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Evelyn Erith still slept; McKay fed the three carrier-pigeons, washed himself at the snow-rill in the woods, then went over to the crag's gritty edge under which for three days now the ghoulish clamour of a lammergeier had seldom ceased.
And I have concluded that the bird is neither a Lammergeier nor a Stein-Adler." "Surely," said one young Hun, "it is a German eagle." "It must be," laughed another, "because it is so methodical and exact. Those are German traits." The nature-student contemplated the wild blossom which he was now idly twirling between his fingers by its stem. "It perplexes me," he mused aloud.
McKay saw the rock-eagles alight heavily on the shelf, then, squealing defiance, hulk forward, undeterred by the hobgoblin tumult of the lammergeier. McKay leaned over the gulf as far as he dared. He could get down to the shelf; he was now convinced of that. Only fear of being seen by the soldiers on Mount Terrible had hitherto prevented him. Rope and steel-shod stick aided him.
Thrown from it, the cloaked form flew like a great blue bat. It fell upon the flattened mound that had once been the proud crown of his city. A blue blot upon desolation the broken body of Cherkis lay. A black speck appeared high in the sky; grew fast the lammergeier. "I have left carrion for you after all!" cried Norhala.
Sapling and shrub stood loyally as his allies. The rock-eagles heard him coming and launched themselves overboard into the depthless sea of air; the lammergeier, a huge, foul mass of distended feathers, glared at him out of blazing scarlet eyes; and all around was his vomit and casting in a mass of bloody human bones and shreds of clothing.
The awful, witch-like screaming of the lammergeier saluted the falling darkness where he squatted, a huge huddle of unclean plumage amid the debris of decay and death. "I don't believe I could have faced that," murmured the girl. "You have more courage than I have, Kay." "No! I was scared stiff.
Perhaps it was his shadow or the roar of his engines that routed out the lammergeier, for the unclean bird took the air on enormous pinions, beating his way upward till he towered yelping above the Boche, and their combined clamour came distinctly to the two watchers below.
A lammergeier swooped down on wide funereal wings; it peered at us; darted away toward the cliffs. "There will be no carrion there for you, black eater of the dead, when I am through," I heard Norhala whisper, eyes again somber. Steadily grew the dawn light; from Norhala's lips came again the chanting.
A false step or an inch's miscalculation of leap may make him a waif for the lämmergeier or land him among the buried villages of the last century. He toils on until success or starvation sends him home. In the former case he out-generals his shy game after a series of manoeuvres to which the deepest stratagems of our Indians are straightforwardness personified.
The lammergeier, huge and horrible with scarlet eyes ablaze, came out on the shelf of rock and yelped at the great rock-eagles; but, if something indeed lay dead there, possibly it was enough for all or perhaps the vulture-like bird was too heavily gorged to offer battle.
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