of black down the throat.
There could be no doubt about it. “Black-throated Diver,” he had whispered reverently, put down the telescope, pulled out his pocket-book and added that name to his list of birds seen on the cruise.
For hour after hour he had stayed there watching that bird diving, coming up again, dipping its head under water as if to peer into the depths and then diving again. He had made a drawing of it and then another, showing the markings just so that he could compare them with the pictures in his book, but he knew for certain what it was. Then, at last, a long line of splashes had shown that the bird was getting up off the water. Again he had heard that strange “Cuck … cuck … cuckcuckcuck.” He had seen the bird in flight, like a cigar with busy wings. It had circled overhead and flown away as if towards the lower loch, but he had seen it swerve southwards and then had lost sight of it altogether.
Dick put his notebook back in his pocket. What mattered now that the cruise was ending? He had seen a Diver with his own eyes. He wanted to tell Dorothea. The others would hardly guess how pleased he was.
He stood up, rather stiffly, took his glasses off, cleaned them, put them on again and looked up to the little hill where he had left the three explorers on the top of that prehistoric dwelling-house. There was nobody there now. He looked along the ridge with a gap in it where that cart track climbed over into the next valley. Nobody there either. He looked up the valley towards the hills and saw specks moving against the heather. He thought he heard a shout … probably Roger. Well, if they had gone so far, they would soon be turning back and coming to look for him, and he knew there would be small chance of watching birds with Roger larking round. That bird had done its fishing and flown away. He could do no more here, but there was the other loch to see. He had better go and have a look at it while there was still time, though there was not likely to be anything there so well worth looking at as that Black-throated Diver. That sort of good fortune was not to be expected twice in an afternoon. Dick did not care. Already his day was the most successful of the whole cruise.
Rejoicing in what he had already seen, he walked along the shore, sometimes having to climb up into the heather, sometimes dodging marshy bits, sometimes finding it hard to keep his footing on loose stones. It was slow going along the shore, but he came at last to where the loch narrowed into a stream flowing through the flats that divided one loch from the other. Once upon a time, thought Dick, looking at those flats, the two lochs must have been one. Perhaps, he thought, when the ancient Picts had built that place on the hill, the whole valley had been one great lake, or even an arm of the sea.
He saw a dipper, bobbing its white shirt front, on a stone in the stream, but did not bother to put it in his notebook. He had seen dippers before. A family of baby water-hens scuttered across and a mother water-hen flapped along close to the bank on which he was walking, pretending to have broken her wing and trying to draw him after her, to give her young ones time to get away. But that, too, he was not seeing for the first time. On a day when he had seen a Black-throated Diver, dippers and water-hens did not mean as much as usual. Presently he was skirting wide reed-beds. The lower loch lay before him, and as he looked at it and at a little island far out towards the middle of it, he became alert once more. After all, seeing one Black-throated Diver need not mean that he would never see another.
Three Mergansers came flying together from the foot of the loch, lifting suddenly at the sight of him, but flying straight on over his head. Dick watched the quick black and white flashes of the three birds until he could see them no more and knew that they must have dropped to the water in the loch that he had just left. He wrote “Three Mergansers” in his notebook and thought of going back there to have another look at them. He looked at his watch. The afternoon was gone and it seemed to him that he had only just begun his day. But now, at any moment, he might hear the Sea Bear’s foghorn telling him that the day was over. It would be silly to go back now.
Beyond the reed-beds, the banks of the loch rose higher and Dick kept close along the water’s edge, knowing that a bank behind him was as good as rocks in front by way of cover. The one thing you must not do is to let birds see you against a background of sky. He went very slowly along the edge of the loch, looking this way and that over the water but mostly towards the little island. No matter what birds might be about, he knew that islands were magnets, alike for birds and for human beings. And this particular island was a very good one. Reeds at one end of it, boulders in the middle and, as he now saw, a flat bit of grassy shore at the end furthest from the reeds. What was that, swimming not far from it? Dick’s heart leapt again. Whatever it was, it looked most awfully like that Diver. Perhaps he had been wrong in thinking it had flown south and out of the valley.
There was water at his feet and small stones, but a few yards further on he saw there was a rock big enough to give him cover and a place behind it that might have been designed for the comfort of a bird-watcher. He crept on, dropped beside the rock, pulled out his telescope, focused it on the island and searched the water where he had seen that swimming bird.
Thank goodness the wind had gone and the waves with it. The water was still and the sun, well away to the right over the western hills, was not in his eyes. But there was no bird … and then, in the circle of smooth water he could see through the telescope, there were ripples on one side. He followed them to their centre and found the bird. It had just come up and he saw it dip its beak and lift its head as if swallowing a drink. There it was, swimming, its body low in the water, its neck lifted, its head turning now one way, now another. It was a Diver all right. Lucky he had not gone back after the Mergansers. He made up his mind to stay exactly where he was. He could hardly be in a better position from which to watch it.
The Diver was swimming towards the island, and Dick was following it with the telescope, when he saw something blackish move on the fiat grassy point of the island, a few feet from the water. Yes. It moved again. For a moment he thought it was some sort of animal. Then he saw that it was a bird, moving in an odd way, as if it could not get properly on its legs. It shuffled along the ground until it almost fell into the water, when, at once, it swam off, another Diver, like the first. He was sure now that it was the bird he had seen on the upper loch together with its mate. “Exactly like grebes,” he thought, watching the two swimming together. “Like grebes, only enormous.”
“Hoo … hoo … hoo!”
He was startled by a long wavering cry. It was like wild laughter, as if the two great birds were sharing some fantastic joke.
“Hoo … hoo … hoo!”
He heard it once again but no more. Both birds dived together. They came up wide apart.
One of them was swimming towards the island. He could not be sure if it was the same one that he had seen launch itself into the water, but it landed at that same place. Whether it was the same bird or not, it had that same weakness in the legs. It seemed to slide itself along the ground, helping itself with its wings. It stopped, close to the water, just where he had first seen a bird move.
Through the telescope he could see the long mottled body of the bird, resting low on the ground. The other Diver was swimming about, moving further and further from the island, diving now and again, staying under water a long time and coming up sometimes where Dick was expecting to see it, and sometimes in quite a different place. The bird on the island scarcely moved.
“If it’s nesting,” thought Dick, “it’s eggs can’t have hatched yet. Or only just. But it’s too far off to see them.”
He kept perfectly still and watched, keeping the telescope trained on the sitting bird, thinking that if it moved again he would be able to see what sort of nest they made. There might be no nest at all. He remembered puffins and shelduck and their use of rabbit holes, and the many birds that laid their eggs on the bare ground, lapwings nesting in open fields, gulls with their eggs hard to see among the pebbles.
