The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

The eagles, following him and swooping at him with imperious savagery, because they were still angry and upset, though never really coming near him, bustled him into taking that awful path at a loose hand canter, not so much, I think, because he, the king of the forest—and this, this lost, lone scene, was part of the local conception of the word "forest"—cared the sweep of a "brow-tine" for the eagles, as because he was startled and uncertain as to what was supposed to be happening. And the stones spurned by his neat hoofs—he seemed to kick most of them down behind him as he finished with them, each making for itself its own miniature avalanche—helped to add to the sudden confusion.

Then it was as if a shell burst in front of him—right under his haughty nose—and he moved exactly eight feet one inch without touching the ground; also, in doing it, he cleared a five-foot-seven-inch bowlder, so absolutely without the slightest sign of an effort that he seemed to have been blown upwards. It is worth noting, because twenty seconds before he had been too lazy to clear a four-foot heather-bush, and had gone through it.

The "shell" had been a party of ptarmigan very much flustered and upset by being all but galloped over; not the white and frozen ptarmigan of the cheap poultry warehouse, but the "live" proposition of that name in their gray, or usual, disguise, posing as stones among many thousand that lay around the summits.

Wild horses would not have put the ptarmigan on wing in face of those terrible, sliding, underrunning shadows of death—indeed, one had been lying within two yards of the Chieftain, as he slid back low to ground after stooping at the lordly stag—but this crashing avalanche of shale with the king of the forest atop was too much for them, and they went down the "hill" into the nothing and the far distance that lay, so to speak, almost at one's feet, like a spatter of shrapnel.

At the same instant two gray shadows evolved themselves out of the very ground, and slid away, swift as scudding clouds, up the slope; and a third gray form, also apparently sprung from nowhere, rose from before them, and dropped like a spent projectile into the low-lands. They were two mountain hares and an old sinner of a gray crow; but the thing that caught the Chieftain's stabbing eye most was none of these.

Both eagles had, with half-shut wings, dropped like mighty barbs towards the dim, blue distance of the vale, after the hurtling ptarmigan; but in an instant their great vans respread, their big, wedged tails swiftly fanned, and with every available brake on, as it were, they fetched up almost short. Then they both described a single, gliding, calm, lazy-looking half-circle, and settled upon a turret rock that shot fifteen feet up from the mountain's shoulder.

Above them, the snow shimmered and glistened blindingly. Below, the warm mists of the dales steamed off under the beating sun. Loch Royal lay like a mighty, burnished shield to the southward; and northward, peak rose behind peak in everlasting grand perspective.

Near them was only the lonely slope, bare now, it seemed, of all life. But they thought otherwise. Their unspeakably fierce gaze was focused upon what looked like a grained slab, like any other grained slab, if it had not all at once begun to twitch, and so—even then one could only make out the faint outline of a body—turn gradually into a wild cat asleep on his side. The twitching was not the result of a fit, but of dreams. Probably he had not meant to go to sleep at all—in a land of golden eagles! He had merely meant to bask in the sun, within instant spring of a handy hole between the stones if anything in the enemy line turned up. That very sun, however, had conspired with drowsiness to betray him, and—something in the enemy line had turned up.

Even so, I doubt if the golden eagles, with all their wonderful prismatic binocular vision, made out the cat, as man could. Birds have not that power, as man has. The twitching they were instant to see. The cause of it they must have, equally instantly, suspected. Certainly, however, was a long time coming to them. Precisely when it did, no man knoweth. They remained like carvings or very fine figures cast in bronze, and as immovable as the same, for the best part of an hour, if you please; and during that time all the sign of life that either of them gave was to wink a yellow eyelid, as quickly as an instantaneous shutter winks, several times.

At the end of that period a rain-squall came racing and howling round the summit. It passed in a few seconds, and left mist—cloud, if you like—damp, dank, and chilly, and a dead calm, in its wake, and—the Chieftain had vanished (I told you he knew the value of a hidden descent). But goodness and his own arrogant self alone knew when or where; in the squall, most likely. But he had certainly vanished.