stained feathers; and the blood of the bird mingled
with the blood of the beast as it trickled slowly down over his mangled
head, upon which one fearful claw of the buzzard was clutched in an
awful grip.

The bird struggled dumbly also, upwards, ever upwards, gasping, with
open beak and staring eyes, fighting vainly for the breath she could
not draw, till at last the two were no more than a speck--one little,
dark, indefinite speck, floating athwart the great, piled, fleecy
mountains of the clouds.

And then, quite suddenly, so suddenly that it was almost like pricking
a bladder, the end came. The magnificent, overshadowing pinions
collapsed; the bird reeled, toppled for an instant in the void, and
then slid back and down, faster and faster and faster, turning over and
over, in one long, sickening dive back to earth.

[Illustration: "Turning over and over, in one long, sickening dive back
to earth"]

A watcher, had there been one, might have seen, just as the last rays
of the setting sun touched the steely reaches of the estuary, turning
them to lakes of crimson, something, somebody--or bodies, truly, for
they were locked together--suddenly appear, streaking down headlong
from out the heavens. There followed a single terrific splash far out
over the tide, an upheaval of waters, a succession of ripples hurrying
outwards, ever outwards, to tell the tale, and then--nothing.

Next morning, as the sun rose, a party of mournfully shrieking
black-backed, herring, common, and black-headed gulls were gathered
around the soaked and bedraggled carcasses of a polecat and a buzzard,
stranded by the falling tide upon a mud spur, and still locked savagely
and implacably in death.

Half a mile away, in the darkness of her burrow, the she-polecat
stirred uneasily in her sleep, and, waking for a moment, stared out at
the still, silent, secret marshes, wondering, perhaps, why her mate had
not returned.

And ten miles away, far up in their great nest among the boughs of a
mighty Scotch fir, three downy, but already fierce-eyed, buzzard
nestlings craned their necks upwards, calling hungrily, and wondering
why their mother had not returned; while their father shot and swerved
backwards and forwards over the tree-tops, mewing and calling, uneasily
and lonelily, to the clouds for his wife, who had so mysteriously
disappeared. And so--fate and the end.

This only remains to be said--the female polecat and the male buzzard
did, in