"He was old enough and wide awake enough by this time to appreciate his
advantages. He could feel the thrill of his mother's long, swinging
swoops through the dewy coolness of the dusk. He could thrill in
sympathy with her excitement of the chase, when she went fluttering up
into the thin pallor of the upper air, following inexorably the
desperate circlings of some high-flying cockchafer. When she dropped
like lead to snap up some sluggish night moth, its wings were not yet
quite dry from the chrysalis, as he clung to the swaying grass tops,
his tiny eyes sparkled keenly. And when she went zigzagging, with
breathless speed and terrifying violence, to evade the noiseless attack
of the brown owl, he hung on to her neck with the tenacity of despair
and imagined that their last hour had come. But it hadn't, for his
mother was clever and expert. She had fooled many owls in her day.
"This adventurous life of his, of course, was lived entirely at night.
During the day he slept, for the most part, folded in his mother's wing
membranes, while she hung by her toes from the edge of a warped board
in the warm goldy-brown shadows of the peak of the old barn. Outside,
along the high ridge pole, swallows, king birds, jays, and pigeons
gathered under the bright blue day to scream, chatter or coo their
ideas of life, each according to the speech of its kind.
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