The Face of the Fields (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

THERE was a swish of wings, a flash of gray, a cry of pain, a squawking, cowering, scattering flock of hens, a weakly fluttering pullet, and yonder, swinging upward into the October sky, a marsh hawk, buoyant and gleaming silvery in the sun. Over the trees he beat, circled once, and disappeared. The hens were still flapping for safety in a dozen directions, but the gray harrier had gone. A bolt of lightning could not have dropped so unannounced, could not have vanished so completely, could scarcely have killed so quickly. I ran to the pullet, but found her dead. The harrier's stroke, delivered with fearful velocity, had laid head and neck open as with a keen knife. Yet a fraction slower and he would have missed, for the pullet caught the other claw on her wing. The gripping talons slipped off the long quills, and the hawk swept on without his quarry. He dared not come back for it at my feet; and so with a single turn above the woods he was gone.