lake presented to him either a mirror of stainless blue, or a
dazzling shield of bright steel.

For an hour or more, on wide, untiring wings, the great bird sailed and
watched. The furtive life of the wilderness, all unaware of that high
impending doom, revealed itself to him, yet he saw nothing to draw him
down out of his realm of silence.

Except for that mysterious whisper of the smitten air in his own wings,
it was to the eagle as if all the action and movement of earth had been
struck dumb. Once he saw a black cow moose, tormented with flies, lurch
out madly from the thickets and plunge wallowing into the lake. High
splashed and flashed the water about her floundering bulk; but not a
whisper of it came up to him. Once he saw a pair of swimming loons
stretching their necks alternately as high as they could above the
water, and opening wide their straight, sharp beaks. He well knew the
strident, wild cries with which they were answering each other, setting
loose a rout of crazy echoes all up and down the shores. But not a
ghost of an echo reached him. It was all dumb show. And once, on the
lower slope of the mountain, an ancient fir-tree, its foothold on the
rocks worn away by frost and flood of countless seasons, fell into the
ravine. He saw the mighty downward sweep and plunge, the convulsion of
branches below; but of the sullen roar that startled the mountainside no
faintest sound arose to him.

At last, as he was wheeling over the centre of the lake, his inescapable
eye saw something which interested him. His great wings flapped heavily,
checking his course. He tipped suddenly, half-shut his wings, and shot
straight downward perhaps a thousand feet. Here he stopped his descent
with a sharp upward turn which made the wind whistle harshly in his
wings. And here he hung, hovering, watching, waiting for the opportunity
that now seemed close at hand.

II

In the heart of the cedar swamp the silence was thick, brooding, and
imperishable. One felt that if ever any wandering sound, any lost
bird-cry or call of wayfaring beast, should drop into it, the intruding
voice would be straightway engulfed, smothered, and forgotten.

The ground beneath the stiff branches and between the gray, ragged,
twisted trunks was grotesquely humped with moss-grown roots and pitted
with pools of black water. Here and there amid the heavy moss fat
fungoid growths thrust up their heads, dead white, or cold red, or pink,
or spotted ora