130 What Birds Have Done With Me 



beauty and natural music are so inherently spirit- 

 ual that they can only be spiritually discerned. I 

 am using this word spiritual in no narrow ecclesi- 

 astical sense, but in the wide sense of oneness, 

 with the only forces that, concealed by the tem- 

 poral, are eternal. Brother, mine, the poor tem- 

 poralities of life have prevented you from seeing 

 the singer and hearing the song. 



Returning in the night, after an absence of 

 more than four months, it seemed most fitting 

 that the insistent reveille of the Loon should usher 

 in the dewy freshness of the late April dawn, and 

 be the fore-runner of a host of familiar voices 

 that, also, woke the echoes of many a dim and 

 far-away spring morning. I found myself not 

 only listening to the cry of this particular Loon, 

 but to every cry of the kind I had heard since 

 childhood. It almost seemed as though these 

 half-forgotten voices lived again, or else I was 

 hearing the echoes of those long since smothered 

 in the silence of death. When I first heard it, it 

 seemed nothing less than the terrible voice of 

 some unknown wild beast, or the lament of a lost 

 soul in torment, and long after I knew the sound 

 came from a bird and was possibly a love call, 

 certain sub-conscious echoes, in my childish mind, 

 would cause fear to show a leering face. 



The next voice was that of the Mourning Dove. 

 Sweet and tender as the dawn, yet seemingly 



