Fire Island / Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track

by George Manville Fenn

Whatever animals they were who called, they were answering each other, and certainly coming nearer.

The remembrance of the strange-looking face he had seen peering through the leaves directly after the great nut had struck Wriggs, came back to Oliver as he resumed his arduous journey, now finding the way easier where the bigger trees grew, now more toilsome where there was an opening caused by the fall of some forest monarch, which had rent a passage for the sunshine, with the consequence that a dense mass of lower growth had sprung up.

In these openings, in spite of heat and weariness, the young naturalist forgot all his troubles for a few brief moments in his wonder and delight, till the knowledge that he must push on roused him once more to action. For there before him were in all their beauty the various objects which he had come thousands of miles to seek. Beetles with wing cases as of burnished metal crawled over leaves and clung to stems; grotesque locust-like creatures sprang through the air, through which darted birds which in their full vigour and perfect plumage looked a hundred times more beautiful than the dried specimens to which he was accustomed in museums and private collections. Here from a dry twig darted a kingfisher of dazzling blue, not upon a fish, but upon a beetle, which it bore off in triumph. Away overhead, with a roar like a distant train, sped a couple of rhinoceros hornbills, to be succeeded by a flash of noisy, harsh-shrieking paroquets, all gorgeous in green, yellow, crimson and blue, ready to look wonderingly at the intruder upon their domain, and then begin busily climbing and swinging among the twigs of a bough, whose hidden fruit they hunted out from among the leaves.

One tree close at hand was draped with a creeper of convolvulus-like growth, hanging its trumpet-shaped flowers in every direction, ready for a number of glittering gem-like birds to hover before them, and probe the nectaries for honey or tiny insects, with their long curved bills. So rapid in their movements were some of these, that their insect-like buzzing flight was almost invisible to the watcher, till they hovered before a blossom in the full sunshine, when their burnished, metallic plumage, shot with purple, crimson, and gold, flashed in the sun’s rays, and literally dazzled the eye.

Oliver was in the home of the sun-birds, the brilliant little creatures which answer in the old world to the humming-birds of the new, with their crests and gorgets of vivid scales.

“It’s grand, it’s wonderful,” he muttered, with a sigh. “But I must get on.”

He forced his way through these openings, with the birds so tame that he could easily have knocked them down with a stick, or caught them with a butterfly-net. But leaving his collecting for a future time, he pressed on, satisfied with the knowledge that he was in the midst of nature’s wonders, for the farther he progressed the more was he impressed with the conviction that he and his companions had happened upon a place which exceeded the most vivid paintings of his imagination, so rich did it reveal itself in all they desired.

The progress he made was slower and slower, for he was nearly at the end of his forces, and the matted-together tangle seemed in his weakness to grow more dense. Where there was opening enough overhead he could see that the sun was sinking rapidly, and he knew that it would be dark almost directly it had disappeared.

“It is hopeless,” he said to himself; “I shall never get out to-night;” and with the idea forced upon him that he must be on the look-out for a resting-place, or an opening where he could light a fire, and, if possible, at the foot of some tree, in whose branches he could make himself a shelter, he still toiled on.

This proved to be a less difficult task, for before long, as he crept beneath the tangle of a climbing cane-like palm, he saw that it was more light ahead, and in a few minutes he reached one of the natural clearings, close to a huge short-trunked, many-branched fig. There was dead wood in plenty, shelter, and fruit of two kinds close at hand, while, greatest treasure of all, a tiny thread of water trickled among some ancient, mossy fragments of volcanic rock, filling a little basin-like pool with ample for his needs. To this he at once bowed his head and drank with avidity, sublimely unconscious of the fact that a tiny, slight, necklace-like snake was gliding over the moistened rock just overhead, and that a pair of bright gem eyes were watching his every motion from the great fig-tree, where its branches rose in a cluster from the trunk.