NONSUCH 



watches, perhaps a little humorously, faint sparks 

 within the shawl-wrapped forms of the steerage, 

 floating past, upstream, toward migration's melt- 

 ing-pot. 



But these are all trifling migrations, whims of 

 empire, tribe or family, variously origined and of 

 brief duration. We must go to the so-called lower 

 animals to find migration in all the majesty of age- 

 old tradition, its beginnings buried in past geologi- 

 cal epochs, with routes fashioned by long forgotten 

 configurations of continents, ancient before man- 

 kind had risen up on his hind legs or climbed into 

 the trees — migrations whose times and seasons 

 have been evolved and governed by countless cen- 

 turies of revolutions of the planet earth. 



From a lofty vantage point let us watch the coast 

 lines of Labrador and Greenland and as far north 

 as any frozen bit of earth distinguishes itself from 

 sheer ice. It is July and the breathlessly short Arctic 

 summer is at its height. As an icicle loses a few drops 

 between clouds, so this northland relaxes its grip 

 for a brief season, countable in days, and permits 

 a few inches of thaw and of dwarfed and hasty 

 growth of moss and flowers to slip through its icy 

 fingers. All is grey and white — sea, old snow- 

 drifts and birds. The birds have come, like the in- 

 termittent drops from the icicle, settling to earth 

 from nowhere at the first hint of thaw, scratching 

 a shallow hollow, and brooding four huddled eggs. 

 The breast of the mother tern is a tiny oasis of 

 warmth amid the Arctic waste ; her food is inchling 



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