232 THE BIG BLOW. 
time it might be anything. Therefore, when 
he saw before and below him, stretched far 
and wide upon the shining miles of mud ooze 
—it was low tide—what looked like sheets of 
glistening snow, he knew what he was in for. 
That dazzling whiteness was not snow, of 
course ; it was gulls, hundreds upon hundreds 
of them, driven in from the open sea to take 
shelter here. 
The rook flock let themselves down on still 
wings, led by the elders, to a special mussel- 
bed that they knew of. Not less than two 
hundred gulls sucked up in a wonderful white 
column to circle and scream around them, 
but the rooks made out they took no notice 
of that. 
The mussel-bed was not sweet walking for 
land birds, being mainly half-frozen slush, but 
they stuck to the job. 
There was one mussel, dead, which our 
friend found; and one shut, and alive, which 
he reduced to capitulation by simply dropping 
it from a height. There was a crab, too, 
which needed a lot of hammering to get at 
inside. Then there was a dead eel, that our 
rook, one big herring-gull, three common 
gulls, and a reprobate gray crow seemed to 
sight all in the same instant. The resulting 
collision of forees—a little maelstrom of wings 
