strike the flock at one blow, and they whirred into the dense green of some tender, motherly firs, whose arms closed about them and hid them from all rude intrusion. These birds are smaller than the ruffed grouse, though they are plump and beautiful creatures, and, because they feed on the spruce tips, are said to have flesh too strongly spiced to be palatable. I am glad of that. After the friendly way in which they received me into their community, to shoot and eat them would be a good deal like going out and bagging the neighborhood children on their way to primary school.
You soon get to feel that way about the deer up here in the Macwahoc woods. All along the lumber roads you may see their tracks, their keen hoofs cutting pointed marks in the soft mold of the wayside. If you have come silently and the wind is right you may swing a curve and be in time to hear a buck stamp and blow before he sees you and flips his flag and bounds off into the brush. Or you may see a slender doe pirouette like a ballet-dancing wood nymph and float away, with a stiff-legged, dappled fawn prancing after.
The creatures of the wilderness, when startled, seem to have a singular scorn of earth. You hardly note that they spurn it from beneath them as they depart. The coyote and jack-rabbit of the western plains do not seem to run; they simply float over the sage-brush, to your following vision much as a hawk does, only far swifter. So I have seen a fox sail along, seemingly about three feet in the air all the time, over a Massachusetts pasture. It is amazingly like flight. A startled Macwahoc deer in the same way seems to unconsciously acquire the true principle of the aeroplane.
In among the hackmatacks and arbor vitæ in the lower land the golden-winged woodpeckers are gathering in numbers in preparation for their fall migration southward. You may hear the vigorous note of the approaching single bird as he stops for a moment on a spruce top. “Kee-yer, kee-yer, kee-yer,” he shouts, with the accent on the yer. It has all the loud nasal twang of the stage Yankee, and the bird is as ludicrously awkward in his ways, sometimes.
If you step softly through the swamp you may find a group of them going through a grotesque dance, seemingly for their own amusement. They spread their tails stiffly, walk along limbs with mincingly awkward gait, and bob and bow to one another, saying, meanwhile, “Wee tew, wee tew, wee tew.” It is an amusing performance, and is apt to be interrupted by your guffaw of laughter, at which, whirls of white, gold, and black, with a dash of red, they fly away to repeat the performance in some undiscovered retreat.
The flicker, which is another of the fifty-seven varieties of alias under which the golden-winged woodpecker sometimes travels, is, I believe, the most brainy of the woodpecker tribe. Having brains he has also humor, and from the time he takes his first flight from the high hole in some woodland stub till pigeon hawk or barred owl cuts short his flickering, he is making a joke of things.
Like the flickers, the crows of northern Maine migrate southward in winter. The deep, long-remaining snows cover their sources of food too deep, and they find the clam flats of the coast a sure refuge and a well-stocked larder. Just now they are waxing fat on grasshoppers, marching in long lines across the open fields, lines from which no careless hopper may escape, and croaking contentment as they go.
They will stay until the snows drive them, however, and even in winter an occasional scout makes a quick flight north just to see how the land lies. It is but a half-day’s trip up and back. I wish I might, too, be able to reach the land of the mother firs as easily when I feel the need of them. However, the aeroplane is in the incubator, and, unless the Wrights go wrong, perhaps next year or the year after I shall.