In southern lands the birds sing their
sweetest songs in the dim light that falls after sun-
set and comes before dawn. But in the Arctic barrens the
sun dips so briefly below the horizon that each of the night
hours is an hour of twilight or a song light, filled with the bubbling song

There came a day in early June when a pair of phalaropes drifted, light as corks, on the glazed sheet of Grenda's pool. Now and then they spun in a circle by rapid thrusts of their lobed feet, then jabbed again and again with needle-like bills to capture the insects stirred up by their movements. The phalaropes had spent the winter on the open sea far to the southward, following the whales and the ever drifting clouds of whale food. On their migration they had come northward by an ocean route as far as possible before striking inland. Soon the phalaropes prepared a nest on the south slope of the ridge not far from the sanderling nest, and lined it, as most of the tundra nests are lined, with willow leaves and catkins. Then the cock phalarope took charge of the nest, and soon showed a "hatching spot" of worn feathers on his breast, the for it was he who sat for 18 days, warming hxx eggs to life.

Often Grenda saw an Arctic fox on its way across the plains from the fox colony among the hills. The foxes were sleek and fat, for lemmings were plentiful. One of the foxes was preparing a cache for the next winter in a yards not a hundred yards from the sanderling nest, and every day Grenda saw him come with several lemmings to bury, digging down to reach the frost line. All the foxes had such caches, which they tried to keep secret from one another.

On the ebb tides the cries of shore birds came up from the mud flats where they were assembling to feed. Twice each day Grenda slipped away from her nest to join them. She carefully parted the shrubs and pressed her body to the ground, showing not so much as her bright black eyes until she was over the crest of the ridge and half the distance to the beach. Then she flew swiftly across the plain, mindful of the dangers to a small bird travelling along across the open spaces of the Arctic.

Now for 4 hours out of the twenty-four the tundra lay under
the sun, and for 4 hours it slept in soft twilight. Out of the
life-giving stuff of the sun it fashioned for itself a cloak of
green which it drew across its nakedness. XXX Arctic willow and
saxifrage, and so on; wild betony and crowberry and so on put
forth new leaves to draw to themselves the strength of the sun.
Into a few brief weeks the plants of the Arctic must beAXWXTXWXTWXX
crowd
XEXXEX a maximum of living. Only the kernel of life, fortified
and protected, endures through the months of darkness and cold.

Soon the grey-green cloak of the tundra was embroidered with
many flowers: first the white cups of the mountain avens; then the
purple of the saffron; then the yellow glades of the buttercups, loud with
the drone of bees trampling over the shiny golden petals and jostling
the laden stamens, so that each bore away a load of pollen on
the bristles of its body. The mid-day sun coaxed out butterflies
dusted and frosted when clouds stole
from the willow thickets where they hid when the colder airs blew,

On the open plains the mosses, the lichens, and the soft grey
 persistent weavers of the open and wind-swept places of the earth,
 clothed the rocks. Still there remained many bare EXXEXX
 patches, dappled with the white of pebbles and speckled light and
dark with black. Even the sharp eyes of the ravens and jaegers
could not tell the pebbles from the mottled eggs of the beach birds
that lay, many of them, on open and shale-strewn patches of plain,
and passed by many a sandpiper
Not even the owls could always distinguish a chick, when it
"froze" to the tundra at the warning cry of its mother, from the
monotonous speckled background.

The phalaropes had spent the winter on the open sea, following the whales and the eel drifting clouds of whole food. On their migration they had come southward across the ocean as far as they could before stoking island.

There came a day in early June when a pair of phalaropes drifted, light as feathers, on the glazed sheet of Grenda's pool. Now and then they spun in a circle by rapid thrusts of their lobed feet, then jabbed again and again with needle-like bills to capture the insects stirred up by their movements. The next day the phalaropes prepared a nest over the slope of a glacial moraine from the sanderling's nest, lining it with last year's dried leaves of the Arctic willow that grew, shrub-like, along the ground. Then the cock phalarope took charge of the nest, and soon he showed Soon the cock phalarope were a "hatching spot" of worn feathers on his breast, for it was he who sat for 18 days on the nest, warming the eggs to life.

when the peds of the fox had pressed the gravel not a dozen
yards away and keen nostrils were testing the air for scent of
the chicks.

When the sun had rolled so low on the northern (?) horizon
that only the high cliff with the eerie of the gyrfalcon caught
and reflected its gleam, Grenda led the four chicks away into the
vast greyness of the tundra.

Now throughout the long days Grenda with her chicks wander-
ed over the stony plains, gathering the young ones under her
during the short chill nights or when sudden gusts of rain drove
across the barrens. She led them by the shores of brimming
fresh water lakes, where fromtwixtaxofwixtwandwogeeawx into
which loons dropped on slender, whistling wings to feed their
young. Strange new food was to be found on the shores of the
lakes and in the swelling turbulence of feeder streams. The
young sanderlings learned to catch insects or to find their
larvae in the streams.

They learned, too,

By the seventh day after their hatching the chicks had
quill feathers a third grown on their wings, although their
bodies were still covered with down. After four more suns the
wings and shouldere were fully clothed in feathers and when they
were two weeks old the fledgling sanderlings could fly with
their mother from lake to lake. Early in life Grenda had taught
them to press themselves flat against the ground when they
heard her danger cry and to lie quite still among the stones

As the fox trotted up the north slope of the moraine the cock phalarope on the nest heard a low "Plip! Plip! Chiss-ick! Chiss-ick!" from the hen, who was on guard nearby and had seen the fox coming up the slope. The cock crept silently from the nest, pressing his body low to the mosses and tight-curling grasses of escape, until he came to the pool where his mate was awaiting him. The two birds sailed out into the middle of the pool where they swam anxiously in circles, preening their feathers, jabbing long bills into the water in a pretense of feeding until the air came clean again, untainted by the musky scent of fox. The cock's breast showed the feather had faked away, for the phalarope chicks were soon to hatch.

When Grenda had led the fox far enough from her young she circled around by the bay flats, pausing to feed nervously for a edge few minutes at the edge of the salty tide. Then she flew swiftly to the betony clump and the four chicks on which the down was yet dark with the dampness of the egg, although soon it would dry to tones of buff and sand and chestnut.

With the wisdom born in her of generations of her forebears, although it was no part of her own experience, the year-old sanderling mother knew that the depression in the tundra, lined with dried leaves and lichens and moulded to the shape of her breast, was no longer a safe place for her young. The gleaming eyes of the fox, the soft pad, pad of his feet on the shales, became for her the symbols of a thousand dangers of the tundra, formless and without name. The place of her nest was not secure for her young.

As she hid the last shell among the stones, a polar fox passed near her, his pads making no sound. As he trotted with sure foot over the shales. His eye gleamed redly as he watched the mother bird, and he sniffed the air, believing she had young nearby. As Grenda flew to the willows farther up the ravine, the fox came to the place where she had left the shells and nose them. As he started up the slope of the ravine, Grenda fluttered toward him, she tumbled to the ground as though hurt, and flapped her wings, and stumbled and crept over the gravel, all the while uttering a high pitched note like the cry of her own young. The fox rushed at her, more in irritation than in attack, for it was the young birds he wanted. Grenda rose rapidly into the air and disappeared over the crest of the ridge, only to reappear from another quarter, tantalizing the fox into following her. So by degrees she led him over the ridge and southward into a harshy bottom fed by the overflow of the upland streams.