the cleared spaces had grown fewer and smaller, the farms were more widely scattered, and forest covered most of the face of the land. Down to this forest the bald eagle slanted toward dusk, coming to rest in the top of a tall cypress surrounded by other cypresses, black gums and magnolias; and after him the golden eagle swung down also to a perch in another great moss-bearded tree near by.
In this way the golden eagle of the high Smokies came to the Low Country of the coastal plain after the death of his mate. Probably loneliness more than anything else was responsible for the whim which had caused him to follow for hundreds of miles the big dark-gray stranger whom he had at first mistaken for his lost consort. The eagle, when he chooses a mate, is wedded to her for life. For fifteen years these golden eagles of the Smokies had lived together, and when on that morning in Slanting Pasture their long comradeship came to an end, there had begun for the survivor a period of incessant restlessness and gnawing discontent.
Somehow he knew what had happened, knew that his mate was lost to him. Yet, incapable of comprehending the significance of death, day after day he had looked for her, ranging far and wide over the ridges and valleys. In all the blue and purple wilderness of mountain and sky, he was alone. No other golden eagle lived within fifty miles of his
