156 '' The Raven Wysr [Sess. 



It was the sort of sound a man might expect to hear when 

 his view was restricted to a few hundred feet of hillside and 

 a strip of blue sky. We struggled upwards in a panic, reviling 

 our burdens. What might we not be missing — a Eaven bring- 

 ing food to her young ; an old cock Eaven, as we have known 

 him to do, warning the hen bird to leave the nest ; both old 

 birds inciting their young, now out of the nest, to betake 

 themselves to flight — oh ! any of a dozen things worth seeing, 

 and having important bearing upon the object of our journey. 

 We heard more Eaven barking — unmistakable Eaven music — 

 and then the first man was clear of the gorge. " What is 

 there ? " the anxious shout went up from the last man to the 

 first. " Nothing visible," came back the answer without a 

 tremor of emotion, and the last man's heart descended into his 

 boots ; then, " Ha ! Eavens," in a voice pitched several tones 

 higher. " Where away ? " from the last man, clinging desper- 

 ately to a diminutive mountain-ash, and frantically striving 

 to get a foothold on crumbling rock and earth lying at an 

 angle of 45°. " Far end of the cliff," vouchsafed the first man 

 testily, with his eyes glued to the binoculars, and then we all 

 saw two Eavens flying about the northern end of the cliff, 

 where in fact the cliff became no cliff, and merged into a steep 

 heather-covered slope, and were puzzled — puzzled as much by 

 their appearance as we had previously been by their absence. 

 The nest we had located in March was in the southern and 

 highest part of the cliff, and almost straight ahead of our 

 present position, which might have been 300 yards from the 

 base of the rock. We could see the gully in which the nest 

 was situated quite plainly, but owing to the configuration of 

 the cliff not even the glasses could pick out the Eavens 

 "wicker-work high mounted," and so relieve us of much 

 speculation and heartburning. A glimpse of the external 

 structure, its whiteness or its blackness, would have told us 

 even at that distance whether young birds had been reared or 

 were being reared in it, and thus disposed summarily of our 

 first notion that the Eavens were merely trying to lure us 

 away from the real site of the nest by feigning a tremendous 

 concern in a supposititious one at the northern end — a bird 

 wile employed commonly enough by other species but apt, as 

 far as our experience guides us, to be too hackneyed and 



