88 Union Bay 



itself when children nurse and raise a lamb which a herder 

 disposes of because the ewe refuses to feed it, or when peo- 

 ple mother a mallard hen and its young, or a boy brings up a 

 colt or calf, or protects a wounded duck or goose which has 

 wandered to the farm. It is so common that it is the rule 

 rather than the exception. 



Almost as common in such areas are accidents. They occur 

 with regularity that might be compared with the automobile 

 and street accidents of a city. In some of them I found the vic- 

 tims lifeless, crumpled, with no evidence to indicate the na- 

 ture of their death. In others the cause was plain, as in the 

 case of the robin which I found poised in an unnatural .posi- 

 tion on a hardhack bush. Its body was stiff, its wings partially 

 open, and it did not move as the canoe approached. I won- 

 dered why until I pulled down the branch and found that a 

 sharply broken twig had impaled the bird as neatly as if it 

 had been spitted. Death had come suddenly for there was no 

 derangement of wings or feathers to indicate that it had 

 struggled. It almost floated there as a bird mounted on a hat 

 might seem to float, graceful in outline and color, but ghastly 

 in its omission of the one thing that originally made it so 

 delightful— its pulsating vigor and awareness of life. 



Many are the traps for unwary things to step into. A black 

 object swinging in the morning breeze attracted my atten- 

 tion. It moved slowly and without noise, in a long arc, and 

 it twisted as it moved. It might have been a black yo-yo or 

 a rubber ball attached to a string, except that it lacked the 

 solidity of such objects, and swung as a last year's pine cone 

 would have swayed in a light wind. It turned as I moved 

 nearer so that I saw a red blotch on a black surface. Then I 

 knew what it was: a redwing blackbird tangled in a thin 

 piece of brown string. One end of the string had wound se- 

 curely around the willow twig and the free end had in some 

 way become wrapped about the legs of the bird so that its 

 efforts to work free had more firmly netted it until at last 



