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Updated: June 13, 2025
Before it pounced it hung on wide, outstretched wings, as the others had done, its head towards me. I drew a deep breath, lifted the rifle, got the foresight dead upon its breast, and touched the hair-trigger. As the charge exploded I saw the aasvogel give a kind of backward twist.
And yet I have often reflected since that if things had gone differently; if, for instance, that king aasvogel had found strength to carry itself away to die at a distance instead of soaring straight upwards like a towering partridge, as birds injured in the lungs will often do I suppose in search of air it might have been better in the end.
In the infinite arch of blue above me I perceived a speck, no larger than a mote of dust. The aasvogel on watch up there far out of the range of man's vision had seen the deed, and, by sinking downwards, signalled it to his companions that were quartering the sky for fifty miles round; for these birds prey by sight, not by smell.
'And the sleeper, eye unlidding, Heard a voice for ever bidding Much farewell to Dolly Gray; Turning weary on his truckle- Bed he heard the honey-suckle Lauded in apiarian lay. Longfellow at his best wrote nothing like that." "I agree with you." "I wish you wouldn't. I've a sweet temper, but I can't stand being agreed with. And I'm so worried about the aasvogel."
So we went, and when Hans was a little composed I told him all that I had observed about the habits of the aasvogel in the air, and he told me all that he had observed about their habits on the ground, which, as I might not shoot them sitting, did not interest me. Still, he agreed with me that the right moment to fire would be just before they pounced.
This was my chance; an aasvogel more or less in South Africa mattered nothing, there were plenty of them and to spare, and they were such disgusting creatures that I had no compunction at all about abandoning my usual rule, and shooting one or two of them merely in order to test my new weapon.
With stiffened limbs he ascended the weary flights of stairs, paused on the fourth landing to blow into his hands and flap his arms. Then, after a glance round, he turned into the corridor on the left. The door of the Aasvogel Syndicate offices was still unlocked, by arrangement. He opened it quietly, stepped in, and as quietly closed it, turning the key.
Reginald stared dismally at the biscuit-tin, which now presented an unattractive array of rejected cracknels. "I believe," he murmured, "if I could find a woman with an unsatisfied craving for cracknels, I should marry her." "What is the tragedy of the aasvogel?" asked the Other sympathetically. "Oh, simply that there's no rhyme for it.
I only sat down and buried my face in my hands. One more such miss, and then Hans began to whisper to me. "Baas," he said, "those aasvogels see the flash of the gun, and shy at it like a horse. Baas, you are shooting into their faces, for they all hang with their beaks toward you before they drop. You must get behind them, and fire into their tails, for even an aasvogel cannot see with its tail."
Teddy found a point of vantage whence through the wire walls of the shaft he could obtain a view, not of Bullard's office itself, but of the corridor leading thereto. On the way up he had noted that the Aasvogel Syndicate's door was just round the corner and that it was the only one showing a light. Calling himself a fool for his pains, he settled down to the wretched game of spying.
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