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All those months the burden of a thought bowed me; and an unanswered question, like the slow turning of a mechanism, revolved in my gloomy spirit: for everywhere around me lay bears, walruses, foxes, thousands upon thousands of little awks, kittiwakes, snow-owls, eider-ducks, gulls-dead, dead.
The pine-trees showed resinous lights, and exhaled a strong, pungent odour. In the day-time the sky was a broad expanse of blue; at dusk it had a soft murky hue and a melancholy attraction. In the heart of the woods, now that winter was over, the first deed of the beasts was being accomplished birth. Eider-ducks, swans, and geese were crying noisily on the river.
It would be worth while to go ashore upon an islet there, near Vogel Sang, to pay a visit to the eider-ducks. Their nests are so abundant that one cannot avoid treading on them.
He did not lack for friends. For, as soon as he made this island rock his home, it became the haunt of every kind of bird. The other animals could not reach him from the shore, poor things. But the blessed wings of the gulls and curlews, the eider-ducks and the ravens, bore them to their Master in his retreat. "Hi!" they said to one another, "we have got him to ourselves now.
Altogether it was a land of enchantment to most, whether gaily or poetically inclined. Only there were certain murmurs by the rugged Scots and fierce Gascons among the guests. George observed to David Drummond that he felt as if this was a nest of eider-ducks, all down and fluff.
Mosses, poppies, saxifrages, cochlearia, and other hardy plants began to sprout, and migratory birds innumerable screaming terns, cackling duck, piping plover, auks in dense clouds with loudly whirring wings, trumpeting geese, eider-ducks, burgomasters, etcetera, began to return with all the noisy bustle and joyous excitement of a family on its annual visit to much-loved summer quarters.
Eider-ducks may not be shot, under penalty of a fine. There is no military service, for throughout the whole island no soldiers are required. Even Reikjavik itself boasts only two police-officers. Commerce is also free; but the islanders possess so little commercial spirit, that even if they had the necessary capital, they would never embark in speculation.
Cuthbert's own ducks are, while the male eider is just as wild and wary as any other sea-bird: a mistake altogether excusable in one who had probably never seen or heard of eider-ducks in any other spot. It may be, nevertheless, that St.
Her latest "aberration," as Arnfinn called it, was an extraordinary interest in the habits of the eider-ducks, auks, and sea-gulls, the noisy monotony of whose existence had, but a few months ago, appeared to her the symbol of all that was vulgar and coarse in human and animal life.
Eider-ducks, chattering kittiwakes, and graceful tern, auks, guillemots, puffins, geese, and even swans, swarmed on the islands, far and near, while seals, whales, narwhals, dolphins, and grampuses, revelled in the sea, so that the Arctic world appeared almost overcharged with animal life.
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