THE HARRIERS 181 



have nearly caught her with their hands whilst sitting, so 

 devoted is she to her four bluish- white eggs. 



And some fine morning, if you know the solitary islet 

 near which or under which the nest is piled up, you may, 

 if lucky, see the cock come out of the blue with a nearly 

 devoured morsel in his mouth either a lark picked to 

 pieces, a water-rail or moorhen, or, more rarely, a young 

 rabbit or leveret, and hover some fifty yards above the 

 nest, calling with his wild voice ; and the hen flies up 

 into the blue to meet him, taking her breakfast with a 

 shrill cry, flying off sluggishly to a hill or some heap of stuff 

 to eat it on an eminence whence she can see the creep- 

 ing gunner, whom she 

 dreads as the lark dreads 

 her. There, too, you 

 will find those strange 

 pellets of hawked - up 

 bones, fur, and feathers. 

 But sometimes the gun- 

 ner is too artful; then 

 a wild shriek resounds HAUNT OF MONTAGU HARRIER. 



over the muffled marshes, 



fading away in the mists, and the mangled cock tumbles to the 

 marsh, or flaps on to the marsh-wall or some neighbouring 

 heap of stuff, where he begins incautiously to dress his 

 wounds; but the stealthy gunner has followed him up again 

 and pours the lead into him, and he falls dying upon the 

 damp ground or litter ; and as the keen gunner breaks forth 

 and seizes him, tossing his long, limp, thin body against the 

 blue sky, the yolk of stolen eggs streams from his mouth, 

 and he is convicted of theft. 



In early spring perhaps, some fine morning, you will 

 not see a cock Montagu in the sky, when suddenly a 

 brown hen flies with her heavier beat in from the sea, 

 and then the blue air resounds with a far-reaching kitti- 

 wake-like shriek. The shaling cock has seen her, and 



M 



