Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/81

Rh time to time so near me as I moved southward, that I began to think it had a nest near by, and was angry at my intrusion into its domains. As I moved, the bird still followed and screamed, coming sometimes quite near, or within gunshot, then circling far off or high into the sky. At length, as I was looking up at it, thinking it the only living creature within view, I was singularly startled to behold, as my eye by chance penetrated deeper into the blue,—the abyss of blue above which I had taken for a solitude,—its mate silently soaring at an immense height, and seemingly indifferent to me. We are surprised to discover that there can be an eye on us on that side, and so little suspected, that the heavens are so full of eyes, though they look so blue and spotless. Then I knew that it was the female that circled and screamed below. At last the latter rose gradually to meet her mate, and they circled together there, as if they could not possibly feel any anxiety on my account. When I drew nearer to the tall trees where I suspected the nest to be, the female descended again, swept by screaming, still nearer to me, just over the tree tops, and finally, while I was looking for the orchis in the swamp, alighted on a white pine twenty or thirty rods off. (The great fringed orchis just open.) At length I detected the nest about eighty feet from the ground, in a