The skua saw red, and the herring-gull saw mainly red skua, as he was hurled back and down under the first rush, and instantly, without a second to recover, was hurled, equally helplessly, the other way, shrieking for his very life, and decorating the air and the old-gold sand with a pretty little cloud of his spotless feathers.

He fought with the desperation of almost all the wild-people, when there is no help for it; hammering, too, but wildly and clumsily.  The skua fought with the cunning and precision of the professional, plus such a rage as can only be described as berserk.

It was not a long fight.  Perhaps the skua felt that, after his collision at sea, his bolt would be soon shot, and he had better do what he was going to do as quickly and thoroughly as possible.  Certainly he did appear to do so; and when at length he drew back, rocking and gasping like a drunken creature, the famed purity of that herring-gull’s uniform was a thing of beauty no longer.  That part of him, indeed, which was not red was mud, or sand, or green slime, and in his eyes was the most worried and tired look you ever saw.

He rocked, too, in his gait, as he ran and blundered, and he gasped with his beak open.  When he rose, which he did without any sort of procrastination, he rocked worse than ever, and twice nearly fell, and once hit the water, before finally slowly dragging himself away upward, flapping low and heavily across the little waves.

With the one available eye—­the eye left him in working condition by the herring-gull’s clumsy efforts—­flaming like a live-coal, that implacable skua watched him go.  He may or may not have known it, of course, but I feel pretty certain that he would a few thousand times rather have been standing there upon the old-gold sand, with only one eye doing duty and an unspeakable agony in the other eye, than be that herring-gull in the condition he was then, going back to the bosom of his tribe.  It is not a thing to dwell upon in polite society, but I tell you that the gull-folk do not always treat their wounded well, and there would be no chance, no earthly chance at all, of his finding a place in all that vast horizon of sea and sky and island where they, the ceaseless, never-resting “White Patrol,” would not eventually find him.

Then the skua lay down, and thereafter surrendered himself to that utter reaction which birds, who live more intensely in action than almost any other creatures, have brought to an apparently exaggerated pitch.  He did not sleep, but he did not move, and every muscle in him, every fiber, every nerve, faculty, organ, was surrendered utterly to rest.

Night came fluttering her sable wings across the scene, breathing and sighing audibly in the first silence that wild landscape of storms and squalls had known throughout the day, and the skua moved.  His neck went up straight, and his head turned, looking sharply this way and that, fierce apprehension written upon him.