le, he had nothing in his memory to warn him of what
followed, nothing to put him up to the absolutely diabolical fury of
the onslaught he had to meet in the next few seconds. He certainly did
his level best with such weapons as Nature had given him, but his
blunt, hooked beak and the claws he had not got seemed suddenly meager
against the hammering, tearing, stabbing, rending dagger weapons of
his--"meal."

The skua saw red, and the herring-gull saw mainly red skua, as he was
hurled back and down under the first rush, and instantly, without a
second to recover, was hurled, equally helplessly, the other way,
shrieking for his very life, and decorating the air and the old-gold
sand with a pretty little cloud of his spotless feathers.

He fought with the desperation of almost all the wild-people, when
there is no help for it; hammering, too, but wildly and clumsily. The
skua fought with the cunning and precision of the professional, plus
such a rage as can only be described as berserk.

It was not a long fight. Perhaps the skua felt that, after his
collision at sea, his bolt would be soon shot, and he had better do
what he was going to do as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
Certainly he did appear to do so; and when at length he drew back,
rocking and gasping like a drunken creature, the famed purity of that
herring-gull's uniform was a thing of beauty no longer. That part of
him, indeed, which was not red was mud, or sand, or green slime, and in
his eyes was the most worried and tired look you ever saw.

He rocked, too, in his gait, as he ran and blundered, and he gasped
with his beak open. When he rose, which he did without any sort of
procrastination, he rocked worse than ever, and twice nearly fell, and
once hit the water, before finally slowly dragging himself away upward,
flapping low and heavily across the little waves.

With the one available eye--the eye left him in working condition by
the herring-gull's clumsy efforts--flaming like a live-coal, that
implacable skua watched him go. He may or may not have known it, of
course, but I feel pretty certain that he would a few thousand times
rather have been standing there upon the old-gold sand, with only one
eye doing duty and an unspeakable agony in the other eye, than be that
herring-gull in the condition he was then, going back to the bosom of
his tribe. It is not a thing to dwell upon in polite society, but I
tell you that the gull-folk do not alwa