THE HOODED CROW 
vent him, and he trusts nobody not even his 
own fellows. 
Of the four birds who remained, Fionog-liat 
was the leader. From the Liffey to the Slaney, 
he was the strongest and 
most cunning poacher 
that ever sucked an egg 
or killed a crippled bird ; 
and day by day as the 
peak of his breast bone grew sharp< 
and his unsatiated appetite keener, his 
audacity and his guile increased. 
There is a certain drab-coloured stretch 
of country at the foot of the Com- 
mergar Mountains where low walls fence the 
bog into tiny fields, which for the most part 
were shaven clean of all pasturage but rush 
tufts, by generations of starveling goats and 
cattle. Three miles to the south'ard a purple 
smear above a low range of hills showed 
where the Kilcool Woods lay ; and to the east, 
snow ribbed the great barren slopes of the 
mountains. It was a desolate country, but 
such as it was Fionog-liat and his followers, 
outcasts in wildernesses, took possession of it. 
Day by day they patrolled the bogland up and 
down. They flew perhaps half a mile apart 
from one another ; but if one bird swooped 
down to some spoil, the next in the line never 
i ii 
