Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/35

 form of a duck, a duck whose wide, flat bill and slender neck identified it at once as a shoveller. Its course would bring it in a few minutes directly under the eagle; and apparently not until it was directly under him did the tyrant reach his decision.

Until that moment the eagle, though he watched the oncoming duck keenly with eyes that glowed fiercely under their beetling brows, continued his placid soaring. Then, as though he had become suddenly aware of something unperceived or unrealized until that instant, he half-closed his wings and slid downward through the hissing air.

The golden eyes of the shoveller drake, speeding northward at last on his long-delayed journey to the distant Canadian lake which all his life had been his summer home, searched the air lane ahead of him and the sky spaces above. Yet those eyes had not seen a certain sinister dark spot which had been moving slowly in wide circles perhaps a thousand feet or more above the line of the drake's flight.

The shoveller had missed that dark spot soaring just under the billowy white clouds because at the moment his attention was otherwise occupied. A half-hour had elapsed since he had begun his journey; and although at first the swiftness and evenness of his wingbeats seemed to prove beyond all doubt