CRANE. 187 



cries. I often heard the waft of known wings ; but three 

 times there sounded overhead the sweeping wave of great 

 wings to which my ears were unaccustomed. I could 

 scarcely doubt it was the Cranes' ; but I dare not turn up 

 my eye : I even once or twice heard a slight chuckle that 

 must have been from them. At length, as I had my glass 

 in the direction of the nest, which was three or four hundred 

 yards off, I saw a tall grey figure emerging from amongst 

 the birch-trees, just beyond where I knew the nest must be ; 

 and there stood the Crane in all the beauty of nature, in the 

 full side-light of an Arctic summer night. She came on 

 with her graceful walk, her head up, and she raised it a 

 little higher and turned her beak sideways and upwards as 

 she passed round the tree on whose trunk I had hung the 

 little roll of bark. I had not anticipated that she would 

 observe so ordinary an object. She probably saw that her 

 eggs were safe, and then she took a beat of twenty or thirty 

 yards in the swamp, pecking and apparently feeding. At 

 the end of this beat she stood still for a quarter of an hour, 

 sometimes pecking and sometimes motionless, but showing 

 no symptoms of suspicion of my whereabouts, and, indeed, 

 no manifest sign of fear. At length she turned back and 

 passed her nest a few paces in the opposite direction, but 

 soon came into it ; she arranged with her beak the materials 

 of the nest, or the eggs, or both; she dropped her breast 

 gently forwards ; and as soon as it touched, she let the rest 

 of her body sink gradually down. And so she sits with her 

 neck up and her body full in my sight, sometimes preening 

 her feathers, especially of the neck, sometimes lazily pecking 

 about, and for a long time she sits with her neck curved 

 like a Swan's, though principally at its upper part. Now 

 she turns her head backwards, puts her beak under the 

 wing, apparently just in the middle of the ridge of the back, 

 and so she seems fairly to go to sleep. While she sits, as 

 generally while she walks, her plumes are compressed and 



inconspicuous 



" I must not go into long particulars concerning the nest 

 of 1854 in Kharto uoma. I found the two eggs on the 



