10 TH Ee AU Diu’ BiOeNt «BU be beeen 
es PORN ae te a ao aE ae area MEE TTS 
(Continued from page seven) 
energy that made a Caspar Milquetoast of her mate’s toe-dipping technique, 
and we laughed as we watched the yellow bird and the green one in the 
glinting mica sand. 
A sudden shower changed our plans about the fire, and I went on a 
tour of inspection down by the roadside of the farm where earlier this year 
I had set some of the 2,000 white pines furnished by the state. The trees 
were flourishing, had added inches in spite of the fact that they had been 
put in the ground late, after growth had already started. My eye took in 
the disappearance of a darkish blue bird. The large beak and dark wings 
with light bars told me it was the blue grosbeak rather than the indigo 
bunting I had first thought to see. There are greater numbers of both kinds 
to be found each year, but the brighter bunting prefers the telephone lines 
for a perch and the grosbeak hides in the bushes by a low-lying stream 
if itecan: 
The setting sun came out to make a brilliant rainbow in our valley. The 
great are lay over our farm, and ended right in a golden cone of hay. 
Robbie, Joeline’s teen-aged sister, came swinging down on us with a hay- 
fork over her shoulder. She insisted she was going to look for that pot of 
gold. We tried telling her that the hay itself was the gold. Robbie is quite 
a girl, part Amazon and part leprechaun. But for a combination of shyness 
with deviltry, I believe Clar’nce couldn’t be matched. Clar’nce, another 
neighbor, at the ripe old age of nine, has slanted brown eyes dancing with 
amusement, and deep dimples to betray the mouth clamped down tight to 
keep the mischief unsaid. Clar’nce is the boy who had a bird in the hand. 
He took me up to show me the trumpet-vine in his grandmother’s yard 
where the magic occurred. It was a ruby-throated hummingbird he had held 
for a moment — “the fightin’est thing,” he told me. He saw it at the throat 
of the great orange trumpets, reached out, and there it was, in his hand! 
On his way up the mountain to show me where it happened he called at 
his aunt’s home and had her hand me down the lard bucket hanging on the 
porch. The wrens had. nested in it; were still in it as I peered into the 
shiny tin pail, and Clar’nce’s aunt assured me that the “young’uns” were 
much “purtier” with feathers than they had been without. “Law,” she 
said, thinking in retrospect of the ugly naked things. “They was a sight! 
But they got a right smart of feathers now.” 
Clar’nce’s grandmother verified his story about his holding the bird 
for an enchanted moment, but she hadn’t let him have it long because 
those “least ones, (the mountain term for the smallest of a kind) had a 
sort of silver on their wings that you could see in the sunshine, and if that 
silver-dust rubbed off, the pore little ol’ thing couldn‘t fly no more.” 
There you have it, my bird count; the two in the bush, the many, many 
in between — including the old owl that hooted every night, the red-winged 
blackbirds, the crows, the yellow-billed cuckoo, the vireos, and the mountain- 
top juncos that I haven’t found a place for in this chronicle — and the 
exquisite jewel-bird with the sort of silver on its wings that mustn’t rub 
off; the bird in the hand, which for a little barefoot mountain boy was 
certainly worth the two in the bush, and all the others. 
