This was no
wounded leopard charging me; no mother-bear
defending with her giant might a captured cub. It
was only a mother-bird, the size of a wild duck,
with swift wings at her command, hiding under
those wings her own and another's young, and
her own boundless fear!
For the second time in my life I had taken
captive with my bare hands a free wild bird. No,
I had not taken her captive. She had made herself
a captive; she had taken herself in the strong net
of her mother-love.
And now her terror seemed quite gone. At the
first touch of my hand I think she felt the love
restraining it, and without fear or fret she let me
reach under her and pull out the babies. But she
reached after them with her bill to tuck them
back out of sight, and when I did not let them go,
she sidled toward me, quacking softly, a language
that I perfectly understood, and was quick to
respond to. I gave them back, fuzzy and black
and white. She got them under her, stood up over
them, pushed her wings down hard around them,
her stout tail down hard behind them, and
together with them pushed in an abandoned egg
that was close at hand. Her own baby, some one
else's baby, and some one else's forsaken egg! She
could cover no more; she had not feathers enough.
But she had heart enough; and into her mother's
heart she had already tucked every motherless
egg and nestling of the thousands of frightened
birds, screaming and wheeling in the air high over
her head.
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