Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/33

Rh shimmered up from the surface. An intake crib for the city's water supply, with the lighthouse above it, a few steamers and one or two of the tiny sail boats dotted the blue of the water; but it was none of these toward which Margaret stared.

Then he saw what it was—a long, faint V-shaped series of dots in the air, sweeping swiftly, steadily, evenly up from the south, passing over the ships below them as though the vessels were anchored and as motionless as the crib, flying on easily, exhaustlessly, altering the shape of their V to the cross of an X and shifting in formation back to V again—before, in barely a hundred breaths, the wild geese from the Gulf far away in the south slipped out of sight on their swing back to their summer breeding places on the shores of the arctic islands about the North Pole.

"What are distance and open water in the Arctic to them?" the girl asked. "In two days, or three at most, they may reach the last lands of the north; and we know that some of them do, and swing south again and then back in the summer to their tundra. They fly each year by