White savage lust for the eyes of stricken or dying 

 Weather, sheep. The ptarmigan he called An t-Eun 

 (Adhar or Aidhre), the bird of the snow or 

 frost — though this is but a variant, of course, 

 of the more familiar Sneacag or Eun-an- 

 Sneachel. When he spoke of the eagle simply 

 as An t-Eun 3£or, the great bird, that seemed 

 less noteworthy, but when he added, Abu I An 

 t-Eun Mor Abu, I was puzzled. I thought he 

 meant aboo to simulate the Iolairs cry, though 

 it sounded much more like the muffled hoot of 

 the great owl than the eagle's screech. He said 

 he remembered that was the eagle's name in 

 an old tale he had often heard his mother tell 

 when he was a child. I never thought of it as 

 Abu, however, till one day I came upon this 

 word in a Gaelic dictionary and found it entered 

 as being an ancient war-cry of the Gael. 

 Truly, a fit survival, for a wild slogan that has 

 ages ago died away from the Gaelic hills : to 

 live still among these desolate mountains, 

 around those wind-tortured scarps and scaurs, 

 in the scream of the golden eagle. The old 

 man had a special bird-name for most of the 

 birds he spoke of or about which I asked him. 

 Doubtless he was as good a naturalist and 

 with as good a right to make names as any 

 ornithologist who would know what the old 

 man could not know, and would be familiar 



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