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It took at least one brood of young herons, sacrificed to the appetite of lucivee or fisher, to teach Quoskh the advantage of that decoy nest to tempt hungry prowlers upon the bare tree hole where she could have a clear field to spear them with her powerful bill and beat them down with her great wings before they should discover their mistake.
Again the stiff wing blow; but this time his jump was higher; one claw gripped the shoulder, tore its way through flying feathers to the bone, while his weight dragged the big bird down. Then Quoskh shortened her neck in a great curve.
At other times, when we noticed him spearing frogs with his long bill, Simmo, who could not endure the sight of a frog's leg on my fry pan, would speak of him disdainfully in his own musical language as Quoskh the Frog Eater, for my especial benefit.
Again he humped himself, rose high over the tree-tops and bore away in strong, even, graceful flight for a lonelier lake, where there was no man to watch or bother him. Far from disappointing me, this keenness of Quoskh only whetted my appetite to know more about him, and especially to watch him, close at hand, at his fishing.
He darted about the heron in a quick, nervous, jumping circle, looking for an opening behind; while Quoskh lifted her great torn wings as a shield and turned slowly on the defensive, so as always to face the danger.
Deer and moose, foxes and wild ducks, frogs and fish, all seemed equally charmed by the great wonder of a light shining silently out of the vast darkness. I saw them all, at different times, and glided almost up to them before timidity drove them away from the strange bright marvel. But Quoskh was not to be watched in that way, nor to be caught by any such trick.
But what the instinct means unless, like our own dancing, it is a pure bit of pleasure-making, as crows play games and loons swim races nobody can tell. Before the young were fully grown, and while yet they were following the mother to learn the ways of frogging and fishing, a startling thing occurred which made me ever afterwards look up to Quoskh with honest admiration.
For the first time after darkness fell I saw him just a vague, gray shadow with edges touched softly with silver light, which whirled once over my canoe and looked down into it. Then he vanished; and from far over on the edge of the waiting woods, where the mystery was deepest, came a cry, a challenge, a riddle, the night's wild question which no man has ever yet answered Quoskh? quoskh?
He had gripped the frog across the middle in his long beak, much as one would hold it with a pair of blunt shears, swelling it out at either side, like a string tied tight about a pillow. The head and short arms were forced up at one side, the limp legs dangled down on the other, looking for all the world like a stuffed rag doll that Quoskh was carrying home for his babies to play with.
It is only a blue heron, wakened out of his sleep on the shore by your noisy approach, that you thought was still as the night itself. He circles over your head for a moment, seeing you perfectly, though you catch never a shadow of his broad wings; then he vanishes into the vast, dark silence, crying Quoskh? quoskh? as he goes.
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