He went up and up steadily; sometimes he had to wait while he searched for a sure foothold in the gigantic wall. Here and there a shrub or tree would grow out of a crevice, and with the aid of these he pulled himself up, hand over hand, while half his body hung in air; and then the muscles of his back stood out like whipcord and rippled along his arms.
As he climbed, the depth under him deepened. He had long passed above the summits of the loftiest pines. Now the forest was far below him, and he was hanging between earth and sky in the middle air. He was climbing from the wolf-world, with its old familiar trails, to the world of the eagles, where the earth trails cease for ever in the trackless wastes of air. What had Shoomoo or Nitka, or the wolf-brothers, to do with this upper world where, surely, if you went on climbing, you must come at last to the sheep-walks of the stars where the pastures are steep about the moon?
And the world yawned under!
A false footing, or the breaking of a shrub, and down he would go to certain death and be dashed to pieces. Yet, in spite of the awful spaces about him and that yawning gulf below, there was no fear in him, nor any dizziness when he looked down. As he rested for a moment, and let his eyes wander, he gazed down five hundred feet as calmly as if he sat by the side of a quiet pool and watched the mirrored world.
If Kennebec had known what was approaching his eyrie on the impossible crags, he would have launched himself out at the intruder with fury and dashed him down the precipice; but he and his mate were far away, having left before dawn for a long journey, and had not come back. Up in the nest in the cloven rock, the eaglets sat and wondered why neither of their parents returned with food.
After a while Shasta could see the eyrie rock and the ends of sticks which stuck out from the side. It was above him—right over the edge of the precipice. He had just reached it and was holding on to the branch of a stunted spruce which grew below the rock, when the branch cracked. Without it the foothold was not sufficient, his feet were only clinging to the roughness of the rock; and suddenly that great chasm below seemed to suck him back.
For one brief moment fear clutched at Shasta's heart, and he seemed to feel himself falling—falling down the steep face of the world. Then the muscles of his feet braced themselves, clinging to the rock; before they relaxed, his whole body became a steel spring, and, when the branch broke, his arms were round the stem of the tree. Once his hands found firm hold there was no more danger; even with half his body hanging in air it was a simple thing for him to lift himself into the tree. In a few moments more he had scaled the rock and was looking down into the eagle's nest.
As soon as his eyes fell on the eaglets his fingers began to twitch. They were horrible-looking things, scraggy in their bodies and covered with dark down, with short, stubby quills sticking out here and there.
Shasta hated these quillish young monsters with all his heart. They gawped up at him in their ridiculous way with their beaks open. The thing he wanted to do was to grab them at once by their ugly necks and send them spinning down the precipice; yet they looked so stupid, squatting there, that it seemed a silly thing to do. If they could have fought, and there could have been a struggle, he would not have hesitated.
The nest was surrounded by a litter of bones and odds and ends of feathers and fur. If the eaglets were hungry it was not for want of gorging themselves in the past; the whole place spoke of Kennebec's ravages, and his constant desire to kill. Much of the food was only half-eaten, showing that there was no need for all this slaughter. It was left there to rot in the sun and to poison the sweet air.