Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/170

122 water; and far in advance of the tide came a great flock of curlew, alighting on a patch of marsh which even the high tide could not swamp; here they crowded, bunched together, their wild moorland calls deadened by the searching wind.

Ere we reached the small white farmstead that stands on the very edge of the saltings, its garden wall lapped by the highest tides, the deep gutter that runs close inshore—remnant of the ancient channel—was filling fast. Up came the water, bearing on its flood a swaying mass of ice blocks, floes, and crinkling fragments; visibly the level rose till the frozen mud vanished and a broad, swift river forced its way towards the embankment. The tide was coming.

A steel-grey line stretched across the horizon towards the once famous Parkgate, indistinct at first, then growing clearer, till we could see the dancing ripples of the racing waters. Sandbanks and mud flats disappeared, grass-covered salting sank beneath the flood; tiny trickles became brooks, empty depressions deep gutters, gutters rivers, until the tide swept far and wide across the view.

With the water came the gulls-black-heads and commons galore, lesser black-backs and herrings; before the tide reached the frozen cart-track a pair of great black-backed gulls, fine birds indeed, alighted on the shore to investigate the body of a crow. The curlews packed closer as the water swirled round their refuge; not until the freshened mud was left bare at the ebb, bare but glittering with daggers of new ice did they move in search of food.