As a fisherman he has no equal. His fishy, expressionless eye is
yet the keenest that sweeps the water, and his swoop puts even
the fish-hawk to shame for its certainty and its lightning
quickness.

Besides all these contradictions, he is solitary, unknown,
inapproachable. He has no youth, no play, no joy except to eat;
he associates with nobody, not even with his own kind; and when
he catches a fish, and beats its head against a limb till it is
dead, and sits with head back-tilted, swallowing his prey, with a
clattering chuckle deep down in his throat, he affects you as a
parrot does that swears diabolically under his breath as he
scratches his head, and that you would gladly shy a stone at, if
the owner's back were turned for a sufficient moment.

It is this unknown, this uncanny mixture of bird and reptile that
has made the kingfisher an object of superstition among all
savage peoples. The legends about him are legion; his crested
head is prized by savages above all others as a charm or fetish;
and even among civilized peoples his dried body may still
sometimes be seen hanging to a pole, in the hope that his bill
will point out the quarter from which the next wind will blow.

But Koskomenos has another side, though the world as yet has
found out little about it. One day in the wilderness I cheered
him quite involuntarily. It was late afternoon; the fishing was
over, and I sat in my canoe watching by a grassy point to see
what would happen next. Across the stream was a clay bank, near
the top of which a hole as wide as a tea-cup showed where a pair
of kingfishers had dug their long tunnel. "There is nothing for