The least vigorous of the flock were most affected. The little family was scattered. Redruff himself flew on several long erratic night journeys. The impulse took him southward, but there lay the boundless stretch of Lake Ontario, so he turned again, and the waning of the Mad Moon found him once more in the Mud Creek Glen, but absolutely alone.
V
Food grew scarce as winter wore on. Redruff clung to the old ravine and the piney sides of Taylor’s Hill, but every month brought its food and its foes. The Mad Moon brought madness, solitude, and grapes; the Snow Moon came with rosehips; and the Stormy Moon brought browse of birch and silver storms that sheathed the woods in ice, and made it hard to keep one’s perch while pulling off the frozen buds. Redruff’s beak grew terribly worn with the work, so that even when closed there was still an opening through behind the hook. But nature had prepared him for the slippery footing; his toes, so slim and trim in September, had sprouted rows of sharp, horny points, and these grew with the growing cold, till the first snow had found him fully equipped with snowshoes and icecreepers. The cold weather had driven away most of the hawks and owls, and made it impossible for his four-footed enemies to approach unseen, so that things were nearly balanced.
His flight in search of food had daily led him farther on, till he had discovered and explored the Rosedale Creek, with its banks of silver-birch, and Castle Frank, with its grapes and rowan berries, as well as Chester woods, where amelanchier and Virginia-creeper swung their fruit-bunches, and checkerberries glowed beneath the snow.
He soon found out that for some strange reason men with guns did not go within the high fence of Castle Frank. So among these scenes he lived his life, learning new places, new foods, and grew wiser and more beautiful every day.
He was quite alone so far as kindred were concerned, but that scarcely seemed a hardship. Wherever he went he could see the jolly chickadees scrambling merrily about, and he remembered the time when they had seemed such big, important creatures. They were the most absurdly cheerful things in the woods. Before the autumn was fairly over they had begun to sing their famous refrain, “Spring Soon,” and kept it up with good heart more or less all through the winter’s direst storms, till at length the waning of the Hunger Moon, our February, seemed really to lend some point to the ditty, and they redoubled their optimistic announcement to the world in an “I-told-you-so” mood. Soon good support was found, for the sun gained strength and melted the snow from the southern slope of Castle Frank Hill, and exposed great banks of fragrant wintergreen, whose berries were a bounteous feast for Redruff, and, ending the hard work of pulling frozen browse, gave his bill the needed chance to grow into its proper shape again. Very soon the first bluebird came flying over and warbled as he flew “The spring is coming.” The sun kept gaining, and early one day in the dark of the Wakening Moon of March there was a loud “Caw, caw,” and old Silverspot, the king-crow, came swinging along from the south at the head of his troops and officially announced,
“The spring has come.”
All nature seemed to respond to this, the opening of the birds’ New Year, and yet it was something within that chiefly seemed to move them. The chickadees went simply wild; they sang their “Spring now, spring now now—Spring now now,” so persistently that one wondered how they found time to get a living.
And Redruff felt it thrill him through and through. He sprang with joyous vigor on a stump and sent rolling down the little valley, again and again, a thundering “Thump, thump, thump, thunderrrrrrrrr,” that wakened dull echoes as it rolled, and voiced his gladness in the coming of the spring.
Away down the valley was Cuddy’s shanty. He heard the drum-call on the still morning air and “reckoned there was a cock patridge to git,” and came sneaking up the ravine with his gun. But Redruff skimmed away in silence, nor rested till once more in Mud Creek Glen. And there he mounted the very log where first he had drummed and rolled his loud tattoo again and again, till a small boy who had taken a shortcut to the mill through the woods, ran home, badly scared, to tell his mother he was sure the Indians were on the warpath, for he heard their war-drums beating in the glen.
Why does a happy boy holla? Why does a lonesome youth sigh? They don’t know any more than Redruff knew why every day now he mounted some dead log and thumped and thundered to the woods; then strutted and admired his gorgeous blazing ruffs as they flashed their jewels in the sunlight, and then thundered out again. Whence now came the strange wish for someone else to admire the plumes? And why had such a notion never come till the Pussywillow Moon?
“Thump, thump, thunder‑r‑r‑r‑r‑r‑rrrr.”
“Thump, thump, thunder‑r‑r‑r‑r‑r‑rrrr” he rumbled again and again.
Day after day he sought the favorite log, and a new beauty, a rose-red comb, grew out above each clear, keen eye, and the clumsy snowshoes were wholly shed from his feet. His ruff grew finer, his eye brighter, and his whole appearance splendid to behold, as he strutted and flashed in the sun. But—oh! he was so lonesome now.
Yet what could he do but blindly vent his hankering in this daily drum-parade, till on
