The Snowy Plover 
This year in April it was Teddy Sanders who laid siege to my heart 
and fairly wore me out with his nonsense. Why, he’d follow me round 
and round till I was ready to drop, and then if I’d stop to pick up a bit 
of a bug, he’d bunt into me and make me listen to his blarney. As if 
I cared for his sly winks and his quivering wings and his absurd little 
bows. But, finally, I married him to get rid of him, and we chose that 
little hummock of sand over there for our home-site. All I had to do 
was to crouch down and twist around and make a little hollow in the 
sand, and Teddy hunted up the prettiest bits of shell—he was very good 
about that—so by the time I had three eggs laid we had the most beautiful 
white lining. And one day Teddy brought a cork and laid it down 
beside me on the sand. And I asked him what that was for, and he said— 
well, he said I might find it handy when I didn’t want to talk. But really, 
Teddy was awful nice; and when there weren’t any people in sight, he’d 
come up to the mound—he liked to hear me talk all right, if he did make 
fun of me—until he had it all covered with toe-tracks. And then one 
day a man came poking along, looking and looking and looking in the 
sand. I slipped oft when he was fifty yards away and did a special 
skirt-dance for his misguidance; but when he saw me he only grinned and 
went on looking. And then by and by he saw the tracks criss-cross on 
the sand, and then he saw the eggs, for his face all lighted up, while my 
heart stood still. But he wasn’t a bad sort, after all, for he went away 
without even touching them. 
But that afternoon the wind came up. I knew the tide was going to 
be high that night, and I scented trouble. Teddy stood by me as I sat 
tight on the eggs facing the wind. The wind freshened and shitted 
to the southwest. By midnight it was blowing great guns and drenching 
us with spray, but the tide was not due to be high till two o’clock. Well, 
you can guess the rest. That was an awful night. By one o’clock the 
water was spilling over into the lagoon, and a little later a great wave 
caught us and bowled us over and over before we could rise and seek 
shelter in the dunes. All my beautiful eggs washed away, and the whole 
colony—there were seven pairs of us—left desolate! 
Yet that cruel, terrible ocean had the audacity to smile next day, and 
let its soft bosom sink and swell as if it wouldn’t hurt a baby lobster. And 
the sun shone and the sand got dry and rustled, and—Oh, well, that same 
man found me two weeks later about ten feet away from where we had our 
first nest, sitting on three eggs that looked to him just like the first ones. 
Teddy hadn’t been able to find as many shells this time to line the nest, 
but we made it near a white stick lying half-buried in the sand, so that we 
could see the place a long ways off. Of course the man didn’t catch me on 
the eggs, but he found them all right, and he might have eaten them for 
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