Page:Wisdom of the Wilderness (1923).pdf/162

 convenient violence, head downward. At about twenty-five or thirty feet above the water he let it go, and swooping after it caught it again dexterously in mid-air, close to the head, as he wanted it. In this position the inexorable clutch of his needle-tipped talons pierced the life out of it, and its troublesome squirming ceased.

Flying slowly with his solid burden, he had just about reached the center of the lake, when an ominous hissing in the air above him warned him that his mighty foe, from far up in the blue dome, had marked his capture and was swooping down upon him to rob him of the prize. He swerved sharply; and in the next second the eagle, a wide-winged, silvery-headed bird of twice his size, shot downward past him with a strident scream and a rustle of stiff-set plumes, swept under him in a splendid curve, and came back at him with wide-open beak and huge talons outspread. He was too heavily laden either to fight or dodge, so he discreetly dropped the fish. With a lightning swoop his tormentor caught it before it could reach the water, and flew off with it to his eyrie in a high, inaccessible ravine at the farthest end of the hogback, several miles down the outlet stream. The osprey, taking quite philosophically a discomfiture which he had suffered so many times before, stared after the magnificent pirate