CHAPTER XXXIII
WHEN BANNERTAIL WAS SCARRED FOR LIFE
IT makes indeed merry play, with just enough of excitement when you bait the Bull, and dodge back to the fence to laugh at his impotent raging. But it makes a very different chapter when a second Bull comes on the other side of the fence. Then the game is over, the Bull-baiter must find some far refuge or scramble up the nearest sheltering tree, or pay the price.
Bannertail had an ancient feud with the big Hen-hawk, whose stick nest was only a mile away, high in a rugged beech. There were a dozen farmyards that paid unwilling tribute to that Hawk, a hundred little meadows with their Mice and Meadowlarks, and one open stretch of marsh with its Muskrats and its Ducks. But the hardwood ridges, too, he counted on for dues. The Squirrels all were his, if only he could catch them. Many a game had he and Bannertail, a game of life and death.
They played again that morning in July. It was the same old swooping of the whistling pinions, and the grasping of strong yellow feet with hard black claws, grasping at nothing, where was a Graycoat half a heartbeat back, the same flaunting silver flag, the mocking "Grrrff, grrrff," the teasing and daring of the Hawk to make another swoop. Then did that big Hen-hawk what he should have done before. He filled the air with his war-cry, the long screaming "Yek-yek-yeeeek!" Coursing low and swift came another, his mate, the lady bandit, even fiercer than himself. Swift and with little noise she came. And when savage old Yellow-eyes swooped and Bannertail whisked around the tree, he whisked right into the clutches of the deadlier she-one. He barely escaped by a marvellous side rush around the trunk. Here again was Yellow-eyes, but right in his face Bannertail dashed his big silvery tail. The Hawk in his haste clutched at its nothingness, or he would have got the Graycoat. But luck was with Bannertail, and again he dodged around the trunk. Alas, the she Hawk was there, and struck; her mighty talons grazed his haunch, three rips they made in his glossy, supple coat. In an instant more the Redtail would have trussed him, for there was no cover, only the big, outstanding trunk, with the Hen-hawks above and below. A moment more and Bannertail's mate, helpless in the distant nest, would have seen him borne away. But as they closed, he leaped—leaped with all his strength, far from them into open air, and faster than they could fly in such a place, down, down, his silver plume in function just behind him, down a hundred feet to fall and land in a thicket of laurel, wounded and bleeding, but safe. He scrambled into a thicker maze, and gazed with new and tenser feelings at the baffled Hen-hawks, circling, screaming high above him.
Soon the bandits gave up. Clearly the Graycoat had won, and they flew to levy their robber-baron tribute on some others that they held to be their vassals.