Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/297

 well ahead of him, but Jen, his finger on the trigger, Judged the distance to be too great. Suddenly, as he rounded a low clump of myrtles close to the island's edge, he jerked the gun to his shoulder. A great, dark-bodied, white-headed bird had launched itself out of a small dead cedar, a magnificent bald eagle.

Even as he aimed the marshman noted a strange clumsiness in the eagle's flight, a slowness of wing beats, a certain heaviness, an appearance of labored effort, as though the big bird's pinions were scarcely equal to their task. The range was short; Jen, remembering that his shot were small, aimed for the head. The eagle dropped like a stone.

Jen turned away from the marshy rim of the hummock and strode through the grass and dead weeds toward the spot where the bird had fallen. Something in the grass a little to his right attracted his attention. For several minutes he studied the objects that he found there—the mangled carcass of a female gray fox and, close by it, the carcass of a great blue heron.

In the cold weather the bodies had suffered comparatively little change. Plainly the eagle had been feeding on them and had kept the vultures off; but Jen found two questions which puzzled him: How came this fox and this heron to be lying side by side