Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/160

116 approach; the birds were hungry, for supplies were limited. Where the peat-stained water debouched upon the sand all was glazed with ice; the tide pools, where the fresh-water gammarid meets the salt-water mysid, were closed to all crustaceans, and no marine worm could force its way through the frozen surface cake; naturally the waders had left them to other bipeds, the sliding, cheerful village children. An odd disconsolate dunlin here and there, a ringed plover with its plumage puffed out like a robin, wandered unprofitably along the high tide mark, but most of their fellows were with the oystercatchers at the edge of the incoming tide.

The sand itself was firm as a macadam road and far more slippery, for the receding, shallowing waves froze as they slipped seaward, and the wet surface became a film of ice. Ice, too, had filled the tiny valleys between the iron-hard ridges of the ripple marks, and all along the highest tide line was a broad ice border, inches deep and several yards in width. The flowing tide had stripped the ice film from the shore, pushing it forward, piling layer upon layer; film had frozen to film, forming a cake; cake upon cake had made an ice-floe. Crushed and up-ended, this mass had been forced landward by the resistless power behind until the shore resembled an Arctic scene.

When the tide turned the steady beat of powerful wings and the clanging cries of swans drowned the crinkling of the disturbed ice; five whoopers, with necks outstretched, came one behind the other from the upper marsh. They passed quickly, for the slow beats are wonderfully strong; in a few seconds they vanished into the seaward haze.

Next day the wind hacked to the west, and warmer sea-breezes brought a thaw and clearer air, and we looked out on a fine range of snow-clad hills, behind Dumfries