It had been a strenuous night. All day the mercury had been flirting
with the zero mark, and soon after sunset burrowed down into the bulb
below all readings. My bed that night felt like a well-iced tomb.
Probably daylight would have found me frozen to death if it had not
been for a saving idea. Hurrying into the children's room, I selected
two of the warmest and chubbiest. Banking them on either side of me in
my bed, I just survived the night. Of course it was hard on them; but
then, any round, warm child of proper sentiments should welcome an
opportunity to save the life of an aged parent.
In spite of my patent heating-plant I woke up toward morning
shivering, and remembered with a terrible depression that I had
boasted to Mrs. Naturalist and to various and sundry scoffing friends
that I would cut down and cut up and haul in one forty-foot hickory
tree before the glad New Year. For a while I decided that there was
nothing on earth worth exchanging for that warm bed. Finally, however,
my better nature conquered, and the dusk before the dawn found me in
the woods in front of a dead hickory tree some forty feet high and a
couple of rods through--at least that was how its flinty girth
impressed me after I had chopped a while. The air was like iced wine.
Every axe-stroke drove it tingling through my blood.
Before attacking the hickory, however, I began to cut down the brush
surrounding the doomed tree, so as to gain clear space for the
axe-swing. Almost immediately a vindictive spice-bush in falling
knocked off my glasses, and they fell into the snow somewhere ahead of
me. Without them I am in the same condition as a mole or a shrew, my
sense of sight being only rudimentary. Down I plumped on my knees in
the snow and fumbled in the half light with numbed fingers through the
cold whiteness ahead.
As I groped and grumbled in this lowly position, suddenly I heard the
prelude to one of the most beautiful of winter dawn-songs. It was a
liquid loud note full of rolling _r's_. Perhaps it can be best
represented in print somewhat as follows: "Chip'r'r'r'r." I forgot my
lost glasses and my cold hands and my wet knees waiting for the song
that I knew was coming. Another preliminary, rolling note or so, and
there sounded from a low stump a wild, ringing song that could be
heard for half a mile. "Wheedle-wheedle-wheedle," it began full of
liquid bell-like overtones. Then the singer added another syllable to
his strain and sang, "Whee-udel, whee-udel, whee-udel." Three times,
with a short rest between, he sang the full double strain through,
although it was so dark that only the ghostly, black tree-trunks could
be seen against the white snow. I needed no sight of him, however, to
recognize the singer. The song took me back to a bitter winter day in
Philadelphia some seventeen years ago, when I was laboriously
learning the birds. I was walking through a bit of waste-land
encircled by trolley-tracks when I heard this same song. It was like
nothing which I had ever heard in New England, where I had learned
what little I knew about birds, and I searched everywhere for the
singer, expecting to see a bird about the size of a robin.
Finally, in the underbrush just ahead of me, I saw an unmistakable
wren singing so ecstatically that he shook and trembled all over with
the outpouring of his song. It was my first sight and hearing of this
southern bird, the Carolina wren, the largest of our five wrens, whose
field-mark is a long white line over the eye. He is reddish-brown,
while the house wren, which is half an inch shorter, is
cinnamon-brown. The long-billed marsh wren also has a white line over
the eye and is about the same size, but is never found away from the
tall grass bordering on water, and has no such song as the Carolina.
The winter wren and the short-billed marsh wren could neither of them
be mistaken for the Carolina, as both are about an inch and a half
shorter and lack the white line. The house wren and the long-billed
marsh wren bubble when they sing, the Carolina wren and the winter
wren ring, and the short-billed marsh wren, the rarest of all, clicks.
Of them all only the Carolina wren sings in the winter.
That day the wren-song brought me good luck. It was no more than
finished when I heard someone passing along a nearby wood-road, who
turned out to be an early-rising workman from whom I borrowed some
matches with which I finally discovered my missing eyes half buried in
the snow. I attacked the pignut hickory with great energy to make up
for lost time. Little by little the axe bit through the tough wood,
until the kerf was well past the heart of the tree. As I chopped I
could hear the quick strokes of a far better wood-cutter than I shall
ever be. Suddenly he gave a loud, rattling call, and I recognized the
hairy woodpecker. He is much larger than the downy, being nearly the
size of a robin, while his call is wilder and louder and lacks the
downward run of the downy's note. We chopped on together, he at his
tree and I at mine. Suddenly from my tree sounded a warning crack, and
the trunk wavered for a moment. I stepped well off to one side, for it
is dangerous to stand behind a falling tree. If it strikes anything as
it falls the trunk may shoot backward. A venerable ancestor of mine,
so the story runs, tried to celebrate his ninetieth birthday by
chopping down a tree, and standing behind it, was killed by the
back-lash of the falling trunk.
The tree swayed forward toward the crimson rim of the rising sun. One
more stroke at its heart, and there was a loud series of cracks,
followed by a roar like thunder as it crashed down. Almost
immediately, as if awakened by the noise, I began to hear bird-notes.
From over to my left sounded a series of sharp, irritating
alarm-notes, and in the waxing light I caught a glimpse of a crested
blood-red bird at the edge of a green-brier thicket. In that same
place I had found his nest the spring before, made of twigs and strips
of bark and lined with grass and roots and holding three speckled
eggs. It was the cardinal grosbeak, another bird unknown to me in New
England. No matter how often I meet this crimson-crested grosbeak, he
will never become a common bird to me. Each time I see him I feel
again something of the thrill which came over me when I first met this
singer from the southland in a thicket on the edge of Philadelphia.
With the Carolina wren and the tufted titmouse, the cardinal grosbeak
completes a trio of birds that can never be commonplace to one born
north of Central Park, New York, which is about the limit of their
northern range.
To-day, as I watched my flaming cardinal, he suddenly dived stiffly
into the heart of the thicket. A moment later from its midst sounded a
clear, loud whistle, "Whit, whit, whit." I answered him, for this is
one of the few bird-calls I can imitate. Before long his dove-colored
mate also appeared. Her wings and tail were of a duller red, while the
upper-parts of her sleek body were of a brownish-ash tint. The throat
and a patch by the base of the bill were black in both. As I watched,
the singer in the thicket added to his whistle the word "Teu, teu,
teu, teu" and then finally ran them together--"Whee-teu, whee-teu,
whee-teu," so rapidly whistled that it sounded almost like a single
note.
On the way back to breakfast, as the sun came up and warmed a slope of
the woods, a flock of slate-colored juncos burst out altogether in a
chorus of soft little trills, with now and then sharp alarm-notes
like the clicking of pebbles together, interspersed with tiny
half-whispered notes best expressed by the same letters as those used
in writing the grosbeak music--"Teu, teu, teu, teu." Suddenly, from a
farther corner of the sun-warmed slope, I heard a few tinkling notes
followed by a tantalizing snatch of rich, sweet song shot through with
canary-like trills and runs. I hurried over the snow and caught a
glimpse of a little flock of birds with crowns of reddish-brown, and
each wearing small black spots in the exact centre of their
drab-colored waistcoats. They were tree-sparrows down from the far
North, and I was fortunate to have heard the peculiarly gentle cadence
of one of their rare winter songs.
Farther on, the caw of a passing crow drifted down from the cold sky,
and before I left the woods I heard the pip of a downy woodpecker and
the grunt of the white-breasted nuthatch, that tree-climber with the
white cheeks which, unlike woodpeckers, can go both up and down trees
head-foremost. In the early spring and sometimes on warm winter days,
one may hear his spring song, which is "Quee-quee-quee." It is not
much of a song, but Mr. Nuthatch is very proud of it and usually
pauses admiringly between each two strains. In my early bird-days I
used to mistake this spring song for the note of an early flicker, and
would scandalize better-educated ornithologists by reporting flickers
several weeks before their time. The last bird I heard before I left
the woods remarked solemnly, "Too-wheedle, too-wheedle, too-wheedle,
too-wheedle," like a creaking wheelbarrow, and then suddenly broke out
into the flat, harsh "Djay, djay, djay" which has given the
silver-and-blue jay its name.
By the time I had reached home, I decided that it was too cold a day
to practise law safely. The state legislature in their wisdom had
already made the day a half-holiday. Not to be outdone in generosity,
I decided to donate my half and make the holiday a whole one. Anent
this matter of holidays, the trouble with most of us is that we are
obsessed with the importance of our daily work. There are many
pleasant byways which we plan to come back and explore when we have
reached the end of the straight, steep, and intensely narrow road that
leads to achievement. The trouble is that there is no returning. Men
die rich, famous, or successful, who have never taken the time to
companion their children or to find their way into the world of the
wild-folk which lies at their very doors. It was not always so. Read
in Evelyn's Diary how for sixty years a great man played a great part
under three kings and the grim Protector, and yet never lost an
opportunity to refresh his life with bird-songs, hilltops,
flower-fields, and sky-air. We reach our goal to-day in a few
desperate years, stripped to the buff like a Marathon runner. One can
arrive later and not miss a thousand little happinesses along the way.
With similar arguments I convinced myself on that day, that it was my
duty as an amateur naturalist to discover how many birds I could meet
between dawn and dark with the thermometer below zero. Certain
gentlemen-adventurers of my acquaintance aided and abetted me in this
plan. They all held high office in a military organization known for
short as the Band. There was First Lieutenant Trottie, Second
Lieutenant Honey, Sergeant Henny-Penny, and Corporal Alice-Palace,
while I had been honored with a captain's commission in this regiment.
To be sure, there was something of a dearth of privates; but with such
a gallant array of officers their absence was not felt. At any hour of
day or night, to the last man, every member of the Band was ready for
the most desperate adventures by field and flood.
[Illustration: A CROW CHORUS]
As we left the house the thermometer stood at four below, while the
sky was of a frozen blue, without a cloud, and had a hard glitter as
if streaked with frost. In a low tree by the roadside, we heard the
metallic note of a downy woodpecker scurrying up the trunk and backing
stiffly down. Farther on sounded a loud cawing, and we saw four
ruffianly crows assaulting a respectable female broad-winged hawk. One
after the other they would flap over her as closely as possible,
aiming vicious pecks as they passed. The broad-winged beat the air
frantically with her short, wide, fringed wings, and seemed to make no
effort to defend herself against her black, jeering pursuers. Once she
alighted on an exposed limb. Instantly the crows settled near her and
used language which no respectable female hawk could listen to for a
moment. She spread her wings and soared away, and as she passed out
of sight they were still cawing on her trail.
If the hawk had been one of the swift Accipiters, such as the gray
goshawk or the Cooper's hawk, or any of the falcons, no crow would
have ventured to take any liberties. One of my friends, who collects
bird's eggs instead of bird-notes, was once attempting feloniously to
break and enter the home of a duck-hawk which was highly regarded in
the community--about two hundred feet highly in fact. As my friend was
swinging back and forth on a rope in front of the perpendicular cliff,
said duck-hawk dashed at him at the rate of some ninety miles per
hour. Being scared off by a blank cartridge, the enraged falcon
towered. A passing crow flapping through the air made a peck at the
hawk as it shot past. That was one of the last and most unfortunate
acts in that crow's whole life. The duck-hawk was fairly aching with
the desire to attack someone or something which was not protected by
thunder and lightning. With one flash of its wings it shot under that
misguided crow, and, turning on its back in mid-air, slashed it with
six talons like sharpened steel. The crow dropped, a dead mass of
black and blood, to the brow of the cliff below.
Finally we reached the tall, stone chimney--all that is left of some
long-forgotten house, which marks the entrance to old Darby Road,
which was opened in 1701. At that point Wild-Folk Land begins. The
hurrying feet of more than two centuries have sunk the road some ten
feet below its banks, and the wild-folk use its hidden bed like one
of their own trails. Foxes pad along its rain-washed course, and
rabbits and squirrels hop and scurry across its narrow width, while in
spring and summer wild ginger, ebony spleenwort, the blue-and-white
porcelain petals of the hepatica, and a host of other flowers bloom on
its banks. The birds too nest there, from the belted gray-blue and
white kingfisher, which has bored a deep hole into the clay under an
overhanging wild-cherry tree, down to the field sparrow, with its pink
beak and flute-song, which watches four speckled eggs close-hidden in
a tiny cup of woven grass.
To-day we followed the windings of the road, until we came to the vast
black oak tree which marks the place where Darby Road, after running
for nearly ten miles, stops to rest. Beyond stretched the unbroken
expanse of Blacksnake Swamp, bounded by the windings of Darby Creek.
The Band seated themselves on one of their favorite resting-places, a
great log which lay under the trees. Above us a white-breasted
nuthatch, with its white cheeks and black head, was rat-tat-tatting up
and around a half-dead limb, picking out every insect egg in sight
from the bark. As the bird came near the broken top of the bough, out
of a hole popped a very angry red squirrel exactly like a
jack-in-the-box. The red squirrel is the fastest of all the tree-folk
among the animals, but a nuthatch on a limb is not afraid of anything
that flies or crawls or climbs. He can run up and down around a
branch, forward and backward, unlike the woodpeckers, which must
always back down, or the brown creepers, which can go up a tree in
long spirals but have to fly down.
A red streak flashed down the limb on which the nuthatch was working.
That was the squirrel. A fraction of a second ahead of the squirrel
there was a wink of gray and white. That was the nuthatch. Before the
squirrel could even recover his balance, there was a cheerful
rat-tat-tat just behind him on the other side of the limb. As the
squirrel turned, the rapping sounded on the other side of the branch.
His bushy tail quivered, and using some strong squirrel-language, he
dived back into his hole. He was hardly out of sight when the nuthatch
was tapping again at his door. Once more the squirrel rushed out
chattering and sputtering. Once more the nuthatch was not there. Then
he tried chasing the bird around the limb, but there was nothing in
that. The nuthatch could turn in half the time and space, and moreover
did not have to be afraid of falling, for a drop of fifty feet to
frozen ground is no joke even for a red squirrel. The aggravating
thing about the nuthatch was that, no matter how hard the squirrel
chased him, he never stopped for a second, tapping away at the branch,
feeding even as he ran. Finally Mr. Squirrel went back to his house
and stayed there, while the nuthatch tapped in triumph all around his
hole, although muffled chatterings from within expressed the
squirrel's unvarnished opinion of that nuthatch.
When the nuthatch finally flew to another tree, we got up and followed
a path that twisted through a barren field full of grassy tussocks
and clumps of mockernut hickories and black-walnut trees, until it at
last lost itself in the depths of Blacksnake Swamp. This swamp had
taken its name from the day that we caught a black snake skimming
along over the tops of the bushes like a bird. In summer it is full of
impassable quagmires, and to-day we hoped to explore the hidden places
which we had never yet seen. We had scarcely passed through the outer
fringe of tall grasses and cat-tails, when we heard everywhere through
the cold air little tinkling notes, and caught glimpses of dark
sparrow-like birds with forked tails, striped breasts, and streaked
rich brown backs, each one showing a fine zigzag whitish line at the
bend of the wing. Another field-mark was a light patch over each eye,
and we identified the first and largest flock of pine siskin of the
year. These siskin are strange birds. One never knows when and where
they will appear. The last flock that I had seen was in my back-yard
in May. Usually too they are in trees, and this was the first time
that I had ever met with them on the ground. The birds gave little
canary-like notes, like goldfinches, which are often found with them,
but can always be recognized by their unstreaked breasts and double
wing-bars.
[Illustration: JUST OUT OF THE NEST--YOUNG RED SQUIRRELS]
For a long time we studied the flock through our field-glasses, until
every last one of the Band had learned this new bird. As we watched
them, a white-throated sparrow lisped from a nearby bush, and a little
later we met a flock of tree sparrows, a bird which is never by any
chance found in a tree. In the distance a woodpecker flew through the
air in a labored up-and-down flight, and, as he disappeared, he gave
the wild cry of the hairy woodpecker, a bird nearly twice the size of
his smaller brother, the downy. Close by the side of the creek, we
heard a tiny note like "pheep, pheep, pheep," and, even as we looked
for the bird, it flew past and lit on a tree on the other side of the
path, not two feet away. We all stood stony still, and in a minute a
brown creeper circled the tree, climbing it in tiny hops in a wide
spiral. He was so close that we could see his stiff, spiny tail with a
little row of spots at its base, and the brown and gray speckles on
his back, and his long curiously curved bill.
We pressed on into the very heart of the great, treacherous marsh,
to-day frozen hard and safe, and explored all of its secret places. In
a tangle of wild-grape vine, we found the round nest, rimmed with
grape-vine bark, of the cardinal grosbeak; while over in a thicket of
elderberry bushes, all rusty-gold with the clinging stems of that
parasite, the dodder, showed the close sheath of the fine branches of
a swamp maple. In a fork at the end of one of the branches, all
silver-gray, was the empty nest of a goldfinch, the last of all the
birds to nest. It was made of twisted strands of the silk of the
milkweed pods hackled by the bird's beak. In the snow, we came across
a strange track almost like the trail of a snake. It was a wide
trough, with little close-set, zigzag paw-marks running all through
it. The Captain told the Band that this was the trail of the fierce
blarina shrew, one of the killers. Without eyes or ears, this strange
little blind death eats its weight in flesh every twenty-four hours,
and slays under ground, above ground, and even under the water. The
Band regarded the strange tracks with enormous interest.
"How big do they grow?" anxiously inquired Henny-Penny, the littlest
but one of the Band.
"Just a little longer than my middle finger," the Captain reassured
him.
Suddenly, in the very midst of this zoölogical bric-a-brac, a great
thought came to each and every of the Band simultaneously.
"Lunch-time!" they shouted with one accord.
Then occurred the tragedy of the trip. In a pocket of his
shooting-jacket the Captain had a package of sandwiches containing
just one apiece, no more, no less. The rest of the lunch, thick
scones, raisins, chocolate, saveloy sausage, bacon, and other
necessaries and luxuries, had been wrapped up in another package and
intrusted to Honey as head of the commissary department for the
day--and Honey had left the package on the hall table! It was a grief
almost too great to be borne. The Band regarded their guilty comrade
reproachfully. Two large tears ran down Honey's cheeks. Alice-Palace,
the littlest of them all, gave way to unrestrained emotions which bade
fair to frighten away the most blood-thirsty of blarinas within the
radius of a mile.
Then it was that the Captain rose to the emergency. "Comrades," said
he, placing one hand over Alice-Palace's widely-opened mouth, "all is
not lost. Old woodsmen like ourselves can find food anywhere. Follow
me. Hist!"
Like Hawk-Eye and Chingachgook and other well-known scouts, the
Captain was apt to employ that mysterious word when beginning a
desperate adventure. The Band followed him with entire confidence,
albeit with certain snifflings on the part of Corporal Alice-Palace.
They crossed a tiny brook, and found themselves in a little grove of
swamp maples which had grown up around the fallen trunk of the parent
tree. The Captain scanned the trees carefully. Everywhere were trails
in the snow which he told them were the tracks of gray squirrels.
Suddenly he reached up and picked out from between a little twig
and the smooth trunk of a swamp-maple sapling, a big, dry,
beautifully-seasoned black walnut. That started the Band to looking,
and they found that the little trees were filled with walnuts, each
one wedged in between twigs or branches so that it would not blow
down. Up and down and about the low trees climbed and scrambled the
Band. Some of the nuts were hidden and some were in plain sight, but
altogether there was nearly half a peck of them, each one containing a
dry, crisp, golden kernel which tasted as rich and delicious as it
looked. They had come upon the winter storehouse of a gray-squirrel
family.
Piling the nuts in the lee of a big oak tree where the camp-fire was
to be made, they followed the Captain to a broken-down rail fence,
where grew a thicket of tiny trees with smooth trunks, whose gray
twigs were laden down with bunches of what looked like tiny purple
plums. Each one had a layer of pulp over a flat stone, and this pulp,
what there was of it, had a curious attractive spicy sugary taste. The
Captain told the Band that these were nanny-plums, sometimes known as
sweet viburnum. Further on, they found clusters of little purple
fox-grapes, fiercely sour in the fall, but now sweetened enough, under
the bite of the frost, to be swallowed.
Still the Captain was not ready to stop. Up the hillside he led them,
by a winding path through tangled thickets, until in a level place he
brought them to a group of curious trees. The bark of these was deeply
grooved and in places nearly three inches thick, while the branches
were covered with scores and scores of golden-red globes. Some were
wrinkled and frost-bitten until they had turned brown, but others
still hung plump and bright in the winter air. It was a grove of
persimmon trees. Before he could be stopped, Henny-Penny had picked
one of the best-looking of the lot and took a deep bite out of the
soft pulp. Immediately thereafter he spat out his first taste of
persimmon with great emphasis, his mouth so puckered that it was with
difficulty that he could express his unfavorable opinion of the new
fruit.
"Handsome is as handsome does," warned the Captain. "Try some of the
frost-bitten ones."
The Band accordingly did so, and found that the worst-looking and most
wrinkled specimens were sweet as honey and without a trace of pucker.
On their way back, they passed through a thicket of tangled bushes,
whose branches were all matted together in bunches which looked like
birds' nests. The twigs were laden down with round, purple berries
about the size of a wild cherry, and the Captain told the Band that
these were hackberries, otherwise known as sugar-berries. They picked
handfuls of them, and found that the berry had a sweet spicy pulp over
a fragile stone that could be crushed like the stones of a raisin,
while the fruit when eaten resembled a raisin in taste.
Hurrying back to the camp-fire tree, the Captain dug a round circle a
couple of feet in diameter in the snow, and spread down a layer of dry
leaves. Over these he built a little tepee of tiny, dry, black-oak
twigs. Underneath this he placed a fragment of birch-bark which he had
peeled off one of the aspen birches which grew on the fringe of the
swamp. This burned like paper, and in a minute the little ball of dry
twigs was crackling away with a steady flame. Over this he piled dry
sassafras and hickory boughs, and in a few moments the Band was seated
around a column of flame which roared up fully four feet high. With
their backs against the great oak tree, they cracked and cracked and
cracked black walnuts and crunched sugar-berries and nibbled
nanny-plums and tasted frost-grapes--saving the single sandwich until
next to the last; while for desert they had handfuls and handfuls of
honey-sweet, wrinkled persimmons.
[Illustration: THE DEAR DEER MICE]
Near the fire Lieutenant Trottie found an old box-cover bedded in the
snow. As he lifted it up, there was a rush and a scurry, and from a
round, warm nest underneath the cover, made of thistle-down, fur,
feathers, and tiny bits of woodfibre all matted together into a sort
of felt, dashed six reddish-brown, pink-pawed mice. They burrowed in
the snow, crept under the leaves, and in a minute were out of sight,
all except one, which tried to climb the box-cover and which Trottie
caught before he could scurry over the top of it. His fur was like
plush, with the hair a warm reddish-brown at the ends and gray at the
roots. Underneath he was snowy-white, although there, too, the fur
showed mouse-gray under the surface. He had little brown claws and six
tiny pink disks on each paw, which enabled him to run up and down
perpendicular surfaces. His eyes were big and brown and lustrous, and
he had flappy, pinky-gray, velvet ears, each one of which was half the
size of his funny little face and thin as gossamer. His paws were pink
and his long tail was covered with the finest of hairs. When he found
he was fairly caught, he snuggled down into Trottie's hand, making a
queer little whimpering noise, while his nose wrinkled and quivered.
When Trottie brought him to the fire, Henny-Penny offered him a
half-kernel of one of his walnuts. Instantly the little nose stopped
quivering, and Mousy sat up like a squirrel on the back of Trottie's
hand and nibbled away until the piece was all gone. Each one of the
Band took turns in feeding him until he could eat no more. Then
Trottie put him back in the deserted nest and replaced the box-cover.
The last adventure of all was on the way home. We were walking along
an abandoned railroad track, when suddenly a flock of light grayish
birds flew up all together out of the dry grass and lighted in a small
elm tree nearby. As we watched them, they turned and all flew down
together. Instantly it was as if a mass of peach-blossoms had been
spilled on the withered grass and white snow. Fully a third of the
flock had crimson crowns and rose-colored breasts, while at the base
of the streaked gray-and-brown backs showed a tinge of pink. It was
our first flock of the lesser redpolls all the way down from the
Arctic Circle. They were restless but not shy, and sometimes we were
able to get within six feet of them. They would continually fly back
and forth from the tree to the ground, keeping up a soft chattering
interspersed with little tinkling notes, somewhat resembling the
goldfinch or the siskin which we had left behind us in the swamp.
Always, when they flew, they gave a little piping call, and their
field-mark was a black patch under the throat which could be seen even
farther than their red polls or their rosy breasts. Their beaks were
light and very pointed, and they had forked tails like the siskin.
It was nearly twilight when we left them and at last started home. As
we followed a fox-trail in and out through the thickets of Fern
Valley, we caught a glimpse of a large brown bird on the ground. At
first I thought that it was some belated fox sparrow; but when it
hopped to a low twig and then raised its tail stiffly as I watched, I
recognized the hermit thrush, which always betrays itself by this
curious mannerism. The last one I had seen was singing like Israfel,
in the twilight of a Canadian forest. To-day the little singer was
silent, and I wondered what had kept him back from the southland, and
hoped that he would be able to win through the bitter days still ahead
of him. I have no doubt that he did, for the hermit thrush is a
brave-hearted, hardy, self-reliant bird.
The sun had gone down before we finally reached the road. Above the
after-glow showed a patch of apple-green sky against which was etched
the faintest, finest, and newest of crescent moons. It almost seemed
as if a puff of wind would blow her like a cobweb out of the sky.
Above gleamed Venus, the evening star, all silver-gold; while over
toward the other side of the sky, great golden Jupiter echoed back her
rays. Below the green, the sky was a mass of dusky gold which deepened
into amber and then slowly faded. As we walked home through the
twilight, we heard the last, sweetest, and saddest singer of that
winter day. Through the air shuddered a soft tremolo call, like the
whistling of swift, unseen wings or the wail of a little lost child.
It was the eerie call of the little screech-owl--and never was a bird
worse named. Answering, I brought him so close to us that we could see
his ear-tufts showing in the half-light. All the way home he followed
us, calling and calling for some one who will never come.