, no joy except to eat; he
associates with nobody, not even with his own kind; and when he catches
a fish, and beats its head against a limb till it is dead, and sits with
head back-tilted, swallowing his prey, with a clattering chuckle
deep down in his throat, he affects you as a parrot does that swears
diabolically under his breath as he scratches his head, and that you
would gladly shy a stone at, if the owner's back were turned for a
sufficient moment.

It is this unknown, this uncanny mixture of bird and reptile that has
made the kingfisher an object of superstition among all savage peoples.
The legends about him are legion; his crested head is prized by savages
above all others as a charm or fetish; and even among civilized peoples
his dried body may still sometimes be seen hanging to a pole, in the
hope that his bill will point out the quarter from which the next wind
will blow.

But Koskomenos has another side, though the world as yet has found
out little about it. One day in the wilderness I cheered him quite
involuntarily. It was late afternoon; the fishing was over, and I sat
in my canoe watching by a grassy point to see what would happen next.
Across the stream was a clay bank, near the top of which a hole as
wide as a tea-cup showed where a pair of kingfishers had dug their long
tunnel. "There is nothing for them to stand on there; how did they begin
that hole?" I wondered lazily; "and how can they ever raise a brood,
with an open door like that for mink and weasel to enter?" Here were two
new problems to add to the many unsolved ones which meet you at every
turn on the woodland byways.

A movement under the shore stopped my wondering, and the long lithe form
of a hunting mink shot swiftly up stream. Under the hole he stopped,
raised himself with his fore paws against the bank, twisting his head
from side to side and sniffing nervously. "Something good up there," he
thought, and began to climb. But the bank was sheer and soft; he slipped
back half a dozen times without rising two feet. Then he went down
stream to a point where some roots gave him a foothold, and ran lightly
up till under the dark eaves that threw their shadowy roots over the
clay bank. There he crept cautiously along till his nose found the nest,
and slipped down till his fore paws rested on the threshold. A long
hungry sniff of the rank fishy odor that pours out of a kingfisher's
den, a keen look all around to be sure the old birds were