75 лучших рассказов / 75 Best Short Stories

Soon it would be berry-time, and Sylvia was a great help at picking. The cow was a good milker, though a plaguy thing to keep track of, the hostess gossiped frankly, adding presently that she had buried four children, so Sylvia’s mother, and a son (who might be dead) in California were all the children she had left. ‘Dan, my boy, was a great hand to go gunning,’ she explained sadly. ‘I never wanted for pa’tridges or gray squer’ls while he was to home. He’s been a great wand’rer, I expect, and he’s no hand to write letters. There, I don’t blame him, I’d ha’ seen the world myself if it had been so I could.

‘Sylvy takes after him,’ the grandmother continued affectionately, after a minute’s pause. ‘There ain’t a foot o’ ground she don’t know her way over, and the wild creatures counts her one o’ themselves. Squer’ls she’ll tame to come an’ feed right out o’ her hands, and all sorts o’ birds. Last winter she got the jay-birds to bangeing here, and I believe she’d ’a’ scanted herself of her own meals to have plenty to throw out amongst ’em, if I hadn’t kep’ watch. Anything but crows, I tell her, I’m willin’ to help support, – though Dan he had a tamed one o’ them that did seem to have reason same as folks. It was round here a good spell after he went away. Dan an’ his father they didn’t hitch, – but he never held up his head ag’in after Dan had dared him an’ gone off.’

The guest did not notice this hint of family sorrows in his eager interest in something else.

‘So Sylvy knows all about birds, does she?’ he exclaimed, as he looked round at the little girl who sat, very demure but increasingly sleepy, in the moonlight. ‘I am making a collection of birds myself. I have been at it ever since I was a boy.’ (Mrs. Tilley smiled.) ‘There are two or three very rare ones I have been hunting for these five years. I mean to get them on my own ground if they can be found.’

‘Do you cage ’em up?’ asked Mrs. Tilley doubtfully, in response to this enthusiastic announcement.

‘Oh no, they’re stuffed and preserved, dozens and dozens of them,’ said the ornithologist, ‘and I have shot or snared every one myself. I caught a glimpse of a white heron a few miles from here on Saturday, and I have followed it in this direction. They have never been found in this district at all. The little white heron, it is,’ and he turned again to look at Sylvia with the hope of discovering that the rare bird was one of her acquaintances. But Sylvia was watching a hop-toad in the narrow footpath.

‘You would know the heron if you saw it,’ the stranger continued eagerly. ‘A queer tall white bird with soft feathers and long thin legs. And it would have a nest perhaps in the top of a high tree, made of sticks, something like a hawk’s nest.’

Sylvia’s heart gave a wild beat; she knew that strange white bird, and had once stolen softly near where it stood in some bright green swamp grass, away over at the other side of the woods. There was an open place where the sunshine always seemed strangely yellow and hot, where tall, nodding rushes grew, and her grandmother had warned her that she might sink in the soft black mud underneath and never be heard of more. Not far beyond were the salt marshes just this side the sea itself, which Sylvia wondered and dreamed much about, but never had seen, whose great voice could sometimes be heard above the noise of the woods on stormy nights.

‘I can’t think of anything I should like so much as to find that heron’s nest,’ the handsome stranger was saying. ‘I would give ten dollars to anybody who could show it to me,’ he added desperately, ‘and I mean to spend my whole vacation hunting for it if need be. Perhaps it was only migrating, or had been chased out of its own region by some bird of prey.’