her meat from God. Aha, you grand Mistress Eagle; it is dinner-time!

Merrily and well has the old cock-grouse lived in the heather, lying warm in the sun, and filling himself with the good things of the moorland, but to-day Pan sends him to your table, and in the swift hissing down-rush of your wings he hears his pipes. Pan will play them for you, too, some day, and the grey film will cover over your fierce yellow eye that was wont undazzled to behold the sun in his strength, and the strong hooked beak which gasped for one breath more of the aromatic moorland air will close, and be hungry no more, and the crooked, horny talon will relax, and next year, maybe, I shall find whitened bones on the hillside, and perhaps, crumpled up under them, a feather, an eagle’s feather. But I shall not be so foolish as to say I have found you, for do I imagine that that is all there is of you, that your life, your spirit, has been blown out like a candle? I know better than that.

For, indeed, there is no other explanation possible of the incessant war, the death, the murder, the butchery in which Nature’s fair hands are steeped and stained, except by this one supposition that the spirit of bird and beast escapes at the moment of death from the splendid sunlit prison of this beautiful world, which has the bright-eyed hours for its bars. Otherwise the world becomes a mere intolerable shambles, viler than Chicago. I at any rate cannot believe otherwise, but should any sceptical reader at this point ask me to sketch out for him the subsequent movements of the wasp he has just squashed in the tongs, or the trout I have just landed, I hasten to assure him that I have not the slightest idea about them. But that does not invalidate the explanation, nor in the least disturb my complete belief in it. I do not know what the weather will be this day year. But I make no manner of doubt that there will be weather of some kind. I only insist that he with his tongs, and I with my Zulu-fly, cannot destroy life. One cannot even destroy matter; how much less, then, the lord and master of matter!

I think I have never been in a house where absurd gaiety—the gaiety of friends, of health, of outdoor spirits—was so rampant as here; and she whose house it was, and who was leader of the ludicrous, was she, as you may have guessed, who in June had asked me to come here for the last time. That evening when I got home I found her sitting out in the garden enjoying the last half-hour of sunset, and she beckoned to me across the lawn.