Wings, Wings, Wings 59 



the ears of heaviness and sleep, in the mid-night, 

 as an "all's well" from the watchers of the silent 

 places. Adolph sometimes shot them when they 

 stopped to rest or feed, but to the small boy it 

 was an evil act, a kind of a treachery to a stranger 

 from a far land who should have received hos- 

 pitality. How big they were, and what a won- 

 derful thing a wing was that could carry such a 

 great bird through the sky, as fast as a train of 

 cars could run on an iron track. The sky made 

 them small, but the earth made them large, and 

 until the Frenchman told him of his mistake, he 

 had thought them the largest birds in the world. 

 Adolph told him that to compare them to a Swan 

 was like an old rooster to a big turkey. 



Adolph also told him that swans were harder 

 to see than geese, because they were white and 

 flew higher and did not keep asking you to come 

 and shoot at them the way a fool goose did. 

 The very next day he saw them, not flying in a 

 great V-shaped flock as he had expected, but in 

 a straight line, hard to tell from the white clouds 

 that hovered about them and whose children they 

 seemed to be. If they were not really the chil- 

 dren of the clouds, maybe the clouds wanted to 

 race with them ; but as he watched them sail along 

 they seemed too stately to race with anything, 

 unless it might be with their own shadows and 

 they were clearly too high up to even see them. 



