I had barely settled comfortably into my place, wondering how long human patience could endure the sting of insects and the hot close air without moving or stirring a leaf, when the heavy silken rustle sounded close at hand, and I heard the grip of his talons on the log.  There he stood, at arm’s length, turning his head uneasily, the light glinting on his white crest, the fierce, untamed flash in his bright eye.  Never before had he seemed so big, so strong, so splendid; my heart jumped at the thought of him as our national emblem.  I am glad still to have seen that emblem once, and felt the thrill of it.

But I had little time to think, for Cheplahgan was restless.  Some instinct seemed to warn him of a danger that he could not see.  The moment his head was turned away, I stretched out my arm.  Scarcely a leaf moved with the motion, yet he whirled like a flash and crouched to spring, his eyes glaring straight into mine with an intensity that I could scarce endure.  Perhaps I was mistaken, but in that swift instant the hard glare in his eyes seemed to soften with fear, as he recognized me as the one thing in the wilderness that dared to hunt him, the king.  My hand touched him fair on the shoulder; then he shot into the air, and went sweeping in great circles over the tree-tops, still looking down at the man, wondering and fearing at the way in which he had been brought into the man’s power.

But one thing he did not understand.  Standing erect on the log, and looking up at him as he swept over me, I kept thinking, “I did it, I did it, Cheplahgan, old Cloud Wings.  And I had grabbed your legs, and pinned you down, and tied you in a bag, and brought you to camp, but that I chose to let you go free.  And that is better than shooting you.  Now I shall find your little ones and touch them too.”

For several days I had been watching Old Whitehead’s lines of flight, and had concluded that his nest was somewhere in the hills northwest of the big lake.  I went there one afternoon, and while confused in the big timber, which gave no outlook in any direction, I saw, not Old Whitehead, but a larger eagle, his mate undoubtedly, flying straight westward with food towards a great cliff, that I had noticed with my glass one day from a mountain on the other side of the lake.

When I went there, early next morning, it was Cheplahgan himself who showed me where his nest was.  I was hunting along the foot of the cliff when, glancing back towards the lake, I saw him coming far away, and hid in the underbrush.  He passed very near, and following, I saw him standing on a ledge near the top of the cliff.  Just below him, in the top of a stunted tree growing out of the face of the rock was a huge mass of sticks that formed the nest, with a great mother-eagle standing by, feeding the little ones.  Both birds started away silently when I appeared, but came back soon and swept back and forth over me, as I sat watching the nest and the face of the cliff through my glass.  No need now of caution.  Both birds seemed to know instinctively why I had come, and that the fate of the eaglets lay in my hands if I could but scale the cliff.