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As I turned, my eye fell upon a soft, yellowish something in the rose-bushes across the docks. I was slow to believe. It was too good to be credited all at once. Within three paddle-lengths of my boat, in a patch of dark that must be a nest, stood my least bittern. I sat still for several seconds, tasting the joy of my discovery and anticipating the look into the nest.
"Forewarned, foolish man, thou are forewarned. Peace," said the King; and, shaking his head, he rode on to join the Normans, who now, in a broad field, where the corn sprang green, and which they seemed to delight in wantonly trampling, as they curvetted their steeds to and fro, watched the movements of the bittern and the pursuit of the two falcons.
The booming of the bittern, described by Goldsmith and Nuttall, is frequently heard in our fens, in the morning and evening, sounding like a pump, or the chopping of wood in a frosty morning in some distant farm-yard. The manner in which this sound is produced I have not seen anywhere described.
Alluding to this bird, Bishop Hall once said: "If a bittern flies over this man's head by night, he will make his will"; whilst Sir Humphry Davy wrote: "I know a man of very high dignity who was exceedingly moved by omens, and who never went out shooting without a bittern's claw fastened to his button-hole by a riband, which he thought ensured him 'good luck."
This signal was answered from the neighborhood of the fire, whereupon the abbe gave the strange, resonant cry of the bittern. A few moments more and Pierre found himself by a camp fire which blazed cheerfully in the recess of a sheltered ravine. Around the fire were gathered some twoscore of Micmacs in their war dress, who merely grunted as the abbe and his little party joined them.
But everything else was unchanged, so sudden had been the interruption. The sunset gold still glowed on the lawn, and the bittern still boomed as announcing some small but dreadful destiny. "Prince Saradine," said the man called Antonelli, "when I was an infant in the cradle you killed my father and stole my mother; my father was the more fortunate.
Hitherto nothing had broken the silence around him but the deep cry of the bog-blitter, or bull- of-the-bog, a large species of bittern, and the sighs of the wind as it passed along the dreary morass. To these was now joined the distant roar of the ocean, towards which the traveller seemed to be fast approaching. This was no circumstance to make his mind easy.
All around them lay a solemn silence broken only by the splash of a bullfrog leaping from a bank, the gurgle of some water snake or the solemn croak of a bittern fishing near by, followed by the flap of its wings as it flew away, alarmed by their approach. All of the boys were more or less impressed by this strange silence. It seemed as though some heavy weight were pressing down upon them.
The bittern alone responded to his voice, as he flew screaming by; or the bull-frog croaked dolefully from a neighboring pool. At length, it is said, just in the brown hour of twilight, when the owls began to hoot and the bats to flit about, his attention was attracted by the clamor of carrion crows that were hovering about a cypress tree.
He puts his beak down into the swamp, in search of insects and snails or other marine life est-ce que je sais? and drawing in the bog-water through holes in his beak, makes a booming sound which is most impressive. Now do not think me an ornithologist or a bird sharp. Personally I do not know a bittern from an olive-backed thrush.
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