as loosed, again that lightning lance darted downward into the
water, and returned with a kicking trophy. Now it was a large
brown-and-green frog, which the victor had more difficulty in killing.
For half a minute he whacked it savagely against the side of the log,
before he could satisfy himself that the limp, bedragged form was past
all effort to escape. Then, picking it up between the tips of his beak,
he stepped from his log, strode with awkward dignity some paces up the
shore, and hid the prize safely in the heart of a tussock of
sedge-grass. Not only for himself was the big blue heron fishing, but
also, and first of all, for certain extraordinarily hungry nestlings in
a cedar swamp behind the neighbouring hills.

Having hidden the frog, the heron raised his head and steadily surveyed
the shores. Then he spread his long wings and flapped up to a height of
seven or eight feet, where he commanded a comprehensive view of the
meadows. Assured that no peril was lurking near, he winnowed slowly
along the shore, his legs trailing ludicrously, and dropped again to
earth at the next point. The moment he touched ground and steadied
himself he became once more the moveless image of a bird, as if just
projected into solidity from the face of a Japanese screen.

At this point, however, fortune failed to smile upon his fishing. For
full five minutes he waited, and neither fish nor frog came within
reach. Suddenly he unlimbered, and went stalking gravely up along the
sloppy mud between the reeds and the shrunken water. As he went, his
long neck craned alternately to one side and the other, and his eyes
pierced every retreat among the rushes or the water-weeds. Sometimes he
snapped up a tiny shiner, or a big black water-beetle, which he promptly
swallowed; but he got no more prizes worth carrying back to the nest
behind the hills. He went forward somewhat briskly, therefore, being in
haste to reach a bit of good frogging-ground a little farther on. At
length, coming to the mouth of a sluggish rivulet, he started to wade
across it, not carefully observing how he set down his feet in the
tangle of weeds and eel-grass. From under the tangle came a muffled
"click." With a startled squawk he lifted his wings, as something
grabbed him by the toes, and held him fast. He was in the iron clutch of
a muskrat trap.

That one squawk was the only sound he uttered; but his powerful wings
threshed the air desperately as he strained to wrench h