shape was falling from the sky like a huge arrowhead—a big brown bird, its wings half closed, its curved beak pointing downward, its feathered legs, armed with long hooked talons, thrust straight beneath it. The hiss became a loud rustling noise like the rushing of wind; and in another half-second the golden eagle, suddenly checking her descent in a smother of buffeting wings, struck her grappling hooks into her prey.
The blue-shirted mountaineer in the alder coppice swore vehemently as he jumped to his feet. Of the three young lambs in Slanting Pasture, the eagle had chosen the one farthest from the hunter's ambush and least conveniently placed for his present purpose, which was, briefly stated, to kill the daring freebooter that had been raiding his flock. For an hour he had been awaiting his chance, and now that it had come it was not so sure a thing as he had hoped for, since the raider had selected a victim behind the alder thicket and not in front of it, and was thus hidden from him at the moment most favorable for a shot. It took the man only a fraction of a minute to dart around the edge of the thicket; yet by that time the eagle, alarmed by a movement of the alders, had already risen forty feet above the ground.
High above Slanting Pasture, a black speck moved across the pale-blue face of the sky. For
