blue as the
sky, whose colour it seemed not to reflect but to absorb.

A tiny fragment of this same heavenly azure drifted downward among the
trees like a bit of sky falling. A second bit of blue that had skimmed
across the lake and was visible now only as it rose and winged across
the contrasting coloured meadow rimming the pool was like a bit of the
lake itself. Two bluebirds. They swerved before the meeting, their wings
fluttered, they lighted on branches of the same tree and shyly eyed each
other. Did a man need to have the still message of all the woods summed
up in final emphasis, this it was: spring is here.

The man himself, as the birds had done before him, had the appearance of
materializing spontaneously from some distilled essence of his
environment. A moment ago the spaces between the wide-set cedar-trees
were empty. Yet he had been there a long time. It was only because he
had moved that he attracted attention even of the sharp-eyed forest folk
who were returning to tree and thicket. As the bluebirds had been
viewless when merged into the backgrounds of their own colour, so he,
while sitting with his back against a tawny cedar, had been drawn into
the entity of the wilderness to which, obviously, he belonged. Here he
blended, harmonized, disappeared when he held motionless. The well-worn,
tall, laced boots were of brown leather, much scuffed, one in colour
with the soil dusting them. The khaki trousers gathered into the
boot-tops, the soft flannel shirt, were the brown of the tree trunks;
skin of hands and face and muscular throat were the bronze of ripe
pine-cones and burnished pine-needles. And, in a landscape spotted with
light and shadow, the head of black hair might have passed for a bit of
such pitch-black shadow as a tuft of thick foliage casts upon the
light-smitten ground.

Beyond this outward harmony there was something at once more intangible
and yet more vital and positive that made the man a piece with the
natural world about him. Perhaps it was that he had lived so many months
of so many years in the open that he had grown to be true brother of the
wild; that he had shed coat after coat of artificial veneer as he took
on the layers of tan; that in doing so he shed from his mind many of the
artificialities of the twentieth century and remembered ancient
instincts. His deep chest knew the tricks of proper breathing; he would
come to the top of a steep climb with unlaboured breath. He stood t