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 bewilderingly strange; for here was no tumbled terrain of ridge and valley, but a flat expanse clothed for the most part with pine forest. Athwart this pine forest lay the cypress and gum swamp where he had spent the night, a green belt four or five miles wide and many miles long; while scattered here and there were houses and cultivated clearings and larger areas, of vivid green bordered and blotched with olive, which he took to be pastures, but which were really wet prairies of tall rushes and abandoned rice fields. In a dozen places he saw the glint and glimmer of water; and far away to the southward a river wound like a gigantic glittering serpent through sunny verdant flats walled in by luxuriant woods of oak, hickory, magnolia and other broad-leaved trees.

But the strangeness of the panorama, so utterly unlike his mountain home, engaged the eagle's attention only momentarily, if indeed he was really conscious of it all. He was hungry, and what chiefly interested him was the life which he saw around him in the air. Whereas in his mountains the air was nearly always empty except perhaps for a solitary buzzard, hawk or raven, here in this new hunting ground the golden eagle saw big birds soaring on every side or flying at lower levels with measured, deliberate wing strokes.

Some of these birds were turkey vultures pre-