f 



41 A giant of beauty and grandeur 



boots were tight and he was trying, without obvious success, to 

 wriggle his numb toes and still keep the tractor moving over the 

 rough trail. 



Now and then one of us in the wagon box would spot a white 

 blob in the distance and then we set up a fearful howl until Bud 

 heard and, with much clanking and bumping, brought the entire 

 equipage to a halt. Standing up on a plank thrown across the 

 wagon box, we looked long and carefully at the white blob, trying 

 to decide if it might be a whooping crane. Aside from pure fig- 

 ments of imagination or optical illusions, we had to eliminate 

 white pelicans and egrets. The pelicans are huge brutes with heavy 

 bodies and a nine-foot wingspread. On the water or squatting 

 lazily on shore, they are bulky and built close to the surface. Also, 

 they are a sparkling, alabaster white, of a different degree of white- 

 ness from the whooping crane. The much smaller egrets are slim 

 and usually alert, leaning forward slightly and rather quick in 

 their movements. When you do spot a whooping crane you won- 

 der how you could mistake him for anything else or anything else 

 for him. He looks like a great, flightless, prehistoric bird, prancing 

 about over the mud flats. His stride, the length and thickness of 

 his neck, and the long, sloping back with its dangling plumes over 

 the tail are completely characteristic. Most of those we saw were 

 at least a half mile or more distant, but on one occasion, as we 

 came from behind the cover of a thick motte of live oaks, there 

 stood a pair of them not fifty yards away. At the moment we saw 

 them they were already moving, sounding off with their bugle- 

 clear trumpet blast of warning and running with amazingly lengthy 

 strides before getting airborne. The red skin on top of their bare 

 heads stood out clearly, and so did the grim, almost fierce cast of 

 their features. They seemed like great satin-white bombers, with 

 their immense wings flicking upward in short arcs and their heavy 

 bodies fighting for altitude. Still calling, they glided over the tops 

 of the scrub, slowly gaining elevation. Nothing flightless about 

 them! 



When they had moved more than a mile to the south of us, 

 to the rim of Mullet Bay, we came up for air, for we had been 



