A MOTHER'S LOVE by L. M. Chase

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 20, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 47.

A MOTHER'S LOVE.

By L. M. Chase

[L. M. Chase, in Our Dumb Animals.]

I AM told by Hon. Lewis McLellan, of Gorham, Me., that while fishing for land-locked salmon in Sebago Lake last May, he was surprised to see a loon with her young one near his canoe.

The anxious mother was employing every artifice to call her child away, but the little one swam so near the fisher that he easily took him aboard in his landing net, and holding him on his knee gently stroked his downy coat to the little fellow's evident satisfaction. Meantime the mother was in an agony of distress. At first, forgetting her native wildness and timidity in her mother's love, she boldly approached the canoe, and, rising in the water till she appeared to stand upon it, furiously flapped her wings, uttering menacing cries. Finding this of no avail, she pretended that she was wounded, rolling over in the water and finally lying still as if dead, evidently to attract attention to herself and from her young one. The fisherman, touched by these displays of motherly affection, put the young loon into the water, which perceiving, the distressed mother instantly came to life and again tried to entice her little one to go with her; but he liked his new acquaintance so well that he remained near the boat, until the fisherman, with a compassion worthy of good Saint Isaac himself, rapidly paddled away for a considerable distance, when he waited to see the outcome of this adventure.

As he withdrew, the mother, with cries of joy, swam to her little one, dove beneath him, and taking him on her back quickly bore him to a safe distance, when she stopped and seemed to be talking to her truant child in very different tones from the “wild, strange hoarse laughter by day, and the ‘weird, doleful cry at night” which John Burroughs attributes to this bird. The fisher says he never imagined the loon could produce such soft, sweet, melodious notes as he then heard. Doubtless these notes seemed not less sweet because the hearer's spiritual senses had just been quickened and purified by a merciful act.

What earthly sounds so sweet as those prompted by a mother's love?