Fishermans Luck | Page 9

into a purchase by a generous and open-handed dealer, to make us
pleased with our bargain and inclined to come back to the same shop.
If I knew, for example, before setting out for a day on the brook,
precisely what birds I should see, and what pretty little scenes in the
drama of woodland life were to be enacted before my eyes, the
expedition would lose more than half its charm. But, in fact, it is almost
entirely a matter of luck, and that is why it never grows tiresome.
The ornithologist knows pretty well where to look for the birds, and he
goes directly to the places where he can find them, and proceeds to
study them intelligently and systematically. But the angler who idles
down the stream takes them as they come, and all his observations have
a flavour of surprise in them.
He hears a familiar song,--one that he has often heard at a distance, but
never identified,--a loud, cheery, rustic cadence sounding from a low
pine-tree close beside him. He looks up carefully through the needles
and discovers a hooded warbler, a tiny, restless creature, dressed in
green and yellow, with two white feathers in its tail, like the ends of a
sash, and a glossy little black bonnet drawn closely about its golden
head. He will never forget that song again. It will make the woods seem
homelike to him, many a time, as he hears it ringing through the
afternoon, like the call of a small country girl playing at hide-and-seek:
"See ME; here I BE."
Another day he sits down on a mossy log beside a cold, trickling spring
to eat his lunch. It has been a barren day for birds. Perhaps he has fallen
into the fault of pursuing his sport too intensely, and tramped along the
stream looking for nothing but fish. Perhaps this part of the grove has
really been deserted by its feathered inhabitants, scared away by a
prowling hawk or driven out by nest-hunters. But now, without notice,
the luck changes. A surprise-party of redstarts breaks into full play

around him. All through the dark-green shadow of the hemlocks they
flash like little candles--CANDELITAS, the Cubans call them. Their
brilliant markings of orange and black, and their fluttering, airy,
graceful movements, make them most welcome visitors. There is no
bird in the bush easier to recognize or pleasanter to watch. They run
along the branches and dart and tumble through the air in fearless chase
of invisible flies and moths. All the time they keep unfolding and
furling their rounded tails, spreading them out and waving them and
closing them suddenly, just as the Cuban girls manage their fans. In
fact, the redstarts are the tiny fantail pigeons of the forest.
There are other things about the birds, besides their musical talents and
their good looks, that the fisherman has a chance to observe on his
lucky days. He may sea something of their courage and their devotion
to their young.
I suppose a bird is the bravest creature that lives, in spite of its natural
timidity. From which we may learn that true courage is not
incompatible with nervousness, and that heroism does not mean the
absence of fear, but the conquest of it. Who does not remember the first
time that he ever came upon a hen-partridge with her brood, as he was
strolling through the woods in June? How splendidly the old bird
forgets herself in her efforts to defend and hide her young!
Smaller birds are no less daring. One evening last summer I was
walking up the Ristigouche from Camp Harmony to fish for salmon at
Mowett's Rock, where my canoe was waiting for me. As I stepped out
from a thicket on to the shingly bank of the river, a spotted sandpiper
teetered along before me, followed by three young ones. Frightened at
first, the mother flew out a few feet over the water. But the piperlings
could not fly, having no feathers; and they crept under a crooked log. I
rolled the log over very gently and took one of the cowering creatures
into my hand--a tiny, palpitating scrap of life, covered with soft gray
down, and peeping shrilly, like a Liliputian chicken. And now the
mother was transformed. Her fear was changed into fury. She was a
bully, a fighter, an Amazon in feathers. She flew at me with loud cries,
dashing herself almost into my face. I was a tyrant, a robber, a
kidnapper, and she called heaven to witness that she would never give
up her offspring without a struggle. Then she changed her tactics and
appealed to my baser passions. She fell to the ground and fluttered

around me as if her wing were broken. "Look!" she seemed