e, hopping ecstatically through some kind of a crazy
dance. A twig snapped as I crept nearer, and they scattered in instant
flight. It was September, and the instinct to flock and to migrate was
at work among them. When they came together for the first time some dim,
old remembrance of generations long gone by--the shreds of an ancient
instinct, whose meaning we can only guess at--had set them to dancing
wildly; though I doubted at the time whether they understood much what
they were doing.

[Illustration]

Perhaps I was wrong in this. Watching the young birds at their ungainly
hopping, the impulse to dance seemed uncontrollable; yet they were
immensely dignified about it at times; and again they appeared to get
some fun out of it--as much, perhaps, as we do out of some of our
peculiar dances, of which a visiting Chinaman once asked innocently:
"Why don't you let your servants do it for you?"

I have seen little green herons do the same thing in the woods at mating
time; and once, in the Zooelogical Gardens at Antwerp, I saw a
magnificent hopping performance by some giant cranes from Africa. Our
own sand-hill and whooping cranes are notorious dancers; and undoubtedly
it is more or less instinctive with all the tribes of the cranes and
herons, from the least to the greatest. But what the instinct
means--unless, like our own dancing, it is a pure bit of
pleasure-making, as crows play games and loons swim races--nobody can
tell.

* * * * *

Before the young were fully grown, and while yet they were following the
mother to learn the ways of frogging and fishing, a startling thing
occurred which made me ever afterwards look up to Quoskh with honest
admiration. I was still-fishing in the middle of the big lake, one late
afternoon, when Quoskh and her little ones sailed over the trees from
the beaver pond and lit on a grassy shore. A shallow little brook stole
into the lake there, and Mother Quoskh left her young to frog for
themselves, while she went fishing up the brook under the alders. I was
watching the young herons through my glass when I saw a sudden rush in
the tall grass near them. All three humped themselves, heron fashion, on
the instant. Two got away safely; the other had barely spread his wings
when a black animal leaped out of the grass for his neck and pulled him
down, flapping and croaking desperately.

I pulled up my killick on the instant and paddled over to see what was