It was scaring business, that three-hundred-foot climb up the sheer face of the mountain.  Fortunately the rock was seamed and scarred with the wear of centuries; bushes and stunted trees grew out of countless crevices, which gave me sure footing, and sometimes a lift of a dozen feet or more on my way up.  As I climbed, the eagles circled lower and lower; the strong rustling of their wings was about my head continually; they seemed to grow larger, fiercer, every moment, as my hold grew more precarious, and the earth and the pointed tree-tops dropped farther below.  There was a good revolver in my pocket, to use in case of necessity; but had the great birds attacked me I should have fared badly, for at times I was obliged to grip hard with both hands, my face to the cliff, leaving the eagles free to strike from above and behind.  I think now that had I shown fear in such a place, or shouted, or tried to fray them away, they would have swooped upon me, wing and claw, like furies.  I could see it in their fierce eyes as I looked up.  But the thought of the times when I had hunted him, and especially the thought of that time when I had reached out of the bushes and touched him, was upon Old Whitehead and made him fear.  So I kept steadily on my way, apparently giving no thought to the eagles, though deep inside I was anxious enough, and reached the foot of the tree in which the nest was made.

I stood there a long time, my arm clasping the twisted old boll, looking out over the forest spread wide below, partly to regain courage, partly to reassure the eagles, which were circling very near with a kind of intense wonder in their eyes, but chiefly to make up my mind what to do next.  The tree was easy to climb, but the nest—­a huge affair, which had been added to year after year—­filled the whole tree-top, and I could gain no foothold, from which to look over and see the eaglets, without tearing the nest to pieces.  I did not want to do that, and I doubted whether the mother-eagle would stand it.  A dozen times she seemed on the point of dropping on my head to tear it with her talons; but always she veered off as I looked up quietly, and Old Whitehead, with the mark of my bullet strong upon him, swept between her and me and seemed to say, “Wait, wait.  I don’t understand; but he can kill us if he will—­and the little ones are in his power.”  Now he was closer to me than ever, and the fear was vanishing.  But so also was the fierceness.

From the foot of the tree the crevice in which it grew led upwards to the right, then doubled back to the ledge above the nest, upon which Cheplahgan was standing when I discovered him.  The lip of this crevice made a dizzy path that one might follow by moving crabwise, his face to the cliff, with only its roughnesses to cling to with his fingers.  I tried it at last, crept up and out twenty feet, and back ten, and dropped with a great breath of relief to a broad ledge covered with bones and fish scales, the relics of many a savage feast.  Below me, almost within reach, was the nest, with two dark, scraggly young birds resting on twigs and grass, with fish, flesh and fowl in a gory, skinny, scaly ring about them—­the most savage-looking household into which I ever looked unbidden.