Forest Friends

by Royal Dixon

With successive days he grew apace, and at last he tumbled himself out of the nest and began to walk. The nest was a mound of mud and sand, for all the world like a basket of sticks and moss reposing on an inverted flower-pot, and not so high but what White Wing could struggle back into it when the heat of the day came and his watchful father took his post by the side of the little home to throw the shadow of his stately figure over it.

At first White Wing was just like the other little flamingoes, and with them he began to play on the sandy floor of the flamingo city, and with them he very soon learned to take short flights as his wings developed. But just as a hundred or so of cousins began to shed their white down and to grow very brown and fuzzy, he began to get whiter and whiter. In a few weeks they were beginning to shed their brown clothes for the beautiful pink feathers which are the proper thing for the flamingo.

Little White Wing was somewhat distressed when his playmates began to jeer at him, and it was perplexing to note a lack of affection on the part of his beautiful father and mother. For his elders were greatly embarrassed. Nothing like this had ever happened in their family. And, so far as the handsome father could learn by inquiry among the oldest birds of Flamingotown, no one had ever heard of a white flamingo. But when the neighbors cast aspersions, and hinted that there must be some common blood in that family, then the father grew angry and the gentle mother had all she could do to keep him from killing little White Wing.

Every night the little fellow would bury his head close to his beautiful mother's ear, and say:

"Don't you think, perhaps, dear mother, that I'll be pink in the morning?"

And she would tell him to hush and be quiet and go to sleep.

But when morning came he would be as white as ever, and his long sad day would begin. No one would play with him and he was soon shifting for himself. Somehow he picked up a living of tiny fish in the long pools of tide-water that the waves left in the soggy lagoon, and when all his playmates had gone to bed and it was safe to come among them, he would step home, picking his way between the nests, and trying to reach his own without calling attention to himself.

All this was hard, but it speedily grew worse. The King of the flamingoes said that the white offspring must die.

"Begone, my child, begone!" the mother whispered to him, for she had heard that little White Wing was to die. "Go away, as far as you can. Sometime it will be all right. Remember that your mother loves you."

So that ended White Wing's childhood. Even before the first streak of dawn, the beautiful young bird flew out and away. Across the lagoon, miles and miles to the westward, over a wide stretch of sea he flew until his wings could hardly bear him up. Then he sighted land, and he strained every nerve to reach it. When at last he wheeled down to the sands in the shade of a great mangrove tree, his first day's flight was finished and he was a lonely, famished bird on a strange shore.