We had settled on our toes in another squatting-place—a dark aisle with only scattered flecks of light. The silence and breathlessness of the moon-craters could have been no more complete than that which enveloped us. My eye wandered from spot to spot, when suddenly I began to think of that great owl-like goatsucker, the ‘poor-me-one.’ We had shot one at Kalacoon a month before and no others had called since, and I had not thought of the species again. Quite without reason I began to think of the bird, of its wonderful markings, of the eyes which years ago in Trinidad I had made to glow like iridescent globes in the light of a flash—and then a poor-me-one called behind us, not fifty feet away. Even this did not seem strange among these surroundings. It was an interesting happening, one which I have experienced many times in my life. It may have been just another coincidence. I am quite certain it was not. In any event it was a Dantesque touch, emphasized by the character of the call—the wail of a lost soul being as good a simile as any other. It started as a high, trembling wail, the final cry being lost in the depths of whispered woe:—
Oo——ooh!
oh!
oh!
oh!
oh!
oh!
Nupee never moved; only his lips formed the name by which he knew it—kalawoe. Whatever else characterized the sounds of the jungle at night, none became monotonous or common. Five minutes later the great bird called to us from far, far away, as if from another round of purgatory—an eerie lure to enter still deeper into the jungle depths. We never heard it again.
Nature seems to have apportioned the voices of many of her creatures with sensitive regard for their environment. Sombre voices seem fittingly to be associated with subdued light, and joyous notes with the blaze of sunlit twigs and open meadows. A bobolink’s bubbling carol is unthinkable in a jungle, and the strain of a wood pewee on a sunny hillside would be like an organ playing dance-music. This is even more pronounced in the tropics, where, quite aside from any mental association on my part, the voices and calls of the jungle reflect the qualities of that twilight world. The poor-me-one proves too much. He is the very essence of night, his wings edged with velvet silence, his plumage the mingled concentration of moss and lichens and dead wood.