Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/28

 lagoon beside the river: days of placid enjoyment of the lagoon's rich stores of food: days of sudden alarms and thrilling adventures. Often the two shovellers saw the gray tyrant. Three times in as many weeks the crippled drake narrowly escaped those lethal talons. But his injured wing was healing; though he could not fly, he could dive more easily and he had learned to thwart the hunting eagle by disappearing promptly beneath the surface. His mate, too, seemed to understand that he could now fend for himself in his own way. Generally when the tyrant appeared she took wing with the other ducks, returning after the eagle had passed on.

There were other enemies besides the tyrant. Once, as the two shovellers dabbled for tiny molluscs close to the reed-bordered bank between the lagoon and the river, a mink sprang at them from a clump of jocko bushes. Wildcats, raccoons and foxes walked this bank by night, and more than once the shovellers heard in the darkness a shrill, tragic, choking cry which told them that some unwary coot, venturing ashore after nightfall, had met a bloody end.

When the tyrant himself did not come, there were wide-winged haunters of the marshes who could frighten although they could not harm. The great blue herons passing from time to time over the