Suddenly some movement among the bushes along the near shore, perhaps two hundred yards away, caught their watchful eyes. In an instant, by some mysterious process, they had sunk their bodies completely below the surface, leaving only their snaky heads and necks exposed to view. This peculiar submerged position they held, it seemed, without difficulty. But whatever it was that alarmed them, it was not repeated; and after perhaps five minutes of cautious watchfulness, they slowly emerged and floated on the surface. Presently the female swam back again behind the islet, laboriously scrambled out upon the shore, waddled to her nest, and settled herself once more to the task of brooding her two big gray-green, brown-blotched eggs. It was the first week in June, and the eggs were near hatching.
The pair of loons were restless and annoyed. Their lake, set in a lonely valley, which was drained by a branch of the Upper Quah-Davic, had seemed to them the perfection of solitude and remoteness. For three years now they had been coming to it every spring with the first of the northern flight. But this spring their solitude had been invaded. A pioneer, a squatter, with a buxom wife and several noisy children, had come and built a cabin on the shore of the lake. To be sure, the lake was large enough to overlook and forget such a small invasion, but for the loons it was a great matter. That cabin, those voices, and laughter, and axe-strokes, and sometimes gun-shots, though almost a mile away from their nesting-place, were a detestable and unpardonable intrusion.
The loon was just about to resume his fishing--a business which, on account of his phenomenal appetite, took up most of his time--when once more a movement in the bushes caught his vigilant eye. At the same instant a flash of white fire jetted through the leafy screen, a vicious report rang out, and a shower of shot cut the water into spurting streaks all about him. But he was not there. Inconceivably swift, he had dived at the flash itself. The lead that would have riddled him struck the empty swirl where he had vanished. A lanky youth with a gun stepped out from behind the bushes, stared in sulky disappointment, and presently strolled off down the shore to look for less elusive game.