“And just hark now!” she said one night when an owl hooted in the ravine. “Him I call the Tax Collector, who, when he turns his head in his white collar and rolls his red eyes or snaps his bill, frightens both man and beast. But if it’s a question of the little white harmless eggs in his own nest, then you’ll see. Then he has a father’s heart in the right place.”
But about nothing did she know so many traditions as about the cranes.
“Never yet,” she said, “have I got to see the long-legged bald-headed cranes when from their mossy retreats they set up their trumpeting and hold their autumn assembly for taking flight. Round their camp they have outposts that sit with a stone in their one uplifted claw, so that it may tumble down and wake them if they fall asleep. But the most wonderful thing is that then if any human being sees the ashen-gray birds go up, he himself begins to flap with his arms and longs to be able to fly with them, so high that the lakes below on the earth are only like little shimmering water-drops.”
“I want to see the cranes,” answered Johannes.
“Perhaps you may get to see them in the autumn, but then you must first teach yourself a great deal. First, you must be able to stand so quiet that you look like a dry juniper bush, and to bend down so that you look like a stone, and to lay yourself flat on the ground so that no one can tell you from a pile of rotten twigs.”
“All that I shall try to teach myself, but you must never go on my island. It isn’t the way you think there. I have a high fireplace and hangings on the walls, and the floor between the rugs is so shining and slippery that you can’t walk on it but have to crawl.”
The pretty stories he had read in the dean’s books ran in his memory, and he wanted to show the girl that he was not inferior to her but could in turn rouse her to wonder and curiosity.
“If you’ll let me get a sight of that house, I’ll go down to the settlement and fetch you a musketoon with bullets and powder-horn.”
“To my island you’ll never come.”
“If you’ll let me get a sight of that house, I’ll teach you in five days to feed yourself on ferns and roots and nothing.”