562 BIRDS OF A TEXAN WINTER. 
to drain, he is an advocate of irrigation. 
In this art he can give our well-diggers 
odds in the game. His genius for 
striking water is wonderful. On the 
dryest parts of the prairie, miles from 
any permanent stream, his ejections of 
mud may be found. Shallow or deep, 
his borings always reach water. He is 
always at home, but less accessible to 
callers than the ant. To the smaller 
birds he is forbidden fruit. In wet 
weather, when his vestibule is shallow, 
the sand-hill crane may burglarize him, 
or even get a snap judgment on him at 
the front door. The bill of the great 
curlew cannot be sent in so effectively, 
not being so rightly drawn; but that 
bird, more common in the season than 
anywhere else away from the coast, finds 
plenty of other food. He is not here in 
the winter. His place just now is filled 
by the jacksnipe, which flutters up from 
every boggy place and comes to bag ia 
a condition anything but suggestive of 
short commons. The snipe’s terrestrial 
surface lies two and a half inches be- 
neath ours. At that distance he strikes 
hard pan; but it is margin enough for 
his operations, and he is not often 
caught among the shorts. Gourmands 
assure us that he lives “by suction,” 
and that there is consequently no harm 
in eating his trail. There is comfort in 
this creed, whatever may be our private 
belief in the substantiality of what the 
bird absorbs; and we cheerfully eat, 
after the suggestion of Paul, “ asking 
no questions,” the while tacitly assuring 
ourselves, like old Fuller with the straw- 
berry, that a better bird might doubtless 
have been made, but as certainly never 
was. For game flavor not even the 
partridge (Bob White), also exception- 
ally abundant here, is his superior. 
But think, ye snow-bound, of the 
state of things implied in this embar- 
rassment of riches,—of a mid-winter 
table balanced between such a choice, 
or, better, balanced by the adoption of 
both, one at each end! Nor would this 
be near telling the whole story. Kx- 
cluding fur and sticking to feather, we 
have a wide range beyond. ‘The larger 
birds we may begin on, very moderately, 
[Dec. 
with crane-steak, a transverse section of 
our stately but distant friend the sand- 
hill. That is the form in which he is 
thought to appear to best advantage. 
By the time you have circumvented 
him by circumscribing him in the grad- 
ually narrowing circuit of a buggy,— 
for stalking him, unless in higher grass 
than is common at this season, is but 
vexation of spirit,—you will feel vicious 
enough to eat him in any shape. His 
brother, the beautiful white bugler, you 
will hardly meet at dinner, he being the 
shyest of his kind. A Canada goose 
—not the tough and fishy bird of the 
Northern coast, but grain- and grass-fed 
from fledging-time—is tender, delicate, 
and everyway presentable. From the 
back upper gallery that looks upon the 
prairie you are likely to see a company 
or battalion of his brethren, their long 
black necks and white ties “ dressing” 
eapitally in line, and their invisible legs 
doing the goose-step as the inventors of 
that classic manceuvre ought to do it. 
This bird seems to affect the mzlitatre in 
all his movements. What can be more 
regular than the wedge, like that so 
common in tactical history, in which he 
begins his march, moving in “a column 
of attack upon the pole’? Even when 
startled and put to flight, he goes off 
smoothly and quietly, company - front. 
In foraging he is strictly systematic, and 
never forgets to set sentinels. We can- 
not fail to respect him while doing him 
the last honors. Of not inferior claim 
is his prairie chum and remote cousin 
the mallard. They are not often in 
close companionship, though kL have 
seen a dozen and a half of each rise 
from the border and the bosom of a 
pond forty yards across,—one loving the 
open, and the other taking repose, if 
not food, upon the water. That there 
should be ponds upon these prairies is 
as striking to one accustomed to hill and 
dale as that so unpromising a surface 
should so teem with life. The prairie 
is as flat as if cast like plate-glass and 
rolled out,—only the table is slightly 
tilted toward the Gulf at the rate of two 
or three hundred feet in a hundred 
miles. At night you may see the head- 
—_— ee ee eee 
