I suppose a bird is the bravest creature that lives, in spite of its
natural timidity.  From which we may learn that true courage is not
incompatible with nervousness, and that heroism does not mean the
absence of fear, but the conquest of it.  Who does not remember the
first time that he ever came upon a hen-partridge with her brood, as
he was strolling through the woods in June?  How splendidly the old
bird forgets herself in her efforts to defend and hide her young!

Smaller birds are no less daring.  One evening last summer I was
walking up the Ristigouche from Camp Harmony to fish for salmon at
Mowett's Rock, where my canoe was waiting for me.  As I stepped out
from a thicket on to the shingly bank of the river, a spotted
sandpiper teetered along before me, followed by three young ones.
Frightened at first, the mother flew out a few feet over the water.
But the piperlings could not fly, having no feathers; and they crept
under a crooked log.  I rolled the log over very gently and took one
of the cowering creatures into my hand--a tiny, palpitating scrap of
life, covered with soft gray down, and peeping shrilly, like a
Liliputian chicken.  And now the mother was transformed.  Her fear
was changed into fury.  She was a bully, a fighter, an Amazon in
feathers.  She flew at me with loud cries, dashing herself almost
into my face.  I was a tyrant, a robber, a kidnapper, and she called
heaven to witness that she would never give up her offspring without
a struggle.  Then she changed her tactics and appealed to my baser
passions.  She fell to the ground and fluttered around me as if her
wing were broken.  "Look!" she seemed to say, "I am bigger than that
poor little baby.  If you must eat something, eat me!  My wing is
lame.  I can't fly.  You can easily catch me.  Let that little bird
go!"  And so I did; and the whole family disappeared in the bushes
as if by magic.  I wondered whether the mother was saying to
herself, after the manner of her sex, that men are stupid things,
after all, and no match for the cleverness of a female who stoops to
deception in a righteous cause.

Now, that trivial experience was what I call a piece of good luck--
for me, and, in the event, for the sandpiper.  But it is doubtful
whether it would be quite so fresh and pleasant in the remembrance,
if it had not also fallen to my lot to take two uncommonly good
salmon on that same evening, in a dry season.