The next morning we started off again in a driving snowstorm, to look at another nest some ten miles farther on. The first bird we met was a prairie horned lark flying over the valley, with its curious tossing, mounting flight, like a bunch of thistle-down. It differs from the more common horned, or shore, lark by having a white instead of a yellow throat and eye-line; and it nests in the mountain meadows in upper Pennsylvania, while its larger brother breeds in the far north.
Noon found us at a deer camp. Through the uncurtained windows we could see the mounted body of a golden eagle, which, after stalking and destroying one by one a whole flock of wild turkeys, had come to an ignoble end while gorged on the carcass of a dead deer. The man who captured it by throwing his coat over its head thought at first that it was a turkey buzzard, which southern bird, curiously enough, finds its way through the valleys up into these northern mountains. In fact, the Collector once found a buzzard’s nest just across a ravine from the nest of a raven. Beyond the camp, on the other side of a rushing torrent, we found another raven’s nest swaying in the gale, in the very top of a slender forty-foot white pine, the only raven’s nest the Collector had ever found in a tree. It was deserted, and we reached home late that night with frost-bitten faces and ears, and without a sight of the eggs of the northern raven.
The next day we took a train, and traveled forty miles down the river to where, on a cliff overhanging the water, a pair of ravens had nested for the last fifty years. There we found numerous old nests, but never a trace of any that were fresh. There too we found a magnificent wild turkey hanging dead in a little apple tree; it had come to a miserable end by catching the toes of one foot in between two twigs in such a way that it could not release itself. The bright red color of its legs distinguished it from a tame turkey. The Collector confided to me that the ambition of his life was to find the nest of a wild turkey, which is the rarest of all Pennsylvania nests. Next to it from a collecting standpoint come the nests of the Northern raven, pileated woodpecker, and Blackburnian warbler, in the order named.
March 12, 1919, found me again on a raven hunt with the Collector. Before sunrise I was dropped from a sleeper at a little mountain station set in a hill country full of broad fields, swift streams, and leafless trees, flanked by dark belts of pines and hemlocks. Beyond the hills was raven-land, lonely, wind-swept, full of lavender and misty-purple mountains, with now and then a gap showing in their ramparts. It was in these gaps that the ravens nested, always on the north side, farthest from the sun.
Nearby was Treaster’s Valley, which old Dan Treaster won from a pack of black wolves before the Revolution. When he lay a-dying, three quarters of a century later, the wailing howl of a wolf-pack sounded outside his cabin, although wolves had been gone from the Valley for fifty years. Old Dan sat up with the death-sweat on his forehead and grinned. “They’ve come to see me off,” he whispered and fell back dead.
"THE YOUNG RAVENS SHALL NEITHER LACK NOR SUFFER HUNGER"
They bred hunters in that Valley. Peter Penz, the Indian fighter, who celebrated his ninetieth birthday by killing a red bear, came from there. So did Jacob Quiggle, who killed a maned panther one winter night, under the light of a wind-swept moon, with his famous gun, Black Sam. Over on Panther’s Run not ten miles away, lived Solomon Miller, who shot the last wood-bison, and died at the age of eighty-eight, clapping his hands and shouting the chorus of a hunting-song.
As the light began to show in the eastern sky, came the first bird-notes of the day. The caw of a crow, a snatch of song-sparrow melody, the chirp of a robin, the fluted alto note of a blue-bird, and the squeal of a red-tailed hawk sounded before the sun came up.