Of all his names—and there were many more that I picked up from watching him in a summer’s outing—“Old Father Longlegs” seemed always the most appropriate. There is a suggestion of hoary antiquity about this solemn wader of our lakes and streams. Indeed, of all birds he is the nearest to those ancient, uncouth monsters which Nature made to people our earth in its uncouth infancy. Other herons and bitterns have grown smaller and more graceful, with shorter legs and necks, to suit our diminishing rivers and our changed landscape. Quoskh is also, undoubtedly, much smaller than he once was; but still his legs and neck are disproportionately long, when one thinks of the waters he wades and the nest he builds; and the tracks he leaves in the mud are startlingly like those fossilized footprints of giant birds that one finds in the rocks of the Pliocene era, deep under the earth’s surface, to tell what sort of creatures lived in the vast solitudes before man came to replenish the earth and subdue it.
Closely associated with this suggestion of antiquity in Quoskh’s demeanor is the opposite suggestion of perpetual youth which he carries with him. Age has no apparent effect on him whatsoever. He is as old and young as the earth itself is; he is a March day, with winter and spring in its sunset and sunrise. Who ever saw a blue heron with his jewel eye dimmed or his natural force abated? Who ever caught one sleeping, or saw him tottering weakly on his long legs, as one so often sees our common wild birds clinging feebly to a branch with their last grip? A Cape Cod sailor once told me that, far out from land, his schooner had passed a blue heron lying dead on the sea with outstretched wings. That is the only heron that I have ever heard of who was found without all his wits about him. Possibly, if Quoskh ever dies, it may suggest a solution to the question of what becomes of him. With his last strength he may fly boldly out to explore that great ocean mystery, along the borders of which his ancestors for untold centuries lived and moved, back and forth, back and forth, on their endless, unnecessary migrations, restless, unsatisfied, wandering, as if the voice of the sea were calling them whither they dared not follow.
Just behind my tent on the big lake, one summer, a faint, woodsy little trail wandered away into the woods, with endless turnings and twistings, and without the faintest indication anywhere, till you reached the very end, whither it intended going. This little trail was always full of interesting surprises. Red squirrels peeked down at you over the edge of a limb, chattering volubly and getting into endless mischief along its borders. Moose birds flitted silently over it on their mysterious errands. Now a jumping, smashing, crackling rush through the underbrush halts you suddenly, with quick beating heart, as you climb over one of the many windfalls across your path. A white flag followed by another little one, flashing, rising, sinking and rising again over the fallen timber, tells you that a doe and her fawn were lying behind the windfall, all unconscious of your quiet approach. Again, at a turn of the trail, something dark, gray, massive looms before you, blocking the faint path; and as you stop short and shrink behind the nearest tree, a huge head and antlers swing toward you, with widespread nostrils and keen, dilating eyes, and ears like two trumpets pointing straight at your head—a bull moose, sh!
For a long two minutes he stands there motionless, watching the new creature that he has never seen before; and it will be well for you to keep perfectly quiet and let him surrender the path when he is so disposed. Motion on your part may bring him nearer to investigate; and you can never know at what slight provocation the red danger light will blaze into his eyes. At last he moves away, quietly at first, turning often to look and to make trumpets of his ears at you. Then he lays his great antlers back on his shoulders, sticks his nose far up ahead of him, and with long, smooth strides lunges away over the windfalls and is gone.
So every day the little trail had some new surprise for you,—owl, or hare, or prickly porcupine rattling his quills, like a quiver of arrows, and proclaiming his Indian name, Unk-wunk! Unk-wunk! as he loafed along. When you had followed far, and were sure that the loitering trail had certainly lost itself, it crept at last under a dark hemlock; and there, through an oval frame of rustling, whispering green, was the loneliest, loveliest little deer-haunted beaver pond in the world, where Quoskh lived with his mate and his little ones.
The first time I came down the trail and peeked through the oval frame of bushes, I saw him; and the very first glimpse made me jump at the thought of what a wonderful discovery I had made, namely, that little herons play with dolls, as children do. But I was mistaken. Quoskh had been catching frogs and hiding them, one by one, as I came along. He heard me before I knew he was there, and jumped for his last frog, a big fat one, with which he slanted up heavily on broad vans—with a hump on his back and a crook in his neck and his long legs trailing below and behind—towards his nest in the hemlock, beyond the beaver pond. When I saw him plainly he was just crossing the oval frame through which I looked. He had gripped the frog across the middle in his long beak, much as one would hold it with a pair of blunt shears, swelling it out at either side, like a string tied tight about a pillow. The head and short arms were forced up at one side, the limp legs dangled down on the other, looking for all the world like a stuffed rag doll that Quoskh was carrying home for his babies to play with.
Undoubtedly they liked the frog much better; but my curious thought about them, in that brief romantic instant, gave me an interest in the little fellows which was not satisfied till I climbed to the nest, long afterwards, and saw them, and how they lived.
When I took to studying Quoskh, so as to know him more intimately, I found a fascinating subject; not simply because of his queer ways, but also because of his extreme wariness and the difficulties I met in catching him doing things. Quoskh K’sobeqh was the name that at first seemed most appropriate, till I had learned his habits and how best to get the weather of him—which happened only two or three times in the course of a whole summer.
One morning I went early to the beaver pond and sat down against a gray stump on the shore, with berry bushes growing to my shoulders all about me. “Now I shall keep still and see everything that comes,” I thought, “and nothing, not even a blue jay, will see me.”