Nor Could All He Told Us
About The Bloody And Glorious Deeds Of Jack _El Matador_ Arouse Any
Enthusiasm In
Me; and though in his speech and manner Jack was as
quiet and gentle a being as one could meet,
I could never overcome a
curious shrinking, an almost uncanny feeling, in his presence,
particularly when he looked straight at me with those fine eyes of
his. They were light grey in colour, clear and bright as in a young
man, but the expression pained me; it was too piercing, too
concentrated, and it reminded me of the look in a cat's eyes when it
crouches motionless just before making its dash at a bird.
Nevertheless, the fight and wound had one good result for me; my
brother had all at once become less masterful, or tyrannical, towards
me, and even began to show some interest in my solitary disposition
and tastes. A little bird incident brought out this feeling in a way
that was very agreeable to me. One evening I told him and our eldest
brother that I had seen a strange thing in a bird which had led me to
find out something new. Our commonest species was the parasitic
cowbird, which laid its eggs anywhere in the nests of all the other
small birds. Its colour was a deep glossy purple, almost black; and
seeing two of these birds flying over my head, I noticed that they had
a small chestnut-coloured spot beneath the wing, which showed that
they were not the common species. It had then occurred to me that I
had heard a peculiar note or cry uttered by what I took to be the
cowbird, which was unlike any note of that bird; and following this
clue, I had discovered that we had a bird in our plantation which was
like the cowbird in size, colour, and general appearance, but was a
different species. They appeared amused by my story, and a few days
later they closely interrogated me on three consecutive evenings as to
what I had seen that was remarkable that day, in birds especially, and
were disappointed because I had nothing interesting to tell them.
The next day my brother said he had a confession to make to me. He and
the elder brother had agreed to play a practical joke on me, and had
snared a common cowbird and dyed or painted its tail a brilliant
scarlet, then liberated it, expecting that I should meet with it in my
day's rambles and bird-watching in the plantation and would be greatly
excited at the discovery of yet a third purple cowbird, with a scarlet
tail, but otherwise not distinguishable from the common one. Now, on
reflection, he was glad I had not found their bird and given them
their laugh, and he was ashamed at having tried to play such a mean
trick on me!
CHAPTER XX
BIRDING IN THE MARSHES
Visiting the marshes - Pajonales and Juncales - Abundant bird life - A
Coots' metropolis - Frightening the Coots - Grebe and Painted Snipe
colonies - The haunt of the Social Marsh Hawk - The beautiful Jacana and
its eggs - The colony of Marsh Trupials - The bird's music - The aquatic
plant Durasmillo - The Trupial's nest and eggs - Recalling a beauty that
has vanished - Our games with gaucho boys - I am injured by a bad boy -
The shepherd's advice - Getting my revenge in a treacherous manner - Was
it right or wrong? - The game of Hunting the Ostrich.
At this time of my boy-life most of the daylight hours were spent out
of doors, as when not watching the birds in our plantation or asked to
go and look at the flock grazing somewhere a mile or so from home, in
the absence of the shepherd or his boy, I was always away somewhere on
the plain with my small brother on egg-hunting or other expeditions.
In the spring and summer we often visited the lagoons or marshes, the
most fascinating places I knew on account of their abundant wild bird
life. There were four of these lagoons, all in different directions
and all within two or three miles from home. They were shallow
lakelets, called _lagunas,_ each occupying an area of three or four
hundred acres, with some open water and the rest overgrown with bright
green sedges in dense beds, called _pajonales,_ and immense beds of
bulrushes, called _juncales._ These last were always the best to
explore when the water was not deeper than the saddle-girth, and where
the round dark polished stems, crowned with their bright brown tufts,
were higher than our heads when we urged our horses through them.
These were the breeding-places of some small birds that had their
beautifully-made nests a couple of feet or so above the water,
attached in some cases to single, in others to two or three, rush
stems. And here, too, we found the nests of several large species -
egret, night-heron, cormorant, and occasionally a hawk - birds which
build on trees in forest districts, but here on the treeless region of
the pampas they made their nests among the rushes. The fourth lakelet
had no rush-or sedge-beds and no reeds, and was almost covered with a
luxuriant growth of the floating _camalote,_ a plant which at a
distance resembles the wild musk or mimulus in its masses of bright
green leaves and brilliant yellow blossoms. This, too, was a
fascinating spot, as it swarmed with birds, some of them being kinds
which did not breed in the reeds and rushes. It was a sort of
metropolis of the coots, and before and after the breeding season they
would congregate in flocks of many hundreds on the low wet shore,
where their black forms had a singular appearance on the moist green
turf. It looked to me like a reproduction in small size of a scene I
had witnessed - the vast level green pampa with a scattered herd of two
or three thousand black cattle grazing on it, on a large cattle estate
where only black beasts were bred.
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