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Updated: May 10, 2025
Now Cuthbert loved all these birds dearly, especially the unselfish eider-duck who picks the down from her own breast to make a softer bed for her little ones. He was kind to them and they had no fear of him. But he dreaded lest after he was gone others should be less kind to his pets. So to protect them he made a promise, and he bequeathed them a legacy, the gift of Saint Cuthbert's Peace.
Be that as it may, ill befell any one who dare touch one of St. Cuthbert's birds, as was proved in the case of Liveing, servant to AElric, who was a hermit in Farne after the time of St. Cuthbert. For he, tired it may be of barley and dried fish, killed and ate an eider-duck in his master's absence, scattering the bones and feathers over the cliffs.
When a Nordlander speaks of birds he does not mean as they do here, only a head or two of game, but an aërial throng of winged creatures, rippling through the sky, flying round the rocks, like white foam, or descending like a snowstorm on their nesting-places; he thinks of eider-duck, guillemot, diver and oyster-catcher swimming in fjord and sound, or sitting upon the rocks; of gulls, ospreys and eagles, hunting in the air; of the eagle-owl, hooting weirdly at night in the mountain-clefts in short, he means a whole world of birds, and has a little difficulty in confining his ideas to the poor capercailzie, surprised and killed by a sportsman in the midst of a love-frolic, when the sun is rising over the pine-clad hills.
Hans, however, steers admirably, and brings us to the other extremity of the island. I was the first to leap on the rock. My uncle followed, while the eider-duck hunter remained still, like a man above any childish sources of astonishment.
But in the summer time Jack and Seimke sat together on the headland in the warm evenings, and the gnats buzzed and the fishes spouted close ashore in the stillness, and the eider-duck swam about. "If only some one would build me a boat as swift and nimble as a fish, and able to ride upon the billows like a sea-mew!" sighed and lamented Jack, "then I could be off."
"Father found him in the woods with a broken wing; but he is nearly well now, and I shall soon set him free," Karen told her. "And here is a woodpecker, and a cuckoo, and a magpie," said Gerda, looking into the cages. "Yes," said Karen, "and last year I had an eider-duck, and I often have sea-gulls.
He called the eider-duck hunter to his side. That worthy, however, shook his head. "Ofvanfor," was his sole spoken reply. "It appears," says my uncle with a woebegone look, "that we must go higher." He then turned to Hans, and asked him to give some reason for this decisive response. "Mistour," replied the guide.
At this moment our worthy guide, the eider-duck hunter, came in after seeing to the feeding and stabling of the horses which consisted in letting them loose to browse on the stunted green of the Icelandic prairies. There was little for them to eat, but moss and some very dry and innutritious grass; next day they were ready before the door, some time before we were. "Welcome," said Hans.
Several hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, must have thus got upon their wings and commenced sailing overhead. "You must know that the eider-duck, in order to protect its eggs from the air when it goes off to get for food the little fish that it catches in the sea, plucks from its breast the fine feathers called down, in which it buries its eggs very carefully.
A wisp of dry grass, or a few fibres of heather, were made to serve instead; and it was not easy to create with these heat enough to kindle fresh peats. At last, however, it was done; and eggs were poked in, here and there, to roast. The cockles must be roasted, too; and two or three little mouse-coloured birds, the young of the eider-duck, were broiled as soon as plucked. So much for the eating.
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