Till that moment Cob had never moved, as we have said.  Save for his one eye and his quivering, one would scarcely have known that he lived.  That was his game, perhaps.  Who can tell?  For a stolid, slow-thinking gull may have, in his way, just as deep, or low, a cunning as a brilliant-brained raven.  Anyhow, in that fiftieth of a second allowed, just when it seemed as if nothing could save his eye, Cob’s head snicked round and up, and he slid the enemy’s beak down off his own with as neat a parry as ever you saw.  And he did more.  He caught hold of the said raven’s beak, got a grip on beak in beak, and once having got hold, he kept hold.  This was nothing new to him.  It was his way—­one of his ways—­of fighting rival great black-backed gulls.  But it was new to the raven, and he had not previously thought out any proper counter to it. (There is a counter, I think.) Result—­caught raven as well as caught gull.

Then it was that raven’s turn to go mad, and dance a paralytic kan-kan; but he could not get any change out of that gull.  Cob hung on almost as well as the trap hung on to him, and far more twistfully.  He was quite at home, of course.  He had been brought up to this sort of thing.  It was the official regulation gull way of fighting under set rules, but he could rarely get any other bird than a gull to fight with him like it.  It was not the raven’s way of fighting, though, and I think he felt himself in a trap.  He certainly acted like a bird out of its senses, while the gull, flapping hugely, and forgetting, in the excitement, his own bondage, gradually forced the raven’s head back and back over his back, till that raven was in the unenviable position of staring over his own back at his own tail, upon which he was ignominiously sitting.  Also, his neck was half-dislocated, and he was nearly choking.  And about this time it began to dawn upon him that it did not pay in the wild to monkey with great black-backed gulls, even trapped ones.  He swore, as well as he could, in a gurgling croak.  Then——­

Clash!

Horrors upon diabolical horrors!  Another trap?

The same ghastly thought flashed to both birds’ brains at the same moment, and both literally sprang bodily up into the gale in one maddened leap, both forgetting all else in the panic to be gone.

Both stopped at the same instant, with a jerk that nearly unhinged every bone in their bodies.  Both yelled with terror at the identical moment.

Both were released—­as by the cutting of a string—­at the same fraction of time, and both hurtled aloft at the same fear-blinded, rocket-like speed.

But both had not been caught by the same kind of trap.

It was the jerk that had freed Cob from the really quite light hold, as we have already explained, of the jaws of the steel trap.

And it was the jerk that had torn out some of the raven’s tail-feathers, and left them in the jaws of the—­gray, old, hill fox.