296 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS 
well as directly attacking them in battle. When 
I was a boy, I will not say how many years ago, 
men used to drive a few miles into the north 
woods from a certain village in Maine and bring 
out two hundred trout in a couple of days. They 
fished with two or three hooks on a line. To-day 
a couple of trout in as many days in that stream 
would be a fair catch. In those same days the 
eagles bred in the pine-hung gorges where the 
stream cut through the mountain defiles. They 
breed there no more. It is hard enough to fight 
nest robbers and hunters, but harder yet to keep 
the race going with the food supply cut off, for 
an adult eagle is a big bird, and a baby eagle is a 
hungry one, and both of them need much pro-' 
visioning. So it was hunger—his own or his 
children’s—that drove Baldy to his many de- 
partures from his most instinctive diet of dead 
fish. 
When the ducks passed northward on their 
migration he would sometimes spy a flock, float- 
ing on some little, wood-encircled pond, as he 
coursed the upper air watching the earth-pano- 
rama below. ‘Then he would drop down and 
