The skua was scarcely bleeding at all now, but he had left enough of a trail for them—they who make a specialty of the job. And they followed it. Hopping grotesquely across the mottled, hurrying patches of moonlight they came, one behind the other, and without noise.
The skua remained as still as the bowlder he sat upon. In that position, even peering closely, you would never have seen him, unless, like ourselves, you knew he was there. But he was drawn together, drawn in all his muscles like a tense spring, and—though this his persecutors could not know—he was recovering from his hurts rapidly, with the wonderful power of recuperation of all the wild-folk, who pay their price for it in clean, hard living.
Then suddenly there was a scuffle below him in the dark. One of the rats squeaked a little, acknowledging receipt of a crab's pincers closed upon him, or her. Followed the sounds of some scuttering, confusion, and the horrible slide and scrape of horny shells upon stone. Then silence, and the skua knew that, in that wonderful way they have, the crabs, at any rate, were gone—for the moment.
Remained, however, the rats, and one peered up over the bowlder the next instant, its eyes glinting in a momentary splash of moonlight fiendishly. Also, his quick ears could hear the soft creepings of the others on every side of the bowlder, back and front. They had surrounded him, and, like wolves, would now rush, and then—and then—— They had gone.
Yes, there could be no shadow of doubt about it. There had come an instant's furtive, hurried movement, a glimpse—no, half a glimpse—of hunched forms hopping through the dark, and they were no more.
The skua stared, and as he stared a great terror seized him. What more deadly form of death than themselves had they suddenly become aware of, to cause them to invite themselves into nowhere in that magic fashion?
In the dead silence that fell, he could hear nothing, see nothing. Yet he felt—indeed he knew—something seemed to tell him, that a deadly foe was at hand.
Hours passed. They were minutes really, but they seemed hours to him. Nothing happened; nothing showed. But the rats did not come back. Therefore, whatever incarnation of death it was that removed them must be there still. He knew that. That lonely, wounded bird knew that. And he was right.
Behind him, practically invisible, flat to the ground, a long, low, narrow, dark shape was lying crouched, creeping, creeping, creeping towards his tail. Slowly, almost painfully slowly, it drew upon him gradually, so gradually that the distance between them could scarce be seen to lessen. And soundlessly, so soundlessly that even his quick ears, trained far beyond the quickest human aural perception, could not hear it.
Then, so quickly that the eye could not follow it, the crouching form made its rush.