Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/172

 final thrust, the eagle's wings opened, beating powerfully, and with his free foot he struck forward and downward, his talons spread to the utmost. Next moment his claws closed upon the rattler's head.

The king was fast to his foe, clamped to him with a grip that could not be shaken. Two long claws had pierced the snake's wide head from above, another had sunk deep into his throat from below, and the muscles operating those claws were strong enough to drive them through gristle and bone. The huge serpent threshed and writhed like a creature in convulsions, and the eagle, one foot in the trap, the other imbedded in his enemy, was all but torn in two. Pulled this way and that as the contortions of the stricken snake dragged eagle and trap here and there over the ground, the king could not keep himself upright no matter how desperately his Pinions beat the air. His wing beats were growing weaker when another convulsive twist of the giant snake's powerful body almost wrenched the big bird asunder and a sharp, intolerable pain shot through him.

That pain was the signal of his victory. A corner of the trap had been jammed under a grass tussock, and the toes of the eagle's left foot had been jerked free by that last and mightiest plunge of the rattler, the trap's steel jaws raking them to the bone.

Somehow the king knew that his chance had come.