Lost Woods by Rachel Carson Read Free Book Online Page B

surface, disturbed the placid sheet. Then the herring would begin flipping into the air. It seemed it was always out of the corner of your eye that you saw them, and you never quite knew where to look for the next little herring skipping recklessly into the air in a sort of back somersault. They did it as though it were great fun – this rash defying of a strange and hostile element, the air. I believe it was a sort of play indulged in by these young children of the herring. They looked like silvery coins skipped along the surface. I never actually saw any of the youngsters caught in the air by a gull, but the quick eyes of the birds must certainly have been attracted by the bright flashes.
    The gulls would greet the arrival of the herring schools with a frenzy of excitement, swooping, plunging, crying loudly. A gull does not dive as a tern does; he swoops and, not quite alighting, plucks his fish from the water. It takes a good eye and good timing. It is less graceful than the beautiful, clean dive of a tern, but perhaps it requires equal skill.
    A night I especially remember there had been a large run of herring into the cove and it had come somewhat later than usual. The gulls, apparently determined to make their catch despite the gathering darkness, fished on until it was hard to understand how they could possibly see the fish. We could see their moving forms against the island – white, mothlike figures against the dark backdrop of the island forest, fluttering to and fro and all the while uttering their cries, in a scene out of some weird shadow world.
    On sunny days the gulls would go aloft to ride the warm, ascending air currents. Up and up, sailing around in slow, wide circles, until they were almost lost to sight. I used to lie on my back on the dock, relaxing in the warm sunshine, and watch the gulls above me in the blue sky. Some were so high they were only white stars wheeling slowly in orbits of their own making.
    It was possible to do a good deal of birding by ear alone, lying there on the dock half asleep. Once the sound had been identified by squinting through half-opened eyes, I knew without looking that the mouselike rustling and patter of very small feet on the dock, skirting my head and passing just beyond my outstretched arm, was the song sparrow on whose territory we were living. I knew that the soft “whuff, whuff” overhead was the wing beat of a gull, the bird passing so close that I could easily hear the sound of air sliding over the feathered wing surfaces. The gulls’ wings made a dry sound, very different from the wet, spattering wing beat of a cormorant that had just risen from the water, and whose precipitate flight down the cove sounded like a wet dog shaking himself.
    Often, as I lay there, I could hear the high, peeping whistle of an osprey, and opening my eyes, would see him coming down along the inner shore of the island. I think a pair of them had a nest somewhere up north of the island; when they carried fish, they were always going north.
    And then there were the sounds of other, smaller birds – the rattling call of a kingfisher that perched, between forays after fish, on the posts of the dock; the call of the phoebe that nested under the eaves of the cabin; the redstarts that foraged in the birches on the hill behind the cabin and forever, it seemed to me, asked each other the way to Wiscasset, for I could easily twist their syllables into the query, “Which is Wiscasset? Which is Wiscasset?”
    Sometimes the still water of the passage would be rippled, then broken, by the sleek, round head of a seal. Swimming up-current, his nostrils and forehead protruding, his passage sent diverging ripples running in silken V’s toward the opposite shores. After looking gravely about him with soft, dark eyes, surveying for a moment the world of sun and air, the seal would disappear as silently as he had come, returning to the soft green lights, the seaweeds streaming from sunken rocks, the