In half-an-hour after
the "find," the leader of the flock broke out of the wood two or three
hundred yards ahead of us, and was closely followed by his companions.
I then recognised in the objects of the chase the strange _thernee_
described by Eveena, whose long soft down furnished the cloak she wore
on our visit to the Astronaut. Their general form, and especially the
length and graceful curve of the neck, led one instinctively to regard
them as birds; but the fore-limbs, drawn up as they ran, but now and
then outstretched with a sweep to strike at a falcon that ventured
imprudently near, had, in the distance, much more resemblance to the
arm of a baboon than to the limb of any other creature, and bore no
likeness whatever to the wing even of the bat. The object of the
hunters was not to strike these creatures from a distance, but to run
them down and capture them by sheer exhaustion. This the great
wing-power of the _caldectaa_ enabled us to do, though by the time we
had driven the thernee to bay my own Pegasus was fairly tired. The
hunters, separating and spreading out in the form of a semicircle,
assisted the movements of the hawks, driving the prey gradually into a
narrow defile among the hills bordering the plain to the
north-eastward, whose steep upward slope greatly hindered and fatigued
creatures whose natural habitat consists of level plains or seabord
forests.
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