Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/233

 of them had reached the water did he stir. Then, hidden from them by a small peninsula of reeds, he hurried with swift awkward strides to the feast.

His mandibles gaped greedily, his wide, white, black-tipped wings were half open as he stalked like a tall ghost out of the reeds into the midst of his victims. If they saw him coming the instinct which was their only friend in the hard battle for life could not warn them in that brief instant that here was a foe who would cut life short before it had well begun. Down flashed the stout curved bill, its mandibles closed, a heavy, sharp-pointed pickax of which the ibis' long sinewy neck formed the handle—down, then up, down in another place, up once more, then down again with marvelous quickness and with perfect aim. Each time the pickax fell it fell upon a baby gator, generally striking the little saurian on the domelike head or just where neck and body joined. Six in all the ibis slew or stunned in quick succession before the survivors, awake at last to the danger, scuttled out to the deeper water or hid themselves under the duckweed and green slime. Then, with half a dozen victims dead or insensible behind him, the slayer opened his mandibles, thrust out his long neck and seized a seventh just as it was disappearing under a lily pad.

This seventh victim was he who was afterwards