It left the skua, however; left him still floating, floating, floating up one long breaker’s side, and sliding down its other side to its fellow behind, towards the shore—­always towards the shore.  It is true that the tide was falling offshore, but that made no difference to the currents of those parts, which were independent currents and of a great force.  They were shouldering the skua steadily to land, and if you had dropped a line overboard there, with an ordinary lead on, you would have felt them pulling at it, and taking the lead along like a live thing.  And the currents were Fate, so far as that bird was concerned.

There was a little inlet, and a little bay in the inlet no larger than a good-sized dining-table, and seaweed, green and red, upon the rock-bowlders that encircled it, and old-gold patches of sand between the rock-bowlders, and green grass behind the rock-bowlders, and brown-plush furze behind the green grass, and a patch of blue sky over all.  And in the middle of the little bay in the inlet, bob-bobbing on the lap-lapping of the littlest waves, that—­sifted out by then, as it were—­had found their way so far, floated the skua, the Richardson’s or Arctic skua, dead, to all appearances, as the proverbial door-nail.  But that was not the rub.  The rub was in the—­ah!

“He-oh!” pealed down the clear, ringing bugle-cry from above, and a shadow floated upon the reflections a-dance on the surface in the little bay in the little inlet—­floated and hung, so that it exactly covered the skua like a funeral pall; floated, and hung, and came down.  As its claws scraped a bowlder, and it furled its long, narrow vans, it was revealed as the big herring-gull—­him we left out upon the face of the waters, watching and waiting on chance.

His spotless expanse of head and neck alone marked him, gave him away, a speck you could see for a mile.  His size—­just on two feet—­proved what his snowy hood proclaimed, in case there were any doubts.  A smaller gull, an uncommon common gull—­of eighteen inches—­came and looked, to make quite sure—­and went away again.  The herring-gull, in spite of his silly name, has a reputation, and a “plug ugly” one.

And the herring-gull, he—­did nothing.  That is the strength of the herring-gull—­doing nothing.  He can do it for an hour, half a morning, or most of a day.  His battle-cry might well have been, “Wait and see,” but he must be one of the few living, breathing things on this earth who have made the game pay, and—­lived.  He might have been a lump of chalk, or a marble carving, or a stuffed specimen, or asleep, or dead, for all the signs of living that he gave.  One began to wonder if he ever would move again.  He had been a bird, but was now the life-size model of one cut in alabaster, with clear pebbles for eyes—­they were quite as hard and cold as that, his eyes.

And all the time the body of the skua floated, and danced, and drifted, and lifted in, making an inch on one wavelet, to lose three-quarters of it on the next, but still, unnoticeably perhaps, but undoubtedly, gradually, surely, for all that, drifting in.