p. 9 | AN ARTFUL MOTHER

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 10, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 49.

AN ARTFUL MOTHER.

WE notice a wild movement amongst the sedge in front. Something is beating its way before us. It is not a dozen yards off now, and the bulrushes and long reeds are violently agitated as it moves along. It can not be a dog, it is not an otter, and no fish would cause such a disturbance. Nor is there any bird which would exactly suggest such a movement. We press forward, and the distance is lessened; it travels slowly. Now we catch sight of something brown moving. Another stride, and the cause of the agitation is revealed. It is a wild duck—a mother bird—pressing her way through the sedge; not alone, however, but closely followed by eight or nine recently hatched little ones, the latter so closely packed together as they swim that they seem to move through the water like a solid bank of dark brown fur. We are seen.

Now you witness one of the most curious sights in nature. The mother at once abandons the efforts she has been so far making to glide away with her charges without being seen. She jumps clean out of the water—

not, however, to fly away, for, alas! she falls back again heavily and apparently helplessly a yard away, painfully flapping a broken wing. You are conscious that her brood scattered chirping in all directions as she rose from the water, but your eye is back again in an instant, and lo! there is not one to be seen, and the chirping has ceased almost as soon as it began. There is, no longer, you notice, the least telltale tremor in the sedge to show where they have gone. The old bird continues her antics with the broken wing. You have seen the sportsman's victim acted in real life, and you know that even a professional medium could not more thoroughly abandon herself to her part. You may watch her at leisure, for she does not in her sad plight seem able to get under cover quickly. Her callow offspring you will see no more.

As we continue to move through the sedge you notice that the unusual exertion is having a wonderfully curative effect on the broken wing of the mother. She is already taking short flights with it, altho still occasionally flopping back heavily into the water. As you look she sits up and flaps both wings airily enough. Now she springs into the air, and, wheeling several times nimbly overhead, actually takes her departure altogether, with a series of wild quacks as a parting salute. We feel somehow as if we had not got the best of the encounter, and that we have been treated throughout as a creature of inferior intelligence.—Pall Mall Gazette.