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Instead, there were two little balls of down, though you couldn't have seen them either, unless you had been about near enough to touch them; for the downy children of Mis were as dappled as his mate and her eggs, and they had, from the moment of their hatching, the instinct for keeping still if danger came near. Peaceful enough, indeed, had been the brooding days of Mother Nomer.
A man came up to take down some electric wires that had been fastened not far from the spot that was the Nomer home. He tramped heavily about, throwing down his tools here and there, and whistling loudly as he worked. All this frightened little Mother Nomer. There is no doubt about that, for her heart beat more and more quickly. But she didn't budge. She couldn't.
But he wasn't a bull and he wasn't a bat and he wasn't a hawk and he wasn't a jar; and he flew more by day than by night, and he never, never milked a goat in all his life. So for the purposes of this story we may as well give him a name to suit ourselves, and call him Mis Nomer.
And their war-time camouflage was wonderful, even though it was only a clumsy imitation of what Mother Nature did when the feathers of Mother Nomer were made to grow dappled like little blotches of light and dark; or, to put it the other way about, when the bird was led, by her instinct, to choose for the nesting-time a place where she did not show.
They came by all their different kinds of queerness naturally enough, Mis and Mother Nomer did, for it seemed to run in the family to be peculiar, and all their relatives had oddities of one kind or another. Take Cousin Whip-poor-will, who wears whiskers, for instance; and Cousin Chuck-will's widow, who wears whiskers that branch.
He hunted long and he hunted well; but so keen was his appetite and so huge the hunger of his twins, that it took the mother, too, to keep the meals provided in the Nomer home. I think they were never unhappy about it, for there is a certain satisfaction in doing well what we can do; and there is no doubt that these birds were made to be hunters.
When there were no branches handy, he would use a rail or a log or a wall, or even the ground; but wherever he settled himself, he looked like a blotch of light and dark, and one could gaze right at him without noticing that a bird was there. That was the way Mother Nomer did, too clowns both of them and always ready for the wonderful game of camouflage! They had remarkable voices.
Three times he almost got her. Almost, but not quite. Crippled as she seemed, she could still fumble and flutter just out of reach; and when at last the man had followed her to a corner of the roof far from her young, Mother Nomer sprang up, and spreading her long, pointed wings, took flight, whole and sound as a bird need be. The man understood and laughed. He laughed at himself for being fooled.
Pete-weet!" and once Why, yes, he should have remembered that this is the trick of many a mother-bird when danger threatens her young. So he went back, with careful step, to where he had been before. He looked this way and that. There was no nest. He saw no young. The little Nomer twins were not the son and daughter of Mis, the clown, and Mother Nomer, the trick cripple, for nothing!
Then Mother Nomer sprang into the air; and the man jumped, in such surprise that, had it not been for the wall, he would have fallen from the roof. It would be hard to tell which was the more startled for a moment man or bird. But Mother Nomer did not fly far.
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