Both stopped at the same instant, with a jerk that nearly unhinged every bone in their bodies. Both yelled with terror at the identical moment.
Both were released—as by the cutting of a string—at the same fraction of time, and both hurtled aloft at the same fear-blinded, rocket-like speed.
But both had not been caught by the same kind of trap.
It was the jerk that had freed Cob from the really quite light hold, as we have already explained, of the jaws of the steel trap.
And it was the jerk that had torn out some of the raven's tail-feathers, and left them in the jaws of the—gray, old, hill fox.
And it was the fox who was standing all alone, watching, with oblique eyes, the two great birds fast dissolving with every desperate, stampeding wing-beat into the hurrying cloud-wrack and the wild seascape—in opposite directions. He had made a good stalk, but had sprung a little short, had brer fox.
Upon a day, weeks later, we find the raven, whose young had left the nest, stolidly soaring over a small, flat island, golden with furze, purple with heather, pale-rose chiffon where it was covered with sea-pinks.
In addition to these, only one other hue, beside green, was there upon that island gem floating on the jade-green sea, and that was a patch of black and white! It flashed to the eye of the raiding rogue-raven, and he altered course towards it, when it turned into a female great black-backed gull, running, literally racing, to her nest, which the raven could now see, with its two big, buff, dark-splashed eggs.
Down flopped the giant gull upon her treasure, and began yelling, "How-how-how-how!" at the top of her voice.
But the island seemed empty of life, and her yelling useless.