Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/105



HALF-HOUR before dawn, in the cypress swamp where the wood ibis flock slept, strange, harsh, unearthly sounds broke the silence which hung over the moss-tapestried cypresses around the shores of the lagoon. These sounds came from the trees where the ibises were talking with one another, clacking their bills, extending and retracting their long necks, opening and folding their wings, impatiently awaiting the coming of day. From the woods came the eerie songs of two chuck-will's-widows answering each other across the still dark water, and presently, close at hand, a big swamp owl woke the echoes with his sonorous "Whoo whoo, whoo-whoo whoo-who-whoo-who." Then, when the first faint light had begun to filter down through the moss curtains of the trees, the eleven-foot alligator who was master of this lagoon sent his long, melancholy, tremulous challenge rolling and quavering through the woods, a resonant, menacing call, incredibly strange and wild.

Scarcely had its last note died when old Sanute, chief of the wood ibis army, craned his long neck,