IV
HIGH SKY
"Clang! Clang! Clang!"—the sound drifted down from mid-sky, as if the ice-cold gates of winter were opening. A gaggle of Canada geese, wearing white bibs below their black heads and necks, came beating down the wind, shouting to earth as they flew. Below them, although it was still fall, the tan-colored marsh showed ash-gray stretches of new ice, with here and there blue patches of snow. Suddenly, faint and far sounded other notes, as of a distant horn, and a company of misty-white trumpeter swans swept along the sky, gleaming like silver in the sun. Down from the Arctic tundras they had come, where during the short summer their great nests had stood like watchtowers above the level sphagnum bogs; for the trumpeter swan, like the eagle, scorns to hide its nest and fears no foe of earth or air.
As their trumpet notes pealed across the marsh, they were answered everywhere by the confused cries and calls of innumerable waterfowl; for when the swan starts south, it is no time for lesser breeds to linger. Wisps of snipe and badlings of duck sprang into the air. The canvasback ducks, with their dark red heads and necks, grunted as they flew; the wings of the golden-eye whistled, the scaup purred, the
74
