lling fish, and wonderfully snatched it up in his hooked bill ere
ever it could touch the waves, without a word or explanation of any
kind whatever.

That, apparently, was his manner of getting his living; a strange
manner, a peculiar way--the way of the pirate on the ocean.

Despoiled, but safe, the guillemot rattled away "for another cast"; but
the foe settled, riding lightly on the lift and fall of the
bottle-green waves.

Here he was no longer a wonderful phantom spirit of the storm, but just
a bird that might have been passed over at first glance as simply a
seagull. But not at a second glance.

Men called this strange bird Richardson's skua, or Arctic skua, or
lesser skua, or, officially, _Stercorarius crepidatus_, or, most
unofficially, in the vernacular, "boatswain," or "man-o'-war," or
"gull-tormentor." Apparently you could take your choice what you
called him. But he did not belong to Mr. Richardson really. He
belonged to nobody, only to himself, to the wind and the rain, that
seemed to have begot him, and to the grim north, from which he took his
other name. He might have claimed the gulls as his near
relations--they loathed him enough.

For a long time he sat on the lifting, breathing swell, floating idly.
There was nothing else on the face of the lonely waters except himself
and a flock, or fleet, I should say, of razorbills and guillemots, very
far away, who alternately showed all white breasts, and vanished--as
they dived and rose all together--like white-faced, disappearing
targets, and one gull, who wheeled and wheeled in the middle distance,
with one eye on the divers and one on the skua, as if, gull-like,
waiting on a chance from either.

Then at last the skua rose again, and swept hurriedly out to sea to
meet a small black-and-white speck that was coming in. It was a
little, rotund, parrot-beaked puffin, loaded with fish--sprats--four of
them set crossways in his wonderful bill. He seemed to know nothing
about the skua till that worthy was upon him, and then, as he fled,
after a furious chase of about three minutes, he suddenly surrendered
by letting fall all his spoil.

The skua caught up one sprat before it hit the surface, but, being too
late to overtake the rest, seemed to take no further notice of them,
but swept on, to settle upon the water a mile away and preen himself.
And this was where the waiting, watching gull came in--the
herring-gull. He sprang to strenuous life, and, a