Near him a spruce tree sprang out of the rocks and reached upward to a ledge far above. Slowly he raised himself against this, but turned to look at me again sitting quietly in his own path—that he could no longer consider his—and smiling at his discomfiture as I remember how ashamed he is to be outdone. Then an electric shock seemed to hoist him out of the trail. He shot up the tree in a succession of nervous, jerky jumps, rising with astonishing speed for so huge a creature, smashing the little branches, ripping the rough bark with his great claws, sending down a clattering shower of chips and dust behind him, till he reached the level of the ledge above and sprang out upon it; where he stopped and looked down to see what I would do next. And there he stayed, his great head hanging over the edge of the rock, looking at me intently till I rose and went quietly down the trail.
It was morning when I came back to the salmon pool. Unlike the mossy forest floor, the hard rock bore no signs to tell me—what I was most curious to know—whether he came down the tree or found some other way over the mountain. At the point where I had stood when his deep Hoowuff! first startled me I left a big salmon, for a taste of which any bear will go far out of his way. Next morning it was gone; and so it may be that Mooween, on his next journey, found another and a pleasanter surprise awaiting him at the turn of the trail.
Sometimes, at night, as you drift along the shore in your canoe, sifting the night sounds and smells of the wilderness, when all harsher cries are hushed and the silence grows tense and musical, like a great stretched chord over which the wind is thrumming low suggestive melodies, a sudden rush and flapping in the grasses beside you breaks noisily into the gamut of half-heard primary tones and rising, vanishing harmonics. Then, as you listen, and before the silence has again stretched the chords of her Eolian harp tight enough for the wind’s fingers, another sound, a cry, comes floating down from the air—Quoskh? quoskh-quoskh? a wild, questioning call, as if the startled night were asking who you are. It is only a blue heron, wakened out of his sleep on the shore by your noisy approach, that you thought was still as the night itself. He circles over your head for a moment, seeing you perfectly, though you catch never a shadow of his broad wings; then he vanishes into the vast, dark silence, crying Quoskh? quoskh? as he goes. And the cry, with its strange, wild interrogation vanishing away into the outer darkness, has given him his most fascinating Indian name, Quoskh the Night’s Question.
To many, indeed, even to some Indians, he has no other name and no definite presence. He rarely utters the cry by day—his voice then is a harsh croak—and you never see him as he utters it out of the solemn upper darkness; so that there is often a mystery about this voice of the night, which one never thinks of associating with the quiet, patient, long-legged fisherman that one may see any summer day along the borders of lonely lake or stream. A score of times I have been asked by old campers, “What is that?” as a sharp, questioning Quoskh-quoskh? seemed to tumble down into the sleeping lake. Yet they knew the great blue heron perfectly—or thought they did.
Quoskh has other names, however, which describe his attributes and doings. Sometimes, when fishing alongshore with my Indian at the paddle, the canoe would push its nose silently around a point, and I would see the heron’s heavy slanting flight already halfway up to the tree-tops, long before our coming had been suspected by the watchful little mother sheldrake, or even by the deer feeding close at hand among the lily pads. Then Simmo, who could never surprise one of the great birds however silently he paddled, would mutter something which sounded like Quoskh K’sobeqh, Quoskh the Keen Eyed. At other times, when we noticed him spearing frogs with his long bill, Simmo, who could not endure the sight of a frog’s leg on my fry pan, would speak of him disdainfully in his own musical language as Quoskh the Frog Eater, for my especial benefit. Again, if I stopped casting suddenly at the deep trout pool opposite a grassy shore, to follow with my eyes a tall, gray-blue shadow on stilts moving dimly alongshore in seven-league-boot strides for the next bog, where frogs were plenty, Simmo would point with his paddle and say: “See, Ol’ Fader Longlegs go catch-um more frogs for his babies. Funny kin’ babies dat, eat-um bullfrog; don’ chu tink so?”