Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/156

 tug and, jerking the line viciously, grinned with delight as he realized that he had hooked an unusually large and powerful fish.

Had he been using the rod and reel of a sportsman there would have ensued a glorious battle amid the curling breakers; but with Jen Murray fishing was not a species of play, and after the fish had somewhat spent its strength in three spirited rushes he hauled away hand over hand upon the heavy line and soon had his victim—a splendid thirty-pound bass, gleaming in the light like burnished bronze—gasping on the beach. Then, just as he rose to his feet after unhooking the fish, he saw the king high over his head journeying in from the sea.

Jen watched the big bird eagerly and marked with care the spot where he spiraled down into the jungle. After hiding his bass in a tamarisk thicket just above high-water mark, so that the watchful turkey vultures, incessantly patrolling the sky, would not spy it from the air, he walked two miles up the lonely palm-fringed beach to a point opposite the place where the eagle had descended. On the way he saw the king, this time accompanied by his mate, rise out of the woods and, circling upward, fly straight out over the ocean.

The marshman grinned again with a gleam of white teeth upon seeing the king and his mate start seaward on what would probably be a long hunt. It