That was nearly eighty miles by canoe from where we now stood, though scarcely ten in a straight line over the mountains; for the rivers and lakes we were following doubled back almost to the starting point; and the whole wild, splendid country was the eagle’s hunting ground.  Wherever I went I saw him, following the rivers for stranded trout and salmon, or floating high in air where he could overlook two or three wilderness lakes, with as many honest fish-hawks catching their dinners.  I had promised the curator of a museum that I would get him an eagle that summer, and so took to hunting the great bird diligently.  But hunting was of little use, except to teach me many of his ways and habits; for he seemed to have eyes and ears all over him; and whether I crept like a snake through the woods, or floated like a wild duck in my canoe over the water, he always saw or heard me, and was off before I could get within shooting distance.

Then I tried to trap him.  I placed two large trout, with a steel trap between them, in a shallow spot on the river that I could watch from my camp on a bluff, half a mile below.  Next day Gillie, who was more eager than I, set up a shout; and running out I saw Old Whitehead standing in the shallows and flopping about the trap.  We jumped into a canoe and pushed up river in hot haste, singing in exultation that we had the fierce old bird at last.  When we doubled the last point that hid the shallows, there was Old Whitehead, still tugging away at a fish, and splashing the water not thirty yards away.  I shall not soon forget his attitude and expression as we shot round the point, his body erect and rigid, his wings half spread, his head thrust forward, eyelids drawn straight, and a strong fierce gleam of freedom and utter wildness in his bright eyes.  So he stood, a magnificent creature, till we were almost upon him,—­when he rose quietly, taking one of the trout.  The other was already in his stomach.  He was not in the trap at all, but had walked carefully round it.  The splashing was made in tearing one fish to pieces with his claws, and freeing the other from a stake that held it.

After that he would not go near the shallows; for a new experience had come into his life, leaving its shadow dark behind it.  He who was king of all he surveyed from the old blasted pine on the crag’s top, who had always heretofore been the hunter, now knew what it meant to be hunted.  And the fear of it was in his eyes, I think, and softened their fierce gleam when I looked into them again, weeks later, by his own nest on the mountain.

Simmo entered also into our hunting, but without enthusiasm or confidence.  He had chased the same eagle before—­all one summer, in fact, when a sportsman, whom he was guiding, had offered him twenty dollars for the royal bird’s skin.  But Old Whitehead still wore it triumphantly; and Simmo prophesied for him long life and a natural death.  “No use hunt-um dat heagle,” he said simply.  “I try once an’ can’t get near him.  He see everyt’ing; and wot he don’t see, he hear.  ’Sides, he kin feel danger.  Das why he build nest way off, long ways, O don’ know where.”  This last with a wave of his arm to include the universe.  Cheplahgan, Old Cloud Wings, he proudly called the bird that had defied him in a summer’s hunting.