opic eye.

He checked, flung up, came round beautifully effortless, and headed
towards the sight. Probably he knew what it was, had fathomed it even
from that distance. It was a gang of gulls flying round and mobbing a
hapless wounded gull on the beach.

It was a foul thing to do, a horrible, blundering, clumsy murder, done
slowly; but even so, it was all over before, with a scream that rang
like the battle-cry of a Highland chief, and set the murderous heads up
in wild alarm, the skua came shooting, twisting, turning, diving, and
darting right into the heart of the crowd.

And they went circling, and wheeling, and hurling down-wind like sheets
of paper, those murderous sea-birds, dispersed and scattered over the
face of the waters, and were gone almost without a word.

Then the skua came lightly down, rocking on the wind, and settled
beside the poor, draggled, white body, no longer white, upon the
shingle, which had been so foully done to death by gulls of various
clans. He may, or may not, have known it, but I can tell _you_ that
the gull was the self-same herring-gull who had tried to kill him the
day before. Now he--but we will draw a curtain here.

Next day the skua went away, and the fishing wild-folk breathed a sigh
of relief as they watched him go, and for three days peace brooded over
the winged fishers of those parts, so that birds could feed upon what
they caught, nor be in fear of getting hunted for it. But upon the
fourth day the skua came back. And he was not alone. A dusky, nearly
brown--for they vary much in color--female skua came with him. And in
due course they built them a home on the ground among the heather, and
they guarded their treasured eggs and reared with amazing fierce
devotion their beloved young.

Before his advent that strip of wild sea-coast had been, mercifully,
without its skuas. Our bold buccaneer, however, having won his
footing, took care to see that, so far as one bird could accomplish the
great task, it never should be again.

XIV

WHEN NIGHTS WERE COLD

And the Northern Lights come down
To dance on the houseless snow;
And God, who clears the grounding berg,
And steers the grinding flow,
He hears the cry of the little kit-fox
And the lemming on the snow.--RUDYARD KIPLING.

A snipe rose suddenly, and began to call out; a capercailzie lofted all
at once, with a great rush of winged bulk, above the snow-bound forest;
and a white hare sl