Broad leaves of the arrow-head and pickerel-weed give
shelter to the coot, bobbing her head and neck as she makes nervous
journeys through the water, sometimes scratching a long streak across
its mirror-like surface as she uses both feet and wings in her haste
to escape from the lone pedestrian. At sundown the sandhill crane may
sometimes be surprised, standing like a silhouette by the shore of a
grassy island. The awkward, wary bittern and the still more vigilant
least bittern are familiar residents here.
Below the dam the creek winds at will through a peaceful valley,
appropriating to itself an ever widening stretch from the farm lands.
Sometimes it hastens down a pebbly speedway, then slackens its pace
and wanders off from its course until suddenly it seems to grow
alarmed, whips around a bend and comes hurrying back. Sometimes its
level flood-plain is a quarter mile wide, bounded on either side by
steep timbered hills which stretch on and on down the valley until the
sky receives them in a glory of blue haze. Sometimes the creek has cut
its way straight down the face of a high rock cliff on one side, while
on the other side is a level meadow with bushy-margined ponds. In
places the water of the creek lies asleep in a dream of sunshine, but
further on it ripples and gurgles over a bouldered bed, walled in by
rocky slopes.
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