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His gliding and curving motions are somewhat like those of the herring-gull, but the wings in gliding are carried stiff and straight, the tips of the long flight-feathers showing a slight upward curve. But the greatest difference is in the way the head is carried. The rook, like the heron and stork, carries his beak pointing lance-like straight before him.
The shorter plumes that shield the bases of the long quill feathers are called the coverts, which are found on both the upper and under surfaces of the wing. Forming a vast expansion of the bony and fleshy framework are the quills, or flight-feathers, called collectively the "remiges."
In summer, when the wildfowl which bred on so many of the lakes in the Blackfeet country lost their flight-feathers, during the moult, and again in the late summer, when the young ducks and geese were almost fullgrown but could not yet fly, the Indians often went in large parties to the shallow lakes which here and there dotted the prairie, and, driving the birds to shore, killed them in large numbers.
The reduction of the digits of the wing in birds to three, with the bones firmly united together, would follow from their use in flight and their disuse as digits, and it would seem, from the fact that the flight-feathers must have been always on the posterior edge of the wing, and that the ulna is larger than the radius, that the three digits which have persisted are the 3rd, 4th, and 5th, and not the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd as usually taught.
On we went, every sound and movement of the forest seeming to spur us forward and add flight-feathers to our speeding feet. For in my Indians, ascendant now, was the dull horror of the supernatural; and as for me my hatred of the Sorcerers was tightening every nerve to the point of breaking.
Hugh Carden Ali, the greatest authority after Abdul on the shahin, took the bird upon his fist, looked at the sunken, piercing eyes which were partially seeled; ran his hand over the narrow body, short tail and black back, and a finger over the large beak and deep mouth; held up the ugly face to the light, examined the flight-feathers and, moving his hand quickly up and down, caused the bird to flutter its wings and so give him a chance of measuring the distance of the wings from the body.
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