I am not going to describe the struggle that followed, in deference to certain good, kind, and well-meaning people who are unable to face the stern realities of life, or—to save their country. Such things, however, must be; and they would not happen if it were not for a hard, though very sound, purpose, among beasts as among men. Nature is far-seeing and very wise. Moreover, she hates hypocrisy, and—well, we may not all be butchers, but most of us eat meat.
It was certainly a very great confloption, for, of course, that wild cat fought like a—like a wild cat, which is like a Welshman, and I cannot say more than that. And in the end the whole inferno, being upon a very sharp slope, began to slide, and slid, dragging a welter of dust and raw earth and feathers and fur after it, in an avalanche of its own, till it fetched up in a tangle of mountain-ash roots and furze two hundred feet below, where it furiously and fearfully, in one wild, awful, whirling flurry, ended.
After that the Chieftain dragged what was left of that wild cat out of the bushes, where he had tried to jamb and crawl and burrow himself, out into the open—well into the open—so that the eagles could look all round, which they like to do, being birds of high degree—also vermin, or counted as such by gamekeepers of low degree.
The pair—Heaven and the laird alone know how long they had been good and faithful partners in life—thereupon set to hooking at one another with their horny, dragon-like beaks, gripping with black-taloned yellow claws that even a Hercules would shake hands with just once, beating with monster wings that would knock you or me silly, snapping horny, resounding snaps, and generally "not 'arf a-carryin' on" in the approved and correct modern matrimonial manner. So it appeared, at least; but among eagles—within the royal circle, that is to say—such things might be their way of paying compliments, for you cannot expect feathered couples of the royal blood to behave like a pair of mere love-birds.
Then came the bullet.
It was a neat, long, nickel-jacketed, lead-nosed bullet of some .300-caliber, and its own report was chasing it. It sang a high-pitched, plaintive little song all alone to itself as it traveled along through the fine, champagne-like mountain air, at about thirteen hundred feet per second, and it was aimed to hit the Chieftain exactly in the full of the chest. That was why, I suppose, it hit the wild cat smack in the backbone, and killed that poor beast all over again. But you can never tell with bullets.
It might be mentioned here that just as turtle-soup is to their worships, so is wild cat to golden eagles—a bonne bouche par excellence, so to say. They do not get it every day, or every month, for the matter of that—at least, not in these islands of enlightenment, for the wild cat shares with them the honor of being a martyr of Fate, and it is on the index expurgatorius of the gamekeeper also.
But, I give you my word, those two mighty birds left that wild cat uneaten. I say "left" him advisedly, for it was rather a matter that they had left him than that they did leave him. Anyway, they were not near him, not anywhere near him, and I suppose they went. There had arisen a noise as if all Regent Street had at that moment rustled its combined "silk foundations," and—there were our eagles far, far away, and in opposite directions, melting quicker than real sugar-knobs in hot grog into the haze of the distant sky.
And after that the Chieftain and his wife glided up into the setting sun till it swallowed them in a red glory, and when the sun had burnt itself out, swam—swam stupendously and wonderfully—through ether down to bed. Bed with them that night consisted in sitting, regally enthroned among clouds, upon a black, rock bastion exactly above a clean drop of not much more than six hundred feet, and rocked by "the wracked wind-eddies" of the mountain-tops. The good God who made all things—even the animal that had fired at them—alone knows what they dreamt about, that superb, intolerant, fierce, haughty, implacable couple.