ill the dawn. The
mother has there taken up her watchful rest, till in darkness she may
glide up to her brood--the sire is somewhere sitting within her view
among the rocks--a sentinel whose eye, and ear, and nostril are true, in
exquisite fineness of sense, to their trust, and on whom rarely, and as
if by a miracle, can steal the adventurous shepherd or huntsman, to
wreak vengeance with his rifle on the spoiler of sheep-walk and
forest-chase.

Yet sometimes it chanceth that the yellow lustre of her keen, wild,
fierce eye is veiled, even in daylight, by the film of sleep. Perhaps
sickness has been at the heart of the dejected bird, or fever wasted her
wing. The sun may have smitten her, or the storm driven her against a
rock. Then hunger and thirst--which in pride of plumage she scorned, and
which only made her fiercer on the edge of her unfed eyrie, as she
whetted her beak on the flint-stone, and clutched the strong
heather-stalks in her talons, as if she were anticipating prey--quell
her courage, and in famine she eyes afar off the fowls she is unable to
pursue, and with one stroke strike to earth. Her flight is heavier and
heavier each succeeding day--she ventures not to cross the great glens
with or without lochs--but flaps her way from rock to rock, lower and
lower down along the same mountain-side--and finally, drawn by her
weakness into dangerous descent, she is discovered at grey dawn far
below the region of snow, assailed and insulted by the meanest carrion;
till a bullet whizzing through her heart, down she topples, and soon is
despatched by blows from the rifle-butt, the shepherd stretching out his
foe's carcass on the sward, eight feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, with
leg thick as his own wrist, and foot broad as his own hand.

But behold the Golden Eagle, as she has pounced, and is exulting over
her prey! With her head drawn back between the crescent of her uplifted
wings, which she will not fold till that prey be devoured, eye glaring
cruel joy, neck-plumage bristling, tail-feathers fan-spread, and talons
driven through the victim's entrails and heart--there she is new lighted
on the ledge of a precipice, and fancy hears her yell and its echo. Beak
and talons, all her life long, have had a stain of blood, for the
murderess observes no Sabbath, and seldom dips them in loch or sea,
except when dashing down suddenly among the terrified water-fowl from
her watch-tower in the sky. The week-old fawn had left the