ast wings, his claws began to slip and slide, and--oh, horror!--still
slipping and sliding, he found the bowlder going from him. It went
from him, receding downwards with terrifying rapidity, and the dancing,
silvery, sparkling water was sliding below, too.

Being a stoat, he hung on with V.C. doggedness and courage; but it was
the worst thing he could have done. Moreover, as it was, he forced the
bird to attempt reprisals in mid-air--a terrible proceeding.

Now, this was difficult, might almost seem impossible; but the skua is
one of the most wonderful flyers that haunt the seas even--and most of
the best are there--and what he could not execute in the air was
scarcely worth mentioning. It included in this case a perfectly
diabolical scraping of the foe's head with his available claw, and
after that, since the dogged stoat did not leave go, and the pain was
excruciating, a wonderful bend forward, and, at a pronounced and
dangerous angle, a fiendish stabbing at the stoat's head with his
murderous beak. This last involved a drop of nearly a hundred feet,
but it did the trick.

Blinded, dazed, shaken, and maddened by the agony of blows upon his
sensitive nose, the stoat opened his jaws to grip higher up the leg;
and in an instant he was gone, turning over and over, down, down, down
to the hungry waves below.

Ten minutes later the skua was calmly and safely asleep upon the top of
a frowning black stack of rock, untroubled, I think, even by dreams of
the terrible things he had gone through.

* * * * * *

Next morning, an apparition of wonder and fierce beauty, the skua,
quite recovered except that he had a lameness in one leg and a weakness
in one wonderful eye that would last him a lifetime, came racing
down-shore out of a stormcloud into the full gold of the sun at some
seventy miles an hour. He was in pursuit of a common gull who, with
more luck than judgment, had caught a fish.

The gull held on for a few minutes, on and in and around the horizon,
going like the wind up and down and around, as for his life, with
friend skua ever close to his tail, before a wild yell, which he could
not mistake, sounded in his ear, and he dropped the prize. The skua
executed his wonderful dive, and caught the gleaming silver thing
before it reached the waves, and shooting up again, was just about to
continue his course, when a constant and peculiar flickering above the
beach caught his telesc