98 
THE NORTHLAND BIRD LIFE 
for these fairy birds always scurry along so 
fast that the black heads can do no more than 
appear far in the distance beyond them..” 
Just when she was thinking hardest and 
her dreams seemed most real, she heard the 
clap-clap of wings. 
“Good! Good!” she almost cheered. “They 
are fairy bird folks! They are, for I hear 
their wings!” 
In just a second she had another thought. 
If the fairy bird folks were real, were not 
the black old pirates real also, and wouldn’t 
they go after Little Baby Laughing Loon, 
who was not half so swift as these fairy bird 
folks? 
At that she called, “Mother! Mother!” 
and started to swim away. But just then 
she realized that these wing claps did not 
really come from cloud land, but from very 
much closer—right over her head, in fact, 
she could see the fellow who was doing the 
clapping. She was very much more fright¬ 
ened now, for after all, real things some¬ 
times frighten us the most, and this fellow 
