Part 7

The bird sank on the water, and the man plunged in; fighting with the current that was sweeping him down, he made for the shore, and reached it breathless far below the stepping-stones, where the angler pulled him out of the water as joyfully as he ever pulled a trout. Then they wound up the line, and sure enough there came ashore at the end of it, a draggled, exhausted, and almost lifeless Sandpiper.

To be carried in a human pocket is not pleasant for a bird, but our young scapegrace was too far gone to trouble himself about it. At his birthplace he was taken out, and there the angler stayed with him, sending his companion home to change. It was getting dark fast, but the old birds were still flying wildly up and down the river, piping loudly in a forlorn hope of finding their young one ere night should wrap the river in darkness. The angler put him down near the water and waited at a little distance.

Ere long his wits came back to him, as the well-known notes told him that he was indeed again near home. And weak as he was, he found strength to send out over the river his own little feeble pipe. In a moment his mother was by his side.

The angler watched them for a moment, and then left them to tell his friend of the good result of a kindly deed. The next day they had to leave the river and all its delights, and to return to work and duty: but they cannot forget the Sandpipers, nor, when the birds return after their winter sojourn in the far south, will they fail to look out without misgiving for their human friends.

THE LAST OF THE BARONS

The Baron sat perched on an old gnarled oak, gazing across the deep ravine below him, where the noisy river leapt from pool to pool. He had been far over the moorland that day with his wife, searching for a safe nesting-place, and had given up the search in despair and returned to his old home; but the Baroness had dallied and been left behind, and now he was expecting her as the sun began to sink in the west. He sat there silent and sad, the last, so he thought, of an ancient race; his head, almost white with age, slightly bent downwards, and his long forked tail sadly weather-worn and drooping.

It was a fresh evening in early April, and one sweet shower after another had begun to entice the ferns to uncurl themselves, and the oaks on the rocky slopes of the Kite’s fortress to put on their first ruddy hue; and now the showers had passed, and the setting sun was shining full in the old Baron’s face as he sat on his bough above the precipices. But neither sun nor shower could rouse him from his reverie.

Suddenly he raised his head and uttered a cry; and at the same moment you might have seen the Baroness gliding slowly over the opposite hill. As she neared him, she stopped in mid-air over the roaring torrent and answered his call; and then he slipped off his bough, like a ship launched into the yielding water, and silently joined her. They flew round and round each other once or twice, and the fisherman on the rocks below looked up and gazed at them with admiration. You could tell them apart without difficulty: the Baroness was the larger bird of the two, and her feathers were in better order—she was still young, not more than twenty or so; while the old Baron looked worn and battered, though the red of his back was brighter, and his fine tail was more deeply forked than that of his lady.

They began to circle round each other slowly, hardly moving their wings, but steering with their long tails, and soon they were far above the isolated hill which was known as the Kite’s fortress. Sweeping in great circles higher and higher, they seemed to be ascending for ever into the blue, never to come down again; now and again a white cloud would pass above them, against which their forms looked black and clear-cut, and then it would drift away, and you had to look keenly to see them still sailing slowly round and round, tiny specks in the pure ether.

All this time they were talking about a very important matter; not chattering and fussing, as common birds do—starlings, sparrows, and such low-born creatures—but saying a few words gravely as they neared each other in their great circles of flight, and thinking of the next question or answer as they parted for another sweep.

“Well,” said the Baron after a while, “have you found a better place than this, where our persecutors cannot reach us without risking their miserable lives?”

“No,” she answered, “none as good as this, and I have been far over the moors toward the setting sun. There are the crags looking down on the flat country and the sea, but they are not so well wooded, and they are too near that seaside town where we have enemies. I have looked at many other places too, but there were none to please me much.”

“I thought so,” said the Baron. “I have known all this country, every tree and every crag, since I first learnt to fly on the hill down below; and there is no such place as this. I and my old Baroness brought up many broods here, and now that I have a young wife again, she wanders about and wants to find a new home.”

“But men found you out and shot her here,” said the Baroness. The Baron sailed away from her in a wide sweep, but soon returned and spoke gravely again.

“Don’t talk of that, dear,” he said. “I have found another wife, and that was more than I could expect. I searched far and wide, over land and over sea; I reached the ugly country to the south, where the smoke made my eyes water, and the fields were no longer green, and no mice or beetles were to be found; I turned again for fresher air, and came to a wild and treeless sea-coast, where the Gulls mobbed me and a gun was fired at me: but not one of our kind did I see—only the stupid Buzzards, and a Kestrel or two. I gave it up, and thought I was indeed the last of the Barons.”

“And then you found me after all near your old home,” said the Baroness, tenderly. “And we have brought up two broods, though what has become of them I know not. And last year we should have done the same, but for the creatures that came up the valley when we were just ready to hatch.”

“Ah,” sighed the Baron, and swept away again in a grand ascending curve.

“Why should they wish to ruin us?” asked she, as with motionless wings he came near her again. “Do we do them any harm, like the Ravens who dig out the young lambs’ eyes, or the vulgar Jays and Magpies—poachers and egg-stealers?”

“Do them harm?” said the Baron, with anger in his voice. “Look at the white farmhouse down yonder! They are good people that live there, and know us well. For generations my family has been on friendly terms with them; they know we do not steal, or pick the lambs’ eyes, and in hard winters they do not grudge us a duckling or two, for if we were to die out it would be bad luck for them. We have our own estate, which seldom fails us; we have the wide moorland and are content with it, and can live on it without meddling with old friends’ property, like the Buzzards and the Ravens.”

“Then why are those other men so mad against us?” asked the Baroness again. “Is not this our own fortress, our old estate, entailed from father to son as you have so often told me, and called by our name? Why do they come and trouble us?”

“Perhaps the old Raven was right,” said the Baron, after a wide sweep; “he told me he had spent years among them as a captive, and had learnt their language and their notions. A great change, he told me, had come over them in the course of his long life. They are now too much interested in us, he said. Once they did not care at all about us, and then we flourished. Now they are poking and prying everywhere; they run about on all sorts of machines, find us out, and won’t let us alone. They go to the ends of the earth to worry us birds, wear our feathers in their hats, and put our skins and our eggs in their museums. It isn’t that they hate us, he said: it’s much worse than that. No, they pretend to love us, and they show their love by coming and spying after us and watching all we do. They are so fond of us that they can’t keep their hands off us; and the harder it is to find us the more trouble they take. Yes, I believe that old Raven was right! Man takes such an interest in us that there will be none of us left soon!”

“Let us try once more,” said the Baroness, with all the hopefulness of youth. “Come down and find a tree on the steepest face of the old fortress. It is quite time we were beginning; the oaks are reddening. Let us do what we can, and hope they will not take an interest in us this year.”

The Baron silently assented, glad that the ancestral rock should not be deserted; and descending rapidly, still in circles, they reached it as the sun set. Next morning at daybreak the tree was chosen—an oak, high up on a rocky shelf, looking to the west across the ravine and the tumbling river. And before the sun was high the foundation of the nest was laid.

In a close little room, in a narrow little street of a large town, poor Mrs. Lee, pale and worn, and rather acid, was scraping bread and butter for her children’s breakfast, and doling out cups of watery tea. Five young ones, of various ages, hungry and untidy, sat expectant round the table. Two places were still vacant; one, the father’s, as you might guess from the two letters awaiting him there, and the other for the eldest son, who helped his father in the workshop. In that shop father and son had been already hard at work for a couple of hours, stuffing an otter which had been brought in the day before.

Now the two came in; the father keen-eyed but sad-looking, the son a big bold lad, the hope of an unlucky family.

Mr. Lee sat down and opened one of the two letters. As he read it, his face grew dark, and his wife watched him anxiously.

“Not an order, Stephen?” she asked.

“O yes, it’s an order,” he said bitterly; “a very nice order. It’s an order to pay up the rent, or quit these premises. Twenty pounds, and arrears five pounds ten. Where am I to get twenty-five pounds just now, I should like to know? Look at the jobs we’ve had all this last winter, barely enough to feed these little beggars, let alone their clothes. A few miserable kingfishers, and a white stoat or two, and such-like vermin. This otter was a godsend, and I shall only get a guinea for it. There’s Lord —— gone round the world, and no orders from him: and young Rathbone killed by the Boers, and no one with any money to spare, or this fellow wouldn’t be pressing so. I tell you, Susan, I don’t know how to pay it.”