JUST as the sun's first rays lit the tops of the tallest cypresses of the lagoon a whitetail buck came to the edge of Anhinga Town. There he met face to face another woods wanderer. On a great pine log lying across the buck's path crouched a large male wildcat. Early in the night an otter had eaten a fish on this log, and the big lynx, hungry as always, had been sniffing at the spot where the feast had taken place. The buck's coming interrupted him and, arching his back slightly, he gave a low growl, glaring out of his fierce, glassy eyes at the tall, antlered intruder who stood facing him in the narrow trail.
The buck halted only for a moment. After ranging the woods and broom grass fields all night he was on his way to his bed in a dense myrtle thicket bordering a black gum swamp, and the shortest route to this thicket lay along the margin of the lagoon which was the site of Anhinga Town. Long ago he had outgrown the instinctive fear of the lynx which in his young days would have sent him racing off at full speed at sight of the big cat crouching on the log. He stood for a moment, head held high, returning steadily the baleful glare of the wildcat's savage eyes: then, shaking his heavy velvet-covered antlers proudly, he strode forward.
The wildcat, apparently without turning his head to see where his leap would take him, jumped six feet backward and faded like a ghost into the cover of the cane thicket clothing the slope of the bank. Leaping lightly over the log, the buck passed on along the narrow path.
Meanwhile Anhinga Town was waking up. In fact, it seemed to be already wide awake, for from many of its houses issued noises of many kinds—noises which might well have given a visitor the impression that the inhabitants were quarreling violently with one another. These houses were situated in tall cypress trees standing in the water of the lagoon. They were all built mainly of sticks, but some were larger and more strongly constructed than the others and were placed much higher in the trees, and it was from these larger houses that the clamor came. These were the homes of great blue herons who had come to live in Anhinga Town and who were now as numerous there as the anhingas or snakebirds themselves.
Very early in the spring, before the snakebirds had returned from the tropical regions where they spent the winter, the herons had set about the business of getting their homes ready for the warm season, and as a result of this early start every heron home in the town contained young. Hence for the present the town seemed to belong to the herons rather than the anhingas. All day long the place rang with the ceaseless clamor of the heron families, while scarcely a sound of any sort came from the anhinga homes, where always, night and day, long-tailed, long-necked birds, the strangest and most fantastic of all the inhabitants of the swamp country, sat brooding over their bluish-white, chalky eggs which, some day soon, would turn into hungry nestlings as grotesque as the young herons had been when they made their entrance into the world.
In a cypress rising from the water fifty feet or so from the log where the buck had encountered the wildcat, a male anhinga sat in a nest placed in a crotch, formed by the trunk of the tree and the lowest of its straight, short limbs. Above him and all around him hung long festoons of gray Spanish moss swaying slightly in the gentle breeze and forming a sort of curtain round-about the nest, almost hiding it from view. Through gaps in this tapestry the sharp eyes of the brooding snakebird looked out upon the little world of the lagoon.
He had watched with keen interest the meeting of the buck and the wildcat on the bank nearby; and now, sitting motionless and impassive in the nest, his snakelike neck thrust well forward, his long tail touching the moss curtain behind him, he was wondering what luck attended his mate who was away fishing while, like a good husband, he took his turn at the monotonous business of warming the four blue-white eggs.
It was a monotonous task in one sense only. The anhinga's tree stood close to an opening in the flooded cypress woods, and across and above this opening herons and snakebirds were constantly flying. Most of the young birds in the heron nests were well grown, and these young herons required an enormous quantity of food. They stood on the nests or on branches close by, and when they saw, or thought they saw, a parent heron returning from the fishing grounds they gaped open their bills, flapped their wings, and made an amazing clamor of squawks, croaks and quacks.
There were times when every heron family in the town seemed to join in the din, to which the adult herons often added their deeper, hoarser voices, so that the whole place rang with an extraordinary variety of noises. In these, with scarcely any effort of the imagination, one might distinguish the barking of dogs, the squealing and grunting of pigs, the squawling of cats, the piercing cries of guinea-fowls and even the roaring of wild beasts. The anhinga was entirely accustomed to this clamor and was not in the slightest degree annoyed by it, though he himself was among the most silent of birds. He sat still and listened and watched.
Above the opening in the flooded woods he saw a great blue heron sweep down the wind, turn, head up into the stiff breeze, and begin to descend. The long wide wings of the great bird curved downward near their tips, his slender neck straightened, his slim legs dangled beneath him as he came down in a gradual slant to his home in the heart of the town, to be greeted instantly by a tumult of squawks and welcoming catcalls.
High in the air, much higher than the heron had been, an anhinga came into view. When he was nearly over Anhinga Town, but a little down the wind from it, he swerved from his straight course and, with wings stiffly extended and long tail spread like a fan, he planed down an invisible spiral stairway from the sky. Very like an airplane he looked, with his long neck and tail and his motionless wings, but lighter, more graceful, more buoyant than any sky-ship ever made by man; and with ease and grace which would have made the best of human air pilots envious, he came to rest upon the top of a dead cypress on the outskirts of the town.
Instantly, then, the gracefulness which had distinguished him in the air left him. Grotesque and fantastic to the last degree, his snaky neck sharply crooked, his dagger-like beak thrusting this way and that as he peered about him, he seemed half bird, half reptile, a reminder of those outlandish feathered creatures of the dim past when the avian race was in its infancy. Seen in the shadows, there would have been nothing to offset this grotesqueness of form and awkwardness of attitude; but perching there in the brilliant sunlight on the summit of the naked cypress top, he was not the somber-hued creature which he seemed when he stood with wings half-open, like a gorged vulture, on some dead limb in the dim, ghostly, moss-tapestried swamp glooms. A green iridescence played upon his glossy black neck, breast and white-tipped tail; upon his back was traced a delicate lace-like pattern of shining white; short gray plumes adorned his head and neck; a rounded blue spot at the base of his bill shone brightly in the light, and the long, straight bill and small throat pouch were of a rich orange color, matching the hue of his webbed feet.
The brooding anhinga spent no time admiring his kinsman—a replica of himself—on the sunny cypress top nearby. To him a more interesting because a less familiar sight was a magnificent wild turkey gobbler who walked slowly along the bank at the lower end of the lagoon, pausing upon the big pine log where the otter had feasted and the wildcat had met the buck. The anhinga looked to see the harem that should be following this superb bronze sultan of the woods; but it was nesting time for the turkey hens and they were all sitting on their eggs in secret places in the deep woods or in dense thickets in the broom grass fields.
The gobbler was still standing on the pine log when the anhinga's sharp ears detected, amid the clamor of the herons, a high thin note twice repeated, coming from amid the cypress trunks beyond the opening in the flooded forest. He knew that it was a female wood duck talking to her little ones, and after a moment or two she came swimming slowly down a winding water lane amid the trees, seven downy yellowish ducklings paddling behind her.
Other eyes saw the wood duck and her brood. One of many logs of various sizes, which lay more than half submerged amid lily-pads and duckweed in the sunlit water near the margin of the lagoon, moved ever so slightly, sinking a little deeper until only two knobs showed above the surface. Very slowly these two black knobs moved forward, cleaving the carpet of duckweed, taking a course which would intersect that of the wood duck and her children.
At that moment the big gobbler on the pine log straightened suddenly. Some sound, the meaning of which puzzled him, had come to his ears from the woods encircling the lagoon and he raised his head high to look and listen. A swamp rosebush hid the gobbler from the wood duck a hundred feet away on the lagoon. Yet the duck saw something move on the bank beyond the bush, though the intervening foliage prevented her from perceiving that it was only a turkey. Since the thing that had moved was on the bank it might be a man, and the mother duck did not believe in taking chances. She turned, spoke a word to her children and headed back along the water lane that led deep into the cypress woods.
The two black knobs moving across the carpet of duckweed came to rest, and presently there rose from the water behind them a black, log-like thing which, viewed at right angles, looked rough and jagged. Though he was not aware of it, the young five-foot alligator was a good deal of a philosopher. If he could not dine on duck just now, at any rate he could resume his interrupted sun-bath and enjoy the warmth of the sunlight on his back.
The brooding anhinga was watching the turkey, still standing erect and alert on the pine log, when another note, this time shrill and insistent, from the mother duck caused him to turn his head. The duck had turned out of the winding water lane and was leading her children away from it through the flooded cypress woods, following a tortuous course in and out amid the tree trunks. In a moment the anhinga understood the reason for her sudden change of direction.
Down the middle of the water lane the grim monarch of the lagoon was coming. No 'gators of the largest size lived in or visited Anhinga Town because this lagoon was not a large one and its waters were generally shallow. Hence the eight-foot saurian now approaching, his long head and four feet of his jagged back showing, lorded it over all the other denizens of the bird city who lived on or in the water under the homes of the snakebirds and herons.
The king of the lagoon either did not see or took little interest in the wood duck family who had so hastily removed themselves from his path. He came on slowly and with dignity down the water lane to the opening in the flooded woods, turned slightly to the left, forged through the lily pads and duckweed like a half-submerged submarine, and came to rest in a shallow place near the shore where the sunny water was very warm. Sinking a little deeper, he lay motionless, scarcely distinguishable from the three or four logs in the water near him.
He had been lying there, utterly still, for nearly half an hour when a crashing roar like a clap of thunder shook Anhinga Town. For a moment even the din of the young herons was hushed, only to break out again more loudly than ever as the frightened adult birds rose from the nests with a mighty flapping of wide wings to circle about just above the tree-tops, croaking and squawking. Down from the pine log pitched the big bronze gobbler. For four or five steps he raced along the bank: then his great wings opened and with quick, powerful beats he swept out over the lagoon. Making a wide circle over the water, he nearly brushed the nest of the anhinga with a wing-tip as he shot past, heading at full speed for the big swamp a mile away to the south.
The anhinga, crouching close upon his nest, saw a man come running along the bank—a negro, with a single-barreled shotgun in his hand, peering eagerly across the lagoon in the direction which the turkey had taken.
The hunter saw no bronze-feathered carcass lying on the water, and presently he walked on towards the pine log and searched the ground near it. He found no feathers there either and he grinned disgustedly with a gleam of white teeth. For months he had been trying to get this gobbler, the biggest in those woods, hunting him in season and out. He had tried a long shot from far down the bank because experience had taught him the impossibility of stalking the wise old bird unless conditions were very favorable; and now he was cursing himself for not having made an effort to get closer to his quarry and cursing also the cheap shells bought at the little cross-roads store.
The negro poacher lingered only a short time on the bank beside the lagoon. His shot might have been heard at the plantation house and he had no wish to fall foul of the master of that plantation.
Fully a half-hour passed before Anhinga Town resumed the even tenor of its life. Within a few minutes the redoubled clamor of the herons sank back to normal, but a longer period elapsed before the two alligators, which had vanished instantly as the shot rang out, renewed their interrupted sun-bath and a big brown banded water snake, which had been sunning itself on a little island of cypress knees, reappeared out of the wine-brown depths.
Gradually those elements of the town's population which had been dispersed or driven into temporary seclusion by the hunter's coming returned to their accustomed places. The gobbler, of course, did not come back; but after a while as many great blue herons and snakebirds as ever were passing back and forth above the tree-tops or perching on convenient limbs, while the fish crows and grackles, which were among the town's most abundant inhabitants, had resumed their comings and goings and the small bird-life of the place was active and vocal again.
Presently other visitors came from the woods around the lagoon. Three gray squirrels and four big, white-eared, white-nosed fox squirrels, whose thick gray-brown fur darkened on the head and tail to black, moved about in the mixed forest of water oak, willow oak and sweet gum beyond the bank where the pine log lay. A small raccoon ambled along the bank and stopped a minute at the pine log to sniff at the spot where the otter had feasted. There was man-scent about the place also, however, and the coon passed quickly on.
He was followed after a little by a cottontail, who came slowly along the bank nearly as far as the pine log and then turned down to the water's edge to nibble the stems of some tall, flag-like aquatic plants which grew there in profusion. Once the little hare stiffened and crouched low in the reeds as a black shadow swept over him; but, glancing up, he saw only a great blue heron flying over the lagoon and above the heron a circling snakebird, and jn a moment the cottontail resumed his feeding.
The brooding anhinga saw the rabbit come down to the edge of the water. Whether by accident or as the result of some sequence of ideas in the bird's rudimentary mind, the anhinga's gaze shifted immediately to the big alligator lying nearly submerged amid the logs and lily pads fifty yards away across the lagoon. It may have been mere chance which caused the snakebird to glance at the 'gator at precisely that moment; but only three days before he had looked down from his nest upon a rather interesting occurrence which took place shortly after a cottontail had hopped along the bank and turned down to the water at that very spot to nibble at those same succulent plant stems.
Possibly, therefore, the anhinga expected to see what he now saw—a gradual subsidence of the 'gator's loglike back until it had sunk out of sight altogether and only the black knobs which were the saurian's eyes and nostrils remained above the surface.
Very slowly these knobs moved in the water. Then they, too, sank until only the hind pair were visible—two dark spots, each of them no bigger than a walnut, on the level carpet of duckweed, the surface of which was marred by many other spots and objects of various shapes—rounded tips of cypress knees, the ends of waterlogged sticks, small logs, and branches fallen from the trees, with here and there the upthrust head of a terrapin or a frog. A man would not have been likely to pick out from among all these the two dark knobs which were the 'gator's periscope; and so slowly did these knobs move across the duckweed carpet that upon a casual glance they would not have seemed to move at all.
The cottontail at the edge of the water nibbled away contentedly. The shadows which swept over him from time to time no longer startled him. He had discovered that they were all made by harmless herons and snakebirds. Ordinarily, swiftly moving shadows like these scared him badly, but now he paid no further attention to them. Two Florida gallinules walked close by him, apparently without seeing him, talking volubly to each other. Wise in the ways of the water-folk of the lagoon, they may have seen the periscope of the long, armored submarine coming gradually nearer and nearer, and possibly its slow, menacing approach was the subject of their conversation. To the cottontail, however, their language was meaningless and he gave no heed to them or to their gabble.
The anhinga on his nest watched in silence, his gaze shifting back and forth between the cottontail and the two black spots out in the lagoon moving so slowly that the movement was barely discernible. Minutes passed, and presently the anhinga's attention was diverted to the three gray squirrels which, more lively and more agile than their handsomer, darker-gray, white-nosed kinsmen, were playing a game of hide-and-seek in a water oak, some of the branches of which projected far over the quiet waters of the lagoon.
They were happy little people, these squirrels, next to the otters the most playful of all the furred folk of the swamp woods. Here and there amid the branches of the oak they chased one another with what seemed like reckless abandon, racing along the stout main limbs, flinging themselves in long leaps from bough to bough, swinging precariously on the smaller moss-draped branches which swayed and bent beneath their weight.
Even less than the cottontail were they concerned with those two black spots on the surface of the water almost directly beneath them and now scarcely fifteen feet distant from the place where the rabbit was feeding at the water's edge.
Away to the right, beyond the open space in the flooded woods, the brooding anhinga saw a dark shape come swinging down the water lane that wound amid the cypresses. This traveler of the water lane traveled not in the water but in the air some ten feet above the surface. His wide wings stirred the moss-pennants trailing from the trees, and he came so swiftly that almost in an instant he had reached the end of the lane and had swept out above the open water.
The anhinga crouched close on his nest. The great horned owls who lived in the deep woods near the farther edge of the lagoon had never molested him; yet he did not like them and on the rather frequent occasions when they hunted by daylight he took pains to keep out of their way. The owl was heading almost directly towards him, but he sat in his moss-curtained house as still as a bird carved out of black marble.
His ordeal was only momentary. In a fraction of a second the owl had passed the anhinga's cypress and, swerving suddenly in the air, had shot upward with increased velocity along a steep incline towards the outermost limb of the wide-spreading oak.
Along this limb, heading towards the outer end, raced one of the gray squirrels. The owl's wide wings darkened over him, long needle-pointed talons were reaching for him when he leaped—wildly, aimlessly—out into the air. The horned killer's momentum carried him fifteen feet beyond the limb; and just as he checked his course and turned, he saw the squirrel hit the water with a splash, disappear for an instant, then strike out awkwardly but bravely for the shore.
The big owl circled over the lagoon, spiraling gradually down towards the surface. There was no hurry now. The squirrel was at his mercy and he would take his time, for he was not especially skillful at plucking his prey from the water. Suddenly, five feet behind the swimming squirrel, a black hideous object burst from below through the thin film of duckweed. As it lunged forward, huge jaws studded with long teeth opened and engulfed the squirrel. For a moment the whole head and two-thirds of the body of the saurian king of the lagoon appeared above the surface as, with an upward toss of his head, he swallowed his victim whole. Then gradually the long body sank out of sight again until the circling owl saw only the periscope eyes.
A hundred yards from the shore of the lagoon, in a dense thicket of cassena, the cottontail came to a halt. He had seen the owl as the big bird turned in the air after stooping at the squirrel, and he had not stopped running until he had gained his cassena fortress which no owl or hawk could penetrate. The anhinga on his nest had already forgotten the tragedy he had witnessed. High above the opening in the flooded woods a female snakebird, her fawn throat and breast gleaming white in the sun, was planing down to Anhinga Town.
Somehow, even at that distance, he recognized his mate. He stirred on the nest, half-opening his wings. His turn of duty was over for a while. In a few minutes he would be circling upward above the cypresses and heading away to his favorite fishing ground—a large lagoon five miles to the northward—leaving his mate to warm the blue-white eggs in the moss-curtained nest and wile away the hours by watching the varied activities of Anhinga Town's inhabitants.