Page:Wild folk - Samuel Scoville.djvu/135

Rh either wing. The leader evidently had a strain of black duck in her blood. She was larger, and lacked the trim bearing of the aristocratic mallard. On the other hand, Blackie had all the wariness and sagacity of the black duck, than whom there is no wiser bird. As the winter came on, a coop was fixed up for them not far from the kitchen, where they slept on warm straw in the coldest weather, with their heads tucked under their soft, down-lined wings up to their round, bright eyes. The first November snowstorm covered their coop out of sight; but when Aunt Maria called, they quacked a cheery answer back from under the drift.

Then came the drake, a gorgeous mallard with a head of emerald-green and a snow-white collar, and with black, white, gray, and violet wings, in all the pride and beauty of his prime. A few days and nights before he had been a part of the North. Beyond the haunts of men, beyond the farthest forests, where the sullen green of the pines gleamed against a silver sky, a great waste-land stretched clear to the tundras, beyond which is the ice of the Arctic. In this wilderness, where long leagues of rushes hissed and whispered to the wind, the drake had dwelt. Here and there were pools of green-gray water, and beyond the rushes stretched the bleached brown reeds, deepening in the distance to a dark tan. In the summer a heavy, sweet scent had hung over the marshland, like the breath of a herd of sleeping cattle. Here had lived uncounted multitudes of waterfowl.

As the summer passed, a bitter wind howled like a