CHAPTER III

THE WOLF IN THE FOREST


I

The Bird Room at Judge Bannister's was back of the library. It was a big
room lined with glass cases. There hung about it always the faint odor
of preservatives. The Trumpeter Swan had a case to himself over the
mantel. He had been rather stiffly posed on a bed of artificial moss,
but nothing could spoil the beauty of him--the white of his plumage, the
elegance of his lines. He was one of a dying race--the descendants of
the men who had once killed for food had killed later to gratify the
vanity of women who must have swans down to set off their beauty, puffs
to powder their noses. No more did great flocks wing an exalted flight,
high in the heavens, or rest like a blanket of snow on river banks. The
old kings were dead--the glassy eyes of the Trumpeter looked out upon a
world which knew his kind no more.

In the other cases were the little birds and big ones--ducks, swimming
on crystal pools, canvas-backs and redheads, mallards and teal;
Bob-whites, single and in coveys; sandpipers, tip-ups and peeps, those
little ghosts of the seashore, shadows on the sand; there were soar and
other rails, robins and blackbirds, larks and sparrows, wild turkeys and
wild geese, all the toll which the hunter takes from field and stream
and forest.