Bird stew was a Maine dish of my boyhood. It meant wild birds, never tame. It tasted and trembled of the wild.
Bird stew spelled the waders, not the swimmers with webbed feet—not ducks, coot, or geese. It meant plovers, sandpeeps, spoonbill plover, the heron—on occasions when hunger for wild meat pinched us thin—and especially, oh very honorably especially, mash hens. For that was the way we Yankees, innocent of the uncomfortable letter R, pronounced marsh hens. The Indian word for them was qwoks. No U in it. This word, so far as 1 know, is the only word in English where a Q is not followed by a U. The name of the bird comes from the sound he makes, as the Abenokis heard him make it long, long ago. It is exactly the cry he makes when the twilight brings him out of the deep balsams, when the title is slanting in at the flood over the mudflats. Then this walking dish of the star-eyed gods comes out to commence his night-long pacing of the summer night's sands, to dip up the silver slivers of minnows and young smelt and swallow them by the light of the moon. The marsh hen belongs to the bittern tribe, but he is shorter-legged, less fishy in taste, and plump as a milk-fed pullet. He is practically extinct now, partly because of the feasts of my childhood before game laws shook their heads.
Let me admit at once that this bird stew of my boyhood is as unattainable now as the manna and quail of the Desert of Sinai. For the laws have come down from Sinai, and most of the thin-legged tribe that found their tender way to transfiguration in our seaside stew are out of bounds for all cooks, taboo, in a closed season forever. Too bad, for plovers and sandpeeps (sandpipers to more ignorant coasts farther south), herons, and mash hens have the most delicate flesh and most pungent flavor of all flying things. They are protected now by law, but even so they are yearly diminishing on our coasts. It could not have been gunning that dooms them, any more than it could have been gunning that caused the disappearance of the wild pigeons that used to make twilights of American afternoons as they came over the sky by myriads. I think the reason is that mankind has become so sinful in these latter evil days that a flesh of innocence, too sweet and fine for his rough palate, is being withdrawn from his sorry world.
The Middle Ages and the Victorian Age fattened their marrow on such delectable as these waders. The medieval falcons brought the long-necked heron low, to be the kingpin feast, especially in the length of his neck, turned on the castle spit. And boys and men in my colthood went after plover and sandpeep and brought home boatloads of these stiver splinters of heaven from the marshes and coves. But in these iron years, the diminishing and unshot waders of the waves are rolling like the pearls of a broken chain off the earth.
Half the poetry of bird stew was the shooting of the game birds. We went at the flood of the tide, found a sunny spot in the deep grass of a shore or behind a warm September dune, and we lay at full length and rippling with excitement and let the azure tide bring into the range of our shotguns these things slim as dreams are.
There would be only pure sunlight and pearly mud and the whisper of wind in sedge or sand, and then suddenly the whole quiet day would whisper loud, and out of nowhere, down like flakes from the sun, would sweep hundreds on hundreds of plovers, spoonbills, or sandpeeps. They would darken the sea, then flash white as they turned all at once, at no signal, showing the snow of the undersides of their wings, wheel in a new direction, circle, and come back, swoop low, suddenly grow feet, tip the sand at the run, and then light on feet so delicate they were not really there, roll like feathery beads, and make sweet high sounds as light as their own bodies. We would tense up and take aim, wait until two score of the rolling beads came together from two directions, passing one another, then we would let go with both barrels. I, in my knee length pants, would be knocked end over end by my muzzle-loader, but rise bruised and exultant and run down to pick up my dead and wring the necks of my maimed.
It was cruel, I know. But there was bird stew ahead. I was hollow as a reed. I was a boy, merciless, hungry, and young. So were my uncles beside me, blowing the smoke From their barrels and telling me to look alive and pick up their birds, directing me just how to wring their lovely necks and bring the sandpeeps or plovers to them.
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