Year After Year I Listened For Its Deep Mysterious Call,
Which Sounded Like _Gow-Gow-Gow-Gow-Gow,_ In Late
September, even as
the small English boy listens for the call of _his_ cuckoo, in April;
and the human-like
Character of the sound, together with the
startlingly impressive way in which it was enunciated, always produced
the idea that it was something more than a mere bird call. Later, in
October when the weather was hot, I would hunt for the nest, a frail
platform made of a few sticks with four or five oval eggs like those
of the turtledove in size and of a pale green colour.
There were other summer visitors, but I must not speak of them as this
chapter contains too much on that subject. My feathered friends were
so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my
first years a book about birds and little else. There remains, too,
much more to say about the plantation, the trees and their effect on
my mind, also some adventures I met with, some with birds and others
with snakes, which will occupy two or three or more chapters later on.
CHAPTER V
ASPECTS OF THE PLAIN
Appearance of a green level land - Cardoon and giant thistles - Villages
of the Vizcacha, a large burrowing rodent - Groves and plantations seen
like islands on the wide level plains - Trees planted by the early
colonists - Decline of the colonists from an agricultural to a pastoral
people - Houses as part of the landscape - Flesh diet of the gauchos -
Summer change in the aspect of the plain - The water-like mirage - The
giant thistle and a "thistle year" - Fear of fires - An incident at a
fire - The _pampero_, or south-west wind, and the fall of the thistles
- Thistle-down and thistle-seed as food for animals - A great pampero
storm - Big hailstones - Damage caused by hail - Zango, an old horse,
killed - Zango and his master.
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