I had taken pains that the flying buzzard should not see me enter, for I hoped she would descend to look after her young. But she would take no chances with herself. I sat near the mouth of the hollow, where I could catch the fresh breeze that pulled at the end, and where I had a view of a far-away bit of sky. Suddenly across this field of blue, as you have seen an infusorian scud across the field of your microscope, there swept a meteor of black,—the buzzard! and evidently in that instant of passage, at a distance certainly of half a mile, she spied me in the log.
I waited more than an hour longer, and when I tumbled out with a dozen kinds of cramps, the maternal creature was soaring serenely far up in the clear, cool sky.
XV
The Lay of the Land
She loved nature—from a veranda, a dog-cart, the deck of a vessel. She had been to the seashore for a whole June, the next June to the mountains, then a June to an inland farm. “And I enjoyed it!” she exclaimed; “the sky-blue, I mean, the sea-blue, and the green of the hills. But as for seeing fiddler crabs and chewinks and woodchucks—things! why, I simply didn’t. In fact, I believe that most of your fiddling crabs and moralizing stumps and philosophizing woodchucks are simply the creatures of a disordered imagination.”
I quite agreed as to the fiddling (some of it) and the philosophizing; I disagreed, however, as to the reality of the crabs and the woodchucks; for it was not the attributes and powers of these creatures that she really disbelieved in, but the very existence of the creatures themselves,—along her seashore, and upon the farm that she visited.
“As for fiddler crabs and chewinks and woodchucks—things,” she did not see them. Certainly not. Yet a fiddler crab is as real an entity as a thousand-acre marsh,—and in its way as interesting. It is a sorry soul that looks for nothing out of doors but fiddler crabs, and insists upon their fiddling; that never sees the sky-blue, the sea-blue, and the green of the rolling hills. I shall never forget a moonrise over the Maurice River marshes that I witnessed one night in early June. It was a peculiarly solemn sight, and one of the profoundly beautiful experiences of my life, there in the wide, weird silence of the half sea-land, with the tide at flood. Nor shall I ever forget two or three of the stops which I made in the marshes that day to watch the fiddler crabs. Nor shall I forget how they fiddled. For fiddle they did, just as they used to years ago, when they and I lived on these marshes together.