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Updated: May 19, 2025
She lay out on the moor, under the August sun. Her hands were pressed like a bandage over her eyes. When she lifted them she caught the faint pink glow of their flesh. The light throbbed and nickered as she pressed it out, and let it in. The sheep couched, panting, in the shade of the stone covers. She lay so still that the peewits had stopped their cry. Something bothered her....
Their stately, powerful trunks were magnificently black against the transparent golden green of the nut bushes and mountain-ashes; higher up, their wide knotted branches stood out in graceful lines against the clear blue sky, unfolding into a tent overhead; hawks, honey-buzzards and kestrels flew whizzing under the motionless tree-tops; variegated wood-peckers tapped loudly on the stout bark; the blackbird's bell-like trill was heard suddenly in the thick foliage, following on the ever-changing note of the gold-hammer; in the bushes below was the chirp and twitter of hedge-warblers, siskins, and peewits; finches ran swiftly along the paths; a hare would steal along the edge of the wood, halting cautiously as he ran; a squirrel would hop sporting from tree to tree, then suddenly sit still, with its tail over its head.
So now, as he thought of Hazel's lissom waist, her large eyes, rather scared, her slender wrists he cursed until the peewits arose mewing all about him. In the thick darkness of the lonely fields he might have been some hero of the dead, mouthing a satanic recitative amid a chorus of lost souls. The long search for Hazel, begun in a whim, had ended in passion.
'Eh, yon's a proper bird! she exclaimed, as a big silken cuckoo alighted on the mud with a gobble, drank with dignity, and took its vacillating flight to a far ash-tree. 'Foxy ought to see that, she added. Silver-crested peewits circled and cried with their melancholy cadences, and a tawny pheasant led out her young.
"No, I have no right," muttered Pyotr Mihalitch. "But so much the better. . . . The harsher I am, the less right I have to interfere, the better." It was sultry. Clouds of gnats hung over the ground and in the waste places the peewits called plaintively. Everything betokened rain, but he could not see a cloud in the sky.
One or two starlings which haunted the house in which we stayed, and slept in their old holes in the thatch, picked up all the various peewits' calls and notes, and used to amuse themselves by repeating these in the apple-trees on sunny mornings. The note was so exact a reproduction that I often looked up to see where the plover was before I made out that it was only the starling's mimicry.
Besides these, the lakes boast all the usual kinds of water-fowl, as herons, ducks, snipe, teal, etc.; the gardens and groves abound with blackbirds, thrushes, and nightingales; curlews and peewits are seen occasionally; while pigeons, starlings, crows, magpies, larks, sparrows, and swallows are common.
Once more Hugo's waking eyes beheld two peewits spitted over the coals and a meal cake baking in the embers. "I did dream of gold last night," said Humphrey, by way of a morning greeting. "Knowest thou what that betokeneth?" "Nay," responded Hugo, pleasantly. "It betokeneth success in thy present undertaking after first meeting with difficulties.
The monotonous and yet pleasing cry of the peewits, the sweet titlark singing overhead, and the cuckoos flying round, filled the place with the magic charm of spring. Coming to these Cuckoo-fields day after day, there was always something to interest me, either in the meadows themselves or on the way thither. The very dust of the road had something to show.
"That ought to bring them, lads," said Dave, with his eyes twinkling beneath his fox-skin cap, after beating a few reeds aside so that they could have a good view of where the unfortunate peewits fluttered at the pegs. "But suppose they don't come?" said Tom. "I know if I was a piewipe I wouldn't be cheated by a few dummies and some pegged-down birds."
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