Through the long narrow valley, hidden between two green hills, marched the Band, following the hidden safe path that generations of foxes had made through the very middle of a treacherous marsh. As the road bent in toward Darby Creek, there sounded the watchman’s rattle of the first kingfisher they had heard that year; and as they came to the creek itself, a vast blue-gray bird with a long neck and bill flapped up ahead of them. It was so enormous that Alice-Palace was positive that it was a roc; but it turned out to be the great blue heron, the largest bird in Eastern America.
From the marshy fields swept great flocks of red-winged blackbirds, each one showing a yellow-bordered, crimson epaulet, proof positive that Mrs. Blackbird was still in the South. Mrs. Robin had come back the week before, which accounted for the joy-songs which sounded from every tree-top. Until she comes, the robin’s song is faint and thin and infrequent. Beyond the creek they heard the “Quick, quick, quick,” of the flicker calling to spring, and before long they came to the tree where he had hollowed his hole. A most intelligent flicker he was, too, for his shaft was sunk directly under a sign which read “No Shooting Here.”
From behind them as they marched, tolled the low sweet bell-notes of the mourning dove—“Ah—coo, coo, coo.” The Captain tried to imitate the sound, and the harassed bird stood it as long as he could, but finally flew away with whistling wings. Then the Captain told the Band of a brave mother-dove whose nest he once found on the last day of March. It was only a flat platform of dry sticks in a spruce tree, and held two pearly-white eggs. The day after he found it, there came a sudden snowstorm, and when he saw the nest again, it was covered with snow—but there was the mother-bird still brooding her dear-loved eggs, with her head just showing above the drifted whiteness.
MR. FLICKER AT HOME
Beside the ruins of a spring-house, a gray bird with a tilting tail said, “Phœ, bee-bee, bee.” It was the little phœbe, so glad to be back that he stuttered when he called his name. Thereafter the Captain was moved to relate another anecdote. It seemed a friend of his had stopped a pair of robins from nesting over a hammock hung under an apple tree, by nailing a stuffed cat right beside their bough. Whereupon the two robins, when they came the next morning, fled with loud chirps of dismay. When two phœbes started to build on his porch, he tried the same plan. He was called out of town the next day, and when he came back a week later he found that the phœbes had deserted their old nest. They had however built a new one—on top of the cat’s head.
As the Band swung back into the far end of Roberts Road, the Captain’s eye caught the gleam of a half-healed notch which he had cut in a pin-oak sapling the year before, at the top of a high bank, to mark the winter-quarters of a colony of blacksnakes. He halted the Band, and one by one they clambered up the slope, stopping puffingly at the first ledge, and searching the withered grass and gray rocks above for any black, sinister shapes. Suddenly Honey did a remarkable performance in the standing-back-broad-jump, finishing by rolling clear to the foot of the bank. Right where he had stood lay a hale and hearty specimen of a blacksnake nearly five feet long. Evidently it had only just awakened from its winter-sleep, for there were clay-smears on the smooth, satiny scales, and even a patch of clay between the golden, unwinking eyes. Only the flickering of a long, black, forked tongue showed that his snakeship was alive. Then it was that the Captain lived up to the requirements of his position by picking up that blacksnake with what he fondly believed to be an air of unconcern. He showed the awe-stricken Band that the pupil of the snake’s eye was a circle, instead of the oval which is the hallmark of that fatal family of pit-vipers to which the rattlesnake, copperhead, and moccasin belong.
“If you have any doubt about a snake,” lectured the Captain, “pick it up and look it firmly in the eye. If the pupil is oval—drop it. Perhaps, however,” he went on reflectively, “it would be better to get someone else to do the picking-up part.”
When the Band learned from the Captain that it was the creditable custom of the Zoölogical Gardens to give free entry to such as bore with them as a gift a snake of size, their views toward the captive changed considerably. Said snake was now legal tender, to be cherished accordingly. It was the resourceful First Lieutenant Trottie who solved all difficulties in regard to transportation. He hurriedly removed a stocking, and the snake was inserted therein, giving the stocking that knobbed, lumpy appearance usually seen in such articles only at Christmas time.
