Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/287

 for a time the eagle puzzled her. At first she paid no attention to him; but suddenly it dawned on her that he never stirred from his perch in the dead cedar sapling, that he had remained there all of one day and part of the next without spreading his wings.

She kept close watch on him during the rest of the second day and never once saw him move; and it may be that she knew then—for a fox's cunning is much more than instinct—that he, too, had lost the use of his wings and was a prisoner on Half-Acre. She realized, at any rate, that all was not well with the big white-headed bird standing stern and immovable in the dead cedar, watching the marshes and the sky with piercing yellow eyes which seemed always to be fixed on something infinitely far away.

With long, grim, confident patience the gray fox bided her time. Somehow she seemed to understand that a moment would come when the great bird in the dead cedar must topple from his perch.

If the eagle also had foreknowledge of that moment it was with a sort of regal resignation, a kingly fatalism that he awaited its coming. He was at once the most fortunate and the least fortunate of the prisoners of Half-Acre. His injury was