Chapter Sixteen.
Where the Quails came from.
In the spring the quails come in from the west, and one September morning I went out into the standing oat-crops with two other guns, each one of us attended by a little Kaffir lad to retrieve the birds. By noon we had traversed and re-traversed in line the upper lands and low lands, bagging 98 brace, and then in the glare of the mid-day we took shelter in the shade of a yellow-wood tree. There we argued the ever-recurring theme of the coming of the quail.
In August there is not a quail to all seeming in the land, but suddenly, as the spring advances, there comes from every thicket of grass and square of growing corn on the coast the whistling call of the male bird—‘phee—phe—yew’ calling in bird language, ‘where are you?—where are you?’ and the answering cry of the modest mate—‘phee—phee’—“here—here.” Whence do they come—these thousands of birds that throng along the coast? On that point regularly as September came round, as the 12-bore gun was taken down, and the cartridges filled with Number 6, we talked greatly, setting forth many theories. Silas Topper was of opinion that the quails spent their time in travelling round the continent of Africa in four huge armies, covering 500 miles from front to rear, and that while one was passing along the southern coast, the second army would be going north somewhere above the Zambesi, while the third would be traversing the shores of the Mediterranean, and the fourth skirting of Gold Coast. We all agreed that was a very good theory, and one deserving more credence than the crude, but positive, assertion of Amos Topper that the quail was originally a frog.
“It stands to reason,” Amos would say, “that a quail is developed from a frog. If ’tain’t so, what becomes of all the frogs?—tell me that. Take a caterpillar. A caterpillar comes from an egg, and a cocoon comes from a caterpillar, and a butterfly from a cocoon.”
“But a quail isn’t a butterfly.”
“Chuts! A tadpole comes from an egg, doesn’t it? Well, a frog comes from a tadpole, and a quail comes from a frog. That’s clear enough, ain’t it?”
Then, of course, the argument would start, and this particular September morning we had got well into the frog theory when old Abe Pike came along.