Part 6 (2/2)
As I said, the time was near when the chick would strike out for himself. He soon left his mother, and a little later she too started for the Gulf of Mexico. Summer was over, and the Glimmergla.s.s was lonelier than ever.
Mahng came back next spring, and of course he brought a wife with him.
But was she the same wife who had helped him make the Glimmergla.s.s ring with his shouting twelve months before? Well, I--I don't quite know. She looked very much like her, and I certainly hope she was the same bird. I should like to believe that they had been reunited somewhere down in Texas or Mississippi or Louisiana, and that they had come back together for another season of parental cares and joys. But when I consider the difficulties in the way I cannot help feeling doubtful about it. The two birds had gone south at different times and perhaps by different routes.
Before they reached the lower Mississippi Valley they may have been hundreds of miles apart. Was it to be reasonably expected that Mahng, when he was ready to return, would search every pond and stream from the c.u.mberland to the Gulf? And is it likely that, even if he had tried for weeks and weeks, he could ever have found his wife of the previous summer? His flight was swift and his sight keen, and his clarion voice rang far and wide over the marshes; but it is no joke to find one particular bird in a region covering half a dozen States. If they had arranged to come north separately, and meet at the Glimmergla.s.s, there would not have been so many difficulties in the way, but they didn't do that. Anyhow, Mahng brought a wife home. That much, at least, is established. They set to work at once to build a nest and make ready for some new babies; but, alas! there was little parental happiness or responsibility in store for them that year.
If you had been there you might have seen them swimming out from sh.o.r.e one bright, beautiful spring morning, when the sun had just risen, and the woods and waters lay calm and peaceful in the golden light, fairer than words can tell. They were after their breakfast, and presently they dived to see what was to be had. The light is dim down there in the depths of the Glimmergla.s.s, the weeds are long and slimy, and the mud of the bottom is black and loathsome. But what does that matter? One can go back whenever one pleases. A few quick, powerful strokes will take you up into the open air, and you can see the woods and the sky. Aha!
There is a herring, his scales s.h.i.+ning like silver in the faint green light that comes down through the water. And there is a small salmon trout, with his gray-brown back and his golden sides. A fish for each of us.
The loons darted forward at full speed; but the two fish made no effort to escape, and did not even wriggle when the long, sharp bills closed upon them. They were dead, choked to death by the fine threads of a gill-net. And now those same threads laid hold of the loons themselves, and a fearful struggle began.
Mahng and his wife did not always keep their wings folded when they were under water. Sometimes they used them almost as they did in flying, and just now they had need of every muscle in their bodies. How their pinions lashed the water, and how their legs kicked and their long necks writhed, and how the soft mud rose in clouds and shut out the dim light!
But the harder they fought the more tightly did the net grapple them, winding itself round and round their bodies, and soon las.h.i.+ng their wings down against their sides. Expert divers though they were, the loons were drowning. There was a ringing in their ears and a roaring in their heads, and the very last atoms of oxygen in their lungs were almost gone. Death was drawing very near, and the bright, suns.h.i.+ny world where they had been so happy a moment before, the world to which they had thought they could return so quickly and easily, seemed a thousand miles away. One last effort, one final struggle, and if that failed there would be nothing more to do but go to sleep forever.
Fortunately for Mahng, his part of the net had been mildewed, and much of the strength had gone out of the linen threads. He was writhing and twisting with all his might, and suddenly he felt something give. One of the rotten meshes had torn apart. He worked with redoubled energy, and in a moment another thread gave way, and then another, and another. A second more and he was free. Quick, now, before the last spark goes out!
With beating wings and churning paddles he fairly flew up through the green water toward the light, and on a sudden he shot out into the air, panting and gasping, and staring wildly around at the blue sky, and the quiet woods, and the smiling Glimmergla.s.s. And how royally beautiful was the suns.h.i.+ne, and how sweet was the breath of life!
But his mate was not with him, and a few hours later the fisherman found in his net the lifeless body of a drowned loon.
Mahng went north. He had thought that his spring flight was over and that he would go no farther, but now the Glimmergla.s.s was no longer home, and he spread his wings once more and took his way toward the Arctic Circle. Over the hills, crowded with maple and beech and birch; over the Great Tahquamenon Swamp, with its cranberry marshes, its tangles of spruce and cedar, and its thin, scattered ranks of tamarack; over the sandy ridges where the pine-trees stand tall and stately, and out on Lake Superior. The water was blue, and the suns.h.i.+ne was bright; the wind was fresh and cool, and the billows rolled and tumbled as if they were alive and were having a good time together. Together--that's the word. They were together, but Mahng was alone; and he wasn't having a good time at all. He wanted a home, and a nest, and some young ones, but he didn't find them that year, though he went clear to Hudson Bay, and looked everywhere for a mate. There were loons, plenty of them, but they had already paired and set up housekeeping, and he found no one who was in a position to halve his sorrows and double his joys.
Something attracted his attention one afternoon when he was swimming on a little lake far up in the Canadian wilderness--a small red object that kept appearing and disappearing in a very mysterious fas.h.i.+on among the bushes that lined the beach. Mahng's b.u.mp of curiosity was large and well developed, and he gave one of his best laughs and paddled slowly in toward the sh.o.r.e. I think he had a faint and utterly unreasonable hope that it might prove to be what he was looking and longing for, though he knew very well that no female loon of his species ever had red feathers--nor a male, either, for that matter. It was a most absurd idea, and his dreams, if he really had them, were cut short by the report of a shotgun. A little cloud of smoke floated up through the bushes, and a charge of heavy shot peppered the water all around him.
But if Mahng was curious he was also quick to take a hint. He had heard the click of the gun-lock, and before the leaden hail could reach him he was under water. His tail feathers suffered a little, but otherwise he was uninjured, and he did not come to the surface again till he was far away from that deceitful red handkerchief.
The summer was an entire failure, and after a while Mahng gave it up in despair, and started south much earlier than usual. At the Straits of Mackinac he had another narrow escape, for he came very near killing himself by das.h.i.+ng head first against the lantern of a lighthouse, whose brilliant beams, a thousand times brighter than the light which had lured his first wife to her death, had first attracted and then dazzled and dazed him. Fortunately he swerved a trifle at the last moment, and though he brushed against an iron railing, lost his balance, and fell into the water, there were no bones broken and no serious damage done.
The southland, as everybody knows, is the only proper place for a loon courts.h.i.+p. There, I am pleased to say, Mahng found a new wife, and in due time he brought her up to the Glimmergla.s.s. That was only last spring, and there is but one more incident for me to relate. This summer has been a happy and prosperous one, but there was a time when it seemed likely to end in disaster before it had fairly begun.
Just northeast of the Glimmergla.s.s there lies a long, narrow, shallow pond. I believe I mentioned it when I was telling you about the Beaver.
One afternoon Mahng had flown across to this pond, and as he was swimming along close to the sh.o.r.e he put his foot into a beaver-trap, and sprung it. Of course he did his best to get away, but the only result of his struggling was to work the trap out into deeper and deeper water until he was almost submerged. He made things almost boil with the fierce beating of his wings, but it was no use; he might better have saved his strength. He quieted down at last and lay very still, with only his head and neck out of water, and there he waited two mortal hours for something to happen.
Meanwhile his wife sat quietly on her eggs--there were three of them this year--and drowsed away the warm spring afternoon. By and by she heard a tramping as of heavy feet approaching, and glancing between the tall gra.s.ses she saw, not a bear nor a deer, but something far worse--a man. She waited till he was within a few yards, and then she jumped up, scuttled down to the water as fast as she could go, and dived as if she was made of lead. The trapper glanced after her with a chuckle.
”Seems pretty badly scared,” he said to himself, but his voice was not unkindly. His smile faded as he stood a moment beside the nest, looking at the eggs, and thinking of what would some day come forth from them.
He was a solitary old fellow, with never a wife nor a child, nor a relation of any kind. His life in the woods was just what he had chosen for himself, and he would not have exchanged it for anything else in the world; but sometimes the loneliness of it came over him, and he wished that he had somebody to talk to. And now, looking at those eggs, and thinking of the fledglings that were coming to the loons, he wondered how it would seem if he had some children of his own. Pretty soon he glanced out on the lake again, and saw Mahng's wife sitting quietly on the water, just out of range.
”Hope she won't stay away till they get cold,” he thought, and went on his way across the swamp. The loon watched him till he pa.s.sed out of sight, and then she swam in to the beach and pushed herself up her narrow runway to her old place. The eggs were still warm.
Half an hour later the trapper stepped out of the bushes beside the pond, and caught sight of Mahng's head sticking out of the water. He was considerably astonished, but he promptly laid hold of the chain and drew bird, trap, and all up onto the bank, and then he sat down on a log and laughed till the echoes went flying back and forth across the pond.
Plastered with mud, dripping wet, and with his left leg fast in the big steel killing-machine, Mahng was certainly a comical sight. All the fight was soaked out of him, and he lay p.r.o.ne upon the ground and waited for the trapper to do what he pleased. But the trapper did nothing--only sat on his log, and presently forgot to laugh. He was thinking of the sitting loon whom he had disturbed a little while before. This was probably her mate, and again there came over him a vague feeling that life had been very good to these birds, and had given them something which he, the man, had missed. He was growing old. A few more seasons and there would be one trapper less in the Great Tahquamenon Swamp; and he would die without--well, what was the use of talking or thinking about it? But the loons would hatch their young, and care for them and protect them until they were ready to go out into the world, and then they would send them away to the south. A few weeks later they would follow, and next spring they would come back and do it all over again.
That is--they would if he didn't kill them.
He rose from his log, smiling again at the abject look with which Mahng watched him, and putting one foot on each of the two heavy steel springs, he threw his weight upon them and crushed them down. Mahng felt the jaws relax, and suddenly he knew that he was free. The strength came back with a rush to his weary limbs, and he sprang up, scrambled down the bank and into the water, and was gone. A few minutes later he reappeared far down the pond, and rising on the wing he flew away with a laugh toward the Glimmergla.s.s.
THE MAKING OF A GLIMMERGLa.s.s BUCK
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