t head-foremost to facilitate flight. From another point now
came a scream, well known to me, and I turned to see an eagle
approaching with tremendous speed. Here before my eyes was to be
committed "an overt act of piracy" that has for untold centuries caused
a strained relationship between these birds. By feints at darting, but
with no real intention to harm, he drove the osprey upward--for in
aerial combats amongst the feathered tribes advantage lies in the higher
altitude, and the hawk excitedly strove for this while the eagle coolly
permitted it. In such a manner the fight was carried skyward until the
combatants looked small. Then it entered its second, and last, phase.

Quite master of the situation the eagle now rose to the upper plane and
began his attack from above, whereupon to save itself the hawk released
its fish and took to flight--which was, of course, exactly what the
eagle wished. Here was his opportunity for the spectacular. Diving
straight downward--first, however, increasing his speed with two swift
strokes of his powerful wings which then became set in a half curve--he
overtook the falling breakfast in mid air, seized it, swung gracefully
outward and disappeared over the forest.

Shame, thought I, that our National Bird, secure from discovery at
Washington, should be practising this thoroughly un-American
might-makes-right business! Yet through my being came a sympathetic
whisper. I had never felt it while in contact with other people, but
here I was stripped as a savage--alone with the woods and the ocean. If
the Florida peninsula had been formed when my ancestors went naked, one
of them might have loitered near this very spot, and I smiled as I
wondered if he, too, had been planning to carry off some female from her
watchful tribe!

It was good to be in the wilderness, good to be savage, good to be
unclothed beneath God's high heaven and know that by my muscle and my
cunning I was king. No ordinary king who went about with a jeweled
crown upon his head could ever feel this exuberance of being, and in
pure delight I plunged into the water.

Out, out and out I swam, joyously diving for handsfull of shells that I
held aloft as a pagan offering to the gods. I put in bursts of speed,
then rested on my back upon the cradling waves, watching the streaks of
feathery clouds that stretched across the sky--streamers, flying far
behind the tempest. And then, with tingling blood, I would flip my body
and s