“Well, sonny, it was this way. You know the eagles’ nest on the old yellow-wood in the big kloof? I got the pig out of there.”
“Oh, you did, did you? As far as I remember, the tree is a hundred feet high, and the nest quite sixty feet up. The pig climbed up, I presume?”
“You presoom morn’s good for you, sonny. Don’t suppose ’cos you bin to the Orange River you know everything. The pig didn’t climb up; he jes’ dropped in on passin’; paid a sort of flying visit. That nest’s as big as a cart wheel, and if you stand below and look up the trunk it shuts out the sky, while down below there’s bones enough, and of sorts, to build up the skelingtons of a entire museum. That pair of eagles used that nest going on for fifteen years, and each year when the young hatch out they kill off more dassies and cats and blue-boks than you could eat in a year.”
“You are welcome to the cats, Abe.”
“Yes, sir. Them eagles have buried, I reckon, as many as two thousand animiles in that leaf-mould cemingtary below the big tree. Well! Grub being skerce, I had a fancy to bury them young squabs of eagles, by way of satisfying my own yearning for food, and giving the ole hook-beaked pirates a hint that they hadn’t the sole right over the earth and air. Sonny, that’s a big tree, and it took me a fortnight to climb up.”
“That was quick!”
“I’ve seen quicker climbin’, but taking the size of the tree and the height of it—maybe, five hundred feet!”
“I thought the height to the nest was about sixty feet?”
“Have you clomb that tree?”
“No, Abe.”