denly, startlingly suddenly, with the full stroke, the dreaded
pickax blow, of all the ravens, he let drive straight at Cob's clear,
shining eye--the left one, with which Cob, with his head twisted, had
all along been regarding him. He had disclosed his hand, that raven.
It was devil's work.

Till that moment Cob had never moved, as we have said. Save for his
one eye and his quivering, one would scarcely have known that he lived.
That was his game, perhaps. Who can tell? For a stolid, slow-thinking
gull may have, in his way, just as deep, or low, a cunning as a
brilliant-brained raven. Anyhow, in that fiftieth of a second allowed,
just when it seemed as if nothing could save his eye, Cob's head
snicked round and up, and he slid the enemy's beak down off his own
with as neat a parry as ever you saw. And he did more. He caught hold
of the said raven's beak, got a grip on beak in beak, and once having
got hold, he kept hold. This was nothing new to him. It was his
way--one of his ways--of fighting rival great black-backed gulls. But
it was new to the raven, and he had not previously thought out any
proper counter to it. (There is a counter, I think.) Result--caught
raven as well as caught gull.

Then it was that raven's turn to go mad, and dance a paralytic kan-kan;
but he could not get any change out of that gull. Cob hung on almost
as well as the trap hung on to him, and far more twistfully. He was
quite at home, of course. He had been brought up to this sort of
thing. It was the official regulation gull way of fighting under set
rules, but he could rarely get any other bird than a gull to fight with
him like it. It was not the raven's way of fighting, though, and I
think he felt himself in a trap. He certainly acted like a bird out of
its senses, while the gull, flapping hugely, and forgetting, in the
excitement, his own bondage, gradually forced the raven's head back and
back over his back, till that raven was in the unenviable position of
staring over his own back at his own tail, upon which he was
ignominiously sitting. Also, his neck was half-dislocated, and he was
nearly choking. And about this time it began to dawn upon him that it
did not pay in the wild to monkey with great black-backed gulls, even
trapped ones. He swore, as well as he could, in a gurgling croak.
Then----

Clash!

Horrors upon diabolical horrors! Another trap?

The same ghastly thought flashed to both birds' brains at