The April night, softly chill and full of the sense of thaw, was closing
down over the wide salt marshes. Near at hand the waters of the
Tantramar, resting at full tide, glimmered through the dusk and lapped
faintly among the winter-ruined remnants of the sedge. Far off—infinitely
far it seemed in that illusive atmosphere, which was clear, yet full of
the ghosts of rain—the last of daylight lay in a thin streak, pale and
sharp, along a vast arc of the horizon. Overhead it was quite dark; for
there was no moon, and the tenuous spring clouds were sufficient to shut
out the stars. They clung in mid-heaven, but kept to their shadowy ranks
without descending to obscure the lower air. Space and mystery, mystery
and space, lay abroad upon the vague levels of marsh and tide.
Presently, from far along the dark heights of the sky, came voices,
hollow, musical, confused. Swiftly they journeyed nearer; they grew
louder. The sound—not vibrant, yet strangely far-carrying—was a clamorous
monotony of honk-a-honk, honk-a-honk, honka, honka, honk, honk. It hinted
of wide distance voyaged over on tireless wings, of a tropic winter
passed in feeding amid remote, high-watered meadows of Mexico and Texas,
of long flights yet to go, toward the rocky tarns of Labrador and the
reed beds of Ungava. As the sound passed straight overhead the listener
on the marsh below imagined, though he could not see, the strongly
beating wings, the outstretched necks and heads, the round, unswerving
eyes of the wild goose flock in its V-shaped array, winnowing steadily
northward through the night. But this particular flock was not set, as it
chanced, upon an all-night journey. The wise old gander winging at the
head of the V knew of good feeding-grounds near by, which he was ready to
revisit. He led the flock straight on, above the many windings of the
Tantramar, till its full-flooded sheen far below him narrowed and
narrowed to a mere brook. Here, in the neighbourhood of the uplands, were
a number of shallow, weedy, fresh-water lakes, with shores so choked with
thickets and fenced apart with bogs as to afford a security which his
years and broad experience had taught him to value. Into one of these
lakes, a pale blur amid the thick shadows of the shores, the flock
dropped with heavy splashings. A scream or two of full-throated content,
a few flappings of wings and rufflings of plumage in the cool, and the
voyagers settled into quiet.
All night there was silence around the flock, save for the whispering
seepage of the snow patches that still lingered among the thickets. With
the first creeping pallor of dawn the geese began to feed, plunging their
long black necks deep into the water and feeling with the sensitive inner
edges of their bills for the swelling root-buds of weed and sedge. When
the sun was about the edge of the horizon, and the first rays came
sparkling, of a chilly pink most luminous and pure, through the lean
traceries of the brushwood, the leader raised his head high and screamed
a signal. With answering cries and a tempestuous splashing the flock
flapped for a few yards along the surface of the water. Then they rose
clear, formed quickly into rank, and in their spacious V went honking
northward over the half-lighted, mysterious landscape. But, as it
chanced, not all of the flock set out with that morning departure. There
was one pair, last year’s birds, upon whom had fallen a weariness of
travel. Perhaps in the coils of their brains lurked some inherited memory
of these safe resting-places and secluded feeding-grounds of the Midgic
lakes. However that may have been, they chose to stay where they were,
feeling in their blood no call from the cold north solitudes. Dipping and
bowing, black neck by neck, they gave no heed to the leader’s signal, nor
to the noisy going of the flock. Pushing briskly with the black webs of
their feet against the discoloured water, they swam to the shore and cast
about for a place to build their nest.
There was no urgent hurry, so they chose not on that day nor the next.
When they chose, it was a little bushy islet off a point of land, well
tangled with alder and osier and a light flotsam of driftwood. The nest,
in the heart of the tangle, was an apparently haphazard collection of
sticks and twigs, well raised above the damp, well lined with moss and
feathers. Here, in course of days, there accumulated a shining cluster of
six large white eggs. But by this time the spring freshet had gone down.
The islet was an islet no longer, but a mere adjunct of the point, which
any inquisitive foot might reach dry shod. Now just at this time it
happened that a young farmer, who had a curious taste for all the wild
kindred of wood, and flood, and air, came up from the Lower Tantramar
with a wagon-load of grist for the Midgic mill. While his buckwheat and
barley were a-grinding, he thought of a current opinion to the effect
that the wild geese were given to nesting in the Midgic lakes. “If so,”
said he to himself, “this is the time they would be about it.” Full of
interest, a half-hour’s tramp through difficult woods brought him to the
nearest of the waters. An instinct, an intuition born of his sympathy
with the furtive folk, led him to the point, and out along the point to
that once islet, with its secret in the heart of the tangle. Vain were
the furious hissings, the opposing wings, the wide black bills that
threatened and oppugned him. With the eager delight of a boy he pounced
upon those six great eggs, and carried them all away. “They will soon
turn out another clutch,” said he to himself, as he left the bereaved
pair, and tramped elatedly back to the mill. As for the bereaved pair,
being of a philosophic spirit, they set themselves to fulfil as soon as
possible his prophecy.
On the farm by the Lower Tantramar, in a hogshead half filled with straw
and laid on its side in a dark corner of the tool-shed, those six eggs
were diligently brooded for four weeks and two days by a comfortable gray
and white goose of the common stock. When they hatched, the good gray and
white mother may have been surprised to find her goslings of an olive
green hue, instead of the bright golden yellow which her past experience
and that of her fellows had taught her to expect. She may have marvelled,
too, at their unwonted slenderness and activity. These trivial details,
however, in no way dampened the zeal with which she led them to the goose
pond, or the fidelity with which she pastured and protected them. But
rats, skunks, sundry obscure ailments, and the heavy wheels of the farm
wagon, are among the perils which, the summer through, lie in wait for
all the children of the feathered kin upon the farm; and so it came about
that of the six young ones so successfully hatched from the wild goose
eggs, only two lived till the coming of autumn brought them full plumage
and the power of flight. Before the time of the southward migration came
near, the young farmer took these two and clipped from each the strong
primaries of their right wings. “They seem contented enough, and tame as
any,” he said to himself, “but you never can tell what’ll happen when the
instinct strikes ’em.”
Both the young wild geese were fine males. Their heads and long, slim
necks were black, as were also their tails, great wing feathers, bills,
and feet. Under the tail their feathers were of snowiest white, and all
the other portions of their bodies a rich grayish brown. Each bore on the
side of its face a sharply defined triangular patch of white, mottled
with faint brown markings that would disappear after his first moult. In
one the white cheek patches met under the throat. This was a large,
strongly built bird, of a placid and domestic temper. He was satisfied
with the undistinguished gray companions of the flock. He was content,
like them, to gutter noisily with his discriminating bill along the
shallow edges of the pond, to float and dive and flap in the deeper
centre, to pasture at random over the wet meadow, biting off the short
grasses with quick, sharp, yet gracefully curving dabs. Goose pond and
wet meadow and cattle-trodden barnyard bounded his aspirations. When his
adult voice came to him, all he would say was honk, honk,
contemplatively, and sometimes honk-a-honk when he flapped his wings in
the exhilarating coolness of the sunrise. The other captive was of a more
restless temperament, slenderer in build, more eager and alert of eye,
less companionable of mood. He was, somehow, never seen in the centre of
the flock—he never seemed a part of it. He fed, swam, rested, preened
himself, always a little apart. Often, when the others were happily
occupied with their familiar needs and satisfactions, he would stand
motionless, his compact, glossy head high in air, looking to the north as
if in expectation, listening as if he awaited longed-for tidings. The
triangular white patch on each side of his head was very narrow, and gave
him an expression of wildness; yet in reality he was no more wild, or
rather no more shy, than any others of the flock. None, indeed, had so
confident a fearlessness as he. He would take oats out of the farmer’s
hand, which none of the rest quite dared to do.
[Illustration: “HE WOULD STAND MOTIONLESS, HIS COMPACT, GLOSSY HEAD HIGH
IN AIR.”]
Until late in the autumn, the lonely, uncomraded bird was always silent.
But when the migrating flocks began to pass overhead, on the long
southward trail, and their hollow clamour was heard over the farmstead
night and morning, he grew more restless. He would take a short run with
outspread wings, and then, feeling their crippled inefficiency, would
stretch himself to his full height and call, a sonorous, far-reaching
cry—ke-honk-a, ke-honk-a. From this call, so often repeated throughout
October and November, the farmer named him Kehonka. The farmer’s wife
favoured the more domesticated and manageable brother, who could be
trusted never to stray. But the farmer, who mused deeply over his
furrows, and half wistfully loved the wild kindred, loved Kehonka, and
used to say he would not lose the bird for the price of a steer. “That
there bird,” he would say, “has got dreams away down in his heart. Like
as not, he remembers things his father and mother have seen, up amongst
the ice cakes and the northern lights, or down amongst the bayous and the
big southern lilies.” But all his sympathy failed to make him repent of
having clipped Kehonka’s wing.
During the long winter, when the winds swept fiercely the open marshes of
the Tantramar, and the snow piled in high drifts around the barns and
wood piles, and the sheds were darkened, and in the sun at noonday the
strawy dungheaps steamed, the rest of the geese remained listlessly
content. But not so Kehonka. Somewhere back of his brain he cherished
pre-natal memories of warm pools in the South, where leafy screens grew
rank, and the sweet-rooted water-plants pulled easily from the deep black
mud, and his true kindred were screaming to each other at the oncoming of
the tropic dark. While the flock was out in the barnyard, pulling lazily
at the trampled litter, and snatching scraps of the cattle’s chopped
turnips, Kehonka would stand aloof by the water-trough, his head erect,
listening, longing. As the winter sun sank early over the fir woods back
of the farm, his wings would open, and his desirous cry would go echoing
three or four times across the still
countryside—ke-honk-a—ke-honk-a—ke-honk-a! Whereat the farmer’s wife,
turning her buckwheat pancakes over the hot kitchen stove, would mutter
impatiently; but the farmer, slipping to the door of the cow-stable with
the bucket of feed in his hand, would look with deep eyes of sympathy at
the unsatisfied bird. “He wants something that we don’t grow round here,”
he would say to himself; and little by little the bird’s restlessness
came to seem to him the concrete embodiment of certain dim outreachings
of his own. He, too, caught himself straining his gaze beyond the marsh
horizons of Tantramar.
When the winter broke, and the seeping drifts shrank together, and the
brown of the ploughed fields came through the snow in patches, and the
slopes leading down to the marshland were suddenly loud with running
water, Kehonka’s restlessness grew so eager that he almost forgot to
feed. It was time, he thought, for the northward flight to begin. He
would stand for hours, turning first one dark eye, then the other, toward
the soft sky overhead, expectant of the V-shaped journeying flock, and
the far-off clamour of voices from the South crying to him in his own
tongue. At last, when the snow was about gone from the open fields, one
evening at the shutting-in of dark, the voices came. He was lingering at
the edge of the goose pond, the rest having settled themselves for the
night, when he heard the expected sounds. Honk-a-honk, honk-a-honk,
honka, honka, honk, honk, they came up against the light April wind,
nearer, nearer, nearer. Even his keen eye could not detect them against
the blackness; but up went his wings, and again and again he screamed to
them sonorously. In response to his call, their flight swung lower, and
the confusion of their honking seemed as if it were going to descend
about him. But the wary old gander, their leader, discerned the roofs,
man’s handiwork, and suspected treachery. At his sharp signal the flock,
rising again, streamed off swiftly toward safer feeding-grounds, and left
Kehonka to call and call unanswered. Up to this moment all his
restlessness had not led him to think of actually deserting the farmstead
and the alien flock. Though not of them he had felt it necessary to be
with them. His instinct for other scenes and another fellowship had been
too little tangible to move him to the snapping of established ties. But
now, all his desires at once took concrete form. It was his, it belonged
to himself—that strong, free flight, that calling through the sky, that
voyaging northward to secret nesting-places. In that wild flock which had
for a moment swerved downward to his summons, or in some other flock, was
his mate. It was mating season, and not until now had he known it.
Nature does sometimes, under the pressure of great and concentrated
desires, make unexpected effort to meet unforeseen demands. All winter
long, though it was not the season for such growth, Kehonka’s clipped
wing-primaries had been striving to develop. They had now, contrary to
all custom, attained to an inch or so of effective flying web. Kehonka’s
heart was near bursting with his desire as the voices of the unseen flock
died away. He spread his wings to their full extent, ran some ten paces
along the ground, and then, with all his energies concentrated to the
effort, he rose into the air, and flew with swift-beating wings out into
the dark upon the northward trail. His trouble was not the lack of wing
surface, but the lack of balance. One wing being so much less in spread
than the other, he felt a fierce force striving to turn him over at every
stroke. It was the struggle to counteract this tendency that wore him
out. His first desperate effort carried him half a mile. Then he dropped
to earth, in a bed of withered salt-grass all awash with the full tide of
Tantramar. Resting amid the salt-grass, he tasted such an exultation of
freedom that his heart forgot its soreness over the flock which had
vanished. Presently, however, he heard again the sound that so thrilled
his every vein. Weird, hollow, echoing with memories and tidings, it came
throbbing up the wind. His own strong cry went out at once to meet
it—ke-honk-a, ke-honk-a, ke-honk-a. The voyagers this time were flying
very low. They came near, nearer, and at last, in a sudden silence of
voices, but a great flapping of wings, they settled down in the
salt-grass all about him.
The place was well enough for a night’s halt—a shallow, marshy pool which
caught the overflow of the highest spring tides, and so was not emptied
by the ebb. After its first splashing descent into the water, which
glimmered in pale patches among the grass stems, every member of the
flock sat for some moments motionless as statues, watchful for unknown
menace; and Kehonka, his very soul trembling with desire achieved, sat
motionless among them. Then, there being no sign of peril at hand, there
was a time of quiet paddling to and fro, a scuttling of practised bills
among the grass-roots, and Kehonka found himself easily accepted as a
member of the flock. Happiness kept him restless and on the move long
after the others had their bills tucked under their wings. In the
earliest gray of dawn, when the flock awoke to feed, Kehonka fed among
them as if he had been with them all the way on their flight from the
Mexican plains. But his feeding was always by the side of a young female
who had not yet paired. It was interrupted by many little courtesies of
touching bill and bowing head, which were received with plain favour; for
Kehonka was a handsome and well marked bird. By the time the sky was red
along the east and strewn with pale, blown feathers of amber pink toward
the zenith, his swift wooing was next door to winning. He had forgotten
his captivity and clipped wing. He was thinking of a nest in the wide
emptiness of the North.
[Illustration: “FELL WITH A GREAT SPLASH INTO THE CHANNEL OF THE
TANTRAMAR.”]
When the signal-cry came, and the flock took flight, Kehonka rose with
them. But his preliminary rush along the water was longer than that of
the others, and when the flock formed into flying order he fell in at the
end of the longer leg of the V, behind the weakest of the young geese.
This would have been a humiliation to him, had he taken thought of it at
all; but his attention was all absorbed in keeping his balance. When the
flock found its pace, and the cold sunrise air began to whistle past the
straight, bullet-like rush of their flight, a terror grew upon him. He
flew much better than he had flown the night before; but he soon saw that
this speed of theirs was beyond him. He would not yield, however. He
would not lag behind. Every force of his body and his brain went into
that flight, till his eyes blurred and his heart seemed on the point of
bursting. Then, suddenly, with a faint, despairing note, he lurched
aside, shot downward, and fell with a great splash into the channel of
the Tantramar. With strong wings, and level, unpausing flight, the flock
went on to its North without him.
Dazed by the fall, and exhausted by the intensity of his effort, Kehonka
floated, moveless, for many minutes. The flood-tide, however, racing
inland, was carrying him still northward; and presently he began to swim
in the same direction. In his sick heart glowed still the vision of the
nest in the far-off solitudes, and he felt that he would find there,
waiting for him, the strong-winged mate who had left him behind. Half an
hour later another flock passed honking overhead, and he called to them;
but they were high up, and feeding time was past. They gave no sign in
answer. He made no attempt to fly after them. Hour after hour he swam on
with the current, working ever north. When the tide turned he went
ashore, still following the river, till its course changed toward the
east; whereupon he ascended the channel of a small tributary which flowed
in on the north bank. Here and there he snatched quick mouthfuls of
sprouting grasses, but he was too driven by his desire to pause for food.
Sometimes he tried his wings again, covering now some miles at each
flight, till by and by, losing the stream because its direction failed
him, he found himself in a broken upland country, where progress was slow
and toilsome. Soon after sunset, troubled because there was no water
near, he again took wing, and over dark woods which filled him with
apprehension he made his longest flight. When about spent he caught a
small gleaming of water far below him, and alighted in a little woodland
glade wherein a brook had overflowed low banks.
[Illustration: “THE DISCOURAGER OF QUESTS DARTED STEALTHILY FORTH.”]
The noise of his abrupt descent loudly startled the wet and dreaming
woods. It was a matter of interest to all the furry, furtive ears of the
forest for a half-mile round. But it was in no way repeated. For perhaps
fifteen minutes Kehonka floated, neck erect, head high and watchful, in
the middle of the pool, with no movement except the slight, unseen oaring
of his black-webbed feet, necessary to keep the current from bearing him
into the gloom of the woods. This gloom, hedging him on every side,
troubled him with a vague fear. But in the open of the mid-pool, with two
or three stars peering faintly through the misted sky above him, he felt
comparatively safe. At last, very far above, he heard again that wild
calling of his fellows,—honk-a-honk, honk-a-honk, honka, honka, honk,
honk,—high and dim and ghostly, for these rough woodlands had no appeal
for the journeying flocks. Remote as the voices were, however, Kehonka
answered at once. His keen, sonorous, passionate cry rang strangely on
the night, three times. The flock paid no heed to it whatever, but sped
on northward with unvarying flight and clamour; and as the wizard noise
passed beyond, Kehonka, too weary to take wing, followed eagerly to the
northerly shore of the pool, ran up the wet bank, and stood straining
after it.
His wings were half spread as he stood there, quivering with his passion.
In his heart was the hunger of the quest. In his eyes was the vision of
nest and mate, where the serviceberry thicket grew by the wide sub-arctic
waters. The night wind blew steadily away from him to the underbrush
close by, or even in his absorption he would have noticed the approach of
a menacing, musky smell. But every sense was now numb in the presence of
his great desire. There was no warning for him.
The underbrush rustled, ever so softly. Then a small, delicately moving,
fine-furred shape, the discourager of quests, darted stealthily forth,
and with a bound that was feathery in its blown lightness, seeming to be
uplifted by the wide-plumed tail that balanced it, descended on Kehonka’s
body. There was a thin honk, cut short by keen teeth meeting with a
crunch and a twist in the glossy slim blackness of Kehonka’s neck. The
struggle lasted scarcely more than two heart-beats. The wide wings
pounded twice or thrice upon the ground, in fierce convulsion. Then the
red fox, with a sidewise jerk of his head, flung the heavy, trailing
carcass into a position for its easy carrying, and trotted off with it
into the darkness of the woods.
[Illustration: SAVOURY MEATS]