Despoiled, but safe, the guillemot rattled away “for another cast”; but the foe settled, riding lightly on the lift and fall of the bottle-green waves.

Here he was no longer a wonderful phantom spirit of the storm, but just a bird that might have been passed over at first glance as simply a seagull.  But not at a second glance.

Men called this strange bird Richardson’s skua, or Arctic skua, or lesser skua, or, officially, Stercorarius crepidatus, or, most unofficially, in the vernacular, “boatswain,” or “man-o’-war,” or “gull-tormentor.”  Apparently you could take your choice what you called him.  But he did not belong to Mr. Richardson really.  He belonged to nobody, only to himself, to the wind and the rain, that seemed to have begot him, and to the grim north, from which he took his other name.  He might have claimed the gulls as his near relations—­they loathed him enough.

For a long time he sat on the lifting, breathing swell, floating idly.  There was nothing else on the face of the lonely waters except himself and a flock, or fleet, I should say, of razorbills and guillemots, very far away, who alternately showed all white breasts, and vanished—­as they dived and rose all together—­like white-faced, disappearing targets, and one gull, who wheeled and wheeled in the middle distance, with one eye on the divers and one on the skua, as if, gull-like, waiting on a chance from either.

Then at last the skua rose again, and swept hurriedly out to sea to meet a small black-and-white speck that was coming in.  It was a little, rotund, parrot-beaked puffin, loaded with fish—­sprats—­four of them set crossways in his wonderful bill.  He seemed to know nothing about the skua till that worthy was upon him, and then, as he fled, after a furious chase of about three minutes, he suddenly surrendered by letting fall all his spoil.

The skua caught up one sprat before it hit the surface, but, being too late to overtake the rest, seemed to take no further notice of them, but swept on, to settle upon the water a mile away and preen himself.  And this was where the waiting, watching gull came in—­the herring-gull.  He sprang to strenuous life, and, arriving swiftly at full speed over the spot, snatched up off the surface, and by clumsily attempting to plunge, two more of the sprats, before the skua could intervene.

Then it was that a terrible and a totally unexpected thing happened, and yet, if one comes to think about it and study the matter more, the most natural in the world; probably, also, on those wild seas, even common-place.  Only, you see, there was no interval at all between the skua sitting placidly on the lap of the waves, eyeing the gull vengefully, and that same skua shooting straight upwards, all doubled up, on the top of what appeared to have been a submarine mine in a mild form in active demonstration.

[Illustration:  “Shooting straight upwards on the top of what appeared to have been a submarine mine in a mild form”]