fired upon and grazed by a bullet, and she said so in no
measured tones. Now, the laird of Loch Royal deer forests had never
allowed his eagles to be fired at or killed. They were part of the
family possessions, as it were--always had been for generation upon
generation; and, moreover, they kept down the grouse on the deer
forests--which was useful, since the grouse is the red deer's unpaid
sentinel, and give him warning of the crawling, creeping stalker.

Wonderfully the two eagles circled round one another in mighty,
still-winged glidings, effortless, majestic, masterly, sometimes
together, sometimes apart, drawing ever away northward with scarcely a
wing-flap, without, it seemed, any visible force to drive them, till they
swam, like specks on the eye-ball, miles away and upwards round the
white-mantled peaks.

Here, so easily can birds pass from scene to scene, they were in another
world, an Arctic land, silent as the Arctic, bare as the Arctic, cold as
the Arctic, and, at first sight, desolate and uninhabited as the Arctic
appears to be. But this was only an example of Nature's wonderful magic.
Desolate it was. Uninhabited--no.

So far as the eagles could see, there was only a raven, cursed with a
far-advertising blackness, who sat upon a splintered fang of rock and
mocked them hollowly. But he was not the only creature there.

Sweeping down with a hissing rush over a giddy slope of shale that looked
perpetually upon the brink of a general slide down _en masse_, with their
immense shadows underrunning them, the eagles startled suddenly by their
unexpectedness a great red beast into motion. There was a clatter of
antlers, a click of hoofs, a little shower of stones, and away went a
superb stag, a "royal," a "twelve-pointer," lordly and supercilious,
picking his way without a slip on that awful incline. But until he
moved, even he had been quite invisible, bang in the open though he was.

The eagles, following him and swooping at him with imperious savagery,
because they were still angry and upset, though never really coming near
him, bustled him into taking that awful path at a loose hand canter, not
so much, I think, because he, the king of the forest--and this, this
lost, lone scene, was part of the local conception of the word
"forest"--cared the sweep of a "brow-tine" for the eagles, as because he
was startled and uncertain as to what was supposed to be happening. And
the stones spurned by his neat ho