oes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound
with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily,
taking sides with all waterfowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat
to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often
successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the morning I
frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few
rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how
he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so that I did
not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day.
But I was more than a match for him on the surface. He commonly went
off in a rain.

As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October
afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like
the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon,
suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods
in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued
with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than
before. He dived again but I miscalculated the direction he would
take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this
time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed
long and loud, and with more reason than before.

He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen
rods of him. Each time when he came to the surface, turning his head
this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and
apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was
the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the
boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his
resolve into execution. He led me at once to the wildest part of the
pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing
in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was
a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against
a loon.

Suddenly your adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and
the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again.
Sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me,
having apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was
he and so unweariable, that when he had swam farthest he would
immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine
whe