Page:Wild folk - Samuel Scoville.djvu/140

118 At last and at last, just when it seemed as if winter would never go, spring came. There were flocks of wild geese beating, beating, beating up the sky, never soaring, never resting, thrusting their way north in a great black-and-white wedge, outflying spring, and often finding lakes and marshes still locked against them. Then came the strange, wild call from the sky of the killdeer, who wears two black rings around his white breast; and the air was full of robin notes and bluebird calls and the shrill high notes of the hylas. On the sides of the Cobble the bloodroot bloomed, with its snowy petals and heart of gold and root dripping with burning, bitter blood—frail flowers which the wind kisses and kills. Then the beech trees turned all lavender-brown and silver, and the fields of April wheat made patches of brilliant velvet green.

At last there came a day blurred with glory, when the grass was a green blaze, and the woods dripped green, and the new leaves of the apple trees were like tiny jets of green flame among the pink and white blossoms. The sky was full of waterfowl going north. All that day the drake had been uneasy. One by one he had moulted his clipped wing-feathers, and the long curved quills which had been his glory had come back again. Late in the afternoon, as he was leading his flock toward the kitchen, a great hubbub of calls and cries floated down from the afternoon sky. The whole upper air was black with ducks. There were teal, wood-ducks, baldpates, black duck, pintails, little bluebills, whistlers, and suddenly a great mass of mallards, the green heads of the drakes