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Occasionally, during the winter, a herring-gull from the harbor swims into this bit of smoky blue; frequently a pigeon, sometimes a flock, sails past; and in the summer dusk, after the swallows quit it, a city-haunting night-hawk climbs out of the forest of chimney-pots, up, up above the smoke for his booming roofward swoop.
The skua saw red, and the herring-gull saw mainly red skua, as he was hurled back and down under the first rush, and instantly, without a second to recover, was hurled, equally helplessly, the other way, shrieking for his very life, and decorating the air and the old-gold sand with a pretty little cloud of his spotless feathers.
Here there was only one species, with a clear resonant cry, and as every bird uttered that one cry, and no other, a totally different effect was produced. The herring-gull and lesser black-backed gull resemble each other in language as they do in general appearance; both have very powerful and clear voices unlike the guttural black-headed and common gull.
Anyway, whatever we poor mortals may kid ourselves into thinking he did or did not know, or what we may think he ought to have known, he began operations as soon as the skua came alongside, so to speak that is, drifted against the particular bowlder upon which the sphinx-like herring-gull happened by chance always by chance, of course to be standing.
As its claws scraped a bowlder, and it furled its long, narrow vans, it was revealed as the big herring-gull him we left out upon the face of the waters, watching and waiting on chance. His spotless expanse of head and neck alone marked him, gave him away, a speck you could see for a mile. His size just on two feet proved what his snowy hood proclaimed, in case there were any doubts.
A smaller gull, an uncommon common gull of eighteen inches came and looked, to make quite sure and went away again. The herring-gull, in spite of his silly name, has a reputation, and a "plug ugly" one. And the herring-gull, he did nothing. That is the strength of the herring-gull doing nothing. He can do it for an hour, half a morning, or most of a day.
He came upon two moorhens, fighting as if to the death, but he was the death; and slew one of them from behind neatly, and had to go back with it, past both bellowings, to a second burrow in the sea-bank, where he put it; and later he came upon only seven great, mangy, old, stump-tailed, scarred, horrible ghouls of shore rats, all mobbing a wounded seagull a herring-gull with a broken wing.
But the next short tack seemed to bring the boat no nearer than before, and the long leg carried it so far away that it was no more use shouting to the orange sail than to a stupid old herring-gull. "Could you wave for a bit, Chris?" Jerry said. "My arms are off." So I took the shirt and waved it by its sleeves, and the catboat began another short tack.
It had now also, for the first time, got some inhabitants of the feathered tribe: in particular the scarth or cormorant, and the large herring-gull, had made the beacon a resting-place, from its vicinity to their fishing-grounds.
In the foreground, half buried under tangles of brown weed torn from the rocks by past storms, lay a dead sailor, and a big herring-gull, with its head on one side and a world of inquiry in its yellow eyes, was looking at him. Tremendous vigor marked the work, and only a Brady could have come safely through the difficulties which had been surmounted in its creation.
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