Part 16

The warning came barely in time. That long neck had flashed forward to its full length,--and just fallen short of the enemy's stockinged leg.

"Gee whizz!" exclaimed the lad, with a nervous laugh. "If that had struck, I guess it would have gone clean through! How are we going to disarm him?"

"Watch me!" said the elder, as he snatched up his coat from the canoe. This effective weapon he threw over the bird's head; and in a few moments the captive was so securely trussed up that he could do nothing but eye his captors with implacable and indomitable hate. The cruel trap was removed from his toes, and their bruises carefully washed. Then very respectfully he was deposited in the bottom of the canoe, and in high elation the boys paddled off.

They had not gone far, however, when a thought struck them both at the same time, and both stopped paddling. They looked at each other with misgivings.

"Well, what is it?" asked the younger, reluctantly.

"I'm afraid," answered the elder, "it's a blame mean trick we're playing on the old bird, at this season! Eh? What do you think?"

"Perhaps so!" assented the other with a sigh, looking wistfully down at their prize. "I never thought about the young ones."

Without a word more they proceeded to loose the bonds of their prisoner. The moment he was free he struck at them savagely; but they had been on guard against such ingratitude, and got out of the way in time. Then he sprang into the air and flapped away indignantly; while the boys stared after him wistfully, half-repenting of their gentleness.

In the Deep of the Silences

In the ancient wild there were three great silences that held their habitations unassailed. They were the silence of the deep of the lake, the silence of the dark heart of the cedar swamp, and the silence of the upper air, high above the splintered peak of the mountain.

To this immeasurable quiet of upper air but one of all the earth sounds could come. That one sound was of such quality that it seemed rather to intensify the silence than disturb it. It was so absolutely alone, so naked of all that murmurous background which sustains yet obscures the individual sounds of earth's surface, that it served merely as an accent to the silence. It was the fine, vibrant hiss of the smitten air against the tense feathers of the soaring eagle.

Through the immense, unclouded solitude the eagle swung majestically in a great circle. At one point in the vast, deliberate swing he was directly above the bald, deep-riven peak of granite upthrust from its mantling forest of firs,--directly above it, at a height of not more than a few hundred feet. The rest of his course took him far out over the soundless spaces of the landscape, which formed an enormous bowl rimmed by the turquoise horizon. The bowl was all a many-shaded green, stains of the light green of birch and poplar blending with the austere green-black of fir, cedar, and hemlock. Here and there through the dense colour gleamed sharply the loops and coils of three watercourses and at the centre of the bowl, glowing in the transparent brilliancy of the northern day, shone the clear mirror of the lake. At that point of his aërial path when the eagle swung farthest from the peak, he hung straight over the middle of the lake and looked down into its depths.

Though no lightest breath was astir far down on the lake surface and not a tree-top swayed in the forest, up here where the eagle was soaring streamed a viewless and soundless wind. So it came about that at some portions of his swing the eagle's wide, apparently moveless wings would tilt a little, careening ever so slightly, and their tense-webbed feathers would set themselves at a delicately different angle to the air-current. When this took place, there would be a different note in that strange whisper. The vibrant hiss would change to a faint, ghostly humming, which again would fade away as the rigid feathers readjusted themselves to another point of the gigantic curve.

Over the soaring black wings the intense sapphire of the zenith thrilled and melted; but the eyes of the eagle were not directed upward, since there was nothing above him but sky, and air, and the infinitude of silence. As he swung, his gleaming, snow-white head and neck were stretched downward toward the earth. His fierce yellow eyes, unwavering, brilliant, and clear like crystal, deep set beneath straight, overhanging brows, searched the far panorama with an incredibly piercing gaze. At such a distance that the most penetrating human eye--the eye of a sailor, a plains' ranger, a backwoods' huntsman, or an enumerator of the stars--could not discern him in his soundless altitude, he could mark the fall of a leaf or the scurry of a mouse in the sedge-grass.

Though the range of his marvellous vision was so vast, the eagle could not see beneath the surfaces of the lake except when he soared straight over it. At one point in his course the baffling reflections of the surface vanished, and his gaze pierced to the bottom. But from all other points the lake presented to him either a mirror of stainless blue, or a dazzling shield of bright steel.

For an hour or more, on wide, untiring wings, the great bird sailed and watched. The furtive life of the wilderness, all unaware of that high impending doom, revealed itself to him, yet he saw nothing to draw him down out of his realm of silence.

Except for that mysterious whisper of the smitten air in his own wings, it was to the eagle as if all the action and movement of earth had been struck dumb. Once he saw a black cow moose, tormented with flies, lurch out madly from the thickets and plunge wallowing into the lake. High splashed and flashed the water about her floundering bulk; but not a whisper of it came up to him. Once he saw a pair of swimming loons stretching their necks alternately as high as they could above the water, and opening wide their straight, sharp beaks. He well knew the strident, wild cries with which they were answering each other, setting loose a rout of crazy echoes all up and down the shores. But not a ghost of an echo reached him. It was all dumb show. And once, on the lower slope of the mountain, an ancient fir-tree, its foothold on the rocks worn away by frost and flood of countless seasons, fell into the ravine. He saw the mighty downward sweep and plunge, the convulsion of branches below; but of the sullen roar that startled the mountainside no faintest sound arose to him.

At last, as he was wheeling over the centre of the lake, his inescapable eye saw something which interested him. His great wings flapped heavily, checking his course. He tipped suddenly, half-shut his wings, and shot straight downward perhaps a thousand feet. Here he stopped his descent with a sharp upward turn which made the wind whistle harshly in his wings. And here he hung, hovering, watching, waiting for the opportunity that now seemed close at hand.

In the heart of the cedar swamp the silence was thick, brooding, and imperishable. One felt that if ever any wandering sound, any lost bird-cry or call of wayfaring beast, should drop into it, the intruding voice would be straightway engulfed, smothered, and forgotten.

The ground beneath the stiff branches and between the gray, ragged, twisted trunks was grotesquely humped with moss-grown roots and pitted with pools of black water. Here and there amid the heavy moss fat fungoid growths thrust up their heads, dead white, or cold red, or pink, or spotted orange. The few scattered herbs that flourished among the humped and dangerous pools were solitary in habit, broad of leaf, tall and succulent of stalk. Not one of them bore any gay or perfumed blossom, to lure into the swamp the brightness of a butterfly or the homely humming of wild bees.

The only bird that habitually endured the stillness and the gloom of the cedar swamp was a shadowy, silent, elusive little nuthatch, which spent its time slipping up and down the ragged trunks, uttering at wide intervals its faint, brief note. So furtive a being, and so shy and rare a voice, only made the silence more impressive, the solitude more profound.

A great black bulk, moving noiselessly as a shadow hither and thither among the shadows, seemed the spirit of the swamp made palpable. The old bear, having learned that certain of the big toadstools growing in the swamp were very good to eat, had taken to haunting the silence of the glooms in the season when the fungoids flourished. The solitude and the stillness suited his morose temper; and for all his seeming awkwardness he moved as delicately as a cat. His great sharp-clawed feet seemed shod with velvet, and never a twig snapped under his stealthy tread. It was not through fear that he went thus softly, for he feared no creature of the wilderness. But the heavy silence was attuned to his mood; and besides, he never knew when he might surprise some mouse, water-rat, or mink that would furnish variety to his toadstool diet.

Such a fortunate surprise, however, could befall him but seldom in the empty solitude of the swamp. So it happened that, one day when he tired of the fat, insipid fungoids, his thought turned to the lake, on whose shores he had sometimes found dead fish. He remembered, with watering chops, that he had even once or twice been able to catch live fish, close in shore, by lying in wait for them with exhaustless patience and scooping them up at last with a lightning sweep of the paw.

Ignoring the toadstools, he turned straight south, and made his way toward the lake. He travelled swiftly, winding this way and that between the green, humped roots, the gray trunks, and the black water-pits. But swiftly as he went, his movement left no trail of sound behind it. A shadow could not have moved more noiselessly. It was as if the age-old silence simply seized and folded away for ever the impact of his great footfalls on the moss. When at length he caught the flash of the bright water ahead of him through the trees, he moved even more cautiously, so extreme was his circumspection. Reaching the edge of the cedar growth, he slipped unseen into a thicket of red willows which afforded a convenient ambush, and peered out warily to assure himself as to what might be going on around the shores. For a long while he crouched there as moveless as a stone, that if by mischance his coming had given alarm to any of the wilderness folk, suspicion might have time to die away.

III

In the mid-deep of the lake the silence was absolute. There was no hiss of tense feathers to accentuate it, as in the upper vast of air. There was no fading and elusive bird-note to measure it by, as in the gloom of the cedar swamp. Down in the gold-brown glimmer the fine silt lay unstirred on the stones. There was no movement, except the delicate, almost imperceptible waving of the great trout's coloured fins.

In the shallower water along the edges of the lake there was always a faint confusion of small sounds. The slow breathing of the lake, as it were, kept up a rhythmic, almost invisible motion among the smaller pebbles, making a crisp whisper which the water carried far beneath the surface while it could not be heard at all in the air above. But none of this stir reached the silent deeps where the big trout, morose and enamoured of his solitude, lay lazily opening and shutting his crimson gills.

Because the water of the lake was dark,--amber-tinted from the swamps about its shores,--the colours of the trout were dark, strong, and vivid. His strangely patterned back was almost black, yet brilliant, like some kinds of damascened steel. His belly was bright pink. His sides had a purplish hue, on which the rows of intense vermilion spots stood out almost incongruously. His fins were as gaudy as the petals of some red-and-white flower.