Читать книгу: «Wild Folk», страница 4
As the partridge broke from the snow, his magnificent, iridescent, black-green ruff stood out a full three inches around his neck, and his strong wings began the whirring flight of his kind. The skunk shed his slowness like a mask and, with the lightning-like pounce of the weasel family, caught the escaping bird just back of the ruff and snapped his neck asunder. There was a tremendous fluttering and beating of brown mottled feathers against the white snow, and a minute later he was feeding full on the most delicious meat in the world.
Before he had finished, there came an interruption. Down from the top of the hill trotted another skunk, an oldtimer whose range marched next to that of the first. As the newcomer caught sight of the dead partridge, he hurried down to join in the feast. The other skunk stopped eating at the sight of this unbidden guest, and made a kind of chirring, complaining noise, with an occasional low growl. According to skunk-standards that was a tremendous exhibition of rage, but the second skunk came on unmoved. Under the Skunk Geneva Convention, the use of aerial bombs or any form of gas-attack against skunk-kind is barred. In a battle between skunk and skunk the fighters must depend upon tooth and claw. Accordingly, when the stranger sniffed approvingly at the half-eaten bird, he was promptly nipped by the owner of the same, just back of the forepaw. He, in turn, secured a grip on the first skunk’s neck, and in a moment the atmosphere was full of flying snow and whirling fur. The teeth of each fighter were so fine and their fur so thick, that neither one could do much damage to the other; but they fought and rolled and chirred and growled, until they looked like a great black-and-white pinwheel.
The contest caught the eyes of an old red fox, who was loping around a ten-mile circle in search of any little unconsidered trifle that might come his way. He was a seasoned old veteran and, unlike the novice of the day before, was well acquainted with skunk-ways. Not for any prize that the country round about held would he have attacked either one of that battling pair. His was a purely sporting interest in the fight, until he happened to catch a glimpse of the partridge half-covered by the loose snow. On the instant, he nobly resolved to play the peacemaker and remove the cause of all the trouble. Step by step, he stole up closer to the fighters, all set to turn and run for his life if either one of them saw him. At last he was poised and taut on his tiptoes not six feet from the prize. As an extra whirl of the contestants carried them to the farthest circumference of the circle of which the partridge was the centre, the fox started like a sprinter from his marks, and reached the grouse in one desperate bound.
Just at that instant a disengaged eye of the first of the skunks came to the surface, in time to see his grouse departing toward the horizon, slung over the shoulder of the fox, nearly as fast as if it had gone under its own wing-power. Instantly the skunk released his hold. His opponent did the same, and the two scrambled to their feet and for a long moment stood sombrely watching the vanishing partridge. Then, without a sound, they turned their backs on each other and trotted away in opposite directions.
A week later the thaw was over, and all that hill-country was once more in the grip of winter. When the temperature went down toward the zero-mark, the skunk went back to bed. Rolled up in a round ball of fur, with his warm tail wrapped about him like a fleecy coverlet, he slept out the cold in the midmost chamber of his den on a bed of soft, dry grass. At the first sign of spring he was out again, the latest to bed and the earliest to rise of all the Sleepers.
At last the green banners of spring were planted on all the hills. Underneath the dry leaves, close to the ground, the fragrant pink-and-white blossoms of the trailing arbutus showed here and there; while deeper in the woods leathery trefoil leaves, green above and dark violet beneath, vainly tried to hide the blue-and-white-porcelain petals of the hepatica. In bare spots the crowded tiny white blossoms of the saxifrage showed in the withered grass, and the bloodroot, with its golden heart and snowy, short-lived petals, and gnarled root which drips blood when broken. A little later the hillsides were blue with violets, and yellow with adder’s-tongue with its drooping blossoms and spotted fawn-colored leaves. Then came days of feasting, which made up for the long lean weeks that had gone before. There were droning, blundering June-bugs, crickets, grubs, grasshoppers, field-mice, snakes, strawberries, and so many other delicacies that the skunk’s walk was fast becoming a waddle.
It was on one of those late spring days that the Artist and the Skunk had their first and last meeting. Said artist was none other than Reginald De Haven, whose water-colors were world-famous. Reginald had a rosy face, and wore velvet knickerbockers and large chubby legs, and made the people of Cornwall suspect his sanity by frequently telescoping his hands to look at color-values. This spring he was boarding with old Mark Hurlbutt, over on Cream Hill. On the day of the meeting, he had been sketching down by Cream Pond and had taken a wood-road home. Where it entered one of Mark’s upper pastures, he saw a strange black-and-white animal moving leisurely toward him, and stood still lest he frighten it away. He might have spared his fears. The stranger moved toward him, silent, imperturbable, and with an assured air. As it came nearer, the artist was impressed with its color-scheme. The snowy stripe down the pointed black nose, the mass of white back of the black head, and, above all, the resplendent, waving pompon of a tail, made it a spectacular study in blacks and whites.
With tiny mincing steps the little animal came straight on toward him. It seemed so tame and unconcerned, that De Haven planned to catch it and carry it back to the farm wrapped up in his coat. As he took a step forward, the stranger seemed for the first time to notice him. It stopped and stamped with its forepaws, in what seemed to the artist a playful and attractive manner. This, if he had but known it, was signal number one of the prescribed three which a well-bred skunk always gives, if there be time, even to his bitterest enemies.
As De Haven moved toward the animal, he was again interested to see the latter hoist aloft the gorgeous black-and-white banner of its clan. Rushing on to his ruin, he went unregardingly past this second danger-signal. By this time, he was within six feet of the skunk, which had now come to a full stop and was watching him intently out of its deep-set eyes. As he approached still nearer, he noticed that the white tip of the tail, which heretofore had hung dangling, suddenly stiffened and waved erect. “Like a flag of truce,” he observed whimsically to himself. Never was there a more dreadful misapprehension. That raising of the white tail-tip is the skunk’s ultimate warning. After that, remains nothing but war and carnage and chaos.
If even then the artist had but stood stony still, there might have been room for repentance, for the skunk is long-suffering and loath to go into action. No country-bred guardian angel came to De Haven’s rescue. Stepping quickly forward, he stooped to seize the motionless animal. Even as he leaned forward, his fate overtook him. Swinging his plumed tail to one side, the skunk bent its back at the shoulders, and brought its secondary batteries into action. A puff of what seemed like vapor shot toward the unfortunate artist, and a second later he had an experience in atmospheric values which had never come into his sheltered life before. From the crown of his velour hat with the little plume at the side, down to his suede shoes, he was Maranatha and Anathema to the whole world, including himself. Coughing, sneezing, gasping, strangling, racked by nausea and wheezing for breath, his was the motto of the Restless Club: “Anywhere but here.” His last sight of the animal which had so influenced his life showed it demurely moving along the path from which it had never once swerved.
The wind was blowing toward the farmhouse, and although it was half a mile away, old Mark Hurlbutt soon had advance reports of the battle.
“A skunk b’gosh!” he remarked to himself, stopping on his way to the barn; “and an able-bodied one, too,” he continued, sniffing the breeze.
A minute later he saw someone running toward him, and recognized his boarder. Even as he saw him, a certain aura which hung about the approaching figure made plain to Mark what had happened.
“Hey! stop right where you be!” shouted the old man. “Another step an’ I’ll shoot,” he went on, aiming the shovel which he had in his hand directly at the distressed artist’s head, and trying not to breathe.
De Haven halted in his tracks.
“But – but – I require assistance,” he pleaded.
“You sure do,” agreed his landlord; “somethin’ tells me so. Hustle over back of the smoke-house and get your clothes off an’ I’ll join you in a minute.”
Mark hurried into the house, and was out again almost immediately with a large bottle of benzine, a wagon-sponge, a calico shirt, and a pair of overalls. As he came around the corner, the sight of the artist posing all pink and white against the smoke-house, with a pile of discarded clothes at his feet, was too much for the old man, and he cackled like a hen.
“Darned if you don’t look like one of them fauns you’re all the time paintin’,” he gasped.
“Shut up!” snapped the artist. “You fix me up right away, or I’ll put these clothes on again and walk through every room in your house.”
This threat brought immediate action, and a few moments later an expensive and artistic suit of clothes reposed in a lonely grave back of Mark’s smoke-house, where they remain even to this day. Thereafter the artist, scrubbed with benzine until he smelt like a garage, left Cornwall forever. He was wearing a mackintosh of his own. Everything else belonged to Mark.
“It’s lucky for you that he went when he did,” said old Hen Root the next evening, when the story was told at Silas Dean’s store at the Centre. “You’re gettin’ on, Mark,” he continued solemnly. “If he’d a’ stayed you might have got some kind of a stroke or other from over-laughin’ yourself. I didn’t dare to do any work for nigh a week after I first saw him telescopin’ round in them velvet short pants.”
“That’s right,” agreed Silas Dean heartily; “an’ you ain’t done any since – nor before,” he concluded, carefully closing the cracker-barrel next to Hen.
It was, perhaps, the meeting with an eminent artist that aroused a new ambition in the skunk’s mind. At any rate, from that day he began to haunt the farmyard. The first news that Mark had of his presence was when a motherly old hen, who had been sitting contentedly on twelve eggs for nearly a week, wandered around and around her empty nest clucking disconsolately. During the night some sly thief had slipped egg after egg out from under her brooding wings, so deftly that she never even clucked a protest. In the morning there were left only scattered egg-shells and a telltale track in the dust.
“Blamed old rascal,” roared Mark. “First he loses me a good boarder an’ now he’s ate up a full clutch of pedigree white Wyandotte eggs. I’m goin’ to shoot that skunk on sight.”
Mark was mistaken. Early the next morning he opened the spring-house to set in a pail of milk. There, right beside the magnificent spring which boiled and bubbled in the centre of the cement floor, a black-and-white stranger was contentedly drinking from a pan of milk that had been placed there to cool. As Mark opened the door, the skunk looked at him calmly, and then quietly raised the banner which had waved over many a bloodless victory. Whereupon the owner of the spring-house backed away, and waited until his visitor had finished his drink and disappeared in a patch of bushes back of the milk-house.
“What about all that talk of shootin’ that skunk at sight?” queried Jonas, the hired man, that evening at supper.
“The trouble was, Jonas,” returned Mark confidentially, “he got the drop on me. If I’d shot I’d of lost one spring, six gallons of milk, an’ a suit of clothes.”
“You men are a lot of cowards,” scolded his wife. “I’d of found some way to stop that skunk a-drinkin’ up a whole pan of good milk right in front of my eyes. He’d not bluff me.”
“Mirandy,” said Mark solemnly, “you take it from me that skunk ain’t no bluffer. If you don’t believe it, telegraph Mr. De Haven.”
In spite of her threat, it was Miranda herself who afterwards insisted that the skunk should continue to live on the farm without fear or reproach. Late one afternoon she had been coming down Pond Hill on a search for a new-born calf which, as usual, had been hidden by its mother somewhere in the thick woods. The path was sunken deep between banks covered with the yellow blossoms of the hardhack. At one spot, where the way widened into a rude road, a crooked green stem stretched out across the pathway, and from it swayed a great rose-red flower like some exquisite carved shell. It was the moccasin flower, the most beautiful of our early orchids. Miranda bent down to pick it with a little gasp of delight.
Suddenly, from just beyond, came a warning hiss, and in front of her reared the bloated swollen body of a fearsome snake. The reptile’s head was flattened out until it was half as wide as her hand, and it swelled and hissed rhythmically like the exhaust of a steam-pipe, and repeatedly struck out in her direction, the very embodiment of blind, venomous rage. Half paralyzed with fear, Miranda moved backward and began to wonder what she would do. Night was coming on, and if she went back over the hill, it would be dark before she could reach home. As for going around, no power on earth would have persuaded her to step into the thick bushes on either side of the path, convinced as she was that they must be swarming with snakes.
At this psychological moment, ambling unconcernedly up the path, came the same black-and-white beast about which she had spoken so bitterly the day before. As it caught sight of the snake coiling and rearing and hissing, the skunk’s gait quickened, and it approached the threatening figure with cheerful alacrity. The snake puffed and hissed and struck, but the skunk never even hesitated. Holding the reptile down with its slim paws it nibbled off the threatening head, neatly skinned the squirming body, and before Mrs. Hurlbutt’s delighted eyes ate it up. Then, without apparently noticing her at all, it went on up the hill until lost to sight among the hardhacks.
It would have been impossible to convince Miranda that the snake was nothing but a harmless puff-adder, and that, in spite of its bluffing ways, it had no fangs and never was known to bite. From that day on the skunk was envisaged in her mind as the guardian angel of the farm, and the edict went out that on no account was it to be molested. Not even when most of the bees from one of Mark’s cherished swarms disappeared into its leather-lined interior, would Miranda permit any adverse action.
“Some skunk that!” jeered Mark. “You let it get away with bees an’ boarders an’ milk an’ eggs, an’ never say a word. I wisht you cared as much for your husband.”
“I might, if he was as brave – an’ good-looking,” murmured Miranda.
It was the sweet influences of the month of June which settled the dispute. Jonas had been down in the sap-works, where the vast sugar-maples grew below the milk-house meadow. As he came back up the slope, the great golden moon of June was showing its rim over Pond Hill. Ahead of him he saw a familiar black-and-white shape moving toward the woods. Even as he watched, a procession came down to meet him. At its head marched another full-grown skunk, while back of her was a long winding procession of little skunks. One, two, three, four, five, six – Jonas counted them up to ten, and the last one of all was jet-black except for a tiny stripe of white on its muzzle. There was a long pause as the lone skunk met the band. Then suddenly he was at the head of it, and the long procession trailed contentedly after him. Separated from him by a winter and a spring, Mrs. Skunk had rejoined her mate, bringing her sheaves with her. Away from the tame folk to return no more, the wild folk moved on and on into the heart of the summer woods.
IV
HIGH SKY
“Clang! Clang! Clang!” – the sound drifted down from mid-sky, as if the ice-cold gates of winter were opening. A gaggle of Canada geese, wearing white bibs below their black heads and necks, came beating down the wind, shouting to earth as they flew. Below them, although it was still fall, the tan-colored marsh showed ash-gray stretches of new ice, with here and there blue patches of snow. Suddenly, faint and far sounded other notes, as of a distant horn, and a company of misty-white trumpeter swans swept along the sky, gleaming like silver in the sun. Down from the Arctic tundras they had come, where during the short summer their great nests had stood like watchtowers above the level sphagnum bogs; for the trumpeter swan, like the eagle, scorns to hide its nest and fears no foe of earth or air.
As their trumpet notes pealed across the marsh, they were answered everywhere by the confused cries and calls of innumerable waterfowl; for when the swan starts south, it is no time for lesser breeds to linger. Wisps of snipe and badlings of duck sprang into the air. The canvasback ducks, with their dark red heads and necks, grunted as they flew; the wings of the golden-eye whistled, the scaup purred, the black ducks, and the mallards with emerald-green heads, quacked, the pintails whimpered – the air was full of duck-notes. As they swept southward, the different families took their places according to their speed. Well up in the van were the canvasbacks, who can travel at the rate of one hundred and sixty feet per second. Next came the pintails, and the wood-ducks, whose drakes have wings of velvet-black, purple, and white. The mallards and the black ducks brought up the rear; while far behind a cloud of blue-winged teal whizzed down the sky, the lustrous light blue of their wings glinting like polished steel in the sunlight. Flying in perfect unison, the distance between them and the main flock rapidly lessened; for the blue-winged teal, when it settles down to fly, can tick off two miles a minute. A few yards back of their close cloud followed a single green-winged teal, a tiny drake with a chestnut-brown head brightly striped with green, who wore an emerald patch on either wing.
In a moment the blue-wings had passed the quacking mallards and black ducks as if they had been anchored in the sky. The whistlers and pintails were overtaken next, and then, more slowly, the little flock, flying in perfect form, began to cut down the lead of the canvasbacks in front. Little by little, the tiny teal edged up, in complete silence, to the whizzing, grunting leaders, until at last they were flying right abreast of them. At first slowly, and then more and more rapidly, they drew away, until a clear space of sky showed between the two flocks, including the green-winged follower. Then, for the first time, the blue-wings spoke, voicing their victory in soft, lisping notes, which were echoed by a mellow whistle from the green-wing.
The sound of his own voice seemed suddenly to remind the latter that he was one of the speed-kings of the sky. An inch shorter than his blue-winged brother, the green-winged teal is yet a hardier and a swifter bird. Unhampered by any flock-formation, the wing-beats of this lone flyer increased until he shot forward like a projectile. In a moment he was up to the leaders, then above them; and then, with a tremendous burst of speed, he passed and went slashing down the sky alone. Farther and farther in front flashed the little green-striped head, and more and more faintly his short whistles came back to the flock behind.
Perhaps it was his call, or it might have been the green gleam of his speeding head, that caught the attention of a sky-pirate hovering in a reach of sky far above. Like other pirates, this one wore a curling black moustache in the form of a black stripe around its beak which, with the long, rakish wings and hooked, toothed beak, marked it as the duck-hawk, one of the fiercest and swiftest of the falcons. As the hawk caught sight of the speeding little teal, his telescopic eyes gleamed like fire, and curving down through the sky, in a moment he was in its wake. Every feather of the little drake’s taut and tense body showed his speed, as he traveled at a two-mile-a-minute clip.
Not so with the lithe falcon who pursued him. The movements of his long, narrow wings and arrowy body were so effortless that it seemed impossible that he could overtake the other. Yet every wing-beat brought him nearer and nearer, in a flight so swift and silent that not until the shadow of death fell upon the teal did the latter even know that he was being pursued. Then, indeed, he squawked in mortal terror, and tried desperately to increase a speed which already seemed impossible. Yet ever the shadow hung over him like a black shroud, and then, in a flash, the little green-wing’s fate overtook him. Almost too quickly for eye to follow, the duck-hawk delivered the terrible slash with which falcons kill their prey, and in an instant the teal changed from a live, vibrant, arrow-swift bird to a limp mass of fluttering feathers, which dropped like a plummet through the air. With a rush, the duck-hawk swung down after his dead quarry, and catching it in his claws, swooped down to earth to feast full at his leisure.
Far, far above the lower reaches of the sky, where the cloud of waterfowl were flying, above rain and storm and snow, was a solitude entered by only a few of the sky-pilgrims. There, three miles high, were naked space and a curved sky that shone like a great blue sun. In the north a cluster of black dots showed against the blue. Swiftly they grew in size, until at last, under a sun far brighter than the one known to the earthbound, there flashed through the glittering air a flock of golden plover. They were still wearing their summer suits, with black breasts and sides, while every brown-black feather on back and crown was widely margined with pure gold. Before they reached Patagonia the black would be changed for gray; for the Arctic summer of the golden plover is so short that he must moult, and even do his courting, on the wing.
This company had nested up among the everlasting snows, and the mileage of their flight was to be measured by thousands instead of hundreds. To-day they were on their first lap of fifteen hundred miles to the shores of Nova Scotia. There they would rest before taking the Water Route which only kings of the air can follow. Straight across the storm-swept Atlantic and the treacherous Gulf of Mexico, two thousand four hundred miles, they would fly, on their way to their next stop on the pampas of the Argentine. Fainter-hearted flyers chose the circuitous Island Passage, across Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Antilles, to the northern shore of South America. The chuck-will’s-widow of the Gulf States, cuckoos from New England, gray-checked thrushes from Quebec, bank-swallows from Labrador, black-poll warblers from Alaska, and hosts and myriads of bobolinks from everywhere took the Bobolink Route from Florida to Cuba, and the seven hundred miles across the Gulf to South America.
Only a few of the highest-powered water-birds shared the Water Route with the plover. When this flock started, they had circled and wheeled and swooped in the wonderful evolutions of their kind, but had finally swung into their journey-gait – and when a plover settles down to straight flying, it would seem to be safe from anything slower than a bullet.
Far above the flock floated what seemed a fleck of white cloud blown up from the lower levels. As it drifted swiftly down toward the speeding plover, it grew into a great bird sparsely mottled with pearl-gray, whose pointed wings had a spread of nearly five feet. Driven down from Greenland by cold and famine, a white gyrfalcon was haunting these solitudes like some grim ghost of the upper sky. His fierce eyes were of a glittering black, as was the tip of his blue hooked beak.
As the plover whizzed southward on their way to Summer, some shadow of the coming of the falcon must have fallen upon them; for suddenly the whole flock broke and scattered through the sky, like a dropped handful of beads, each bird twisting and doubling through the air, yet still shooting ever southward at a speed which few other flyers could have equaled. Unluckily for the plover, the gyrfalcon is perhaps the fastest bird that flies, and moreover it has all of that mysterious gift of the falcon family of following automatically every double and twist and turn of any bird which it elects to pursue. This one chose his victim, and in a flash was following it through the sky. Here and there, back and forth, up and down, in dizzy circles and bewildering curves, the great hawk sped after the largest of the plover. As if driven in some invisible tandem, the white form of the falcon kept an exact distance from the plover, until at last the latter gave up circling and doubling for a stretch of straight flight. In an instant, the flashing white wings of the falcon were above it; there was the same arrowy pounce with which the lesser falcon had struck down the teal; and, a moment later, the gyrfalcon had caught the falling body, and was volplaning down to earth with the dead plover in its claws.
For a time after this tragedy the sky seemed empty, as the scattered plover passed out of sight, to come together as a flock many miles beyond. Then a multitude of tiny black specks showed for an instant in the blue. They seemed almost like motes in the sunlight, save that, instead of dancing up and down, they shot forward with an almost inconceivable swiftness. It was as if a stream of bullets had suddenly become visible. Immeasurably faster than any bird of even twice its size, a flock of ruby-throated humming-birds, the smallest birds in the world, sped unfalteringly toward the sunland of the South. Their buzzing flight had a dipping, rolling motion, as they disappeared in the distance on their way to the Gulf of Mexico, whose seven hundred miles of treacherous water they would cover without a rest.
As the setting sun approached the rim of the world, the lower clouds changed from banks of snow into masses of fuming gold, splashed and blotched with an intolerable crimson. Again the sky was full of birds. Those last of the day-flyers were the swallow-folk. White-bellied tree swallows; barn swallows, with long forked tails; cliff swallows, with cream-white foreheads; bank and rough-winged swallows, with brown backs – the air was full of their whirling, curving flight. With them went their big brothers, the purple martins, and the night hawks, with their white-barred wings, which at times, as they whirled downward, made a hollow twanging noise. With the flock, too, were the swifts, who sleep and nest in chimneys, and whose winter home no man yet has discovered.
As the turquoise of the curved sky deepened into sapphire, a shadowy figure came toward the circling, flashing throng of swifts and swallows. The newcomer’s great bare wings seemed made of sections of brown parchment jointed together unlike those of any bird. Nor did any bird ever wear soft brown fur frosted with silver, nor have wide flappy ears and a hobgoblin face. Miles above the ground this earth-born mammal was beating the birds in their own element. None of the swallows showed any alarm as the stranger overtook them, for they recognized him as the hoary bat, the largest of North American bats, who migrates with the swallows and, like them, feeds only on insects.
As the sun sank lower, the great company of the bird-folk swooped down toward the earth, for swallows, swifts, and martins are all day-flyers. Not so with the bat. In the fading light, he flew steadily southward alone – but not for long. Up from earth came again the great gyrfalcon, his fierce hunger unsatisfied with the few mouthfuls torn from the plover’s plump breast. As his fierce eyes caught sight of the flitting bat, his wings flashed through the air with the same speed that had overtaken the plover. No bird that flies could have kept ahead of the rush of the great hawk through the air.
A mammal, however, is farther along in the scale of life than a bird, and more efficient, even as a flyer. As the pricked-up ears of the bat caught the swish of the falcon’s wings, the beats of its own skin-covered pair increased, and the bird suddenly ceased to gain. Disdaining to double or zigzag, the great bat flew the straightaway race which the falcon loves, and which would have meant quick death to any bird who tried it. Skin, however, makes a better flying surface than feathers, and slowly but unmistakably the bat began to draw away from its pursuer. The gyrfalcon is the speed-king among birds, but the hoary bat is faster still. Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed before the hawk realized that he was being outflown. Increase his speed as he would, the bat, in an effortless nonchalant manner, moved farther away. When only a streak of silver sky, with a shoal of little violet clouds, was left of the daylight the gyrfalcon gave up the chase. As he swooped down to earth like a white meteor, the brown figure of the bat disappeared in the violet twilight, beating, beating his way south.
As the sky darkened to a peacock-blue, and a faint amber band in the west tried to bar the dark, suddenly the star-shine was full of soft pipings and chirpings. The night-flyers had begun their journey, and were calling back and forth heartening each other as they flew through the long dark hours. Against the golden disc of the rising moon a continuous procession of tiny black figures showed the whole sky to be full of these pilgrims from the north. The “chink, chink” of the bobolinks dropped through the stillness like silver coins; and from higher up came the “tsip, tsip, tsip” of the black-poll warblers, all the way from the Magdalen Islands. With them were a score or so of others of the great warbler family. Black-throated blues, Cape Mays, redstarts, golden-wings, yellow warblers, black-throated greens, magnolias, myrtles, and tiny parulas – myriads of this many-colored family were traveling together through the sky. With them went the vireos, the orioles, the tanagers, and four different kinds of thrushes, with a dozen or so other varieties of birds following.
