easy a proposition to
dispose of as people may think. Try it.

One of the rats turned suddenly and faced towards him. The skua could
see its little, cruel eyes gleaming like gimlet-holes in the wall of a
lighted room. Then another, and another, and another did the same.

The skua was scarcely bleeding at all now, but he had left enough of a
trail for _them_--they who make a specialty of the job. And they
followed it. Hopping grotesquely across the mottled, hurrying patches
of moonlight they came, one behind the other, and without noise.

The skua remained as still as the bowlder he sat upon. In that
position, even peering closely, you would never have seen him, unless,
like ourselves, you knew he was there. But he was drawn together,
drawn in all his muscles like a tense spring, and--though this his
persecutors could not know--he was recovering from his hurts rapidly,
with the wonderful power of recuperation of all the wild-folk, who pay
their price for it in clean, hard living.

Then suddenly there was a scuffle below him in the dark. One of the
rats squeaked a little, acknowledging receipt of a crab's pincers
closed upon him, or her. Followed the sounds of some scuttering,
confusion, and the horrible slide and scrape of horny shells upon
stone. Then silence, and the skua knew that, in that wonderful way
they have, the crabs, at any rate, were gone--for the moment.

Remained, however, the rats, and one peered up over the bowlder the
next instant, its eyes glinting in a momentary splash of moonlight
fiendishly. Also, his quick ears could hear the soft creepings of the
others on every side of the bowlder, back and front. They had
surrounded him, and, like wolves, would now rush, and then--and
then---- They had gone.

Yes, there could be no shadow of doubt about it. There had come an
instant's furtive, hurried movement, a glimpse--no, half a glimpse--of
hunched forms hopping through the dark, and they were no more.

The skua stared, and as he stared a great terror seized him. What more
deadly form of death than themselves had they suddenly become aware of,
to cause them to invite themselves into nowhere in that magic fashion?

In the dead silence that fell, he could hear nothing, see nothing. Yet
he felt--indeed he knew--something seemed to tell him, that a deadly
foe was at hand.

Hours passed. They were minutes really, but they seemed hours to him.
Nothing happened; nothing showed. But the ra