Men called this strange bird Richardson's skua, or Arctic skua, or lesser skua, or, officially, Stercorarius crepidatus, or, most unofficially, in the vernacular, "boatswain," or "man-o'-war," or "gull-tormentor." Apparently you could take your choice what you called him. But he did not belong to Mr. Richardson really. He belonged to nobody, only to himself, to the wind and the rain, that seemed to have begot him, and to the grim north, from which he took his other name. He might have claimed the gulls as his near relations—they loathed him enough.
For a long time he sat on the lifting, breathing swell, floating idly. There was nothing else on the face of the lonely waters except himself and a flock, or fleet, I should say, of razorbills and guillemots, very far away, who alternately showed all white breasts, and vanished—as they dived and rose all together—like white-faced, disappearing targets, and one gull, who wheeled and wheeled in the middle distance, with one eye on the divers and one on the skua, as if, gull-like, waiting on a chance from either.
Then at last the skua rose again, and swept hurriedly out to sea to meet a small black-and-white speck that was coming in. It was a little, rotund, parrot-beaked puffin, loaded with fish—sprats—four of them set crossways in his wonderful bill. He seemed to know nothing about the skua till that worthy was upon him, and then, as he fled, after a furious chase of about three minutes, he suddenly surrendered by letting fall all his spoil.
The skua caught up one sprat before it hit the surface, but, being too late to overtake the rest, seemed to take no further notice of them, but swept on, to settle upon the water a mile away and preen himself. And this was where the waiting, watching gull came in—the herring-gull. He sprang to strenuous life, and, arriving swiftly at full speed over the spot, snatched up off the surface, and by clumsily attempting to plunge, two more of the sprats, before the skua could intervene.
Then it was that a terrible and a totally unexpected thing happened, and yet, if one comes to think about it and study the matter more, the most natural in the world; probably, also, on those wild seas, even common-place. Only, you see, there was no interval at all between the skua sitting placidly on the lap of the waves, eyeing the gull vengefully, and that same skua shooting straight upwards, all doubled up, on the top of what appeared to have been a submarine mine in a mild form in active demonstration.
[Illustration: "Shooting straight upwards on the top of what appeared
to have been a submarine mine in a mild form">[
This submarine mine, however, in addition to the burst and heave of torn and upflung falling waters and foam, had a visible heart, a great, shining, wet, torpedo-shaped body, which rose on end beneath the stricken bird, and fell again with a splintering crash that shot up the heads of the diving birds half a mile away. It might have been a thresher-shark, or some other northern shark, or it might have been a dolphin, which is bad, or a killer whale, which is a good deal worse, if it had not been a great gray seal seeking dinner; and its effect on the luckless skua was the effect of a battering ram, and the skua that fell back again with the fall of snarling water was to all intents and purposes a corpse.
But it was a good thing that he was so. Had it been otherwise, had he tried to get away or fluttered, there would have been no more of him. That is to say, the head of the seal came up—or its wet and suggestive big nose did—and poked about, trying to find the bird. It had evidently meant to grab him, to engulf him utterly and forever in the first rush; but something—some unlooked-for lift of a wave or turn of the bird—had made the shot miss, or nearly miss, so that the bird had been hit by the bloated six-footer's nose, instead of being crushed in its teeth—its terrible long and glistening array of murderous teeth.