IN CAMP WITH AN AUDUBON BIRD WARDEN:
BY T. GILBERT PEARSON


you ever broil bacon on a pointed stick stuck slant-
vise before a camp fire? Each strip turns white and
urls on itself, while great, hot, greasy tears fall sput-
eringly into the ashes below. You burn your fingers
nd smoke is in your eyes; but you eat that bacon with
marvelous relish while you fight off mosquitoes with


               one hand and listen to the big bull alligator's sunrise
bellow coming up on the wind from the swamp. Perhaps, however,
you prefer your breakfast where the plates are ever garnished and spot-
less linen abounds and the only booming that salutes your ears is the
never-ceasing roar of the city streets.
    It is really a good thing to get away now and then from some of the
conventionalities of fife; and if you wander far enough afield you are
sure to find some unusual thrills awaiting you.
    Not long ago I was awakened by a prolonged rattling shriek which
echoed through the starlight stillness of a subtropical night. With
weird undulations it passed over our camp, crossed the saw-grass glade
and bounded, with many reverberations, along the interminable wall
of the Big Cypress Swamp. This most unusual sound might have
caused the uninitiated to start up and reach for his gun. But to the
bird warden, Rhett Green, who lay beneath his tent it meant only that
another day was about to break; and that from the fire-blackened pine-
lands a sand-hill crane was voicing somewhat of the agony that seems
to smite these birds at the first breath of the dawn wind. Again and
again the call was repeated, and ever it was answered by another a
short distance away.
   As if in response to the strident reveille of the cranes the bird world
awoke and, as the first faint flush of morning crept across the sky, a
wren alighted on the ridge pole of the tent and sang. The whistle of
a cardinal bird came out of an oak tree; from the palmetto thicket a
chewink spoke, and somewhere a cuckoo clucked. In a pine top
above a brown-headed nuthatch called; one answered from a neighbor-
ing tree. Then another a little farther on, and another and another,
and so on and on through the open pine woods, away and away to the
last outskirts of civilization at Fort Meyers resting on the banks of the
Caloosahatchee River, thirty miles distant.
   It was good to lie there on a blanket in the heart of one of the few
really wild spots left in Eastern United States, and to think that the
cries and calls of the dawn must be very similar to those often heard
by that splendid old mystic Don Ponce de Leon ere he sprang from his
couch in the morning to renew his search for the fountain of youth.
Occasionally a hunting party penetrates the country, or a cow man


56