“Look here, my children,” he said as he plucked one dead fowl with wonderful rapidity, “eat well to-day, for from to-morrow you will have yourselves to look after.” His children eyed him curiously, so did the Red Fox who sat solemnly outside his lair. “I mean it,” continued the Golden Eagle seriously. “You will hunt for yourselves after to-day, and if you come poaching on the hunting-grounds of your mother and myself there will be trouble and you will be in the midst of it. Down to now we have raised and fed you, your wants have been our worry, but now that time is up, and after to-day you are no more to us than if you didn’t exist. We don’t want to see you again, and if you are wise you will take care that we don’t.” And on the following morning the young eaglets departed, flew some way together, and then chose their respective kingdoms.
They did not thrive, and of the three only one reached maturity. The first lighted on a stoat in a ditch and could not strike it with the sharp talons before the angry little beast had jumped at its throat and bitten through the external jugular vein. Another, not heeding his parents’ warnings, set out for the farm whence the sucking-pig had come and was shot. But the parent birds remained together in their eyrie and knew no trouble save when storms were brewing. They could see storms rising out of the Atlantic, and when one was on the way to their beloved hills they would grow nervous and restless and fill the air with their screams.
August came round and the Golden Eagle’s joy of life knew no bounds. Never had the moors been so full of delicious red grouse, never before in all his long life had he fed so well.
One afternoon he sat on a rock at the head of a wild corrie. Below him went the stalker and his master, two hundred yards away and quite invisible.
“A fine day, Donald,” said the sportsman; “my best achievement since I came to the Highlands.” To be sure he was only a Sassenach, but he had shot a grouse, and caught a salmon in the morning, and an hour ago, after a long stalk, he had grassed a ten-pointer that was on its way to the lodge strapped to a pony’s back.
“Best kill that de’il yonder,” grumbled Donald, taking a huge pinch of snuff preparatory to launching into a long account of the Golden Eagle’s misdeeds.
Some unaccountable impulse brought the eagle to his wings. Ignorant of his danger, he floated lazily down the valley until the barrel of a mannlicher rifle gleaming from below caught his quick eye. He seemed to see right into it. As though conscious of imminent danger, he screamed defiance and rose higher with loud flapping of his heavy wings. The rifle cracked....
“How terribly the Mother Eagle has been screaming,” said the Red Fox to himself as he made cautious way down the hill that night. “Thank goodness she has gone to sleep at last. My nerves were giving out.”
THE BADGER
Even the residents hardly knew the part of the forest that the badger called his own, the tourists and callers from the nearest seaside town had never seen it. From June to September there were visitors in plenty; they came along the white dusty roads in coaches, carriages and motor-cars; they walked, or rode on bicycles, held picnics in the shadow of beech and oak trees, and often left assortments of glass bottles and paper to mark the spot they had delighted to honour. Sometimes on his nightly rounds Brock would pass one of these places, and would make haste to get away from the neighbourhood, for his scent was exceedingly keen, and he knew the number of the visitors as certainly as though he had been out during the daytime. The fear of man had come to him quite naturally, it was part of his life to dread and avoid this relentless enemy, just as it was his rule to range the woods by night and to retire to his earth when the sun came out of the east heralded by the pageant of the morning twilight.