40 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



up from those sentinels as they spied me. That 

 caw meant the approach of danger, yet the birds on 

 the ground would keep right on at their task. Per- 

 haps I would swerve aside and turn up the wood 

 road, and nothing more would happen. On the 

 other hand, sometimes I would pick up a stick the 

 length of a gun, and approach the bars to the field. 

 Then the sentinels would utter another caw, sharper 

 in sound, appreciably different from the first, and 

 instantly every bird on the ground would rise and 

 disappear into the woods on the farther side. I have 

 done this time and again to make sure that there is 

 a difference in the two notes, and I cannot doubt it. 

 They say two distinct and different things ; they are 

 definite sentences. Take again the cawing of the 

 crows about the house in the early morning, or far 

 off across the upland pasture in the woods where 

 the night mists still trail the tree-tops. The note is 

 not harsh; softened by distance, indeed, it is posi- 

 tively mellow. It speaks of sun-up and breakfast 

 no less surely than the song of the meadow-lark or 

 the fluting of the white-throat. Wandering over 

 the uplands when the crows are calling, with now 

 and then a glimpse of their shining black bodies 

 winging against the blue sky. or a red October 

 maple, you have a sense of landscape charm pecul- 

 iarly American, and the caws are music to your 

 ears, the folk-song of our woods and cornlands. 

 But what an utterly different note the crow emits 

 when he is on the war-path or gathering in angry 

 council — gathering in a caw-cuss, as the old New 

 England punsters always put it. "When the crow 

 cries, "Here is corn for breakfast!" we hear music 



