swoop at him, not knowing quite whether the gaudy creature is
dangerous or only uncanny. I saw a great hawk once drop like a
bolt upon a kingfisher that hung on quivering wings, rattling
softly, before his hole in the bank. But the robber lost his
nerve at the instant when he should have dropped his claws to
strike. He swerved aside and shot upward in a great slant to a
dead spruce top, where he stood watching intently till the dark
beak of a brooding kingfisher reached out of the hole to receive
the fish that her mate had brought her. Whereupon Koskomenos
swept away to his watchtower above the minnow pool, and the hawk
set his wings toward the outlet, where a brood of young
sheldrakes were taking their first lessons in the open water.

No wonder the birds look askance at Kingfisher. His head is
ridiculously large; his feet ridiculously small. He is a poem of
grace in the air; but he creeps like a lizard, or waddles so that
a duck would be ashamed of him, in the rare moments when he is
afoot. His mouth is big enough to take in a minnow whole; his
tongue so small that he has no voice, but only a harsh
klr-rr-r-ik-ik-ik, like a watchman's rattle. He builds no nest,
but rather a den in the bank, in which he lives most filthily
half the day; yet the other half he is a clean, beautiful
creature, with never a suggestion of earth, but only of the blue
heavens above and the color-steeped water below, in his bright
garments. Water will not wet him, though he plunge a dozen times
out of sight beneath the surface. His clatter is harsh, noisy,
diabolical; yet his plunge into the stream, with its flash of
color, its silver spray, and its tinkle of smitten water, is the
most musical thing in the wilderness.