ONE September morning there wheeled a great concourse of gulls over the headland. Through the mist their cries came wild and plaintive. Old men in the village said that it meant a big storm.
I did not believe that birds could prophesy. Having studied the phenomena of nature for many years, I have come to know that everything happens by chance. For instance, during the autumn of 1920 severe wintry weather was forecasted because the hawthorn peggles were plentiful, and the granaries of squirrels were more numerous than usual. Quite a number of journals and periodicals stated these “portents” quite seriously. What illusions! The spring of that year was mild, the hawthorn blossom beautiful, and unravaged by frost. Hence the peggles. As for the squirrels, they found a goodly fall of beechen mast, and promptly stored it!
But to return to the gulls over Baggy Point. There must have been two or three thousand of them, floating and wailing. “A master storm be cumin’,” said the granfers.
All that day, sunlessness and quiet seas. I told the granfers that they were wrong (I am young and self-confident). I explained that their knowledge of nature was not great—had one not told me that swallows sleep in the mud of the river Taw during winter?
But that night clouds came up and hid the stars, the owls called mournfully, the wind shook the elms in the churchyard. A moan under the door, a rattling of the window; the spaniels on my bed whined uneasily. Something was astir—a great silence hollow and foreboding. The chimney tun hummed a little song of rue in the dark; I was instantly awake, and waiting.
A faint roar overbore the near sounds. It was the sea on the rocks two miles away. Suddenly the rain came, like goose-shot against the window, on the trees: the blast tore at the thatch. All through the night it continued until a gray dawn showed low clouds going over like the canvas of ancient galleons, windburst and tattered.
The next morning tons of seaweed—deep-sea plant, too—heaved and shuddered in the rockpools, while a belt of oil fuel lay on the sand with spars and planks. Had there been a wreck somewhere? No one knew. Certainly it looked as though a cargo had gone overboard, for from the headland one could see another black belt where the walls of gray-green water toppled in foam.
But the gulls? They had gone inland, right up the wide sandy estuary of the river. How did they know, so many hours before, that the storm was coming?
The more one thinks one knows of nature the more open should be the mind of the naturalist. I am learning, or should I say, unlearning?