The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

Dead silence reigned over the garden, and Cold, with a capital C, gripped the land. Heaven help any bird who roosted on an empty stomach on such a night! It would freeze to its perch before morning, most like.

Indeed, our thrush had a neighbor, a hedge-sparrow just newly arrived from "somewhere up north." It had come in after dark, and therefore had no time to feed. The thrush just took his head out from under his wing and opened one eye, as the poor little beggar perched close to him for company. He could see it plainly in the petrified moonlight.

When next he opened one eye and looked, dawn was at hand, and the poor little bird was still there. When at last, with shoulders humped and feathers puffed, our thrush flew down to feed in the first pale-gold glimmer of very-much-diluted sunlight, the hedge-sparrow did not move. Now, in opening his wings, possibly from a vague idea of frightening the hedge-sparrow away from the magic swept circle on the lawn close by, and its bread, the thrush brushed heavily against that hedge-sparrow, so that—oh, horror!—it fell, or swung over backwards, rather, and hung head downwards, swaying slightly, like a toy acrobat on a wire, before it fell, so rigidly and so stiffly immovable that one expected it to shatter to pieces like glass as it hit the ground. It did not, however. But it did not matter. The hedge-sparrow was quite, quite dead before it fell, frozen stiff and stark in the night. And none of the other birds seemed to care. Why should they? Such a fate might overtake themselves.

The thrush, much tucked up, but still with some fight in him, was late. Big flocks of peewits or green plover—he could see them between the spruce-boughs—had gone drifting by, winking like floating silver, high overhead, bound westward; and skylarks were passing over the garden, one by one, heading southwest towards the warm, and chortling to each other as they went. Starlings—some of them with extraordinarily bright-yellow dagger-beaks, and some with dull beaks—were before him, squabbling and sparring over the bread on the lawn. A robin dropped a little chain of melancholy silvery notes, and a great titmouse bugled clearly, "Ting-ling! Ting-ling! Ting-ling!" Some one opened a window of the house giving on to the lawn, and the last house-fly blundered out into the cold air; and a company of gnats—surely the most hardy of insects—was dancing in the pale sunlight by the summer-house, above the snow.

The opening of the window had erupted the starlings into the surrounding trees, there to whistle and indulge in a "shiveree," such as is dear to the heart of the excitable, social starling. And our thrush was standing motionless in the middle of the swept circle on the lawn almost at once. No one saw him go there. Indeed, unless the observer looked closely, no one saw him at all, for even then he was, unless he moved, difficult to see, and, whatever had been his custom before, in those days he moved but little.

He had come at even to a garden given over to hen-chaffinches—no cocks, as we said—but at dawn, or, rather, his later hour for rising, he found the garden given over to song-thrushes, all pale beside him, all slim, all snaky of build—Continental song-thrushes, most like, and the same only come to those parts in very hard weather, for they come a long way.

Our song-thrush, standing on his one leg, looked at them with one shrewd eye. There were two of them in the snowless circle on the lawn, which had been swept clear of the snow, that was now deep, before he was up, and had also been replenished with bread. Two thrushes sat in the spruce-fir, and one on the top of the summer-house, and every jack of them was ravenous. He could expect no mercy from them. They must live, if they could, and there was not enough food for all. And he asked no mercy himself, either. Still, it was long odds.

Then he showed that he, even a bird, knew the laws of strategy, the essence of which is surprise. He surprised everybody by suddenly charging at the thrush on the lawn near him with a murderous ferocity that took one's breath away. It certainly would have taken away that of the other song-thrush, if our friend had not knocked it out of him by the impact. By all the laws of precedence, of course, any one of those others ought to have sent him, with his one leg, into headlong retreat by merely threatening. But our friend was not concerned with the laws of precedence, it seemed. He became a law unto himself, and a most amazing "character" to boot. Also, he fought like several demons, and, by sheer reckless fury, removed that dumbfounded rival of his from the lawn in twenty-one hectic seconds.

Then he fed—it was enough only to glance, just glance, at the other thrushes and the chaffinches, after that astounding exhibition of his character. He fed, and, after he had stuffed full, he stood still a little way off.

This was the signal for two of the thrushes in the spruce-fir to flap down to the bread. One got there. The other saw what was coming, and turned hastily back. The one that got there snatched up a piece of bread. But he never ate it. Something hit him on the side. It felt like the point of a skewer, but it was our thrush's beak, really, and by the time he had recovered from that blow he found himself so busy saving his eyesight that he was glad enough to drop his bread and go.