18 BEYOND THE PASTURE BARS 



my neighbor who owned the barn. He did not 

 build the barn for holes. He built it for hay. 

 And I think he thought the one sane thing that 

 flickers could make was pot-pie! 



And I think that some city neighbors of mine 

 thought so too, when another crazy flicker took to 

 boring holes into their rain-pipes. 



Now it is a very natural thing for a woodpecker 

 to peck holes in wood (the flicker belongs to the 

 woodpecker family, you know) natural I should 

 say for him to peck holes into dead and hollow 

 trees; but quite unreasonable to drill holes into 

 big barns. Still barns are made of trees, are 

 built of wood, and are hollow, so that boring into 

 barns may not be very unnatural or very crazy 

 after all. But to bore into galvanized iron rain- 

 pipes that is the work of stark madness; and 

 no one can blame the people who owned the rain- 

 pipes for thinking so. 



What it was that drove this particular flicker 

 crazy I cannot say, unless, perhaps, it was noise. 

 Certainly drumming for hours on a rain-pipe is 

 enough to drive anything crazy; and this flicker 

 for hours every morning banged the sounding 

 pipes as if it were the Judgment-Day and he was 

 trying to wake the dead! 



