Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 4, 1925 — page 159: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

By WILLIAM BYRON MOWERY HAK-OOR, the great master of Mt. Dunali Major, perched on a light- - ning-blasted pine twenty miles down the valley from his nest. He was intent upon a bevy of hoary marmots that played along a sunny ledge. For a full hour the eagle had sat immobile, poised to swoop when one of the “ whistling pigs” strayed too far from its rock hole. His eyes had not once turned to the spruce forest below; they had not picked up the flickering shadow of a hunter slipping from tree to tree. From the purple shadows of the virgin spruce came the shattering cr-aa-ck of a rifle. The peculiar zimm-mm of a bullet screamed upward through thin air. The sudden, paralyzing stab of a needle | point seared across Chak-oor’s breast. The jar of it stunned him; tore his talons from their clutch of the dead limb. His wings refused to spread; he started to fall, spin- ning around and around helplessly; struck the narrow ledge where the finger-roots of his perch-tree grasped a precarious hold; struck and caromed off into the half-a-thou- sand foot drop to the slope below. The hunter watched, chuckling. As the spruce tops reached up toward Chak-oor, the soaring muscles of his scap- ula recovered from their paralysis. Strength flowed out into his wings. They spread and caught the air. At the very instant when the hunter was expecting his prize to crash through the trees to his feet, Chak- oor came out of his spinning; righted him- Self; careened upward in a long U swoop. The hunter emptied his magazine—more out of baffled disappointment than in hopes of bringing down the great golden eagle. Then he ran along the slope to a place where a winter avalanche had swept a nar- row swath down the mountain side; and watched. But Chak-oor was too wise to betray his nest by winging straight toward it. The 949 (CO) GIOok