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Updated: June 15, 2025
When perched on a tree it stood like an ibis; and instead of the measured wing-beats characteristic of a heron's flight, it flew with a quick, vigorous flapping of the wings. There were queer mammals, too, as well as birds. In the fields Miller trapped mice of a kind entirely new. Next morning the sky was leaden, and a drenching rain fell as we began our descent of the river.
But, save for that, he took no further notice, and beat on with his terrific, piston-like, regular wing-beats; and the gull, that speckless, dazzling, hardened, hard giant, laughed laughed, I say, softly and to himself, hoarsely and insolently: "How-how-how-how!" It was as if he laughed in derision. And then a strange thing happened.
Stone's voice, which had till then been but a thin, husky murmur, gradually grew louder and louder, as though he were addressing a great concourse "'the golden universal haze in which men should have flown like bright wing-beats round the sun gave place to the parasitic halo which every man derived from the glorifying of his own nativity.
Now and then there was a great flapping of wings in the trees overhead, and a heavy brown and black speckled mountain-hen alighted close to the man's head, stretched out her neck toward him, cocked her head, called her scattered brood together, and departed with slow and deliberate wing-beats.
There was a whizzing of wing-beats in the air; two large birds swept over their heads and struck down into the copse whence the sound had issued. "This is indeed a most singular thing," said Augusta, under her breath, and with wide-eyed wonder. "Let us go nearer, and see what it can be." "I am sure I can go if you can," responded Arnfinn, not any too eagerly.
There must be somewhat on which its wing-beat shall fall, stepping stones for its hurrying feet. We call it ether, not knowing what we mean. But in this space is the play of intensest force and quickest activity. There are hundreds of millions of millions of wing-beats or footfalls in a second. Mathematical necessities surpass mental conceptions.
The next phenomenon was color, unreal, living pigment, which seemed to appeal to more than one sense, and which satisfied, as a cooling drink or a rare, delicious fragrance satisfies. A medium-sized, stocky bird flew with steady wing-beats over the jungle, in black silhouette against the sky, and swung up to an outstanding giant tree which partly overhung the edge of my clearing.
They included big and little white egrets and also the mauve and pearl-colored heron, with a partially black head and many- colored bill, which flies with quick, repeated wing-flappings, instead of the usual slow heron wing-beats. In the warehouse were scores of skins of jaguar, puma, ocelot, and jaguarundi, and one skin of the big, small-toothed red wolf.
And I knew, and the knowledge only intensified my pain, that my agitation, the strugglings of my soul to recover that lost life, were like the vain wing-beats of some woodland bird, blown away a thousand miles over the sea, into which it must at last sink down and perish. Such a mental state cannot endure for more than a few moments, and passing away, it left me weary and despondent.
I heard a grackle "sing" in the manner just described, wing-beats and all, while flying from one tree to another; and later still, in a country where boat-tailed grackles were an every-day sight near the heart of the village, I more than once saw them produce the sounds in question without any perceptible movement of the wings, and furthermore, their mandibles could be seen moving in time with the beats.
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