He lifted his feathery horns angrily at the remembrance. “The blue terror caught sight of me as I looked forth from the beautiful dark home in the dead oak tree which I have selected for thee, my beloved. It was just as the gaudy daylight was giving way to the pleasing blackness of night that I came forth, thinking all the little day flyers would have been asleep, but a belated bluejay saw me and, with lifted crest and shrill voice, raised the hue and cry. The robin left his mud daubed nest in the orchard across the road, the titmouse from his home in the knot hole of the rail fence, the nuthatch, the butcher bird and hosts of others all came, with piercing scoldings, sharp pecks and fluttering wings. I might have gone back into the darkness of our new home and so saved myself further annoyance, but, light of the world,” as he rolled his eyes fondly toward her, “I wanted not the blue terror to know where thou wouldst lay thine eggs—he is an egg thief, himself, thou knowest—so I sailed away into the open, and, O, the clamor they raised. And see,” showing two or three broken feathers, “what the bold blue terror has done, the strong voiced and strong winged bluejay.”
“How I wish I had been there,” muttered the lady owl vengefully through her clenched beak. “I would have torn his blue crest from his wicked little head.”
“And I would have taken his head along with it, at least as far as that black necklace of which he is so proud, if he had but given me the chance,” laughed the owl grimly. “It’s my usual way, only there were so many of the light, active little things that when I turned toward one another would come at me from the other side, so that my only safety from annoyance—for that was all they could do—was in my swift and silent wings.
“It seemed,” he went on, his great eyes blazing at the recollection, “as if all the birds in the woods joined the mob, friend and foe flying wing to wing, the most innocent seed bird and the bloodiest thief fighting side by side, and I had to buffet them with wing and claw, though they kept beyond reach of my beak,” he added proudly, and he passed his great feather-clad claw caressingly down his polished black beak, curved like a scimitar, and as strong and sharp.
“Thou knowest, my beautiful one,” he continued, “how the bluejay and the woodpecker fight one another, but tonight they joined forces as if they had been friends from the dawning of creation; and when the butcher bird cried out, ‘He ate three of my children yesterday,’ the titmouse—forgetting the thorn on which that same butcher bird impaled her first husband in the early summer—replied in fullest sympathy, ‘And he stole one of my lovely eggs only a week ago,’ and then she screamed with all her tiny might and flew at my head as boldly as if she had been an eagle. The little pests!”
“Never mind, my hero,” murmured the lady owl as fondly as a coo dove, “a man has his mosquitoes, a dog has his fleas, there is a horsefly for the horse, and these little birds are our mosquitoes, our fleas and our flies. Who-who-who,” she stammered in her rhetorical flight; “who has not his troubles in this world?”
“Who-who-who,” echoed the owl.
S. E. McKee.
TO A NUTHATCH.
Shrewd little hunter of woods all gray,