Through the hot, cloudless days in the back of North Queensland there is always something beside the sun watching you from the sky. Over the line of the hills or above the long stretches of plains, a black dot swings round and round: and its circles rise slowly or fall slowly, or simply remain at the same height, swinging in endless indolent curves, while the eyes watch the miles of earth below, and the nine-foot wingspan remains motionless in the air.
You know there is nothing you can do that will not be observed: that the circling eagle, however small the distance may make it, however aloof its flight may seem, has always fixed upon the earth an attention as fierce as its claws. But the eagles watch the sky as well as the earth. One cloudless morning the two eagles flew off together, in close formation, toward the valley of the farmer’s house. The sky was as clean as a gun barrel and the sun hit them both in the back of the neck as they flew westward toward the scrubby range and the valley beyond.
They let the wind, like a cool rushing sense of elation and freedom, blow around their necks and hair. The country matched the element in which both moved: both hard and unforgiving of mistakes, yet endlessly stretching, magnificent in freedom. As they approached the hills, the earth below them and the creeks were brown and dry as a walnut, with a strip of green along the river and a few bright squares where a farmer had sunk a bore and put in a few acres of lucerne. A mob of sheep stirred along in a cloud of dust through a few scattered myalls and gum trees.
THe eagle finally bounced over the hills through air rough from the hot rocks, and turning away from the other, moved up the broad valley, searching the sky for the black dot of an eagle and wheeling like a windmill on its side. There was no sign of anything, not even of a cloud or a high whirly of dust. Everything seemed to him shiny and empty, yet somehow waiting to go off. He made a long, leisurely run up the valley, a few feet above the ground, lifting his wing over a fence or two, turning around a gum tree or away from a flock of sheep.
The only other sign of life was the farmer standing near his truck by the gate of a paddock. He answered his wave, turned and flew over him, and then continued up the valley. Above him, in the other plane, his friend waited. He ran wheels almost along the ground and turned across another fence. Suddenly the whole top of a tree flapped off in front of him and the eagle disappeared behind him before he could turn. Another bird rose from a dead sheep a few hundred yards away, but the eagle’s whole attention was concentrated on the bird that had risen from the myall tree.
It was undoubtedly the eagle the farmer had told him about. By the time he had turned and come back in a climb, the eagle was five hundred feet above him. He looked for the other plane and saw that his friend was moving toward them and climbing also, so that with the added height he could dive as they had planned. The pilot was astonished to find that the bird was outclimbing him without even moving a feather of its wings. On the hot, unseen currents it swung lazily round and round, its motionless rings always above the quivering, roaring aircraft.
To make things worse, the eagle, in order to climb as quickly as possible, had to move in a straight line and then turn back, whereas the eagle sailed up in a close spiral. Yet the eagle, its mastery already established, now deliberately ceased climbing and waited for the plane to struggle up to its level. The eagle came around in a curve at the bird, the slots on the ends of the wings clattering above him; and then, just as he ducked his head to avoid the shining curved beak, the braced black and brown feathers, the sky was amazingly empty in front of him.
The eagle had flicked over as lightly as a swallow, with no sign of panic or haste. He looked down and saw it below him, circling as quietly as if nothing in the morning, in the sky or in the land, had disturbed its watchful mastery of the air. As he dived toward it and followed it around again, he saw his friend drop his wing and come down, steep and straight, to make the attack they had planned. He could see that the eagle, for all its apparent negligence, was watching him and not the diving eagle.
The eagle shot on and began to pull out of its dive; the eagle recovered again into its slow swinging, a few hundred feet lower. Yet it had shown a little concern. For the first time a fraction of dignity had been lost: momentarily the great wings had been disturbed a little from the full stretch. Nothing existed for him except the black, polished brownness of the eagle’s plumage, the glistening beak, the wedge-shaped tail. The eagle had scorned him with silence, with its refusal to flap its wings, its mastery of the motionless sweep, the quick flick to safety and then the motionless circling again.
The eagle had begun to wonder who was playing with whom. Perhaps the bird would suddenly turn, dive, rip him with his talons, and slide sideways down the vast slope to earth. Yet now the eagle had been forced to move its wings, and the pilot had seen the first sign of victory. He turned in again toward the eagle. It circled still on unmoving wings, but subtler and harder to floow, and shifted height slightly as it swung around. The eagle heard and saw, and flicked over to where, before, safety had always been emptily waiting for it.
It flashed, wings still gloriously outstretched, straight into the beak of the other eagle. The heavy box of bone, beak and claw plunged and slewed to the ground. The pilot could not watch the last few feet of its descent. They walked over to the dark mass of feathers. They stood in silence. The moment of skill and danger was past, and the dead body before them proclaimed their victory. Frowning with the glare of the sun and the misery of their achievement, they both looked down at the pitiful monarch.
Not a mark of blood was on it, the beak glistening and uncrushed the ribbed feet and talons clenched together. It was not the fact of death that kept them in silence: what both of them could still see was the heap of bone and feathers, slewing and jerking uncontrolled to the ground. As they ran back toward the airplanes, a black dot broke from the hills and swung out above them, circling round and round. The farmer, who has lost the last of his sheep, something they thought was theirs forever, had finally come to realise that nothing really belongs to him.
