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Updated: May 12, 2025
Quoskh the Watchful I could tell my great bird's mate by sight or hearing from all others, either by her greater size or a peculiar double croak she had had hidden her nest in the top of a great green hemlock. Near by, in the high crotch of a dead tree, was another nest, which she had built, evidently, years before and added to each successive spring, only to abandon it at last for the evergreen.
I was sitting in my little blind at the beaver pond, waiting for a deer, when Quoskh came striding along the shore. He would swing his weather-vane head till he saw a frog ahead, then stalk him slowly, deliberately, with immense caution; as if he knew as well as I how watchful the frogs are at his approach, and how quickly they dive headlong for cover at the first glint of his stilt-like legs.
Quoskh K'sobeqh was the name that at first seemed most appropriate, till I had learned his habits and how best to get the weather of him which happened only two or three times in the course of a whole summer. One morning I went early to the beaver pond and sat down against a gray stump on the shore, with berry bushes growing to my shoulders all about me.
I was still-fishing in the middle of the big lake, one late afternoon, when Quoskh and her little ones sailed over the trees from the beaver pond and lit on a grassy shore. A shallow little brook stole into the lake there, and Mother Quoskh left her young to frog for themselves, while she went fishing up the brook under the alders.
I would hear only a startled rush of wings, and then a questioning call as they sailed over me before winging away to quieter beaches. If I were jacking, with a light blazing brightly before me in my canoe, to see what night folk I might surprise on the shore, Quoskh was the only one for whom my jack had no fascination.
Quoskh meanwhile stood in the shadow, where he would not be noticed, knee-deep in water, his head drawn down into his shoulders, and a friendly leafy branch bending over him to screen him from prying eyes. As a fish swam up to his chum he would spear it like lightning; throw his head back and wriggle it head-first down his long neck; then settle down to watch for the next one.
The mussels which he found were invariably, I think, eaten as his own particular tidbits; for I never saw him attempt to carry them away, though once I found two or three where he had hidden them. If Quoskh were fishing for his own dinner, instead of for his hungry nestlings, he adopted different tactics.
To-night the woods were tense as a waiting fox, watching to see what new thing would come out of the lake, or what strange mystery would be born under their own soft shadows. Quoskh was abroad too, bewitched by the moonlight. I heard him calling and paddled down. He knew me long before he was anything more to me than a voice of the night, and swept up to meet me.
And the cry, with its strange, wild interrogation vanishing away into the outer darkness, has given him his most fascinating Indian name, Quoskh the Night's Question. To many, indeed, even to some Indians, he has no other name and no definite presence.
When you had followed far, and were sure that the loitering trail had certainly lost itself, it crept at last under a dark hemlock; and there, through an oval frame of rustling, whispering green, was the loneliest, loveliest little deer-haunted beaver pond in the world, where Quoskh lived with his mate and his little ones.
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