The Last Egg in the Nest

by Algernon Blackwood

The three Ransom boys were home for the holidays and all the household knew it. The household included four dogs, a pony, two pet cats, a very talkative parrot, and several white mice, which had been trained to do all sorts of wonderful tricks.

Of course there were others in the household⁠—two sisters, a father, and a mother but, at times, it seemed as if the animals were by far its most important section.

The Ransom boys⁠—Harry, George, and Edwin, aged respectively ten, twelve, and sixteen⁠—were as fine a trio of manly school boys as you could find anywhere, even if they were sometimes up to larks that their father was not supposed to know about in general, and certainly did not know about in particular.

“Has Fred been over yet?” asked Edwin, the first night after dinner.

“Not yet,” answered his sister, a pretty girl of eighteen; “but I expect he will come over tonight.”

“You ought to know best, May,” said George, with a wink at his brothers.

The blush that rose to May’s fair cheeks was scarcely noticeable in the lamplight, and George was such a persistent tease that this particular stab drew no special degree of attention. May went on sewing placidly, and let the boys ramble on with their talk and plans for the holidays.

Fred Winter was a neighbour’s son, who had been at the same school with the Ransoms, but had just gone up to Cambridge. He was specially high in the brothers’ estimation, because, among other claims to their esteem, he possessed a very complete collection of birds’ eggs, which he had accumulated with great pains, and to which his elder brother, who travelled widely, had brought home valuable foreign additions. Harry and George Ransom, just at this period of their lives, thought that a large and complete collection of birds’ eggs was about the most desirable possession in the world. At least two-thirds of their holidays were spent in looking for specimens with which to enlarge their collection; and Edwin, the youngest of the three, who had always joined their expeditions as a sort of golf “caddie” (to carry the bag and climbing irons), was now for the first time admitted seriously into the partnership.

“Mr. Winter has added a wonderful new hawk’s egg to his collection, I believe,” May continued quietly, after a pause. “He told me the other day that he bought it from a man who climbed down Farmer Mutton’s cliffs to the nest and⁠—”

“Farmer Mutton’s cliffs!”

“A new hawk’s egg!”

“What hawk is it?”

“What kind of egg⁠—speckled or plain?”

“How did he get it? Did the birds attack him?”

“How did he get down the cliffs?”

May dropped her sewing in dismay at the sudden storm the simple remark had raised, but she had the boys in her power now, because, if they teased her, she could hold them in check by refusing to satisfy their curiosity.

“He climbed down to the nest with ropes,” she said, answering the last question first, probably because it was the only one she was able to answer. “They let him down from above, and he was so glad to get back again to the ground that he dropped some of the eggs and broke them.”

“Silly idiot!” said Edwin.

“What an ass!” sneered George. “Humph!” grunted Harry, who was too disgusted even to find words.

“There was a straight drop of three hundred feet beneath him,” May went on, “and the rope began to split, or crack, or something, just as they hauled him back over the edge.”

A fresh storm of questions that broke out here was interrupted by the arrival of Freddy Winter himself. The boys at once surrounded him and took him prisoner, and their sister, who was the real object of his visit, enjoyed very little personal conversation with Mr. Winter that evening. She recognised that a judicious concession to the enemy might save her much subsequent teasing, and, being of a naturally sweet disposition, she contrived that the boys should have their egg-collecting hero all to themselves for the greater part of the evening.

Winter was a good-natured fellow into the bargain, so he allowed himself to be taken prisoner, and made no effort to escape until his captors had forced from him all the secrets concerning the hawk’s nest in Farmer Mutton’s cliffs. Then, by a judicious invitation to “the trio” to come over in the morning, for the hundredth time, to inspect his collection, and particularly to view the new-found treasure, he saw his opportunity to get away.

“And now I must say good night to your sister and be getting home,” he said, at last making his escape, while the boys fled to their special den where they could be alone to discuss the exceedingly important matters that had been brought to their consideration that evening.

The conference turned out to be a very curious one. It appeared from Fred’s account that the hawk’s nest in Farmer Mutton’s cliffs was not actually a new discovery. The hawks had nested there for years and years, but the dangerous character of the cliffs, combined with the fact that the farmer was very fond of his hawk’s nest and had threatened to shoot any boys he caught attempting to rob it, had effectually guarded the birds from invasion and attack. The cliffs rose in a sheer wall of more than four hundred feet, and offered very little foothold. From below they were absolutely inaccessible, but their summit could be reached by a roundabout pathway, and the trees that grew along the edge provided natural posts to which a rope with any amount of weight at the end of it could be safely fastened. Then it was simply a matter of having the necessary nerve to make the descent, dangling at the end of a rope, with two angry, sharp beaked birds screaming round your head. Dick Ormsby, who worked on the farm that adjoined old Mutton’s, had accomplished this feat, and had found two nests. With four eggs in a little bag tied round his neck, his companions had pulled him slowly up the dizzy distance, and landed him safely over the edge of the cliff. In his frantic efforts to ward off the blows of the parent birds, however, and prevent himself at the same time from swinging out too much from the rocks and fraying the rope on which his life depended, he had struck the eggs a blow that had smashed two of them beyond all power of mending.

Fred had bought one of the remaining sound ones at the stiff price of a guinea, for, as Dick said, “it was a specerlative venture; the eggs is rare anyway, and I risked my life. Now, ef that don’t constitute value, I don’t know nuthin’. The eggs is preshus stones⁠—that’s what they is, an’ I’ll let ’em go at a guinea apiece, or I won’t let ’em go at all.”

So Dick got his price, and, according to what Fred told the “trio,” the other egg was still to be had at the same figure.

How to get possession of that egg, then, was the momentous subject under consideration of the boys. It had taken very little time and effort to show that funds were reprehensibly low, and that the purchase of the egg from Dick at his own price was for the moment out of the question.

“The figure is a prohibitive one,” announced Edwin slowly, and with a deep breath to help him over the long word. “I haven’t a sixpence to my name, and my next pocket-money isn’t due for a week.”

“Nor have I,” sighed Harry.

“I have a very little,” said George, in his turn, “but it’s May’s birthday next Monday, and I wanted to buy her a present with it.”

“May will have other birthdays, I suppose,” suggested Edwin; but the idea did not “catch on.”

Mr. Ransom was not a rich man. He made his boys a weekly allowance of pocket money, which he intended should be enough to enable them to hold their own with other boys in their set, and yet was not enough to let them get into mischief. As a matter of fact, however, they were too independent to care two straws whether they could hold their own with other boys, and their allowances were accordingly just sufficient to allow them to get comfortably into mischief. This they did at regular intervals.

The net result of their conference now was the decision that the egg could not be bought, and that the only way to obtain so valuable a specimen for their collection was to climb down to the nest themselves and get one.

The dangers of the undertaking only served to whet their appetite for the adventure.

“I’ll go down at the end of a rope,” said Edwin, the youngest, “if you fellows are sure you can pull me up again.”

“Oh, we can pull you up all right,” said Harry authoritatively; “but I think I’d better be the one to go down. I’ll wear a fencing mask in case the birds attack me.” “Bring up the eggs in your mouth, remember,” said Edwin wisely, “or you’ll break them as Dick did. Besides, you’ve got the largest mouth of us all, and the only one that will hold two eggs at once.”

At any other time Edwin might have got a cuff over the head for this gratuitous piece of information, but on this occasion it was so obviously a compliment that his elder brother only smiled complacently, and replied with a consciousness of superior power in his tone.

“Oh, trust me not to break them, once I get my hands on them. No one knows how to carry birds’ eggs in his mouth without breaking them better than I do.”

“Well, now,” slowly began George, who had not been heard from at all since the bold project of robbing the nest had been under discussion, “don’t you fellows think it is rather a cruel trick to play? One of the nests is already empty. It only had two eggs in it, and Fred said that Dick took them both. The other one can only have one or two left in it.”

“It only has one,” interrupted Harry, “because Dick divided the two eggs, and put one in the empty nest.”

“Then there’s only an egg apiece for each nest,” George went on, “and if we take those the birds will have no young ones at all. I hate to do a thing like that. Why not ask Dick to hold his egg for us until we can afford to get it, or, for that matter, we might wait just as well till next year. The hawks are pretty sure to nest again in the same spot, and then we can get two eggs, or as many as we want, for that matter.”

“If we got there first,” growled Harry. “I don’t see anything cruel in it, George; the birds don’t seem to mind much. They’ll lay a lot more eggs at once. Birds are like our old hens, and never know the difference.”

“This is in the interest of science,” announced Edwin, with a solemn face, throwing out his chest⁠ ⁠… “It’s an opportunity not to be lost. I think you’re afraid you will have to do the climbing.”

Edwin evidently did not show to his elder brothers the respect they demanded of him, and this retort would inevitably have led to a scuffle and a chase round the room had not Harry interposed in his most determined way, and ordered his brothers to “shut up” at once.

So George, who was a tenderhearted little chap where dumb animals were concerned, was overruled on the question of cruelty, and when the trio at length fell asleep, long after midnight, it had been finally decided that a raid was to be made upon the hawks’ nest, with the aid of ropes, from the top of the cliffs, and in spite of the alleged terrors of Farmer Mutton’s gun.

For various reasons the date of the attack was postponed several days. One reason was that the yearly fair was in progress in the neighbouring town, and the boys were waiting to learn if Farmer Mutton was not going in to see it. Another reason was that a hundred feet of strong reliable rope was not so easily procured as they had imagined. In the meantime, however, they had been over to see Fred’s specimen, and the sight had been almost too much for them. They had also paid a secret visit of inspection to the cliffs, and Fred Winter had pointed out to them, without any idea that they intended to reach it, the exact spot where the nests were.

The cliffs rose very abruptly out of the farmer’s fields. They formed the end of a range of hills that showed nowhere so grand and rugged an appearance as here. A stream flowed at their base, and watered the farm, and from time to time huge blocks of stone, loosened by the frost and rains, came thundering down to terrify the cows in old Mutton’s meadows and find a resting-place in the muddy bottom of the stream.

“A nasty piece of climbing, in my opinion,” declared Fred, as he pointed out to the trio how Dick had accomplished his feat. “If that rope had had any weak spot in it, the man would have been dashed to pieces on those sharp rocks after a pleasant little drop of about two hundred feet.”

“He’d have been dead long before he got to the bottom, wouldn’t he?” observed Edwin, while the others laughed in chorus.

High up against the skyline Fred showed them the tree to which the rope had been tied. Close behind it, but not visible from where they were standing, was a big angular rock round which the men had thrown the slack rope in loops as they pulled Dick higher and higher. In this way, in case the weight had become too much for them and the rope had slipped through their hands, there was never more than a few spare inches to go. The boys listened attentively to all the details Fred had to give, sometimes not without a shudder, and exchanged many looks that were full of meaning and significance.

About a hundred feet from the summit, on a narrow ledge formed by the dislodgment, years before, of some heavy mass of rock, the hawks had built their clumsy nests of sticks and twigs. Far above their heads, as the boys stood in Farmer Mutton’s meadow and shaded their eyes to look upwards, they could just make out the two fierce birds, mere specks in the sky, circling round and round, many hundred feet above the summit of the cliffs. From time to time their shrill cry, that had something plaintive in it, dropped downward to them.

“They can see us far better than we can see them,” said Fred; “and you can be sure they are watching us too. Their eyes are as sharp and quick as eagles’.”

“Poor things,” said George; “perhaps they are crying for the stolen eggs.”

“You are too tenderhearted to be an egg collector,” laughed Fred. “It’s a good thing the farmers are not, or we should never have hens’ eggs for breakfast.”

“I don’t mind taking one egg from a nest, or even two, if there are plenty left, and the bird won’t miss them,” replied George; “but it seems rather a shame to take all.”

“They have probably laid a lot more by this time,” remarked Edwin, who knew nothing whatever of the habits of hawks, and little of any other birds.

Two days after this preliminary visit to the scene of action, Farmer Mutton hitched up his best team and drove with his wife and daughter to the fair. The boys, who had been watching his movements narrowly, heaved collectively a sigh of relief, and, with enough rope to lower a dozen men into the crater of Vesuvius, started in the early after noon along the pathway that led by a round about route to the summit of the cliff.

It had been decided, as a wise alteration in their plans, to lower George down to the nest, because Harry’s greater strength would be far more needed in hauling up than in warding off the possible attacks of the enraged birds. George accepted the position with becoming gravity, and paid no attention whatever to Edwin’s remark that it was only right the least valuable member of the party should be the one to run most risk of breaking his neck.

Far below, when they reached the top of the cliffs, they could see Farmer Mutton’s cosy house nestling among the apple-trees, and his cows grazing in the fields, looking about the size of Newfoundland dogs. The wind rushed up the sides of the precipice with a shriek, and laughed in their faces.

“Ugh! What a height!” they said in one breath, as they lay down flat on their faces and peered cautiously over the dizzy brink.

So far there had been no signs of the hawks, and Edwin’s statements that they were probably on their nests was about the most likely remark to which he gave utterance that day.

George, without a word, took off his coat, put on the fencing mask, and tied the rope securely round his waist and under his arms. The other end was made fast to the trunk of a big pine-tree that stood a yard or so from the edge, and the boys then proceeded to haul George over a branch of the tree, so as to test the tying of the rope and see if it hurt him anywhere. A round piece of wood was fixed between two stones on the edge of the cliff to prevent the rope fraying, and the boys, with clenched teeth, next proceeded to lower George slowly over the brink of the precipice.

“Remember, old fellow, two pulls mean you are ready to come up, and three that you have safely reached the ledge. Don’t forget the signal, and we’ll haul you up whenever you want to come,” cried Harry, as his brother disappeared from view and swung into space with three hundred feet of air between him and Farmer Mutton’s meadows.

Slowly, foot by foot, Harry and Edwin let out the rope, which had been carefully looped round the angle of the big boulder. The strain did not seem too great for them at first, and sometimes, when George found a chance foothold on the face of the cliff, there was no weight at all. A hundred feet is a long way, though, when a boy, and a brother at that, is hanging at the other end of a rope that can only move a foot at a time. The work soon began to tell on the two boys, as breathing well testified.

“Brace yourself well against the rock, Edwin, and move exactly when I do.” “Right you are,” gasped the youngest.

Steadily the rope passed over the edge, and the boys began to wonder how soon George would reach the ledge and find a resting-place. The only way they could tell would be by the slackening of the rope.

“Think he’s all right?” asked Edwin, puffing and blowing, but working with every muscle like a little man.

“Of course he is. George is the pluckiest chap I ever knew.”

“If he misses that ledge and passes it, how shall we know? He can’t signal with his full weight on the rope.”

Harry saw the force of this remark, and, before unwinding another coil of the rope from the boulder, he told his brother to go to the edge and look over.

Edwin crept cautiously along the ground and peered over the brink. Harry watched his face anxiously, and saw his cheek suddenly turn pale under the flush of the exercise. “Harry,” he said quietly, turning to his brother a white face, “he’s missed the ledge. He’s dangling several feet below it, and the beastly hawks are at him, I do believe!”

“Shout that we’ll pull him up at once,” cried Harry. “Up to the nests, I mean quick!”

Once, twice, three times, Edwin put his hands to his mouth, trumpet-wise, and hallooed to his brother, a hundred and twenty feet below. The wind sweeping round the bare rocks caught his voice and dived with it into the depths. George made no sign⁠—and Edwin did not know whether he had heard or not.

“Come and pull,” roared Harry. “That’s the only thing to do.”

The boys had never before realised how dear their brother was to them. He had never seemed such a good fellow as at this moment, when he was swinging in the wind against the face of that awful cliff.

It was one thing to let him down, foot by foot, but it was quite another thing to pull him up, inch by inch. The weight seemed twice as great. The brothers strained every muscle, and hauled till the rope cut into their hands and the perspiration poured in streams down their faces. Loop by loop they passed the rope round the rock, inch by inch it crept up toward them over the brink, and at last they had the satisfaction and relief of feeling the signal which meant that George was on the ledge and able to give the three pulls.

“Run and see, quick, while I hold on,” cried Harry excitedly.

But Edwin had dropped to the ground exhausted. The strain of the last few minutes had been too much for him, and the effort that would have been no easy matter even for two men had laid him panting and tired out upon his back.

Seeing his brother’s predicament, Harry, who himself was not far from being “done,” crawled to the edge and craned his head out to see. The height made him dizzy for a moment, but he was immensely relieved to see his brother standing safe, for the moment at least, upon one end of the narrow ledge of rock. He shouted to him some words of encouragement, in a lull of the wind, and his heart gave a bound when he saw George wave his arm in return.

The nests were at the other end of the ledge, perhaps twenty feet away from where George was standing, and it was a very difficult matter to crawl along near enough to get the eggs. The distance was too great for Harry to see the nests themselves, much less to make out if there were eggs in them or not. But he plainly saw the birds, which, frightened and angry, were flying in swift circles in the neighbourhood of their home. Sometimes they seemed above and sometimes below the spot where George was perched, but, so far at least as Harry could see, they had no intention of actually attacking him.

With his hand on the rope to feel the slightest signal from George, Harry lay down beside his brother to recover strength and wind.

“I wouldn’t be in George’s place for a good deal,” he said. “I had no idea it was such dizzy work climbing down a cliff. The rocks bulge out a little above the nests and you have to dangle out there with nothing between you and Mutton’s fields until you can swing in and get your feet on the ledge. Hullo! the rope’s moving!”

Sure enough the rope was sliding sideways across the piece of wood that was fixed on the edge of the cliff to prevent the rocks cutting it. Edwin, who had by this time recovered his breath, ran at once to look over and see what was the matter.

“George is creeping along the ledge,” he cried; “he’s within a few feet of the nest, and the birds are screaming and flapping their wings like fury just over his head. Oh, they are monsters!”

While his brothers had so anxiously been watching his progress from the top of the cliff, George, whose head was never affected by dizziness, had been calmly facing the terrors of his position. The rocks above the ledge overhung it in such a way that he had to make considerable swing to get his feet in upon the projection. The first time he had missed it by about six inches, and before he could gather himself together for another attempt he had been lowered too far below it. The frightened hawks had risen screaming from their nests and shot up into the air, where they circled and dropped and rose again with a power and swiftness that were amazing.

As he felt himself being still lowered, George began to think that his brothers would not stop until the rope gave out, which he calculated would be just in time to leave him dangling halfway down the face of the precipice.

Meanwhile, the force of the wind made him swing to and fro more than was pleasant, and the rope, moreover, began to pinch and hurt under his arms.

The wind rushed up, cold and strong, round his legs, and brought with it the faint mooing of the cows far below. It made a peculiar swishing sound as it swept across the rocks above his head.

When at length his brothers began to haul him up again to the ledge, he realised for the first time that they were going to find it very hard work indeed. He rose so slowly, inch by inch, with little jerks, and he knew by the motion that his brothers had all they could manage. It was fully ten minutes before he found himself opposite the ledge, with the coveted nests, and this time he was moving so slowly that he found no great difficulty in landing himself upon the rock. With feelings of thankfulness and relief he gave the signal, by three pulls, that he had arrived upon the ledge; and when, a moment later, he heard Harry’s voice shouting to him from above, he waved his arm in return and wished devoutly that he was upon the top of the cliff by his side.

After a few moments’ rest he began to crawl along the ledge, which was nowhere so much as two feet wide, in the direction of the nests. His brothers above saw the rope move, and were watching him.

It was ticklish work. He clung to the face of the cliff with his fingers, and moved, inch by inch, the rope still under his arms in case of a slip. After a while he was obliged to go down on his knees with his face close against the wall of rock and his heels hanging over into space. At last he got within arm’s reach of the first nest and saw that there was only one egg in it. The birds were flapping their big grey wings close to his head, uttering piteous cries, but they did not seem inclined to attack him. Sometimes they swept so close past him that he could feel the wind their wings made upon his face. George listened to their cries, and to him they seemed to say, “Leave us something, at least! Don’t take all our precious eggs. They are our children and we love them.”

The little fellow’s heart turned sick within him as he listened to their wild cries of appeal. He interpreted them only too well. What should he do? They were only wild birds⁠—wild, fierce birds too, that preyed on other inoffensive lives. His hand was outstretched to take the egg. There was nothing to prevent him. “To come all this way, with the danger and the trouble, for nothing,” he thought to himself⁠—“and what will Harry and Edwin say?” It was hard to decide.

Just then the mother-bird did an amazing thing. Under his very nose, as it were, she swooped down, folded her broad wings, tucked in her claws under her and entered her nest. It was the mother’s devotion in the very face of the enemy; and George, boy though he was, could not fail to be touched by the bird’s courage.

The balance was turned, and he withdrew his hand that had almost touched her long feathers, and began to retrace his steps carefully along the ledge.

“I don’t care what they say: I can’t do it,” he said to himself. “I’ll save up my pocket money and buy the egg from Dick, and May must wait for her birthday present after all.”

Then he gave the signal to hoist.

Harry and Edwin from above had watched their brother’s perilous journey with much anxiety. They could not see the nest itself because a rock jutted out and concealed it; but they saw the big bird swoop in at him, and they were afraid it had attacked him.

“It can’t hurt him,” said Harry, “with that fencing mask over his face. The only thing I’m afraid of is that it may strike the rope with its beak and cut it.”

The boys were glad at length when they saw George crawling back along the ledge, and still gladder to feel the hoisting signal.

They began, with renewed strength, the terrible pull up the hundred feet to the top. Neither of them said anything, but, at the end of the first five minutes, so severe was the strain that Edwin dropped on his knees exhausted. George was not then a quarter of the way up. Harry held on like grim death till his brother was able to get up and help him again, and by this means they slowly hauled George up the face of the precipice.

How it would all have ended is hard to say, for Harry too was nearly exhausted, and the rope had begun to slip backward through their weakening grasp. The boys’ hearts were in their mouths, for they knew that if the rope got beyond their control and fell the distance they had already hoisted it, the jerk would either break it in two, or it would slip from their brother’s body and let him drop upon the rocks, three hundred feet below. The predicament was a terrible one.

“Hullo, boys! What are you doing here, and what in the world is that rope for?”

It was May’s voice, and Fred Winter was with her.

By the happiest of strange coincidences, Fred had called that afternoon to take her for a walk, and she asked to see the place where Dick had climbed down to the hawk’s nest. She little expected to find her brothers there.

“George is at the other end of the rope,” cried Harry, with a gasp.

May uttered a scream of horror, and Fred, who had taken in the situation at a glance, at once lent his powerful strength to the rope with such effect that in a very few minutes George’s face appeared, ghastlywhite behind the network of the mask, above the edge of the cliff. His shoulders and legs followed in very short order, and his brothers seized him and dragged him away from the dangerous brink.

As soon as the rope was untied, May’s tears had been dried, and the worst of the explanations were over:

“I thought you would never get me up.” George said at length; “but I’m awfully glad to be here again. I haven’t got any eggs,” he added slowly. “There was only one in the nest, so I didn’t take it.”

“Quite right,” said Fred, with a glance at Miss Ransom’s eyes, which were still half sunshine, half tears.

Harry and Edwin were so glad to have their brother safely with them again that they said nothing at all, and the party, still excited over the adventure that had involved so narrow an escape, made their way home again. They followed the winding path way through the woods, and the boys, with the rope over their arms, tired and subdued, went on ahead and left Fred Winter to follow slowly with their sister.

What he said to her and what she replied in turn, of course, they never knew, but when she said good night to them that evening she announced as a great secret that Fred had proposed to her that very afternoon and that she had accepted him.

Next day Fred came over with a present for the boys; and what do you think it was? It was a speckled hawk’s egg for their collection.