He was a few feet below me. I could have laid my hands upon him, but he did not appear to see me, and stood like a statue while I studied his points. Mamma, too, was suddenly quiet; either she saw at last that my intentions were friendly, or she thought the supreme moment had come, and was paralyzed. I had no leisure to look after her; I wanted to make acquaintance with her bairn, and I did. He was the exact image of his parents; I should have known him anywhere, the same soft, tawny back, and light under-parts, but no tail to be seen, and only a dumpy pair of wings, which would not bear him very far. The feathers of his side looked rough, and not fully out, but his head was lovely and his eye was the wild free eye of a veery. I saw the youngster utter his cry. I saw him fly four or five feet, and then I climbed the bank, hopeless of returning the way I had come, pushed my way between detaining spruces, and emerged once more on dry ground. I had been two hours on the trail.
I slipped into the house the back way, and hastened to my room, where I counted the cost: slippers ruined, dress torn, hand scratched, toilet a general wreck. But I had seen the tawny-thrush baby, and I was happy. And it's no common thing to do, either. Does not Emerson count it among Thoreau's remarkable feats that
"All her shows did Nature yield
To please and win this pilgrim wise;
He found the tawny thrush's brood,
And the shy hawk did wait for him"?
XI.
THE TAWNY THRUSH'S BROOD.
"He found the tawny thrush's brood," says Emerson, in enumerating the special gifts of the nature-lover whose praise he celebrates. Whether the reference were to Thoreau or to another "forest-seer," it was certainly to a fortunate and happy man, whom I have always envied till I learned to find the shy brood myself.
I shall never forget the exciting and blissful moment when I discovered my first tawny-thrush nest. It was the crowning event of a long search.
It was not until the fourth year that I had looked for him, that I came really to know the bird, to see his family, and last of all his nest. My summer abiding-place in the Black River country was very near a bit of woods where veeries were plentiful, and I saw them at all hours, and under nearly all conditions.