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TEXAS: Wild turkey and prairie chickens. Plover, all species; curlew, cardinal, road-runner, woodcock, wood-duck, canvas-back, cranes, all the herons; wild turkey; quail, all varieties; prairie chicken and Texas guan. Curlew, very rare; plover, very rare; antelope. Chas. Antelope nearly all gone. UTAH: Our wild birds are well protected, and there are none that are threatened with extinction.
Keeping in view the glint of the road, we galloped; rejoicing, both of us, to be free of the jog jog of the lanes. And first the voice of the curlew died; then the glint of the road vanished; and we were quite alone. Even the furze was gone; no shape of anything left, only the black, peaty ground, and the thickening mist.
The stillness of the moonlight night is not interrupted by the screeching of opossums and flying squirrels, nor by the monotonous note of the barking-bird and little owlet; no native dog is howling round our camp in the chilly morning: the cricket alone chirps along the water-holes; and the musical note of an unknown bird, sounding like "gluck gluck" frequently repeated, and ending in a shake, and the melancholy wail of the curlew, are heard from the neighbouring scrub.
They raised the old psalm-tune which our fathers called "Complaint," and the cracked, wavering voices of the women, with the deep, rough bass of the old sea-captain, rose in the uproar of the storm with a ghostly, strange wildness, like the scream of the curlew or the wailing of the wind:
Joe said yes, he had a boat one he had just bought but it needed three people to sail her. We told him we would like to see it anyway. So the mussel-man took us off a little way down the river and showed us the neatest, prettiest, little vessel that ever was built. She was called The Curlew. Joe said he would sell her to us cheap.
"The captain Where's the captain, of this craft?" he said, pointing to the Curlew. "Oh, you mean the Doctor," said I. "Well, he isn't here at present." At that moment the Doctor arrived with his arms full of note-books and butterfly-nets and glass cases and other natural history things. The big man went up to him, respectfully touching his cap. "Good morning, Captain," said he.
As he went forth the plaintive cry of the curlew high up above the treetops startled him more than once, and the sudden movement of every wild beast and bird that his own footsteps had frightened filled him with new fears. In the broad daylight neither man nor beast could have had power to daunt him.
They sipped grenadine, heavy essence of a thousand berries. They had the place to themselves, save for Tony the waiter, with his smile of benison; and Carl read from Yeats. He had heard of Yeats at Plato, but never had he known crying curlew and misty mere and the fluttering wings of Love till now.
One evening, as the moon shone over the hill, the woodcock, that for months had dwelt by day in the oak-scrub near the "set," and had fed at night in the swampy thickets by the rill, heard the voice of a curlew descending from the heights of the sky, and rose, on quick, glad pinions, far beyond the soaring of the lark, to join a great bird-army travelling north.
A few deer are feeding on the coarse rough grass of this far-extending plain; they keep at a distance from you, and are continually on the look-out. The spur-winged plover, and a species of the curlew, black, with a white bar across the wings, nearly as large again as the scarlet curlew on the sea-coast, frequently rise before you.
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