Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/294

 Then, with a scream, he planed swiftly down through the air, his talons spread, his hooked bill partly open. Already he seemed to taste the life-giving meat that he craved. Coming from above and behind, he would strike the fox just forward of the shoulders and sink his long claws into her nape.

By a tenth of a second he was too late to strike the spot at which he aimed. The fox, her hindquarters too stiff and weak to permit of swift maneuvring, had been compelled to take her punishment. She lay on her chest, her jaws clamped on the heron's leg, one furry forepaw raised as a shield against the tall bird's blows. But that slim foreleg was an ineffectual buckler. She could not parry thd darting snakelike thrusts that followed one another with frenzied rapidity. Before the fight had lasted twenty seconds the heron's long sharp-pointed bill had stabbed her in half a dozen places. Yet these wounds, though most of them were in the face, were comparatively slight; and in spite of the blinding blood and stinging pain, she kept her grip on the heron's leg, striving meantime to force her body forward upon her captive.

Then, a fraction of a moment before the eagle struck his quarry, the heron's javelin found the mark it had been seeking. Driven with all the force of that sinewy neck, the needle point of the heavy