Before he knew what was happening, he was blinded by the beating of vast wings, his claws began to slip and slide, and—­oh, horror!—­still slipping and sliding, he found the bowlder going from him.  It went from him, receding downwards with terrifying rapidity, and the dancing, silvery, sparkling water was sliding below, too.

Being a stoat, he hung on with V.C. doggedness and courage; but it was the worst thing he could have done.  Moreover, as it was, he forced the bird to attempt reprisals in mid-air—­a terrible proceeding.

Now, this was difficult, might almost seem impossible; but the skua is one of the most wonderful flyers that haunt the seas even—­and most of the best are there—­and what he could not execute in the air was scarcely worth mentioning.  It included in this case a perfectly diabolical scraping of the foe’s head with his available claw, and after that, since the dogged stoat did not leave go, and the pain was excruciating, a wonderful bend forward, and, at a pronounced and dangerous angle, a fiendish stabbing at the stoat’s head with his murderous beak.  This last involved a drop of nearly a hundred feet, but it did the trick.

Blinded, dazed, shaken, and maddened by the agony of blows upon his sensitive nose, the stoat opened his jaws to grip higher up the leg; and in an instant he was gone, turning over and over, down, down, down to the hungry waves below.

Ten minutes later the skua was calmly and safely asleep upon the top of a frowning black stack of rock, untroubled, I think, even by dreams of the terrible things he had gone through.

* * * * * *

Next morning, an apparition of wonder and fierce beauty, the skua, quite recovered except that he had a lameness in one leg and a weakness in one wonderful eye that would last him a lifetime, came racing down-shore out of a stormcloud into the full gold of the sun at some seventy miles an hour.  He was in pursuit of a common gull who, with more luck than judgment, had caught a fish.

The gull held on for a few minutes, on and in and around the horizon, going like the wind up and down and around, as for his life, with friend skua ever close to his tail, before a wild yell, which he could not mistake, sounded in his ear, and he dropped the prize.  The skua executed his wonderful dive, and caught the gleaming silver thing before it reached the waves, and shooting up again, was just about to continue his course, when a constant and peculiar flickering above the beach caught his telescopic eye.

He checked, flung up, came round beautifully effortless, and headed towards the sight.  Probably he knew what it was, had fathomed it even from that distance.  It was a gang of gulls flying round and mobbing a hapless wounded gull on the beach.

It was a foul thing to do, a horrible, blundering, clumsy murder, done slowly; but even so, it was all over before, with a scream that rang like the battle-cry of a Highland chief, and set the murderous heads up in wild alarm, the skua came shooting, twisting, turning, diving, and darting right into the heart of the crowd.