For a moment or two he paddled softly, recovering his breath and shaking the water from nostrils and eyes. He had an instant of apprehensiveness, lest the bear should turn upon him and attack him at a disadvantage; and by way of precaution he gave forth the most savage and piercing yell that his labouring lungs were capable of. But he saw at once that on this score he had nothing to fear. It was a well-frightened bear, there swimming frantically for the sandspit; while the dead salmon, quite forgotten, was drifting slowly away on the sullen current.
Barnes’s foot was hurting fiercely, but his heart was light. Swimming at leisure, so as to just keep head against the stream, he watched the bear scuttle out upon the sand. Once safe on dry land, the great beast turned and glanced back with a timid air to see what manner of being it was that had so astoundingly assailed him. Man he had seen before––but never man swimming like an otter; and the sight 210 was nothing to reassure him. One longing look he cast upon the salmon, now floating some distance away; but that, to his startled mind, was just a lure of this same terrifying and perfidious creature whose bright grey eyes were staring at him so steadily from the surface of the water. He turned quickly and made off into the woods, followed by a loud, daunting laugh which spurred his pace to a panicky gallop.
When he was gone, Barnes swam to the sandspit. There he wrung out his dripping clothes, and lay down in the hot sand to let the sun soak deep into his chilled veins.
The Nest of the Mallard
When the spring freshet went down, and the rushes sprang green all about the edges of the shallow, marshy lagoons, a pair of mallards took possession of a tiny, bushy island in the centre of the broadest pond. Moved by one of those inexplicable caprices which keep most of the wild kindreds from too perilous an enslavement to routine, this pair had been attracted by the vast, empty levels of marsh and mere, and had dropped out from the ranks of their northward-journeying comrades. Why should they beat on through the raw, blustering spring winds to Labrador, when here below them was such a nesting-place as they desired, with solitude and security and plenty. The flock went on, obeying an ancestral summons. With heads straight out before, and rigid, level necks––with web feet folded like fans and stretched straight out behind, rigid and level––they sped through the air on short, powerful, swift-beating wings at the rate of sixty or seventy 212 miles an hour. Their flight, indeed, and their terrific speed were not unlike those of some strange missile. The pair who had dropped behind paid no heed to their going; and in two minutes they had faded out against the pale saffron morning sky.
These two were the only mallards in this whole wide expanse of grass and water. Other kinds of ducks there were, in plenty, but the mallards at this season kept to themselves. The little island which they selected for their peculiar domain was so small that no other mating couples intruded upon its privacy. It was only about ten feet across; but it bore a favourable thicket of osier-willow, and all around it the sedge and bulrush reared an impenetrable screen. Its highest point was about two feet above average water level; and on this highest point the mallard duck established her nest.
The nest was a mere shallow pile of dead leaves and twigs and dry sedges, scraped carelessly together. But the inside was not careless. It was a round smooth hollow, most softly lined with down from the duck’s own breast. When the first pale, greenish-tinted egg was laid in the nest, there was only a little of this down; but the delicate and warm lining accumulated as the pale green eggs increased in number.
In the construction of the nest and the accumulation of the eggs no interest whatever was displayed by the splendid drake. He never, unless by chance, 213 went near it. But as a lover the lordly fellow was most gallant and ardent. While his mate was on the nest laying, he was usually to be seen floating on the open mere beyond the reed-fringe, pruning his plumage in the cold pink rays of the first of the sunrise.