ofs--he seemed to kick most of them down
behind him as he finished with them, each making for itself its own
miniature avalanche--helped to add to the sudden confusion.

Then it was as if a shell burst in front of him--right under his haughty
nose--and he moved exactly eight feet one inch without touching the
ground; also, in doing it, he cleared a five-foot-seven-inch bowlder, so
absolutely without the slightest sign of an effort that he seemed to have
been blown upwards. It is worth noting, because twenty seconds before he
had been too lazy to clear a four-foot heather-bush, and had gone
_through_ it.

The "shell" had been a party of ptarmigan very much flustered and upset
by being all but galloped over; not the white and frozen ptarmigan of the
cheap poultry warehouse, but the "live" proposition of that name in their
gray, or usual, disguise, posing as stones among many thousand that lay
around the summits.

Wild horses would not have put the ptarmigan on wing in face of those
terrible, sliding, underrunning shadows of death--indeed, one had been
lying within two yards of the Chieftain, as he slid back low to ground
after stooping at the lordly stag--but this crashing avalanche of shale
with the king of the forest atop was too much for them, and they went
down the "hill" into the nothing and the far distance that lay, so to
speak, almost at one's feet, like a spatter of shrapnel.

At the same instant two gray shadows evolved themselves out of the very
ground, and slid away, swift as scudding clouds, up the slope; and a
third gray form, also apparently sprung from nowhere, rose from before
them, and dropped like a spent projectile into the low-lands. They were
two mountain hares and an old sinner of a gray crow; but the thing that
caught the Chieftain's stabbing eye most was none of these.

Both eagles had, with half-shut wings, dropped like mighty barbs towards
the dim, blue distance of the vale, after the hurtling ptarmigan; but in
an instant their great vans respread, their big, wedged tails swiftly
fanned, and with every available brake on, as it were, they fetched up
almost short. Then they both described a single, gliding, calm,
lazy-looking half-circle, and settled upon a turret rock that shot
fifteen feet up from the mountain's shoulder.

Above them, the snow shimmered and glistened blindingly. Below, the warm
mists of the dales steamed off under the beating sun. Loch Royal lay
like a mighty, burnis