Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/147

 muddy margins of the sluggish streams; round and round, in wide interweaving circles, with scarcely a quiver of his black-brown wings, taking his ease in the cool soundless solitude where no living creature dared challenge his supremacy.

He had been soaring thus, more than half asleep, for nearly an hour, when suddenly his lethargy left him. His fierce yellow eyes gleamed under their beetling white brows as he checked his smooth onward course and hung for a moment suspended, his gaze fixed upon one spot in the vast panorama of russet marsh, pale-blue sea and dark-green forest within range of his vision. Then, half closing his wings, he slid swiftly down a sharply inclined plane, the wind whistling past the hard edges of his pinions. Two or three hundred feet above the marsh he extended his wings, swerved to the right, and, beating back against the fresh southwest breeze, began to circle above the actors in the marshland drama which had stirred his interest.

All through the marshes of Odistash wind many tidal creeks, twisting and turning this way and that, dividing into lesser creeks which in turn divide into little marsh brooks, filling with the flood tide which pours in through narrow inlets between the barrier islands, emptying again with the ebb. These waterways teem with life. Into them with the flood tide come the incalculable armies of the mullet; and in