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By and by he became interested in the dog's movements, playing about in the rain among the stocks. "What has he got in his mouth?" he asked presently. "Come here, Watch," the shepherd called, and when Watch came he bent down and took a corncrake from his mouth. He had found the bird hiding in one of the stocks and had captured without injuring it.
Estein laughed. "I see that I am with a skilful helmsman," he said. "And I, that I am with an over-confident crew," she answered. Only a distant corncrake broke the silence of the lonely channel, its note sounding more faintly as they left the land behind.
In a fever of haste I sought her along the brook, among the bushes and trees, even along the road. And, as I sought, night fell, and in the shadows was black despair. I searched the Hollow from end to end, calling upon her name, but no sound reached me, save the hoot of an owl, and the far-off, dismal cry of a corncrake.
There was a corncrake rattling in the fields, and more than once they saw frogs hop out of the road as they drove by in the twilight. A hare ran before them through the dusk and disappeared.
I thought I was going to have at last some peace, when a corncrake a creature upon whom Nature has bestowed a song like to the tearing of calico-sheets mingled with the sharpening of saws settled somewhere in the garden and set to work to praise its Maker according to its lights. I have a friend, a poet, who lives just off the Strand, and spends his evenings at the Garrick Club.
"If you see Laheen the Eagle again, or Blackfoot the Elk or the Crow of Achill tell them to come and visit me sometime. I'm all alone here except for my swallow and cuckoo and corncrake. And mind you, great Kings and Princes used to come to see me." So she went on talking in low tones and in sudden high tones.
The eternal roaring of the sea seemed to be subdued, as if even it felt awed by the stillness of the June night. The sand on which he lay was damped with dew. Only the sharp cry of the corncrake broke the solemnity of the night. He rose, and, peering anxiously before him as each fresh stretch of his way became visible, crossed the sandhills.
Buckley used to bring down her son and heir, and sit under an oak by the river-side, sewing. Pleasant, long days they were when dinner would be brought down to the old tree, and she would spend the day there, among the long meadow-grass, purple and yellow with flowers, bending under the soft west wind. Pleasant to hear the corncrake by the hedge-side, or the moorhen in the water.
When spring came once more, and the scented primroses gleamed faintly in the gloom beside the upper entrance to the burrow, and the corncrake, babbling loudly, wandered through the growing grass at the foot of the meadow-hedge, the household of the voles was broken up.
'Those birds are provided by God for man, but the corncrake is a wild bird of the woods: and not he alone; many they are, the wild things of the woods and the fields, and the wild things of the rivers and marshes and moors, flying on high or creeping below; and a sin it is to slay them: let them live their allotted life upon the earth.
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