A favourite climbing tree - The desire to fly - Soaring birds - A
peregrine falcon - The dovecote and pigeon-pies - The falcon's
depredations - A splendid aerial feat - A secret enemy of the dovecote -
A short-eared owl in a loft - My father and birds - A strange flower -
The owls' nesting-place - Great owl visitations.
By the side of the moat at the far end of the enclosed ground there
grew a big red willow, the tree already mentioned in a former chapter
as the second largest in the plantation. It had a thick round trunk,
wide-spreading horizontal branches, and rough bark. In its shape, when
the thin foliage was gone, it was more like an old oak than a red
willow. This was my favourite tree when I had once mastered the
difficult and dangerous art of climbing. It was farthest from the
house of all the trees, on a waste weedy spot which no one else
visited, and this made it an ideal place for me, and whenever I was in
the wild arboreal mood I would climb the willow to find a good stout
branch high up on which to spend an hour, with a good view of the wide
green plain before me and the sight of grazing flocks and herds, and
of houses and poplar groves looking blue in the distance. Here, too,
in this tree, I first felt the desire for wings, to dream of the
delight it would be to circle upwards to a great height and float on
the air without effort, like the gull and buzzard and harrier and
other great soaring land and water birds. But from the time this
notion and desire began to affect me I envied most the great crested
screamer, an inhabitant then of all the marshes in our vicinity. For
here was a bird as big or bigger than a goose, as heavy almost as I
was myself, who, when he wished to fly, rose off the ground with
tremendous labour, and then as he got higher and higher flew more and
more easily, until he rose so high that he looked no bigger than a
lark or pipit, and at that height he would continue floating round and
round in vast circles for hours, pouring out those jubilant cries at
intervals which sounded to us so far below like clarion notes in the
sky. If I could only get off the ground like that heavy bird and rise
as high, then the blue air would make me as buoyant and let me float
all day without pain or effort like the bird! This desire has
continued with me through my life, yet I have never wished to fly in a
balloon or airship, since I should then be tied to a machine and have
no will or soul of my own. The desire has only been gratified a very
few times in that kind of dream called levitation, when one rises and
floats above the earth without effort and is like a ball of
thistledown carried by the wind.
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