There, too, the turtle-doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white-pines over, my head; or the red squirrel, coursing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisitive.  You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns....

In the fall the loon (Colymbus glacialis) came, as usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before I had risen.  At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses.  They come rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon.  Some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there.

But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with their discharges.  The waves generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all waterfowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs.  But they were too often successful.  When I went to get a pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods.  If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day.  But I was more than a match for him on the surface.  He commonly went off in a rain.

As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself.  I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before.  He dived again but I miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before.

He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him.  Each time when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat.  It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution.  He led me at once to the wildest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it.  While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine.  It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon.