ugh the air at a
speed of something like a hundred miles an hour. As he flew, the
flurries of snow gathered into a squall of whirling flakes, almost
obscuring the waste of marsh-land that rushed past beneath his flight,
and shutting him off alone in the upper heights of sky.

Alone indeed he imagined himself, while the cold air and the streaming
snowflakes whistled past his flight. But keen as were his eyes, other
eyes keener than his had marked him from a loftier height, where the air
was clear above the storm strata. A great Arctic goshawk, driven by some
unknown whim to follow the edge of winter southward, was sailing on wide
wings through the high, familiar cold. When he saw the black drake far
below him, shooting through the snowflakes like a missile, his fierce
eyes flamed and narrowed, his wings gave one mighty beat and then
half-closed, and he dropped into the cloudy murk of the storm belt.

The drake was now about a hundred yards ahead of the great hawk, and
flying at perhaps ninety miles an hour under the mere impulse of his
desire to reach the other estuary. When he caught sight of the white
terror pursuing him, his sturdy little wings doubled the rapidity of
their stroke, till he shot forward at a rate of, perhaps, two miles a
minute, his wedge-shaped body and hard, oiled plumage offering small
resistance to the air even at that enormous speed. His only chance of
escape, as he well knew, was to reach the water and plunge beneath it.
But he could not turn back, for the terror was behind him. Straight
ahead lay his only hope. There, not more than two or three minutes
distant, lay his secure refuge. He could see the leaden gray expanse,
touched by a gleam of cold and lonely sunlight which had pierced the
obscurity of the squall. Could he reach it? If he could, he would drop
into the slow wave, dive to the bottom, and hold to the roots of the
swaying weeds till the terror had gone by.

A hundred yards behind came the hawk, moving like a dreadful ghost
through the swirl and glimmer of the snow. His plumage was white, but
pencilled with shadowy markings of pale brown. His narrowed eyes, fixed
upon the fugitive, were fiercely bright and hard like glass. His hooked
beak, his flat head, his strong, thick, smoothly modelled neck, were
outstretched in a rigid line like those of the drake.

The long, spectral wings of the great hawk beat the air, but not with
haste and violence like those of the fleeing quarry. Swift