Forest Neighbors: Life Stories of Wild Animals

by William Davenport Hulbert

In the course of his winter wanderings through the South he happened to alight one day on a certain wild pond down in Mississippi, and there he found another loon—a widow whose former husband had lost his life the previous summer under rather peculiar circumstances.

Beside a small lake in Minnesota there lives an old Dutchman who catches fish with empty bottles. On any calm, still day you may see a lot of them floating upright in the water, all tightly corked, and each with the end of a fishing-line tied around its neck. They seem very decorous and well-behaved, but let a fish take one of the hooks and begin to pull, and immediately that particular bottle turns wrong end up, and acts as if it had taken a drop too much of its own original contents. Then the Dutchman paddles out in his little scow, and perhaps by the time he has hauled in his fish and re-baited the hook another bottle is excitedly standing on its head. But never before nor since have any of them behaved as wildly as the one that a loon got hold of.

The loon—not Mahng, you understand, but the first husband of his new acquaintance—had dived in search of his dinner, and the first thing he saw that looked as if it might be good to eat was the bait on one of the Dutchman's hooks. He swallowed it, of course, and for the next five minutes he went charging up and down that pond at a great rate, followed by a green glass monster with the name of a millionnaire brewer blown in its side. Sometimes he was on the surface, and sometimes he was under it; but wherever he went that horrible thing was close behind him, pulling so hard that the sharp cord cut the corners of his mouth till it bled. Once or twice he tried to fly, but the line caught his wing and brought him down again. When he dived, it tangled itself around his legs and clogged the machinery; and when he tried to shout, the hook in his throat would not let him do anything more than cough. The Dutchman got him at last, and eventually Mahng got his widow, as you shall see.

She had her children to take care of, and for a time she was very busy, but after a few weeks they flew away to the south, as Mahng's had done, and she was free to go where she liked and do what she pleased. For a while she stayed where she was, like a sensible person. Minnesota suited her very well, and she was in no hurry to leave. But, of course, she could not stay on indefinitely, for some frosty night the lake would freeze over, and then she could neither dive for fish nor rise upon the wing. A loon on ice is about as helpless as an oyster. And so at last she, too, went south. She travelled by easy stages, and had a pleasant journey, with many a stop, and many a feast in the lakes and rivers along the route. I should like to know, just out of curiosity, how many fish found their way down her capacious gullet during that pilgrimage through Illinois and Kentucky and Tennessee.

Well, no matter about that. The Mississippi pond was in sight, and she was just slanting down toward the water, when a hunter fired at her from behind a clump of trees. His aim was all too true, and she fell headlong to the ground, with a broken wing dangling helplessly at her side.

Now, as you probably know, a loon isn't built for running. There is an old story, one which certainly has the appearance of truth, to the effect that when Nature manufactured the first of these birds she forgot to give him any legs at all, and that he had started off on the wing before she noticed her mistake. Then she picked up the first pair that came to hand and threw them after him. Unfortunately they were a misfit, and, what was, perhaps, still worse, they struck his body in the wrong place. They were so very short and so very far aft that, although he could stand nearly as straight as a man, it was almost impossible for him to move about on them. When he had to travel on land, which he always avoided as far as he could, he generally shoved himself along on his breast, and often used his wings and his bill to help himself forward. All his descendants are just like him, so you can see that the widow's chances were pretty small, with the hunter bursting out of the bushes, and a broad strip of beach between her and the friendly pond.

But she was a person of resource and energy, and in this great emergency she literally rose to the occasion, and did something that she had never done before in all her life, and probably will never do again. The astonished hunter saw her lift herself until she stood nearly upright, and then actually run across the beach toward the water. She was leaning forward a trifle, her long neck was stretched out, her two short legs were trotting as fast as they could go, and her one good wing was wildly waving in a frantic endeavor to get on. It was a sight that very few people have ever seen, and it would have been comical if it hadn't been a matter of life and death. The hunter was hard after her, and his legs were a yard long, while hers were only a few inches, so it was not surprising that he caught her just as she reached the margin. She wriggled out of his grasp and dashed on through the shallow water, and he followed close behind. In a moment he stooped and made another grab at her, and this time he got his arms around her body and pinned her wings down against her sides. But he had waded out a little too far, and had reached the place where the bottom suddenly shelves off from fifteen inches to seventy-two. His foot slipped, and in another moment he was splashing wildly about in the water, and the loon was free.

A broken wing is not necessarily as serious a matter as you might suppose. The cold water kept the inflammation down, and it seemed as if all the vital forces of her strong, healthy body set to work at once to repair the damage. If any comparative anatomist ever gets hold of the widow and dissects her, he will find a curious swelling in the principal bone of her left wing, like a plumber's join in a lead pipe, and he will know what it means. It is the place where Nature soldered the broken pieces together. And it was while Nature was engaged in this soldering operation that Mahng arrived and began to cultivate the widow's acquaintance.

"In the spring a fuller crimson
comes upon the robin's breast,"

and in the spring the loon puts on his wedding-garment, and his fancy, like the young man's, "lightly turns to thoughts of love."