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There was old Moses Waldron, the first settler, an out-and-out backwoodsman; smart with an axe, sure with a gun, free with a bowl of metheglin, open in hospitality, and an enemy only to owls, and blackbirds, wolves, thieves, tories and the British. He chased the tories and redcoats in his dreams, and talked to himself while walking alone awake. The owls annoyed him sorely.
His hands trembled on the chair, and he slowly thrust them into his pockets, breathing hard through his nose. The boy expected an outbreak, but none came. A bee buzzed above them. A yellow butterfly zigzagged by. Blackbirds chattered in the firs. The screech of a peacock shrilled across the yard, and a ploughman's singing wailed across the fields: Trouble, O Lawd!
Higher, higher, in a series of swift rushes, she mounted like the dream-woman in her dream. From solid cubes of darkness to grey landing-glimmers. To the third-story bedroom that had never been done up. In the company of Little Miss Muffet, the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, and Georgy Porgy, would he be lying, cold and ghastly, with a wound across his throat?
And fine fat blackbirds he made of those youngsters, too, in the end, I want to tell you, for he stuck to 'em like a brick. A little past noon each day the sun covered a crack between two boards on the summer-house floor, and up through that aperture, for three days, had come a leggy, racy-looking, wolfish black spider.
It was spring, and along the tow-path strutted the large, glossy blackbirds which had just come back, and made the boys sick with longing to kill them, they offered such good shots. But the boys had no powder with them, and at any rate the captain would not have stopped his boat, which was rushing on at the rate of two miles an hour, to let them pick up a bird, if they had hit it.
I hung about a minute longer, and then turned and went out of the porch again and through the lime-avenue into the road, while the blackbirds sang their strongest from the bushes about me in the hot June evening.
The blackbirds puffed their feathers and sounded their singular call from the branches of the old pecan tree, and the flashing of the oriole enlivened the sombre foliage of the enormous live-oaks in the avenue.
And as it was, not a few of them lost their lives in the midst of plenty. The sun, however, shone just as brightly as if there were no note of tragedy; parrots screamed as usual; blackbirds trilled, frogs croaked and bellowed, and the turtles laid their eggs in the hot sand. In other words, the procession of life moved on without taking note of those that dropped out along the way.
All through the hot months the women toiled in the corn fields; and when the corn was in the milk, all the village children screamed and waved their arms to frighten away the blackbirds. When the harvest had been carefully placed in bark barrels and buried, part of the village had already left to hunt the fox or gather wild rice along the lakes and cranberries in the marshes.
Each morning the blackbirds awoke us with their chatter as they left their roosts to fly to the swamp. And through the long twilight the air was filled with their noise as they went back to their roosts. It was the time that the rice ripened. And there were ducks also, and ducks and blackbirds feasted to fatness on the ripe rice half unhusked by the sun.
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