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"There's no one to throw big stones here. That was Mr Jack." "Well, did he throw stones?" I said wonderingly. "No! What a fellow you are! A jack a pike a big fish took one of the young moorhens for his dinner." "Why, I thought pike lived on fish," I cried. "They live on anything. I've seen them swallow young ducks and water-rats and frogs anything they can get.
Or I might quit hold of the osier, and, entering a shallow backwater, disturb shoals of roach playing where the water was transparent to the bottom, after their wont. Winding in and out like an Indian in his canoe, perhaps traces of an otter might be found his kitchen modding and in the sedges moorhens and wildfowl would hide from me.
The moorhens were fond of this pond because it was surrounded with a great quantity of rushes; they were numerous all up the brook. These birds, being tame and common, are not much regarded either for sport or the table, yet a moorhen shot at the right time of the year not till the frosts have begun is delicious eating.
The draining of marsh-lands and levels began the exile of wild-fowl; and now the increasing preservation of trout adds to the difficulties under which these birds strive to retain a hold upon inland waters. The Thames is too long and wide for complete exclusion; but it is surprising how few moorhens even are to be seen along the river. Lesser rivers are still more empty, as it were, of life.
The depressions were filled with jungle of more or less density, while here and there opened glades, shadowed even during noon by thin groves of towering trees. At our approach fled in terror flocks of green pigeons, jays, ibis, turtledoves, golden pheasants, quails and moorhens, with crows and hawks, while now and then a solitary pelican winged its way to the distance.
She loved in the long winter nights to hear the winnow-winnow of powerful wings as the wild ducks circled down towards the pool, the whir of the grey lag-geese far in the mysterious sky, and the whistle of the teal and the gurgle of the moorhens among the weeds close by the river's brim. Crouched on a grassy mound beside the rapids, she could see each movement on the surface of the pool.
Between the boughs sparsely clothed with leaves and the slender tree-trunks she caught a glimpse of the bronze and amber river running over its stones, or winding about the big dripping boulders that were in the bed of the stream. A damp, rheumatic place, she said to herself, although she loved the river; and its backwaters, full of wild duck and dabchick and the moorhens, were enchanting places.
This road, extending from the far-off tidal estuary to the river's source in the wild mountains to the north, communicated with all the dwellings of the riverside people, and had been kept clear for hundreds of years by wandering voles and water-shrews, moorhens, water-rails, and coots, and, in recent days, by those unwelcome invaders, the brown rats.
Then there are water shrews, the beaver, otter, duck-billed platypus, and a host of others, not related, just as, among birds, there are water ousels, moorhens, ducks, divers, etc., which have permanently made the water their home and seek their living in it. All these have attained to web-footedness in a greater or less degree. And it has a consequence not to be escaped.
I put the fastenings on my boat For a year and for a day, And I went where the rowans grow, And where the moorhens lay; And I went over the stepping-stones And dipped my feet in the ford, And came at last to the Swineherd's house, The Youth without a Sword.
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