The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

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 cock-grouse, somewhere below the amber sea, crowed aloud to proclaim the day, and a raven mocked at him hoarsely.

Then, and not till then, the Chieftain awoke. The Chieftain showed as a chocolate, golden-brown, wedge-shaped mass 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 shore 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 cock-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 passed, 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 passing 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 pass 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 masse, 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.