168 WITH EARTH AND SKY 
of this glory to be made a sounding gallery for 
a single curlew call! And now, here among 
farmed fields and neighborly dwellings and a 
prairie which had forgotten it was ever prairie 
at all, and with prairie grass not even a dim 
memory, a curlew call! Blessed be the Kind God 
for this unexpectedness. He is ever and anon 
thrusting on us like an unexpected cloud and 
the sound of running water when we know not 
a water brook is near. The curlew call—that 
was to make the day of spring immortal to my 
memory. To me one curlew call can render one 
sunny year radiant and memorable. 
I cannot tell just why the curlew call affects 
me so and uses my heart as a woodpecker uses 
a bare branch for an instrument of music. It 
haunts me. It is not alone thrilling, it is beguil- 
ing and haunting. 
It is as if the prairie were lifting its tear- 
drenched, melancholy cry for all those wide 
breadths it had once been and was not now. 
That sickle curlew bill flings out that weird voice 
like a tear-wet banner. It is a wail that is the 
very ecstasy of sadness like the mad song in 
Lucia de Lammermoor. I recall when I heard 
the curlew first long since as a prairie lad and 
how I heard that strange pathos flung out on 
the prairie wind at morning or evening where 
the curlew had his nest, and that voice has 
dwelt with me like a memory of a gray sea seen 
at dawn through all these distant years. 
