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If we heard a jaguar or puma, it would most likely be a magnified tom-cat-like sort of sound." "But that mournful howl, uncle?" I whispered. "A poor, melancholy spider-monkey saying good-night to his friends in the big trees. Most of the other cries are made by night-birds out on the hunt for their suppers. That cry was made by a goat-sucker, one of those `Chuck-Will's-widow' sort of fellows.
There were many whippoorwills, or rather Brazilian birds related to them; they uttered at intervals through the night a succession of notes suggesting both those of our whippoorwill and those of our big chuck-will's-widow of the Gulf States, but not identical with either.
Now they heard the distant baying of house-dogs, now the doleful call of the chuck-will's-widow; and once Mary's blood turned, for an instant, to ice, at the unearthly shriek of the hoot-owl just above her head. At length they found themselves in a dim, narrow road, and the negro stopped. "Dess keep dish yeh road fo' 'bout half mile an' you strak 'pon the broad, main road.
At night you had often to ride from picket to picket in dense darkness, trusting to the horse to find his way, or sometimes dismounting to feel with your hands for the track, while the great Southern fire-flies offered their floating lanterns for guidance, and the hoarse "Chuck-will's-widow" croaked ominously from the trees, and the great guns of the siege of Charleston throbbed more faintly than the drumming of a partridge, far away.
It's the same way with another second cousin, Chuck-will's-widow." "Who?" cried Peter, wrinkling his brows. "Chuck-will's-widow," Jenny Wren fairly shouted it. "Don't you know Chuck-will's-widow?" Peter shook his head. "I never heard of such a bird," he confessed. "That's what comes of never having traveled," retorted Jenny Wren.
Under them was a neglected orange grove, and in one of the orange-trees, amid the glossy foliage, appeared my first summer tanager. It was a royal setting, and the splendid vermilion-red bird was worthy of it. Among the oaks I walked in the evening, listening to the strange low chant of the chuck-will's-widow, a name which the owner himself pronounces with a rest after the first syllable.
The dewy Cherokee roses brushed my face, the solemn "Chuck-will's-widow" croaked her incantation, and the rabbits raced phantom-like across the shadowy road.
"If you'd ever been in the South the way I have you would know Chuck-will's-widow. He looks a whole lot like the other two we've been talking about, but has even a bigger mouth. What's more, he has whiskers with branches. Now you needn't look as if you doubted that, Peter Rabbit; it's so. In his habits he's just like his cousins, no nest and only two eggs.
Sounds indistinct but numerous troubled my brain, until I was fully roused to wakefulness by horrible visions and doleful cries. The chuck-will's-widow, which in the south supplies the place of our whippoorwill, repeated his oft-told tale of " chuckwill's-widow, chuck-will's-widow," with untiring earnestness.
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