Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/17



LL evening thick gray mists had drifted low above the island woods before a brisk northeast breeze; but toward midnight the wind had lulled, and now the moon hung high and round in a sky where no shred of cloud floated. The air had been swept dry and clean. Very faint and far, yet singularly clear, seemed the voices of the September night; voices of many different kinds, dropping softly down through the still moonlit spaces.

Mat Norman, his back against the trunk of a laurel oak at the edge of a small meadow of rushes, listened eagerly. The muffled thunder of surf breaking along a barrier beach a half mile away made a sort of background for the voices falling from the upper air and seemed somehow to enhance their distinctness.

Norman recognized many of them—the metallic chirps of ricebirds, the guttural "quok-quok-quok" of night herons or Indian pullets, the mellow calls of plover and curlew, the high-pitched cries of green