1908-1909.] " The Raven Wys!' 155 



tions encouraged a hope that it could not be the case. 

 Perhaps, followed the more inspiriting reflection, the old birds 

 are away on the hunt. Possible also — the ornithologist is 

 wise if he leaves nothing out of account, — but past experi- 

 ence and present facts shattered the reflection almost before 

 it was aired. There was not a single item in our Eaven 

 experience to prove that both birds are ever so distantly 

 absent from the nest that they cannot be apprised of the 

 visits of human intruders, and on the present occasion there 

 was the additional argument that we had been travelling for 

 a couple of hours over a hillside directly commanded by the 

 nest and the air above it. Perhaps, and here was C. afire to 

 prove and uphold the Eaven's sagacity, perhaps the old birds 

 had cleared out of the neighbourhood of their nest for the 

 very purpose of misleading us, with the deliberate intention of 

 giving us no clue to the nest's position. Might not, C.'s 

 imagination was hot afoot now in vindication of his darling 

 birds, might not the bird — Eaven we had named him, after 

 all he might only have been a Hooded Crow — we had seen as 

 we moved along the hillside have been one of the pair on the 

 look-out, marking our progress and reporting it to his mate, 

 so that we might be baffled by their absence when we drew 

 near the ancestral seat. Again possible — the laconic response 

 from my brother revealed the state of his hopes. No one 

 was readier, nay, more eager to admit the resources of Eaven 

 cunning, no one readier to acknowledge that he had not 

 sounded by many fathoms the depths of Eaven intelligence 

 than my brother and myself, but our experience, and we 

 exhorted C. to recall his own, of Eaven behaviour when 

 there are young in the nest, when parental devotion and 

 anxiety seem to master all those deeply-rooted qualities of 

 wariness and artfulness which are so conspicuous in their lives 

 at other times, had nothing in it to support, much in it 

 indeed to subvert, the reasonableness of such a conjecture. 

 And so when we had finished speculating and braced our- 

 selves for the lung- exerting ordeal of getting to the base of 

 the cliff, we were braced likewise for — in every bird-nesting 

 sense of the term — the worst. 



We were climbing out of the burn gorge when some one, the 

 chances are it was my brother, swore he heard a Eaven bark. 



