I left the pan of milk in an open space in the yard one bright moonlight night, and, as I half expected, Jim refused to share my pillow. I went to bed as usual, but in a few minutes got up and watched him from a secluded position.
He walked around the pan of milk a few times, cawing under his breath in an important, businesslike way, then flew off for the bottle. He returned with it, and filled it from the pan, using his beak for the purpose, and tilting the pan with his foot when the milk got shallow.
When the bottle was full, he pounded in the cork, grasped it in his claws, and flew away with it towards his nest. I surmised then that Jim was so much of a parent that Mrs. Jim did not have milk enough for all the little ones, and the husband and father was compelled to forage for the balance. Deeply touched, I left a large can of malted milk tablets on the window-sill, open. Within two days, they were all gone.
It was Hoot-Mon, the great Owl, who put an end to Jim. Between the Owls and the Crows there is lifelong enmity. An Owl will attack a Crow at night and a Crow will attack an Owl in the daytime. I knew Hoot-Mon, of course—every Little Brother of the Woods knows Hoot-Mon,—but an article on him had not as yet been ordered, and so I made no special study of him.
It was my fault, too. After Jim was asleep, I put the pan of milk outside for fear it would sour. When he woke and missed it, he scratched my face violently. Trembling with rage, I put him out, saying, as I did so: “You miserable, low-down, black beast, I wish I might never see you again!”
Unexpectedly my wish was granted. In my dooryard, in the morning, when the blood-red sun rose out of the mists of dawn, I found poor Jim, torn and mangled and irretrievably dead, lying beside the empty milk-pan.
He had been slain by Hoot-Mon, who, after eating as much as he could, had sailed away with beak and claws dripping, to wait for darkness and further feasting.
Even if Jim had not been so very dead I could not have saved him, for, in the words of a rival Unnaturalist, “there are no hospitals for sick Crows.”
Poor Jim Crow! Time has softened your misdemeanours with its kindly touch and my memory of you is a pleasant one!