He was about eighteen inches long, and bluish-ash in colour. His throat and upper breast were white, tinged with yellow, and marked with a few dark streaks. But the most noticeable thing was the eyes. They were large, and keen, dusky; ringed with yellow eyelids. Fierce and remorseless was their expression, aided by the short, hooked bill.
The falcon suddenly stiffened. From the lake below the sloping forest had come a faint trumpet-like call. He knew the call well, for many times had he and his mate preyed upon the wild duck in the Devon estuary opposite Lundy Island.
The next moment he had gone through the trees, a swift shadow. A little vole splitting a beechmast on the ground below crouched in terror. For everything preyed upon its kind. The weasel came by day, and in summer the grass snake; if it left the wood and went to the meadow there was the poised kestrel hawk; in the furrows a fox sometimes ran, snapping at the tiny mice; in the dark night came the great wood owl, and that white devil, the barn owl.
The mouse crouched in terror, but he passed on, a swift shadow: he was a noble bird, and did not take rodents.
Seven duck had flighted, and were going towards the reaches of the Thames. They flew fast and steadily, at fifty miles an hour. The passing narrow shadow became a relentless and swift whirling speck above them, ever climbing.
Then one of the duck was falling, the flight was scattered; the falling one clutched and borne to the beechwood, where the hooked beak tore and ripped.
Thenceforward the wood became a place of terror. One morning the keeper discovered a cock pheasant lying dead on the leaves. A small part of its breast had been eaten. At first he thought that it was the work of a fox—but he was puzzled; he knew that the fox usually ate more of a longtail than a small part of its breast, and always buried his half-eaten victim for consumption on another occasion. And on turning it over, he was still more puzzled. The back was ripped as though a knife had slashed and turned the skin right back.
A hundred yards away he found a carrion crow. The back of the crow was also smashed, although no attempt had been made to eat any section of its body. In other parts of the wood the keeper found slain pheasants, all badly broken; the remains of a squirrel—one forepaw and a bushy tail comprising the remains. Three dead duck floated in the lake. Whatever new and ghastly thing was causing the havoc, he told his head man later, it seemed to delight in destroying and killing for sport.
Gradually the terror became the topic of talk in the inns roundabout Bromley, in Kent. Some of the bolder and more imaginative declared that it was caused by an Arctic owl—one even said that he had seen it stooping at a dog in the twilight. He was a well-known liar.
No one in the district—which was outlying to a large town just outside the suburban area of south-east London—had ever heard of the like.