But even as I looked and wondered, and tried to make out what other game had been furnished the young savages I had helped to feed, a strange thing happened, which touched me as few things ever have among the wild creatures.  The eagles had followed me close along the last edge of rock, hoping no doubt in their wild hearts that I would slip, and end their troubles, and give my body as food to the young.  Now, as I sat on the ledge, peering eagerly into the nest, the great mother-bird left me and hovered over her eaglets, as if to shield them with her wings from even the sight of my eyes.  But Old Whitehead still circled over me.  Lower he came, and lower, till with a supreme effort of daring he folded his wings and dropped to the ledge beside me, within ten feet, and turned and looked into my eyes.  “See,” he seemed to say, “we are within reach again.  You touched me once; I don’t know how or why.  Here I am now, to touch or to kill, as you will; only spare the little ones.”

A moment later the mother-bird dropped to the edge of the nest.  And there we sat, we three, with the wonder upon us all, the young eagles at our feet, the cliff above, and, three hundred feet below, the spruce tops of the wilderness reaching out and away to the mountains beyond the big lake.  I sat perfectly still, which is the only way to reassure a wild creature; and soon I thought Cheplahgan had lost his fear in his anxiety for the little ones.  But the moment I rose to go he was in the air again, circling restlessly above my head with his mate, the same wild fierceness in his eyes as he looked down.  A half-hour later I had gained the top of the cliff and started eastward towards the lake, coming down by a much easier way than that by which I went up.  Later I returned several times, and from a distance watched the eaglets being fed.  But I never climbed to the nest again.

One day, when I came to the little thicket on the cliff where I used to lie and watch the nest through my glass, I found that one eaglet was gone.  The other stood on the edge of the nest, looking down fearfully into the abyss, whither, no doubt, his bolder nest mate had flown, and calling disconsolately from time to time.  His whole attitude showed plainly that he was hungry and cross and lonesome.  Presently the mother-eagle came swiftly up from the valley, and there was food in her talons.  She came to the edge of the nest, hovered over it a moment, so as to give the hungry eaglet a sight and smell of food, then went slowly down to the valley, taking the food with her, telling the little one in her own way to come and he should have it.  He called after her loudly from the edge of the nest, and spread his wings a dozen times to follow.  But the plunge was too awful; his heart failed him; and he settled back in the nest, and pulled his head down into his shoulders, and shut his eyes, and tried to forget that he was hungry.  The meaning of the little comedy was plain enough.  She was trying to teach him to fly, telling him that his wings were grown and the time was come to use them; but he was afraid.