At this moment the fugitive opened his beak for one despairing squawk, his acknowledgment that the game of life was lost. The next instant the hawk's white body seemed to leap forward even out of the marvellous velocity with which it was already travelling. It leaped forward, and changed shape, spreading, and hanging imminent for the least fraction of a second. The head, with slightly open beak, reached down. A pair of great black talons, edged like knives, open and clutching, reached down and forward.
The movement did not seem swift, yet it easily caught the drake in the midst of his flight. For an instant there was a slight confusion of winnowing and flapping wings, a dizzy dropping through the sky. Then the great hawk recovered his balance, steadied himself, turned, and went winging steadily inland toward a crag which he had noted, where he might devour his prey at ease. In his claws was gripped the body of the black drake, its throat torn across, its long neck and webbed feet trailing limply in the air.
In the Unknown Dark
IS long, awkward legs trembling with excitement, his long ears pointing stiffly forward, his distended nostrils sniffing and snorting, he stared anxiously this way and that from the swirling, treacherous current to the silent man poling the scow. The river, at this point nearly half a mile wide, daunted him now that he saw it at such close quarters, though all summer he had been viewing it with equanimity from the shore. A few hundred yards above the comparatively quiet course of the ferry he saw a long line of white leaping waves, stretching from bank to bank with menacing roar, and seeming as it were about to rush down upon the slow ferry and overwhelm it. When he looked toward the other side of the scow the prospect was equally threatening. The roar from below was worse than the roar from above, and the whole river, just here so radiant with the sunset glow, grew black with gloom and white with fury as it plunged through a rocky chasm strewn with ledges. The only thing that comforted him at all and kept his fears within bounds was the patient, sturdy figure of the man, poling the scow steadily toward shore.
This nervous passenger on the primitive backwoods ferry was a colt about eight months old, whose mother had died the previous day. His owner, a busy lumberman, was now sending him across the river to a neighbour's farm to be cared for, because he was of good "Morgan" strain. The ferryman had taken the precaution to hitch the end of his halter-rope to a thwart amidships, lest he should get wild and jump overboard; but the colt, though his dark brown coat was still woolly with the roughness of babyhood, had too much breadth between the eyes to be guilty of any such foolishness. He felt frightened, and strange, and very lonely; but he knew it was his business just to trust the man and keep still.
When the animal trusts the man he generally comes out all right; but once in a long while Fate interferes capriciously, and the utterly unexpected happens. Hundreds of times, and with never a mishap, the ferryman had poled his clumsy scow across the dangerous passage between the rapids—the only possible crossing-place for miles in either direction. But this evening, when the scow was just about mid-channel, for some inexplicable reason the tough and well-tried pole of white spruce snapped. It broke short off in the middle of a mighty thrust. And overboard, head first, went the ferryman.
As the man fell his foot caught in the hook of a heavy chain used for securing hay-carts and such vehicles on the scow; and as the clumsy craft swung free in the current the man was dragged beneath it. He would have been drowned in a few seconds, in such water; but at last, in the twisting, the captive foot fell clear. The man came to the surface on the upper side of the scow, made one despairing but successful clutch, got hold of the edge, and with his last strength drew himself aboard, all but suffocated, and with a broken ankle. Tricked by years of security, he had left his spare pole on the shore. There was absolutely nothing to do but let the scow drift, and pray that by some succession of miracles she might survive nine miles of rapids and gain the placid reaches below.
As the man, white and sullen, crouched on the bottom of the scow and held his ankle, the colt eyed him wonderingly. Then he eyed the river, very anxiously, and presently braced his legs wide apart as the scow gave a strange, disconcerting lurch. The roar was growing swiftly louder, and those fierce white waves appeared to be rushing right up the middle of the river to meet the scow. Daunted at the sight, he crowded as close as he could to the ferryman, and nosed him as if to call his attention to the peril.