Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/18

 surface. Next moment, to the right, to the left and ahead, the whole lagoon heaved thunderously upward, as the main body of the pintails and the vast array of the mallards rose in a solid, opaque mass.

For a space of seconds the air glittered and swirled with the flash of their whirring wings, while the water falling from their bodies shimmered in the pale morning light like rain. Then, above and behind him, dark against the mist blanket hanging over the marsh, the crippled shoveller saw the wide-pinioned shape of doom for which, even as he swam, his round, brilliant, golden eyes had been searching.

If the keener eyes of the gray eagle had already picked out the lone duck swimming across the surface of the lagoon ahead of him, and perhaps a hundred feet below him, for some moments he seemed to give no heed to it. Possibly he mistook the shoveller for a coot, many hundreds of which dotted the pools and ponds within range of his vision. Possibly his attention was distracted momentarily by the great twin armies of pintails and mallards which had surged upward from the long lagoon bordering the river and were racing off through the air, the mallards swinging to the right and the pintails to the left. At any rate, some seconds elapsed before the eagle, with a slight motion of his tail, altered his line of flight so that he would