The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

However, our thrush seemed to be no coward, and he at once buckled to, to fight Fate and all the world—one bird v. the rest. It was appalling odds, and I guess no darn fool could have been found to back that bird's chance of winning through.

Then he showed that he had at least one trump up his sleeve. A shape like unto the shape of a silken kite came floating in ample circles across the low-hung sky. And the color of that shape was brown—pale brown; and the shape was alive, and had the appearance of eternally looking for something, which it always could not find. So hunts the kestrel falcon, and by the same token the thrush knew that this was a big hen-kestrel. I say "big" advisedly, because in kestrel society it is the ladies who have the weight and the vote.

And the thrush, who had by that time flown to the ground, promptly "froze "—froze to stillness, I mean—and vanished. It was a startling little trick of his, almost an eccentricity; but the fact was that so long as he kept still on the dark ground where the snow had been swept away—and earth and grass mingled almost to a black whole against the white—he was practically invisible. This was because of his peculiar somber color. Had he been light of dress, like an ordinary song-thrush, any eye could have picked him up in that spot.

Now, that kestrel was in a bad temper and vicious. She was cursing the snow which covered the doings of the field-mice, which ordinarily were her "staff of life"; and she had not killed since dawn. Hence she was a public danger, even to wild-folk she usually left alone, and just now she was looking for our thrush, who she had seen fly down and—vanish.

There he was, however, bang in the open, unshielded by any cover, motionless on one leg, looking upwards, and, to all intents and purposes, not there. The kestrel came shooting up superbly, going at a great pace on the wind, cutting the cold air like a knife, twisting and turning her long tail tins way and that, but moving her quarter-shut wings not one stroke. Right over him she dived, her wonderful eyes stabbing down, so close that you could see her small, rounded head turning and craning. But no thrush did she see. She "banked," hung, swept round, and came back. Then she hovered, like a bird hung from the sky by an invisible hair; and for our thrush she was indeed the sword of Damocles, for the spot in the air where she hung was directly over him. If anybody had shot her dead at that instant, she would have fallen upon his back. At that instant, or the next, she might fall upon his back, anyway, without anybody shooting her. Indeed, the betting seemed a good few hundred to one that she would.

Very few human beings know the full meaning of the word "still"—not even bluejackets!—but most of the wild-folk do. They have to. So did the thrush, but never before had he kept so utterly, stonily, frozenly, strickenly motionless. If he had moved an eyelid even, winked, or gulped too hard, it would have been all up with him. But he didn't and it was not all up; though the kestrel seemed as if she were going to hover there, in that spot, through all eternity. And when at last she condescended to surrender to the wind and vanish like a falling star into the horizon, our friend was as near nervous prostration and hysteria as a bird can be. A very little longer and I believe he would actually have died from sheer overstrain, instead of from kestrel.

Then the thrush fed. He did it against time, before dark, for if night came and caught him with an empty crop, he froze. Perhaps he would freeze, anyway; but no matter.

The hen-chaffinches, presumably at the end of a journey, or part way along it, too, were in a like hurry, and for the same reason. He could see them now only as faint splashes of white, as they opened tail and wing to fight; but they could not fight him, and he savagely kept the little clearing in the snow free of all save himself. It was as if he knew that he was "up against it," and the fact had developed a grim fierceness in his character.

An owl must have gone over about this time, because an owl did go over that garden about the same time every night; but perhaps she was not expecting thrushes in that gloom, or was in a hurry to keep an appointment with a rat. Anyway, the owl did not develop.

Thereafter and at last the thrush went to sleep in a spruce-fir.