THE CURLEW CALL 167 
So I take the killdeer with wandering voice 
and staggering flight into the open window of 
my heart and leaned against my tree-trunk and 
took the wandering shadow unthinkingly yet 
wisely. 
Then a mourning dove fluted plaintively as if 
heartache that even June could not abate was 
using this bird as a harp full of tear-drip music. 
Enough. The day has had its holy and happy 
choir of sunshine and wandering path and wan- 
dering cattle feet and satisfying hedge-row, and 
field-row, and growing grain and caressing bird 
voices, when, O wonder! a curlew’s call like a 
scythe mowing its swath in the prairie sky made 
me leap to my feet and dance like a leaf in the 
wind (a rather portly leaf, admittedly). A curlew 
call! Only one curlew had I heard in twenty 
years, and that on a great plateau among the 
mountains of Montana in companionship of the 
daughter of my heart when we were vagrantly 
taking our way to Careless Creek. That weird 
voice had flung me into a mood of a thousand 
memories of prairie days, and June ecstasy made 
with the prairie wind. The undiluted Montana 
sunlight, the far distances through the amazing 
splendor of light which had made great painter 
Turner, worshiper of light, laugh out loud in his 
solemnity of spirit, the rim of the landscape and 
the mysterious mountains so remote as to seem 
things of cloud and yet were they things of 
earth, substantial as the world—and then all 
