^ The Voices of the Wilderness 



sharply defined, clear note of our European cuckoo, though 

 the latter listens in silence to the cry of his cousins all 

 through the winter under the equator. This cry seems 

 to me, with its low, dull, softly prolonged tones — so 

 different from the louder cry of its northern relative — 

 to be quite in keeping with its mysterious tropical home. 

 For the sickle cuckoo knows all its deepest mysteries, 

 and no bird ranges so unweariedly through the densest 

 thickets and over the most inaccessible regions. In the 

 most hidden, solitary, and unknown spots ^ it would come 

 fluttering up from the ground at my feet, often startling 

 me. It seemed to me as if the bird wanted to call my 

 attention to newly discovered mysteries, as its " Dut-diit — 

 dududu — dut-diit " came sounding to me, now here, now 

 there, low, soft and melodious, by day under the brooding 

 noonday heat, and just the same in the midnight hours. 



At night, too, he is seconded, as I have already 

 mentioned, by his more timid cousin, with an ever 

 repeated " Ki-kii-kii — ki-kii-ku," that resounds monotonously 

 in the distance. 



There is a strange charm in continually hearing these 

 voices again and again, without knowing the little singers ; 

 and a triumph at last in making out which they are. 



" During a sleepless night," said Richard Wagner, 

 '' I once went out upon the balcony of my window on 

 the Grand Canal at Venice. As if in a deep dream the 

 legend-haunted city of the lagoons lay spread out before 



1 From the Cameroon district in West Africa Professor Yngwe 

 Sjostedt writes to me also of a nearly related species of cuckoo that 

 has much the same cry. 



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