Sometimes, at night, as you drift along the shore in your canoe, sifting the night sounds and smells of the wilderness, when all harsher cries are hushed and the silence grows tense and musical, like a great stretched chord over which the wind is thrumming low suggestive melodies, a sudden rush and flapping in the grasses beside you breaks noisily into the gamut of half-heard primary tones and rising, vanishing harmonics. Then, as you listen, and before the silence has again stretched the chords of her Eolian harp tight enough for the wind's fingers, another sound, a cry, comes floating down from the air--_Quoskh? quoskh-quoskh?_ a wild, questioning call, as if the startled night were asking who you are. It is only a blue heron, wakened out of his sleep on the shore by your noisy approach, that you thought was still as the night itself. He circles over your head for a moment, seeing you perfectly, though you catch never a shadow of his broad wings; then he vanishes into the vast, dark silence, crying _Quoskh? quoskh?_ as he goes. And the cry, with its strange, wild interrogation vanishing away into the outer darkness, has given him his most fascinating Indian name, Quoskh the Night's Question.
To many, indeed, even to some Indians, he has no other name and no definite presence. He rarely utters the cry by day--his voice then is a harsh croak--and you never see him as he utters it out of the solemn upper darkness; so that there is often a mystery about this voice of the night, which one never thinks of associating with the quiet, patient, long-legged fisherman that one may see any summer day along the borders of lonely lake or stream. A score of times I have been asked by old campers, "What is that?" as a sharp, questioning _Quoskh-quoskh?_ seemed to tumble down into the sleeping lake. Yet they knew the great blue heron perfectly--or thought they did.
Quoskh has other names, however, which describe his attributes and doings. Sometimes, when fishing alongshore with my Indian at the paddle, the canoe would push its nose silently around a point, and I would see the heron's heavy slanting flight already halfway up to the tree-tops, long before our coming had been suspected by the watchful little mother sheldrake, or even by the deer feeding close at hand among the lily pads. Then Simmo, who could never surprise one of the great birds however silently he paddled, would mutter something which sounded like _Quoskh K'sobeqh_, Quoskh the Keen Eyed. At other times, when we noticed him spearing frogs with his long bill, Simmo, who could not endure the sight of a frog's leg on my fry pan, would speak of him disdainfully in his own musical language as Quoskh the Frog Eater, for my especial benefit. Again, if I stopped casting suddenly at the deep trout pool opposite a grassy shore, to follow with my eyes a tall, gray-blue shadow on stilts moving dimly alongshore in seven-league-boot strides for the next bog, where frogs were plenty, Simmo would point with his paddle and say: "See, Ol' Fader Longlegs go catch-um more frogs for his babies. Funny kin' babies dat, eat-um bullfrog; don' chu tink so?"