ed his
wings together and shot down to the ground, striking his talons into one
of the hens. "I'll teach you, I will, that I'm no eagle!" he screamed
furiously, and struck with his beak.

That instant he heard Akka call to him from the air, and rose
obediently. The wild goose flew toward him and began to reprimand him.
"What are you trying to do?" she cried, beating him with her bill. "Was
it perhaps your intention to tear that poor hen to pieces?" But when the
eagle took his punishment from the wild goose without a protest, there
arose from the great bird throng around them a perfect storm of taunts
and gibes. The eagle heard this, and turned toward Akka with flaming
eyes, as though he would have liked to attack her. But he suddenly
changed his mind, and with quick wing strokes bounded into the air,
soaring so high that no call could reach him; and he sailed around up
there as long as the wild geese saw him.

Two days later he appeared again in the wild goose flock.

"I know who I am," he said to Akka. "Since I am an eagle, I must live
as becomes an eagle; but I think that we can be friends all the same.
You or any of yours I shall never attack."

But Akka had set her heart on successfully training an eagle into a mild
and harmless bird, and she could not tolerate his wanting to do as he
chose.

"Do you think that I wish to be the friend of a bird-eater?" she asked.
"Live as I have taught you to live, and you may travel with my flock as
heretofore."

Both were proud and stubborn, and neither of them would yield. It ended
in Akka's forbidding the eagle to show his face in her neighbourhood,
and her anger toward him was so intense that no one dared speak his name
in her presence.

After that Gorgo roamed around the country, alone and shunned, like all
great robbers. He was often downhearted, and certainly longed many a
time for the days when he thought himself a wild goose, and played with
the merry goslings.

Among the animals he had a great reputation for courage. They used to
say of him that he feared no one but his foster-mother, Akka. And they
could also say of him that he never used violence against a wild goose.

IN CAPTIVITY

Gorgo was only three years old, and had not as yet thought about
marrying and procuring a home for himself, when he was captured one day
by a hunter, and sold to the Skansen Zooelogical Garden, where there were
already two eagles held captive in a cage built of iron bars and ste