The youth dropped his oar and leaned over to snatch up the prize. But he jumped back with alacrity as his father snapped: “Look out!”
“What for?” he demanded, rather sheepishly.
“Why,” replied the older man, “he’ll stick you like a pig with that knife beak of his’n, if ye don’t look sharp! Reach me yer jacket. We’ll wrap up his head till we kin get him clear o’ the net.”
The youth obeyed. Helplessly swathed in the heavy homespun jacket, whose strong man smell enraged and daunted him, the great bird was disentangled from the net and lifted into the boat. Laughingly the father passed the bundle along the gunwale to his son.
But swathing a powerful bird in a jacket is a more or less inexact undertaking, as many have found in experimenting with wounded hawks and eagles. By some lucky wriggle the loon got his head free. Instantly, with all the force of his powerful neck-muscles, he drove his beak half-way through the fleshy part of his old enemy’s arm. With a startled yell the lad dropped him. He bounded from the gunwale and rolled into the water. The man snatched at him and caught a flopping sleeve of the jacket. The jacket promptly and neatly unrolled, and the loon, diving deep, was out of sight in an eye-wink, leaving his would-be jailers to express themselves according to their mood. When he came to the surface for breath, he was a hundred yards away, and on the other side of the boat, and as he thrust little more than his beak and nostrils above water, he was not detected.
A few minutes more, and he was laughing derisively from the other side of the islet, swimming in safety with his mate and his two energetic chicks. Nevertheless, for all his triumph and the discomfiture of his foes, the grim experience had put him out of conceit with the lake. That same night, when the white moon rode high over the jagged spruce ridges, a hollow globe of enchantment, he led his little family straight up the river, mile after mile, till they reached another lake. It was a small lake, shut in by brooding hills, with iron shores, and few fish in its inhospitable waters, but it was remote from man and his works. So here the outraged bird was content to establish himself till the hour should return for migrants to fly south.
HOW A CAT PLAYED ROBINSON CRUSOE
The island was a mere sandbank off the low flat coast. Not a tree broke its bleak levels, not even a shrub. But the long, sparse, gritty stalks of the marsh-grass clothed it everywhere above tide-mark, and a tiny rivulet of sweet water, flowing from a spring at its centre, drew a riband of inland herbage and tenderer green across the harsh and sombre yellow-gray of the grass. One would not have chosen the island as an alluring place to set one’s habitation, yet at its seaward end, where the changing tides were never still, stood a spacious, one-storied, wide-verandahed cottage, with a low shed behind it. The one virtue that this lone plot of sea-rejected sand could boast was coolness. When the neighbor mainland would be sweltering, day and night alike, under a breathless heat, out here on the island there was always a cool wind blowing. Therefore a wise city dweller had appropriated the sea waif, and built his summer home thereon, where the tonic airs might bring back the rose to the pale cheeks of his children.
The family came to the island toward the end of June. In the first week of September they went away, leaving every door and window of house and shed securely shuttered, bolted or barred, against the winter’s storms. A roomy boat, rowed by two fishermen, carried them across the half mile of racing tides that separated them from the mainland. The elders of the household were not sorry to get back to the distractions of the world of men, after two months of the companionship of wind and sun and waves and waving grass-tops. But the children went with tear-stained faces. They were leaving behind them their household pet, the invariable comrade of their migrations, a handsome moon-faced cat, striped like a tiger. The animal had disappeared two days before, vanishing mysteriously from the naked face of the island. The only reasonable explanation seemed to be that she had been snapped up by a passing eagle.
The cat, meanwhile, was fast prisoner at the other end of the island, hidden beneath a broken barrel and some hundredweight of drifted sand.