Half a mile farther on Jean sat down on a spherical boulder and donned her moccasins. Afterward they turned in from the beach, crossed a flat sweep of tundra and ascended the hill to the top of the Island. As they walked toward the edge of the cliffs the shrill chorus of thousands of sea-birds grew louder.
"O-o-o-o!" there was a little bell-like shiver in the girl's voice. "There's no sound in all the world so wild, so suggestive of the mystery of the untamed, as the calling of nesting gulls, Gregg!" They stood on the promontory with the winged things dipping and swirling all about them. Jean continued slowly, as if trying to put into words some illusive feeling. "Sometimes—it frightens me—I don't know why—and at the same time, it fills me with such a sense of freedom and lightness that often, just for a little moment, I almost believe I too might rise into the air and balance myself against the breeze with them!"
Harlan had never seen the nesting grounds of gulls in season, but Jean, before coming to Kon Klayu, had once gone ashore on a gull island during laying time.
"For weeks afterward," she told him, "every night when I closed my eyes I could see the green waving grass and grey sand dotted with hundreds and hundreds of crude nests. Each nest contained from one to three eggs, larger than duck eggs, and of a nile-green color closely speckled with brown, yellow and lavender. Why, they were so near together, Gregg, that it was difficult to step without crushing the eggs!"
With the memory of the gull island in her mind, she started with Harlan to traverse the stretch of green back of the promontory.
Back and forth for a square mile they went, searching the flat above the cliffs. Gulls, flying above, eyed them curiously, making strange human sounds. Occasionally one alighted on the ground. As often as this happened they raced hopefully to the spot but found nothing but grass blades bending from the wind.
"It's no use, Jean," Harlan decided, after two hours' vain effort. "It's too early for them to lay. Let's go back to the edge of the cliffs. The shags lay earlier, I believe, only their nests are so blamed hard to get at down there."
Jean was not enthusiastic about shag nests.
"They fill me with melancholy—those long-necked, black creatures, Gregg," she said uneasily. "Lollie and I call them witch-birds. I remember last fall we used to sit on the porch steps in the afterglow, watching them—strings of dusky, witch-birds, speeding silent and low over the darkening water to the cliffs. But, if you wish," she added, "we'll go and see."
They headed for the windy heights overlooking the ocean, where nodding tundra grass fringed the space beyond. Harlan took her hand as they crept close to the edge. They peered down through the cloud of wild fowl that swarmed in uncounted thousands before their eyes. Three hundred feet below, deliberate blue rollers, with spray-laced tops swept in and broke against the rocks, the impact sending whitened water high into the air. The face of the cliff was plastered with seabirds: murres, gulls, sea-parrots and cormorants. Harlan threw a stone down and the air became black with them, leaving the numbers in the rocks apparently the same. Sea-parrots flew in from the water and disappeared under the overhanging sod at the top. Mingled with the breath of the ocean was the wild, unforgetable odor that clings to the places where seabirds roost.