“Have you a special day for your departure?” she asked. “I shall be off to the osiers in September and I’d like to see you go.”
“When we have received our marching orders,” replied the bird, “or as you might say, knowing no better, when the instinct for departure is upon us, we await the first fine night with a wind blowing towards the south. Have you ever noticed how the winds help birds at the season of the great migrations? They do, whether you have noticed it or not.”
For some days in the beginning of August the fields and woods showed a large number of cuckoos now quite mute, and then the Vixen prepared to leave the neighbourhood. Cub hunting had started.
“We are ready to fly now,” said the Cuckoo. “The signal has come to us; the wind is backing towards the north.”
“Aren’t you sorry to leave?” she asked him.
“Yes and no,” he replied. “If you had perennial spring and summer I would stay gladly enough. But one of my family was taken half-fledged from a nest here once and lived with clipped wings in an old garden across the river. He has spoken to all of us about the English winter, and it is something we never wish to meet. We are going to a land of such sunshine as you have never seen.”
Half-way through September there was no cuckoo of any age to be heard or seen. And the place seemed to lack something, over and above the crops that had gone from the fields and the green mantle that was fading from the hedgerow and the wood.
THE SEAL
Towards the latter end of May, the grown-up lady seals sought a corner of the shore where the slope was gentle and the sun was warm; the younger seals betook themselves, together with the old males, to another part of the coast, out of sight and hearing. Before the first of the long June days had come to bring new jewels to the treasury of the sea, the meaning of the separation was made plain—there were many little baby seals playing by their mothers’ side. Some rested upon a little nest of white wool that had nothing to do with their skin, which was dark and of a different texture. No mother had more than one child.
Had you passed among the mother seals in the very early June days, while they sprawled at ease, suckling their little ones, you might have noticed one male seal who was rather bigger and more intelligent than most of his neighbours. You would not have been able to go among or even near them unless you had taken the form of a red shank, or an oyster-catcher, or of one of the other sea birds that are the particular friends of seals; but you may take it, that this baby was the best of the pack, if only because the story is concerned with his career.