Atalapha, a Winged Brownie 
secret influence that reached all life. The northern 
songbirds now showed different plumes. The Wild 
Geese and the Cranes found things just the same in 
this land of winter sun and food, but a change had 
come inside. An unseen prompter persistent, 
reiterant, unreasoning, sang in Atalapha’s heart: 
“Away, away; up and away!” So it sang in every 
heart, and the Bat host moved, as the prairie grass 
is moved by the unseen wind, headed all one way, 
turned in the moon of Wild Geese, moved in the 
month of Greening Grass, swinging northward 
with a common impulse, even as they had come to 
the south in the autumn. 
They made neither haste nor speed; but strag- 
gling as before, in a larger company than before, it 
might have been noted that in the Blue Mountains 
many left the host that followed the white wailing 
line of the sea, and took another course, for these 
were summer dwellers in the far northwest. 
Atalapha and his kindred of the pine woods kept 
on. Their nightly journey and their nightly meals 
covered the country as fast as it was won again by 
victorious spring. One night a sudden change of 
weather sent all the Bats into hiding-places, where 
they huddled together and in many cases became 
insensible from the cold. For three days they lay 
hid and seeming dead, but all revived when the sun 
166 
