Once, up on the Big Toledi, I saw a curious bit of their education. I
was paddling across the lake one day, when I saw a shellbird lead her
brood into a little bay where I knew the water was shallow; and
immediately they began dipping, though very awkwardly. They were
evidently taking their first lessons in diving. The next afternoon I
was near the same place. I had done fishing--or rather, frogging--and
had pushed the canoe into some tall grass out of sight, and was
sitting there just doing nothing.
A musquash came by, and rubbed his nose against the canoe, and nibbled
a lily root before he noticed me. A shoal of minnows were playing
among the grasses near by. A dragon-fly stood on his head against a
reed--a most difficult feat, I should think. He was trying some
contortion that I couldn't make out, when a deer stepped down the
bank and never saw me. Doing nothing pays one under such
circumstances, if only by the glimpses it gives of animal life. It is
so rare to see a wild thing unconscious.
Then Kwaseekho came into the shallow bay again with her brood, and
immediately they began dipping as before. I wondered how the mother
made them dive, till I looked through the field-glass and saw that the
little fellows occasionally brought up something to eat. But there
certainly were no fish to be caught in that warm, shallow water.
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