luck
after his fellow-fisherman, whether he meet him on the wilderness lakes
or in the quiet places on the home streams where nobody ever comes.

KOSKOMENOS THE OUTCAST

Koskomenos the kingfisher is a kind of outcast among the birds. I think
they regard him as a half reptile, who has not yet climbed high enough
in the bird scale to deserve recognition; so they let him severely
alone. Even the goshawk hesitates before taking a swoop at him, not
knowing quite whether the gaudy creature is dangerous or only uncanny.
I saw a great hawk once drop like a bolt upon a kingfisher that hung on
quivering wings, rattling softly, before his hole in the bank. But the
robber lost his nerve at the instant when he should have dropped his
claws to strike. He swerved aside and shot upward in a great slant to a
dead spruce top, where he stood watching intently till the dark beak of
a brooding kingfisher reached out of the hole to receive the fish
that her mate had brought her. Whereupon Koskomenos swept away to his
watchtower above the minnow pool, and the hawk set his wings toward
the outlet, where a brood of young sheldrakes were taking their first
lessons in the open water.

No wonder the birds look askance at Kingfisher. His head is ridiculously
large; his feet ridiculously small. He is a poem of grace in the air;
but he creeps like a lizard, or waddles so that a duck would be ashamed
of him, in the rare moments when he is afoot. His mouth is big enough
to take in a minnow whole; his tongue so small that he has no voice, but
only a harsh klr-rr-r-ik-ik-ik, like a watchman's rattle. He builds no
nest, but rather a den in the bank, in which he lives most filthily
half the day; yet the other half he is a clean, beautiful creature, with
never a suggestion of earth, but only of the blue heavens above and the
color-steeped water below, in his bright garments. Water will not wet
him, though he plunge a dozen times out of sight beneath the surface.
His clatter is harsh, noisy, diabolical; yet his plunge into the stream,
with its flash of color, its silver spray, and its tinkle of smitten
water, is the most musical thing in the wilderness.

As a fisherman he has no equal. His fishy, expressionless eye is yet the
keenest that sweeps the water, and his swoop puts even the fish-hawk to
shame for its certainty and its lightning quickness.

Besides all these contradictions, he is solitary, unknown,
inapproachable. He has no youth, no play