I never saw the inside of that home. At the moment I was in too much of a hurry to get down and wash in the lake; and after that, so large were the young birds, so keen and powerful the beaks, that no man or beast might expect to look over the edge of the nest, with hands or paws engaged in holding on, and keep his eyes for a single instant. It is more dangerous to climb for young herons than for young eagles. A heron always strikes for the eye, and his blow means blindness or death, unless you watch like a cat and ward it off.
When I saw the young again they were taking their first lessons. A dismal croaking in the tree-tops attracted me, and I came over cautiously to see what my herons were doing. The young were standing up on the big nest, stretching necks and wings, and croaking hungrily; while the mother stood on a tree-top some distance away, showing them food and telling them plainly, in heron language, to come and get it. They tried it after much coaxing and croaking; but their long, awkward toes missed their hold upon the slender branch on which she was balancing delicately--just as she expected it to happen. As they fell, flapping lustily, she shot down ahead of them and led them in a long, curving slant to an open spot on the shore. There she fed them with the morsels she held in her beak; brought more food from a tuft of grass where she had hidden it, near at hand; praised them with gurgling croaks till they felt some confidence on their awkward legs; then the whole family started up the shore on their first frogging expedition.
It was intensely interesting for a man who, as a small boy, had often gone a-frogging himself--to catch big ones for a woodsy corn roast, or little ones for pickerel bait--to sit now on a bog and watch the little herons try their luck. Mother Quoskh went ahead cautiously, searching the lily pads; the young trailed behind her awkwardly, lifting their feet like a Shanghai rooster and setting them down with a splash to scare every frog within hearing, exactly where the mother's foot had rested a moment before. So they went on, the mother's head swinging like a weather-vane to look far ahead, the little ones stretching their necks so as to peek by her on either side, full of wonder at the new world, full of hunger for things that grew there, till a startled young frog said _K'tung!_ from behind a lily bud, where they did not see him, and dove headlong into the mud, leaving a long, crinkly, brown trail to tell exactly how far he had gone.