Everyday Adventures

by Samuel Scoville

I hurried, for angels flying or sitting are rarely scored on my bird-lists. When I reached the room, Henny-Penny had burrowed so far under the bedclothes that it seemed doubtful if he would ever reach the surface again. When I switched on the light, at first I could see nothing, and I began to be afraid that the “nangel” had escaped through the open window. Finally on the picture-moulding I spied the celestial visitor. It was a screech owl of the red phase,—they may be either red or gray,—and when I came near it snapped its beak fiercely, to the terror of the Sergeant under the clothes. With a quick jump I managed to catch it. At first it puffed up its feathers and pretended to be very fierce, but at last it snuggled into my hand and was with difficulty persuaded to fly out again into the cold night.

NO ADMITTANCE Per Order, Mr. SCREECH OWL

Another singer of the night is of course the whip-poor-will. When I lived farther out in the country than I do now, for two successive years I was awakened at two o’clock in the morning by a whip-poor-will passing north and singing in the nearby woods. The third year he broke all records by alighting on my lawn at sunset in late April. There, under a pink dogwood tree which stood like a statue of spring, he sang for ten minutes. Only once before have I ever heard a whip-poor-will sing in the daylight. Once at high noon in the pine-barrens, one burst out so loud and ringingly that the pine warbler stopped his trilling and the prairie warbler his seven wire-thin notes which run up the scale. It was as uncanny as when the Lone Wolf gave tongue to the midnight hunting chorus for Mowgli, at the edge of the jungle by day.

Now, when I live nearer civilization, and alas! farther from the birds, I have to travel far to hear whip-poor-wills. One hour and eleven minutes from my office in time, thirty-seven miles in space, but a whole life away in peace and happiness and rest, I have a little cabin in the heart of the barrens. There in spring I sleep swinging in a hammock above a great bush of mountain-laurel, ghost-white against the smoky water of the stream.

Below me in the marsh, where the pitcher-plants bloom among the sweet pepper and blueberry bushes, is a pitch-pine sapling bent almost into a circle. Sometimes my friends cut exploration paths through the bush or, in the winter, search for firewood, but no one is ever allowed to touch that bent tree. There some spring night, as a little breeze, heavy with the scent of white azalea and creamy magnolia blossoms, sways me back and forth, from the bent tree showing dimly in the moonlight through the tree-trunks, the whip-poor-will perches himself, lengthwise always, and sings and sings. Through the dark rings his hurried stressed song, with the accent heavy on the first syllable. The singer is always afraid that some one may stop him before he finishes, and he hurries and hurries with a little click between the triads. At exactly eight o’clock, and again at just two in the morning, he sings there. Up in the mountains, where we once found the whip-poor-will’s two lustrous eggs lying like great spotted pearls on a naked bed of leaves, he sings at eight, at ten, and at three. Some people dislike the song. To me the wild lonely voice of the unseen singer pealing out in the dark has a strange fascination.

There are certain bird-notes that strike strange chords whose vibrations are lost in a mist of dreams. I remember a little runaway boy, who stood in a clover field in a gray twilight and heard the clanging calls of wild geese shouting down from mid-sky. Frightened, he ran home a vast distance—at least the width of two fields. As he ran, there seemed to come back to him the memory of a forgotten dream, if it were a dream, in which he lay in another land, on a chill hillside. Overhead in the darkness passed a burst of triumphant music, and the strong singing of voices not of this earth. From that day the trumpet-notes of the wild geese bring back through the fog of the drifting years that same dream to him who heard them first in that far-away, long-ago clover field. A few years ago there was a night of April storm. Until midnight the house creaked and rattled and clattered under a screaming gale. Then the wind died down, and a dense fog covered the streets of the little town. Suddenly overhead sounded the clang and clamor of a lost flock of geese that circled and quartered over the house back and forth through the mist. That night the dream came back so vividly that, even after the dreamer awoke, he seemed to feel the cold dew of that hillside and hear an echo of the singing voices.

It was only a few months ago that this same dreamer found himself on the shore of Delaware Bay, with the three friends who had gone adventuring with him for so many happy years. In the middle of a maze of woods and swamps shrouded in clouds of low-lying mist, they found at last the nest of the bald eagle for which they were searching. It was in the top of a towering sour-gum tree, and the great birds circled around, giving futile little cries that sounded like the squeaking of a slate pencil. As it was too misty to photograph the nest and the birds, the party started off exploring until the light became better.

Following the song of a fox sparrow, the dreamer became separated from the others in the mist, and after plashing through half-frozen morasses, found himself on the barren shore of the bay itself. As he stood there, with the white mist curling around him like smoke, from the sea came a clamor of voices. Nearer and nearer it swept, until a wild trumpeting sounded not thirty feet above his head. Around and around the clanging chorus swept, while, stare as he would, he could not spy even a feather of the flock so close above him. At the sound the years rolled back. Once again he was in the clover field in the gray twilight. Once again, on a far-away hillside, he heard that other chorus of his dreams. For a moment, in the lonely mist by the sea, he had a strange illusion that the life of which that cold hillside was a memory was the reality, and the present the dream.