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Updated: May 2, 2025
And then, as the Umpire glides into smooth water, and her head is brought round to the light breeze, away goes the anchor with a rattle that awakes a thousand echoes; and all the startled birds among the rocks are calling through the night the sea-pyots screaming shrilly, the curlews uttering their warning note, the herons croaking as they wing their slow flight away across the sea.
They had a clear hour before them, but unless the mist came up again with the tide, they could count on no more time. Already out on the face of the moorland the curlews were crying tentatively one to the other. Louis would gladly have talked, but Stair sat grave and silent.
After a further struggle across the level summit of the hill, I reached my second landmark, a pool in a little hollow between the hills, which is well known to the inhabitants of the district, and interesting to naturalists, as the resort of curlews and other rare birds; here again I took a short rest, and then started upon what I fondly dreamed would be the last difficult stage of my journey.
The Eskimo curlew within the last decade has probably been exterminated and the other curlews greatly reduced. In fact, all the larger species of shorebirds have suffered severely. So adverse to shorebirds are present conditions that the wonder is that any escape. In both fall and spring they are shot along the whole route of their migration north and south.
Indeed, in the scarcely dawning light were seen large numbers of curlews and pigeons, traversing the air with a quick and frightened flight, which, in the night, usually abandoned to the silent bat, looked strange to the eye, and sounded sinister to the ear. Diana did not reply, but rode on without turning her head.
Round about his steading, which was screened by sycamores from the westerly gales, lay the mountain pastures, broken by terraces of limestone rock. Above, where the limestone yields place to the millstone, were the high moors and fells, where grouse, curlews and merlins nested among the heather, and hardy, blue-faced sheep browsed on the mountain herbage.
Was it like an Irish stream, winding through the brown bogs, where the wild ducks squatter up from among the white water-lilies, and the curlews flit to and fro, crying "Tullie-wheep, mind your sheep;" and Dennis tells you strange stories of the Peishtamore, the great bogy-snake which lies in the black peat pools, among the old pine-stems, and puts his head out at night to snap at the cattle as they come down to drink?
Every morning, after the fuss of getting off the family to their several avocations, she would run down the garden, and stand for a few minutes by the wall that overlooked the moor, watching great shafts of sunlight fall from a gray sky on to brown wastes of heather and bracken, listening to the call of the curlews or to the trilling autumn warble of the robin, perched on the red-berried hawthorn bush.
Well, the MacNicol lads were now in a fair way of earning an independent and honourable living, and this sketch of how they had struggled into that position from being mere wastrels living about the shore like so many curlews may fitly cease here.
Then the squires carried in beautiful white swans on silver platters, and roasted cranes and curlews on plates that glowed like the sun. After that came rabbits stewed in sweet sauce, and hams and curries. The last course consisted of tarts and preserves, dates and figs and pomegranates. The supper began about five o'clock, and the guests ate and drank into the night.
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