The pods were green. In a few days
they would be opening, and the tundras would be white carpets.
He listened to the call of life. It was about him everywhere, a melody
of bird-life subdued and sleepy even though the sun was still warmly
aglow in the sky. A hundred times he had watched this miracle of bird
instinct, the going-to-bed of feathered creatures in the weeks and
months when there was no real night. He picked up his pack and went on.
From a pool hidden in the lush grasses of a distant hollow came to him
the twilight honking of nesting geese and the quacking content of wild
ducks. He heard the reed-like, musical notes of a lone "organ-duck" and
the plaintive cries of plover, and farther out, where the shadows seemed
deepening against the rim of the horizon, rose the harsh, rolling notes
of cranes and the raucous cries of the loons. And then, from a clump of
willows near him, came the chirping twitter of a thrush whose throat was
tired for the day, and the sweet, sleepy evening song of a robin.
_Night!_ Alan laughed softly, the pale flush of the sun in his face.
_Bedtime!_ He looked at his watch.
It was nine o'clock. Nine o'clock, and the flowers still answering to
the glow of the sun! And the people down there--in the States--called it
a frozen land, a hell of ice and snow at the end of the earth, a place
of the survival of the fittest! Well, to just such extremes had
stupidity and ignorance gone through all the years of history, even
though men called themselves super-creatures of intelligence and
knowledge.
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