From several of the upper windows had been built out simple and practical feeding-shelves,—shallow wooden boxes partitioned off by cross-pieces into some six or eight compartments. Here we would put out marrowbones, suet, shreds and scraps from the dinner-plates, nuts, acorns, pinecones, grains, crumbs, fragments of cheese, and here, all the long winter through, our welcome guests were chickadees, nut-hatches, tree sparrows, downy woodpeckers, juncos, with an occasional fox sparrow or purple finch or flock of Canadian crossbills. Our unwelcome guests were English sparrows, of whom, however, we had but few and those of rather subdued deportment; blue jays, who would fly away with big pieces of meat or cocoanut, and the gray squirrels, who would come stealing softly down the edge of the casement and suddenly leap into the box. Here they would sit up on their haunches, defying us through the pane with hard, black eyes, and gobble till they could gobble no more. Then they would stuff their elastic cheeks almost to bursting and make off with their plunder only to be back again before the little birds, so long and so patiently waiting on the snowy branches of the nearest tree, had really settled down to enjoy the leavings.
Sigurd instinctively understood that the little birds were guests—to the English sparrows he gave the benefit of the doubt—and that the blue jays and squirrels were intruders. On a keen winter day, when the boxes had been freshly filled, he was indeed an overworked collie, scampering from room to room and window to window, barking furiously at the raiders. This vociferous warning that no trespassers were allowed sufficed for the blue jays, who would flap sullenly away, but the squirrels were quick to learn that a bark was not a bite. Shadowtail would only drop his nut and sit up erect and alert, his little fists pressed to his heart, his beady eyes staring straight against the dog's honest, indignant gaze. Seeing that his loudest roar had lost its terrors, Sigurd would leap up toward the window and give it a resounding thump with his paw. At first this new menace put the squirrels to precipitate retreat. Off they went, nor stood upon the order of their going. A few minutes later, one shrewd little gray face after another would peer around the casement edge, but at the first view of that upright, shining figure, with the flowing snow-white ruff, mounting guard on chair or hassock, the goblin faces vanished. Sigurd was immensely proud of himself during this epoch of the warfare. A very Casabianca in his firm conception of duty, only the most imperative summons could call him from his post. But when the squirrels had learned that the barrier between the collie and themselves was, though transparent, an effective screen, and would, as before, saucily plant themselves in the middle of the box and resume the stuffing and pillaging process more diligently than ever, under his very eyes, Sigurd, frantic with fury, would beat an utterly tremendous tattoo upon the pane. Three times one January he crashed through the glass in one of my chamber windows, cutting his face and paws and subjecting the room to a more Arctic ventilation than I cared for. On these occasions the squirrels saved themselves by prodigious leaps into the nearest tree and did not venture back while that jagged gap remained,—so satisfactory a result, from Sigurd's point of view, that he marveled at my folly in calling in a glazier to repair the damage. As the man was working at the window, Sigurd would look from him to me with a puzzled and reproachful expression accentuated by the long strips of court plaster across his nose.
He had a vigorous ally in my mother, who brought her own bright wits to bear on the circumvention of the enemy. She knitted a little bag, filled it with nutmeats and hung it from the middle sash outside the window, so that it dangled halfway down in the open space which gave the squirrels no footing but delighted our winged pensioners. It was fun to see two spirited fluffs squaring at each other atop a lump of suet for the best chance to rise at the bag, till another plumy midget came fiercely down upon them and drove them, chirping remonstrance, off to the outer edges of the box. Then the newcomer, bristling with victory, flew up and secured the most desirable position on that swinging dinner-pail, while the others, nudging and scrambling, sought for a footing on the further side. But the squirrels studied the situation from above and from below and presently learned to run up the blind, make a sidelong leap to the bag and cling to it with all four legs and feet, while they gnawed through the threads until the goodies literally poured into their mouths. There they would cling and feast, while on the other side of the glass my mother and Sigurd, both of them sharply protesting and angrily rapping the pane, held a Council of War. As a result, my mother bought two iron sink-mops, wired them together and triumphantly fashioned a bag which even the strong teeth of the furry burglars, for all their persevering and ingenious efforts, could not bite open. But the happy chickadees and nut-hatches would perch there, by relays, all day long, thrusting their bills through the iron interstices and drawing out, bit by bit, the finely broken nutmeats.
The blue jays were routed quite by accident. The support of my box, a strip of wood running from the underside of that little feeding table to the house wall, had loosened its lower nail, and one day, when some passing touch of grippe kept me in bed, with Sigurd sitting upright on a chair beside me, playing nurse, a plump jay lit heavily upon the edge of the shelf and screeched with fright as it shook and slid beneath him. He took to his glossy wings and, within five minutes, the oak hard by was alive with our whole colony of blue jays, all eying that box and deep in agitated discussion. At last one venturesome fellow struck boldly out and lit on it, only to feel it sway and sag and, with a shriek rivaling that of his predecessor, flapped up just in time to save himself, as he believed, from a terrific disaster. This performance was repeated twice more and then the whole blue jay crew abandoned, for the rest of the winter, not only their attacks on my particular bird box, though its support was promptly made secure, but on all the bird boxes of the house. Sigurd and I were well content as we heard them croaking to one another, "A trap! Jam my feathers, a hateful, human trap! But they couldn't hoodwink us. Yah, yah, yah!"
The squirrels, however, continued to be Sigurd's chief household care. Out of doors, too, he was forever chasing them, but never, to my knowledge, so much as brushed the tail of one. In his sleep, he often seemed to be dreaming of a squirrel hunt, his feet running eagerly even while his body lay at full stretch upon the rug, and his breath coming in short pants. Sometimes he would howl in nightmare slumbers, but generally he appeared elate, climbing, perhaps, the trees of Dreamland, less slippery than our icy oaks, and driving out his enemies from their loftiest fastness.
Sigurd bore no grudges and when, as the pussy-willows, anemones and violets, the robins and the orioles were bringing in the spring, he was called upon to adorn a blue jay funeral procession, he wore his black ribbon with decorum. The chief mourner, a little lad by name of Wallace, was one of our nearest neighbors and most honored friends. He had been much perturbed in spirit over the perils of the blue jay brood whose nursery, so reckless were their parents, tilted precariously on a pine branch that overhung a ledge just beyond one end of Wallace's porch. He feared every wind would overthrow that nest, but when the shocking old mother, apparently in a fit of temper, deliberately pushed her children out herself, and they fell, one by one, to instant death on the rock below, Wallace's grief and horror were too great for a child's good. His resourceful father therefore proposed a grand funeral, as the only testimony of regard and regret that we could offer to the unlucky fledgelings, and Wallace, who was much preoccupied with his future career, having at one time planned to be a dentist in the forenoon, a musician in the afternoon, and an editor at night, entered with enthusiasm upon the duties of undertaker, sexton, and clergyman. Called upon for an anthem, I responded with a lament which Wallace found "too sad" to hear more than twice. On the second occasion it was intoned at the tiny grave, above which Sigurd drooped a puzzled head, not understanding a game that had in it neither romp nor laughter.
Though fond of Wallace, our collie's bearing toward small boys in general was not conspicuous for cordiality. Women he accepted as essential to the running of the universe; men—except for those vindictive monsters perched on express teams with long whips in hand—he regarded with amiable indifference; but about small boys he was dubious. Some of our rougher little neighbors had stoned and snowballed the new puppy. At Christmas we met that situation by converting Sigurd into Santa Claus,—dressing him up in holly ribbon and sleighbells and hanging on him the little gifts which we were in the way of taking about to the children on our hill. The immediate effect was excellent. Sigurd was thanked and patted and, in his pleasure at such appreciation, he would magnanimously lick the boyish hands that had been so often raised against him. One urchin was so impressed by a toy fire-engine that, at least through January, he touched his cap to "Mr. Sigurd" whenever they met; but with Fourth of July and Hallowe'en our troubles were all renewed. Firecrackers and torpedoes are so disconcerting to collie nerves that no normally bad boy could resist setting them off under Sigurd's very nose, somersaulting with ecstasy to see his instantaneous bolt for home; while on Hallowe'en all the youngsters on the hill would call in a troop, weirdly disguised, swinging Jack-o'-Lanterns and banging, scraping, whistling, piping, on strange instruments not of music. On these distracting occasions Sigurd was ready to tear those giggling spooks to bits, and either Joy-of-Life or I had to hold him tight, while the other passed the cookies and candies for which our supernatural visitants had come.
May Day was better fun for Sigurd. He quickly understood that the Maybasket chase was only a game and played it with a vim. But in general he did not care for festivals nor for any variation of the usual round. Just everyday living was joy enough for him. If Sigurd had made the calendar, the week would have been all Mondays. Even Christmas puzzled more than it pleased him. Such a confusion of brown paper and tissue paper, such a flourishing of queer, lumpy stockings, such tangles of string, such excitement over objects that had no thrill for his inquiring nose! And for himself, the rubber cats with gruesome squeaks inside them, the mechanical beetles that shook his courage as they charged at him across the floor! He could not make it out. Once when all the people present were shouting with mirth over a new, preposterous game of cards, Sigurd quietly picked up from under the table a pack not yet called into service and carried it out into the kitchen, where he was presently discovered with one forefoot set on the cards tumbled about before him, while he gazed dejectedly down at them in a defeated effort to find out why they were amusing. And the Christmas parties, for which he had to be scrubbed until he shone like an image of white and gold! And if it happened that, between his toilet and the party, he whizzed off with Laddie, what unpleasantness on his return!
"Sigurd was especially invited for to-night and I promised Wallace to bring him. But he's too dirty now and he hasn't had his dinner."
"All his own doing. He shall come dirty and dinnerless and learn to be ashamed of himself."