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"In his rage Kapchack ordered a decimation of the wood-pigeons, which I myself think was a great mistake; but, as I have told you before, I do not meddle with politics.
But an hour after I heard Guy and Edwin arguing vociferously in the dark, on the respective merits and future treatment of their two sisters, Muriel and Maud. John and I sat up late together that night. He could not rest even though he told me he had left the mother and her two daughters as cosy as a nest of wood-pigeons.
Now this war-cry supplied, as doubtless the raven had foreseen, the very link that was wanting to bind the immense crowd of wood-pigeons together. Thenceforward they had a common sign and pass-word, and were no longer scattered.
Here in the early spring we used to come and watch the first violet uplifting its head from the dark green leaves behind the mossy boles, and listen for the first note of the blackcap, the nightingale's herald, and the first coo of the wood-pigeons among the bare and newly-budding trees.
But the wood-cutters heard only the wind stirring in the branches. Ah, how cold it was in winter when the skies were steely black and the giant stars sparkled icily! And how pleasant it was when spring returned, and the gossipy birds came back again! The first year a pair of wood-pigeons took to housekeeping in his topmost branches.
This went on for some time, but at last one of the boys spied out a woodpecker in the meadow-lands among the wood-pigeons, and when he had found her nest in a half-dead alder tree, came running to Peter with the news of his discovery.
And thus we went on and on, through ancient mountain-forests, while the boughs lashed my face and I could look into the nests of the eagles and wood-pigeons, of the starlings and squirrels. It was a wondrous ramble; now and then I gasped for breath, yet on we went till, on the topmost bough of an oak, behold, there was Lorenz Abenberger, and the evil words he spoke made me wake up.
"There sit the wood-pigeons," continued she, pointing to a number of laths and a cage which had been fixed into the walls, near one of the openings. "Both rascals would fly away directly, if they were not closely locked up. And here is my old sweetheart 'Ba;" and she dragged out a reindeer by the horn; he wore a bright copper ring round his neck, and was tied up.
And you, forests, under whose symmetrical shields of dark green the colors of the fawns move, like the waters of the river under its spears, its cimeters of flag, where, in gleaming circles of steel, the breasts of the wood-pigeons flash in the playful sunbeam, and many sounds, many notes of no earthly music, come over the well-relieved glades, should not your depth pass into that poet's heart, in your depths should he not fuse his own?"
In the cornfields on either hand wood-pigeons are numerous in spring and autumn. Up to April they come in flocks, feeding on the newly sown grain when they can get at it, and varying it with ivy berries, from the ivy growing up the elms. By degrees the flocks break up as the nesting begins in earnest.
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