Again and again I had to rescue him from their fury, though he was the meekest crow I have ever seen, and they no longer had young to defend. Kingbirds go to bed at early dusk as a rule, but even after dark and long after I had put my foundling under shelter for the night, this pair could be heard swearing away to themselves up in the top of their apple tree, waiting for one more whack at him. Kingbirds leave us for the south about the first of September. I am quite sure this pair delayed their migration for some days that year, hating to give up their daily harrying of my ancient and toothless old crone of a crow.
He died, of old age no doubt, before the winter, seeming to fade gently away, as a patriarch should. When, about the fifth of May the next year, the kingbirds came back, they were noticed looking our back yard over very minutely several different times. They remembered the crow and were prepared to drive him over into the next country before they began their nesting.
The patriarch was so old he could not see when I found him. Box and Cox were so young when I lifted them from their nest that they had never seen. They had scarcely kicked their blue-green, brown-splashed eggshells overboard when I climbed to their great, strongly-built home in the upper limbs of a good-sized pine. It had a foundation of stout sticks topped with smaller ones, and within these a well-woven cup of slender twigs lined with grapevine bark and the soft fiber of the red cedar.
There were five young, hideous, negroid creatures with dark warts where eyes would be, and mouths that gaped portentously. Had I realized when I got them the amount of bird food those gaping mouths would engulf, and then opening, clamor for more, I would have left them to their parents. These had slipped silently away when I approached the nest, nor were they visible at all during the kidnapping. I take it that this desertion is prompted by wisdom, not cowardice or heartlessness, for crows are devoted parents and look after their young long after they have left the nest and after a period at which the devotion of other bird parents has ceased.
There was no choice among the five; all were equally ugly, and I took two at random and shinned down the tree with them in a bandanna handkerchief swung from my teeth. Seeing their young thus carried away in the teeth of a marauder, I dare say the old crows thought of me as I thought of their fellows that ate the young robins. But though I don’t doubt they saw from safe retreat all that went on, they took great care neither to be seen nor heard.
The two young birds accepted the featherless biped in loco parentis without any question. They also accepted all I would put into their yawning maws, and opened them mutely for more. By and by they found eyesight, and later voices. Then, not seeing food coming, they would call for it with yearning and yell for it with ebullient eagerness when they saw it, or me, or any other approaching biped. I don’t think the neighbors took kindly to this pair of pets of mine. It was too much like having a piano and an opera candidate in the next flat.
Sometimes their own weight a day went into these howling dervishes, in the form of fish, frogs, grasshoppers, meat, scraps from the table, any thing, indeed, that luck put in my way or that the ingenuity of desperation suggested, and still nightfall found them ravenously emulating Oliver Twist. But they grew, and grew so much alike that which was Box or which was Cox neither I nor anybody else could tell.
As their feathers sprouted so did their ambitions. In a little while they could stand on the edge of their nest, which I had built for them in the low limbs of a tree near the back door, and flap their impotent wings at the same time that they yelled for the waiter. Though I was their guardian angel it was not for me in particular that their clamor rent the sky, but any one who by any remote possibility might feed them.
Their first venture off the nest showed this. The new minister went through the yard, thus making a short cut to a neighborly call. By chance Box and Cox had been stuffed to repletion some minutes before and were silent, half asleep in fact. But when the new minister’s hat passed within two feet of their nest they rose to the occasion, and with one mutual crow-language yell of “Bread, for the Lord’s sake give us bread!” they landed on his hat. The family rescued him, of course, with humble apologies, and he was good enough not to take offence. He came later to call, generously, also I think somewhat stealthily, and by way of the front door.
Box and Cox had found their wings and they used them to hunt down all possible purveyors of food. They knew me best because I fed them oftenest, but otherwise showed neither partiality nor affection. They kept away from the carpenters at work in the near-by shop because they had many times narrowly missed decapitation with hatchets, but they kept just beyond hatchet stroke only and clamored tantalizingly. The carpenters thought they taunted them and used to threaten gun play.