ling back again, making
curious, wavy, graceful lines athwart the sunset glow, to croak and be
sociable together, and help each other watch the long night out.

[Illustration]

Quoskh the Watchful--I could tell my great bird's mate by sight or
hearing from all others, either by her greater size or a peculiar double
croak she had--had hidden her nest in the top of a great green hemlock.
Near by, in the high crotch of a dead tree, was another nest, which she
had built, evidently, years before and added to each successive spring,
only to abandon it at last for the evergreen. Both birds used to go to
the old nest freely; and I have wondered since if it were not a bit of
great shrewdness on their part to leave it there in plain sight, where
any prowler might see and climb to it; while the young were securely
hidden, meanwhile, in the top of the near-by hemlock, where they could
see without being seen. Only at a distance could you find the nest. When
under the hemlock, the mass of branches screened it perfectly, and your
attention was wholly taken by the other nest, standing out in bold
relief in the dead tree-top.

Such wisdom, if wisdom it were and not chance, is gained only by
experience. It took at least one brood of young herons, sacrificed to
the appetite of lucivee or fisher, to teach Quoskh the advantage of that
decoy nest to tempt hungry prowlers upon the bare tree hole where she
could have a clear field to spear them with her powerful bill and beat
them down with her great wings before they should discover their
mistake.

By watching the birds through my glass as they came to the young, I
could generally tell what kind of game was afoot for their following.
Once a long snake hung from the mother bird's bill; once it was a bird
of some kind; twice she brought small animals, whose species I could not
make out in the brief moment of alighting on the nest's edge,--all these
besides the regular fare of fish and frogs, of which I took no account.
And then, one day while I lay in my hiding, I saw the mother heron slide
swiftly down from the nest, make a sharp wheel over the lake, and plunge
into the fringe of berry bushes on the shore after some animal that her
keen eyes had caught moving. There was a swift rustling in the bushes, a
blow of her wing to head off a runaway, two or three lightning thrusts
of her javelin beak; then she rose heavily, taking a leveret with her;
and I saw her pulling it to pieces awkwardly on