A BIRD OF THE DARK
The world is never more than half asleep. Night dawns and there is almost as wide a waking as with the dawn of day. We live in the glare till it leaves us blind to the forms that move through the dark; we listen to the roar of the day till we can no longer hear the stir that begins with the night. But here in the darkness is life and movement,—wing-beats, footfalls, cries, and calls,—all the wakefulness, struggle, and tragedy of the day.
Whatever the dusk touches it quickens. Things of bare existence by day have life at night. The very rocks that are dead and inanimate in the light get breath and being in the dark. What was mere substance now becomes shadow, and shadow spirit, till all the day's dead live and move. The roads, fences, trees, and buildings become new creatures; landmarks, distances, and places change; new odors are on the winds; strange lights appear; soft footsteps pass and repass us; and hidden voices whisper everywhere. The brightest day is not more awake; at high noon we are not more alert.
One of the commonest of these night sounds is the cry of the whippoorwill. From the middle of April to the end of September it rings along the edge of the clearing; but how seldom we have seen the singer! To most of us it is only a disembodied voice. Night has put her spell upon the whippoorwills and changed them from birds into wandering shadows and voices. There is something haunting in their call, a suggestion of fear, as though the birds were in flight, pursued by a shape in the gloom. It is the voice of the lost—the voice of the night trying to find its way back to the day. There is snap enough in the call if you happen to be near the bird. Usually the sound comes to us out of the darkness and distance—the loneliest, ghostliest cry of all the night.
It is little wonder that so many legends and omens follow the whippoorwill. How could our imaginations, with a bent for superstition, fail to work upon a creature so often heard, so rarely seen, of habits so dark and uncanny?
One cannot grow accustomed to the night. The eager, jostling, open-faced day has always been familiar; but with the night, though she comes as often as the day, no number of returns can make us acquainted. Whatever is peculiarly her own shares her mystery. Who can get used to the bats flitting and squeaking about him in the dusk? Or who can keep his flesh from creeping when an owl bobs over him in the silence against a full moon? Or who, in the depths of a pine barren, can listen to a circle of whippoorwills around him, and not stay his steps as one lost in the land of homeless, wailing spirits? The continual shifting of the voices, the mocking echoes, and the hiding darkness combine in an effect altogether gruesome and unearthly.