The feeding stations in the back yards were deserted. The birds, for example-where had they gone? Many people, baffled and disturbed, spoke of them. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among the adults but also among the children, who would be stricken while they were at play, and would die within a few hours. In the town, the doctors were becoming more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness that had appeared among their patients.
The farmers told of much illness among their families. Some evil spell had settled on the community mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Then, one spring, a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. So it had been from the days, many years ago, when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns. Other people came to fish streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall, people came from great distances to observe them. Even in winter, the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wild flowers delighted the traveller’s eye through much of the year. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the mornings. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards, where white clouds of bloom drifted above the green land. There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings.
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