One day on the ash heap in their own yard in town he saw a new, strange bird.  He was always seeing new birds, but this was of unusual interest.  He drew its picture as it tamely fed near him.  A dull, ashy gray, with bronzy yellow spots on crown and rump, and white bars on its wings.  His “Birds of Canada” gave no light; he searched through all the books he could find, but found no clew to its name.  It was years afterward before he learned that this was the young male Pine Grosbeak.

Another day, under the bushes not far from his shanty, he found a small Hawk lying dead.  He clutched it as a wonderful prize, spent an hour in looking at its toes, its beak, its wings, its every feather; then he set to work to make a drawing of it.  A very bad drawing it proved, although it was the labour of days, and the bird was crawling with maggots before he had finished.  But every feather and every spot was faithfully copied, was duly set down on paper.  One of his friends said it was a Chicken-hawk.  That name stuck in Yan’s memory.  Thenceforth the Chicken-hawk and its every marking were familiar to him.  Even in after years, when he had learned that this must have been a young “Sharp-shin,” the name “Chicken-hawk” was always readier on his lips.

But he met with another and a different Hawk soon afterward.  This one was alive and flitting about in the branches of a tree over his head.  It was very small—­less than a foot in length.  Its beak was very short, its legs, wings and tail long; its head was bluish and its back coppery red; on the tail was a broad, black crossbar.  As the bird flew about and balanced on the boughs, it pumped its tail.  This told him it was a Hawk, and the colours he remembered were those of the male Sparrow-hawk, for here his bird book helped with its rude travesty of “Wilson’s” drawing of this bird.  Yet two other birds he saw close at hand and drew partly from memory.  The drawings were like this, and from the picture on a calendar he learned that one was a Rail; from a drawing in the bird book that the other was a Bobolink.  And these names he never forgot.  He had his doubts about the sketching at first—­it seemed an un-Indian thing to do, until he remembered that the Indians painted pictures on their shields and on their teepees.  It was really the best of all ways for him to make reliable observation.

The bookseller of the town had some new books in his window about this time.  One, a marvellous work called “Poisonous Plants,” Yan was eager to see.  It was exposed in the window for a time.  Two of the large plates were visible from the street; one was Henbane, the other Stramonium.  Yan gazed at them as often as he could.  In a week they were gone; but the names and looks were forever engraved on his memory.  Had he made bold to go in and ask permission to see the work, his memory would have seized most of it in an hour.

IX