the same
moment, and both literally sprang bodily up into the gale in one
maddened leap, both forgetting all else in the panic to be gone.

Both stopped at the same instant, with a jerk that nearly unhinged
every bone in their bodies. Both yelled with terror at the identical
moment.

Both were released--as by the cutting of a string--at the same fraction
of time, and both hurtled aloft at the same fear-blinded, rocket-like
speed.

But both had not been caught by the same kind of trap.

It was the jerk that had freed Cob from the really quite light hold, as
we have already explained, of the jaws of the steel trap.

And it was the jerk that had torn out some of the raven's
tail-feathers, and left them in the jaws of the--gray, old, hill fox.

And it was the fox who was standing all alone, watching, with oblique
eyes, the two great birds fast dissolving with every desperate,
stampeding wing-beat into the hurrying cloud-wrack and the wild
seascape--in opposite directions. He had made a good stalk, but had
sprung a little short, had brer fox.

Upon a day, weeks later, we find the raven, whose young had left the
nest, stolidly soaring over a small, flat island, golden with furze,
purple with heather, pale-rose chiffon where it was covered with
sea-pinks.

In addition to these, only one other hue, beside green, was there upon
that island gem floating on the jade-green sea, and that was a patch of
black and white! It flashed to the eye of the raiding rogue-raven, and
he altered course towards it, when it turned into a female great
black-backed gull, running, literally racing, to her nest, which the
raven could now see, with its two big, buff, dark-splashed eggs.

Down flopped the giant gull upon her treasure, and began yelling,
"How-how-how-how!" at the top of her voice.

But the island seemed empty of life, and her yelling useless.

Down dropped the raven in front of her.

Down winnowed the hen-raven at the back of her.

And, both together, they approached. And all the time the great
black-backed gull continued to yell, "How-how-how-how!"

At last, when he had got close enough, the cock-raven lunged at her,
or, rather, underneath her. She parried his stroke, and--the hen-raven
lunged. Nothing now, she knew, could save her eggs, unless she rose to
fight the cock-raven. The hen-raven then ran in. She only required a
second in which to ruin each egg, but she never got it.

Nobody saw the avalanche comi