wnward before I could find it
with my gun sight, striking the decoys with a great splash and
clatter. Before he discovered his mistake or could get started again,
I had him. The next moment Don came ashore, proud as a peacock,
bringing a great snowy owl with him--a rare prize, worth ten times the
trouble we had taken to get it.

Owls are generally very lean and muscular; so much so, in severe
winters, that they are often unable to fly straight when the wind
blows; and a twenty-knot breeze catches their broad wings and tosses
them about helplessly. This one, however, was fat as a plover. When I
stuffed him, I found that he had just eaten a big rat and a
meadow-lark, hair, bones, feathers and all. It would be interesting to
know what he intended to do with the duck. Perhaps, like the crow, he
has snug hiding places here and there, where he keeps things against a
time of need.

Every severe winter a few of these beautiful owls find their way to
the lonely places of the New England coast, driven southward, no
doubt, by lack of food in the frozen north. Here in Massachusetts they
seem to prefer the southern shores of Cape Cod, and especially the
island of Nantucket, where besides the food cast up by the tides,
there are larks and blackbirds and robins, which linger more or less
all winter. At home in the far north, the owls feed largely upon hares
and grouse; here nothing comes amiss, from a stray cat, roving too far
from the house, to stray mussels on the beach that have escaped the
sharp eyes of sea-gulls.

Some of his hunting ways are most curious. One winter day, in prowling
along the beach, I approached the spot where a day or two before I had
been shooting whistlers (golden-eye ducks) over decoys. The blind had
been made by digging a hole in the sand. In the bottom was an armful
of dry seaweed, to keep one's toes warm, and just behind the stand was
the stump of a ship's mainmast, the relic of some old storm and
shipwreck, cast up by the tide.

A commotion of some kind was going on in the blind as I drew near.
Sand and bunches of seaweed were hurled up at intervals to be swept
aside by the wind. Instantly I dropped out of sight into the dead
beach grass to watch and listen. Soon a white head and neck bristled
up from behind the old mast, every feather standing straight out
ferociously. The head was perfectly silent a moment, listening; then
it twisted completely round twice so as to look in every direction. A
mome