“Why, because Stumpy read it, too, and he was saying when he was up here to-day that it was a ‘foolishness,’ as he called it, and no bird could carry such a weight.”
“Oh, that’s not so,” said Mr. McLean, decidedly, while the children dropped their checkers and pricked up their ears for a story. “I don’t know about a good-sized boy, but we know that an eagle could carry a small one. My idea is that they can lift as much in proportion to their weight as a hawk or a horned owl, and I’ve known a horned owl to snatch up a large house-cat and make off with it.
“My belief is that if hawks or owls can carry more than twice their weight—and everybody knows they can—that an eagle could do as much, or more, perhaps. Once, when I was a lad, I found an eagle lying helpless on his back in the road shot through the body with a rifle-ball, poor creature. I was kind of afraid of him, he looked so fierce, and I up-ended a long road skid and dropped it on him. Before it reached him he stretched up and caught it in his claws and held it up the length of his legs above him. I walked up on the skid and stood over him, and he easily held me and the skid, which I should judge would weigh more than twenty pounds. I took pains to be weighed myself that same day and tipped the scales at one hundred and nineteen pounds. You tell Stumpy that, and tell him to put a stick in the claw of a wounded eagle and let him grasp a small tree with the other and a man must be stronger than ever I was to take the stick away from him.”
Ronald had left the table as soon as eagles, hawks, and horned owls had begun to fly through the conversation and now leaned on the arm of his father’s chair.
“I should think, Daddy,” he said in his wheedling way, “that it would be a good night to tell us that story about the baby that was carried off to Garrison Mountain when you were a little boy in Maine. I haven’t heard it, I do think, more’n once since I lived in this country.”
McLean laughed. “I’m no story-teller,” he said, “and a good thing I’m not. What with Stumpy and his tales and your mother there and her ballads, you children would never have learned to read if I’d told stories, too.”
“Never you mind about my ballads,” advised Mother, good-humoredly. “You like them just as well as the children do. Tell the boy about the white-headed eagle. I’d like to hear it again, myself.”
“It was a good while ago it happened,” said McLean, “for it was not long after my father and mother died and I was brought over from the old country to an uncle on a farm in Maine.
“We knew that two old white-headed eagles built their nest every year on a crag of Garrison Mountain in plain sight of the folks in the valley and we heard them screaming over us every spring when they came back to settle down again in the old homestead. The charcoal-burners in the camps used to hear them, too, as they swooped down to the lowlands for rushes and grass to line their nest, and when the great eggs were laid and the mother was keeping them warm, many a lamb or little pig did the old father eagle take her for her dinner. Mothers used to be extra watchful of their babies for the first few weeks of spring, but nothing ever did happen and of course they thought nothing ever would.”
“Would an eagle really like a baby better than a lamb?” asked Lesley, fearfully.