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At certain seasons of the year the intrepid bird-hunters suspend themselves from the cliffs by means of ropes, and feather their own nests by robbing the nests of their neighbors. Enormous quantities of eggs are taken in this way. The eider-down, of which the nests of the eider-duck are composed, is one of the most profitable articles of Faroese traffic.
It is difficult to believe such a story, is it not? You know all miracles bear more or less resemblance to the story of the Golden Tooth. We have our golden tooth in Jarvis, that is all. Duncker the fisherman asserts that he has seen her plunge into the fiord and come up in the shape of an eider-duck, at other times walking on the billows of a storm.
Strong, in order to change the food a little, had procured several dozens of eider-duck eggs, twice as big as hens' eggs, and of greenish colour. It was not much, but the change was refreshing to a crew fed on salted meat.
He carried a bundle containing a gift skins of the young eider-duck to make an undergarment for his lady-love, two plump little auks with which to gratify her palate, and a bladder of oil to wash them down and cause her heart to rejoice. Good fortune favoured this brave man, for he met Oblooria at a lonely part of the shore among the boulders.
"It is the luck of the spear," said Ujarak, "not the skill of the hunter." This would have been an unkind cut to ordinary mortals, but it fell as harmless on Ippegoo as water on the back of the eider-duck. A snub from the wizard he took almost as a compliment, and the mere success of his shot afforded him unbounded pleasure.
There were ducks and geese of various kinds, and innumerable quantities of plover, cormorants, gulls, and eider-ducks, the eggs of which they found in thousands. Many of these birds were good for food, and the eggs of most of them, especially those of the eider-duck, were excellent.
"The eider-duck is about the size of the common mallard, or wild duck proper. Its colour is black below, and buff-white on the back, neck, and shoulders, while the forehead is bluish black. It is one of the `sea-ducks, or fuligulae, as the naturalists term them, and it is rarely seen in fresh water.
The Mygenaes-holm, a solitary rock, guards, like a sentinel, one of the passages, and forms a terrific precipice of 1500 feet on one side, against which the waves break with an everlasting roar. Here the solan-goose, the eider-duck, and innumerable varieties of gulls and other sea-fowl, build their nests and breed.
"Good-morning, Madam Long-legs; already, so early, upon the pond?" "Fine thanks, beloved Clatter-beak. I have brought me a little breakfast. Would you like, perhaps, the quarter of an eider-duck, or a little frog's thigh?" "My best thanks, but this morning I have little appetite. I come to the pond for a very different reason.
He took pains, however, that it should be both soft and elastic. The latter quality he obtained by a careful choice of the bamboos that were to serve as shafts; the former requisite he secured by thickly bedding it with the lopped-off leaves, and adding an upper stratum of cotton, obtained from a species of bombyx growing close at hand, and soft as the down of the eider-duck.
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