If, impatient of a host of inarticulate instructors, we prefer communing with our kind and falling back on human story, some of that, too, is at hand. Half a century ago, to a year, a short string of forlorn and forlorn-looking people crossed the prairie close by, from west to east, from the Colorado to the Brazos. The head of it was Sam Houston's "army," three or four hundred strong, with all its matériel in one wagon. The rest consisted of the débris of all the Anglo-American settlements, women, children, cows, and what poor household stuff could be moved. Slowly ferrying the Brazos, and as slowly making its way down the left bank, picking up as it went the rest of the homesteads and some more fighting-men, it turned to the right at the head of the estuary. Then the little column, strengthened with some sea-borne supplies and relieved of its wards, turned to face its pursuers. These were twice its numbers, with four or five thousand reserves some days behind. Generalship was given the go-by on both sides, the cul-de-sac of San Jacinto being closed at both ends. Thirty minutes of noise and smoke, and the empire of Cortez and Montezuma was split in two. Clio nibbed another quill, steel pens not having then been invented. The gray geese who might have supplied it recomposed themselves on the prairie, and all the rest of their feathered friends followed their example, as the military interlude melted away and left them their ancient solitary reign.
Of the feathered spectators of the scene we have episodically glanced at, the most interested were those constant supervisors, the vultures. Of these there are three species, one of which—the Mexican vulture—is but an occasional visitor. The other two—the black vulture and the turkey-buzzard—are monopolists in their peculiar line. They constitute here, as generally throughout the warmer parts of the continent and its islands, the recognized sanitary police. No law protects them, but they do not need it. They are too useful not to command that popular sympathy which is the higher law. The flocks and herds upon a thousand plains are theirs. Every norther that freezes and every drought that starves some of the wandering cattle and sheep brings to them provision. The railroads also, not less than the winds of heaven, are their friends, the fatal cow-catcher being an ever-busy caterer. The buzzards are, of course, under such circumstances, warm advocates of internal improvement and welcome the opening of every new railway. Their ardor in this respect, however, has of late years been damped by the building of wire fences along the track, an interference with vested rights and an assault upon the hoary claims of infant industries against which in their solemn assemblies they doubtless often condole with each other. Unfortunately for their cause, they cannot lobby.
Somehow, there seems to be always a wag or clown among each group of animals,—some one species in which the amusing or the grotesque is prominent. Among these clownish fellows I should class the black vulture, or john-crow. He is not a crow at all, but gets that name probably because so historic a tribe as Corvus must have some representative, and the real crow, so common at the North, is one of the few birds that are not much seen in this quarter. John unites in his ways at once fuss and business. He alternates oddly between bustle and gravity. Seated stately and motionless for hours on a leafless tree, he will suddenly, as if struck by a new idea, start off on a tour that might have been dictated by telegram. He does not sail and circle like his friend and comrade, never being distracted by soaring pretensions, but goes straight to his object. His flight is a regular succession of short flaps, with quiescent intervals between the series. The flaps are usually four, sometimes five or six. I am sure he counts them. You have seen a pursy gentleman in black hurrying along the street and tapping his boot with a cane, as though keeping time. Fancy this gentleman in the air, dressed in feathers, his coat-skirt sheared off alarmingly short and square, and looking like a cherub in jet, all head and wings,—although John is not exactly a cherub in his habits. A white spot on each wing adds a bit of the harlequin to his style.
Were I to seek a "funny man" among the quadrupeds, I should name another dweller of the Southwestern prairies, the jack-rabbit,—John II. let us call him. Nobody ever gets quite accustomed to the preternatural ears of this hare. In proportion they are to those of others of the Leporidæ nearly what the ears of the mule are to those of the horse. When this bit of bad drawing, as big as a fawn and weighing ten pounds or so, jumps up before you and bounds away at railroad speed, he makes you rub your eyes. You expect the apparition to disappear like other apparitions, especially as it moves off with vast rapidity. But it does not. As suddenly as it started it is transformed into a prong like an immense letter V, projecting in perfect stillness from the grass a hundred yards off. You advance, and the same proceeding is repeated. Jack is obviously deep in guns, and knows the difference in power between a muzzle- and a breech-loader, if he has not ascertained, indeed, what number shot you have in your cartridge. He varies his distance according to these contingencies. Only, he has not as yet learned to gauge the greyhound: that dog is frequently kept for his benefit.
A special endowment of this immediate locality is a large and permanent sheet of water, three or four miles by one, which bears, and deserves, the name of Eagle Lake. For, though overhung by no cliffs or lofty pines, it is far more the haunt of eagles, of both the bald and the gray species, than most tarns possessing those appendages of the romantic. Its dense fringe of fine trees, among them live-oaks a single one of which would make the fortune of an average city park, can well spare the Conifers. They are all hung with Spanish moss, a feature which conflicts with the impression of lack of moisture conveyed by the light ashen color of the bark and short annual growth of many of the smaller trees. Here and there tiny inlets are overhung with undergrowth which supplies a safe nesting-place to a multitude of birds of many kinds. The surface of the lake I have never seen free from ducks of one species or another, and generally of half a dozen. Almost the whole family, if we except the canvas-back and the red-head, visit it at one or another period. One item in their bill of fare is the nut of the water-lily, the receptacles of which, resembling the rose of a watering-pot, dot the shallows in great quantity. The green, cable-like roots of this plant are afloat, forming at some points heavy windrows. Some say they are torn up from the bottom by the alligators; but it is more probable that they are loosened and broken by the continual tugging of the divers. The alligators are not vegetarians, and they are not using their snouts much at this season. The young shoots of the Nymphæa are doubtless tempting food, as those of the Vallisneria are on the Chesapeake and the North Carolina sounds. Sustenance may be drawn also from the roots of the rushes and reeds which cover with their yellow stems and leaves many acres of the lake, and are thronged now by several species of small birds.
Hawks, of course, are always in sight, and that in astonishing variety, from the osprey down to two or three varieties of the sparrow-hawk. A monograph on the Raptores of Eagle Lake would be a most comprehensive work. The osprey, notwithstanding the abundance of his scaly prey, is not common: probably the field is too limited for him. Ducks are the attraction of the other large species. In summer, ducks are rather secondary among the water-birds, the ibis, water-turkey, and flamingo imparting a tropical character to the scene that somewhat obscures the more familiar forms. There is even a survival here of birds that have nearly disappeared from the American fauna,—the paroquet, once so common in the Mississippi Valley as far north as the Ohio, being sometimes seen, and, if I mistake not, a second species of humming-bird straying north by way of Mexico.
From where we stand, under a canopy of rich green leaves, looking out upon the sunny water through a banian-like colonnade of mighty trunks and hanging vines, the pearly moss tempering the light like jalousies, summer seems but a relative idea. Fly-catchers flit back and forth, barn-swallows and sand-martins skim the lake, and an occasional splash or ripple at our feet shows that humbler life is getting astir. The highest life, or what modest man calls such, we have all to ourselves. Yet not quite; for there is visible yonder, beneath the outer tip of a live-oak which we have found to stretch and droop twenty-four paces from the seven-foot trunk, a little fleet of canoes. They belong to the professional fisherman whose too tarry nets are quite an encumbrance for some yards of the sandy beach, and whose well may be noticed about a rifle-shot out from the shore. More than that, though Piscator is absent, some one is inspecting his boats. In fact,—and it is simple fact, and I am not smuggling in a bit of padding in the shape of sentiment,—two persons become perceptible, both with their backs towards us, now and studiedly all the time. One, a man, chooses a boat after trying several, and, with similar show of unavoidable delay, is cushioning the seats with carefully-arranged moss in four times the necessary quantity. During this absorbing process he rips one of his cuffs, or tears off a button from it, or smears it with the tar that besets the boat and its oars. This calamity supplies the lady, a neat young person, with a pretext for occupation, and she uses it to the fullest and most affectionate extent. It is growing late, and unless we relieve the couple of our obviously detected presence we shall deprive them of their Sunday-afternoon row. That it is a row with the stream we find ten days later, when their wedding becomes the sensation of the little village.
The old, old story! how pat it comes in! How could it have failed to come in, when the talk is of birds?
Edward C. Bruce.