Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/267

 himself was among the most silent of birds. He sat still and listened and watched.

Above the opening in the flooded woods he saw a great blue heron sweep down the wind, turn, head up into the stiff breeze, and begin to descend. The long wide wings of the great bird curved downward near their tips, his slender neck straightened, his slim legs dangled beneath him as he came down in a gradual slant to his home in the heart of the town, to be greeted instantly by a tumult of squawks and welcoming catcalls.

High in the air, much higher than the heron had been, an anhinga came into view. When he was nearly over Anhinga Town, but a little down the wind from it, he swerved from his straight course and, with wings stiffly extended and long tail spread like a fan, he planed down an invisible spiral stairway from the sky. Very like an airplane he looked, with his long neck and tail and his motionless wings, but lighter, more graceful, more buoyant than any sky-ship ever made by man; and with ease and grace which would have made the best of human air pilots envious, he came to rest upon the top of a dead cypress on the outskirts of the town.

Instantly, then, the gracefulness which had distinguished him in the air left him. Grotesque and fantastic to the last degree, his snaky neck sharply crooked, his dagger-like beak thrusting this way and