Of all swimmers that breathe the free air none can compare with him in swiftness and in a grace that is the smooth and even flow of the poetry of motion. Now he dives, or rather vanishes from the surface, nor reappears till his wake has almost flickered out.
His voyage accomplished, he at once sets forth on exploration of new shores or progress through his established domain, and vanishes from sight before his first wet footprints have dried on the warm rock where he landed.
You are glad to have seen him, thankful that he lives, and you hope that, sparing your chickens and your share of trout, partridges, and wild ducks, he too may be spared from the devices of the trapper to fill his appointed place in the world's wildness.
VI
APRIL DAYS
At last there is full and complete assurance of spring, in spite of the baldness of the woods, the barrenness of the fields, bleak with sodden furrows of last year's ploughing, or pallidly tawny with bleached grass, and untidy with the jetsam of winter storms and the wide strewn litter of farms in months of foddering and wood-hauling.
There is full assurance of spring in such incongruities as a phœbe a-perch on a brown mullein stalk in the midst of grimy snow banks, and therefrom swooping in airy loops of flight upon the flies that buzz across this begrimed remnant of winter's ermine, and of squirrelcups flaunting bloom and fragrance in the face of an ice cascade, which, with all its glitter gone, hangs in dull whiteness down the ledges, greening the moss with the moisture of its wasting sheet of pearl.
The woodchuck and chipmunk have got on top of the world again. You hear the half querulous, half chuckling whistle of the one, the full-mouthed persistent cluck of the other, voicing recognition of the season.
The song of the brooks has abated something of its first triumphant swell, and is often overborne now by the jubilant chorus of the birds, the jangled, liquid gurgle and raucous grating of the blackbirds, the robin's joyous song with its frequent breaks, as if the thronging notes outran utterance, the too brief sweetness of the meadowlark's whistle, the bluebird's carol, the cheery call of the phœbe, the trill of the song sparrow, and above them all the triumph of the hawk in its regained possessions of northern sky and earth.