Page:Wild folk - Samuel Scoville.djvu/137

Rh For a moment it hung on the knife-edge of the world, and then dipped down and was gone.

Through the violet twilight five gleaming, misty-white birds of an unearthly beauty, glorious trumpeter swans, flew across the western sky in strong, swift, majestic flight. As the shadows darkened like spilt ink, their clanging notes came down to the lonely drake. When the swans start south, it is no time for lesser folk to linger. The night was aflame with its million candles as he sprang into the air, circled once and again, and followed southward the moon path which lay like a long streamer of gold across the waste-lands. Night and day and day and night and night and day again he flew, until, as he passed over the northwestern corner of Connecticut, that strange food sense which a migrating bird has, brought him down from the upper sky into the one stretch of marshland that showed for miles around. It chanced to be close to the base of the Cobble.

All night long he fed full among the pools. Just as the first faint light showed in the eastern sky, he climbed upon the top of an old muskrat house that showed above the reeds. At the first step, there was a sharp click, the fierce grip of steel, and he was fast in one of Hen's traps. There the old man found him at sunrise, and brought him home wrapped up in his coat, quacking, flapping, and fighting every foot of the way. An examination showed his leg to be unbroken, and Hen held him while Aunt Maria with a pair of long shears clipped his beautiful wings. Then, all gleaming green and violet, he was set down among