June 12, 1915. 
LAND AND ,W.ATEE 
TALES OF THE UNTAMED. 
MARGOT (continued). 
Adapted from the French by Douglas English. 
IT lifted on a treacherous wire, and loosed from either 
side a whip of steel, which cut into her neck. So fierce, 
so Budden was the grip that she dropped limp with 
sprawling limbs. She woke to find herself fast held, 
to hear the crunch of human tread, to see a mon£trou« 
two-legged thing loom up in ominous black. 
And Instinct whispered counsel. 
She felt that she was trapped, that she must somehow 
free herself before the monster reached her. She arched her 
body like a bow, and, with firm-planted claws and lashing 
wings, pulled back with frenzied strength against the grip. 
Her beak, her head, her tautened neck were as one cord which 
stretched to breaking-point. The trap's jaws eased — her ears 
flipped past the catch of them. Another maddened pull, a 
•crape which rasped six feathers from their roots, and she was 
free. 
Ten seconds more and she had met her fate. The Man 
eame running as she writhed, and flung himself to grip her. 
She slipped like oil between his fumbling fingers, and winged 
her screaming flight aloft to cross the ridge on which the 
•now laj thawing. His fat bewildered face, upturned, stared 
after her until she passed the skyline. She had escaped once 
more from Man, and mastered one more lesson. 
The hoar-frost danced and twinkled on the trees; the 
plough was one vast iris-tinted brilliant, whose myriad facets 
caught the sun's white flame, and mirrored it in pink, and 
gold, and azure. No snare, no enemy was in sight. One 
•ound, and one sound only, broke the stillness — the cry of 
magpie in distress, and Margot and her sisters sped towards it. 
Did some faint memory of the pool still haunt them ? 
There was no water here, no tree; a waste of snow-clad earth, 
a waste of sky, save where a grey smoke spiral told of the 
cottage hidden by the rise. 
But there was something which brought back the pool — 
a sister voicing her distress, and that distress a riddle. 
She lay upon a wooden board, breast upwards. Her feet 
clawed at the empty air. She wailed and screamed inces- 
santly. 
From every side, from forest, wood, and copse, flocked 
mags in twos and threes to stare at her. 
The bird was crucified. Two staples driven through her 
fleshy wing-bones racked her with pain unspeakable. Bub 
•Le felt torture worse than this — the inversion of her world. 
With feet and belly uppermost, it was as though the heavens 
had capsized. Her dizzied brain reeled to and fro, her head 
boat dully, sideways on the wood, as, with one rounded terror- 
stricken eye, she searched the abyss that hung above her 
head, and saw the plumage of her sisters' breasts above her. 
They screamed and wheeled and screamed again, and, 
one by one, approached in lowering spirals, and so dropped to 
earth. They circled round her, tripping, strutting, prancing, 
with pointing beaks, with necks outstretched. Their orbits 
narrowed gradually. Margot was boldest of them all. She 
danced across the prisoner, whose claws, now clenched, now 
wide outspread, sought point for thrust, or grapple. 
Her sisters, too, drew near. Not one of them could 
understand. 
There was a babel rout of birds, a jostling, cackling horde 
of them, wing-flapping, sideways leaping, with eyes and 
tongues adrift in wonderment. 
And, suddenly, a tragedy. 
Margot had skimmed, for once, too near. The groping 
daws entangled her. Like drowning hands they fastened 
on her neck, and her screams joined the captive's screams, and 
both were hardened to short, gasping sobs, to stifled, gurgling 
discords, which, for an instant, struck the audience mute. 
An eerie duel this. 
The prisoner's claws gripped, strangling, and Margot 
tugged against them, w^ings awhirr. Her feet, which rage had 
etceled, slipped sideways on the ice-glazed board. She fell, 
recovered, slipped again, and lunging fiercely with her 
hampered beak, sought to pierce heart or eye. She brought 
her claws to bear at last, and drove into her rival's quivering 
body, and tugged, the while, against the grip. In vain she 
clawed, in vain she stamped. Her rival was insensible to 
pain, and clinched her hold the tighter. 
Margot was strangling fast. Her eyes were shot with 
blood; her beak gaped wide to ease her lungs; bet heart raced 
pulsing, throbbing. 
And round her stalked the sisterhood, and clucked, and 
■izzed, and giggled. 
The screams grew weirder, wilder. The combatants had 
plumbed the depths of hate. 'They fought for life, and voiced 
their agony, fighting. 
But suddenly came swish of soaring pinions, and, round 
the duel, stillness. 
Clear-marked against the skyline rose a Man. 
Margot had seen him instantly. She checked her screams, 
and wrestled on in silence. 
Her ravil could see nothing but her enemy, and miauled 
and screamed at random. 
The Man loomed higher, higher still. He towered colossal 
over them, shapeless, fantastic, terrible. 
His footsteps crunched the hoar-frost jewels to powder, 
and left broad muddy smears behind. His breath steamed 
on the frosted air, and hung impure about his clumsy going. 
And Margot.knew that Death minced in his wake. 
His shadow crept across her. His vastness 'clotted ouii 
the sky. He fixed cold, pitiless eyes on her, and, on a 
sudden, shook and rocked with peal on peal of laughter. 
A droll bird this. The draggled plumage tickled him; 
the terror-haunted eyes; the treading feet. 
He stopped and Margot skivered. 
She felt her feet clutched by his horny fingers, her head 
racked from her body, her windpipe tautened, strictured. 
It was the end. Her wings dropped limp to either side. 
The death-sob jerked and rattled in her throat. Her mind 
reeled into darkness. 
But suddenly the lower grip relaxed. Her rival's clawa 
were roughly forced apart. Her neck was freed. Sha 
breathed. 
The Man alone now held her. 
He gripped her feet, held her breast-high, and stared at 
her with goggle eyes and thin-lipped, sneering mouth. 
And Margot, screwing round her head, stared back. She 
could not understand. She only knew that she., was prisoner, 
that she had lost her forest. 
Yet she made bid for freedom. She wrestled with hia 
sturdy grip. She stabbed her beak against his fist, witll 
strength born of despair. 
The Man's fist was hard as oak. 
He jerked her head away from him, and mocked her 
frantic writhings. But soon he tired, swung off his back a 
cage of latticed wire, unhasped the door, and thrust tha 
prisoner in. 
Margot had felt the unloosing of his fingers, and, for a 
moment, thought herself at large. 
She flung at the unyielding wires, and stabbed and pecked 
and scratched at them. Her feet slipped past their barrier, 
and clawed the air beyond. With wings a-whirr she leapt, 
and fell back stunned. She bruised her head, her feet, in 
vain. The rigid wires defied her strength; she could not bend 
a strand of them. 
And over her the invulnerable hand, the pitiless, mock- 
ing, terrible hand swung on its swivelled ring the jolting caga 
which held her unknown destiny. 
Strange sounds, and diverse, drummed upon her ears.. 
She paid no heed. One thought beset her mind — to get away j 
one hope possessed her senses — to break or bend the wires. 
A wall of nightmare faces rose about her. She knew noti 
how the wall came into being, or how the crowd which formed 
it multiplied. She grasped no differences in men, no 
individuality, of height, or face, or gesture. 
All smelt the same ; all were her captor's friends, friends 
leagued with him to compass her destruction. The circle 
moved along with her, with shouts, with boisterous laughter.. 
And Margot, who knew nothing of Man's voice, thought 
every cry a menace, a call to others of the tribe to share an 
easy kill. So had she seen a flight of crows wing screaming to 
a crippled hare, and peck her eyes, and eat her where they 
found her. 
Each shout, each laughter-peal from human throat, 
stabbed at her heart, and froze her young warm blood. 
And suddenly the day was blotted out — in chaos of 
fantastic sounds, of heavy airs, of noisome, musty odours. 
With rounded, terror-haunted eyes she cowered before 
this darkness in the noonday. 
The stench, the gloom of four-walled room at first 
15* 
