Word: heron
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Samuel Songo, a Mashona tribesman of Southern Rhodesia, has a left arm that is like a magnificent piece of ebony sculpture. But the rest of his body is stunted and crippled; his reedy heron's legs are too frail to carry him, and he can use only two fingers at the end of his wizened right arm. When Africa was darkest, such human culls as Sam Songo were staked out for the leopards to rid them from the tribe. But Sam was allowed to live and to learn to carve living figures in stone with those two fingers...
...Hanlon's subjects range from a dipping, dabbing Ouzel to a mournful Solemn Heron and a whole series of popeyed, studious-looking little owls. His materials are chunks of volcanic rock found in California's hills. He chisels a bosomy pouter pigeon from pitted grey pumice, uses polished quartzite for the silken feathers of a nesting woodcock, letting the shape of the stone suggest his forms. He chisels a fierce eagle, coldly eying the world, with a few simple curves; in his owls, a rough triangle of stone becomes a beak, a sharp shelf of rock becomes...
...weird, heron-like copper bird he was getting. "Tell me, what does it symbolize?" he asked. "Oh," replied the Harvardmen, "it's a sort of American peace dove." "Well," said Tsarapkin, "it is a very fine gift. Peace be with you and yours...
...rumpled and untidy as his rooms. The tweeds he wears are worn and baggy, his thinning grey hair unruly, his bushy grey mustache in need of a trim. Bony and angular, with pale, piercing eyes, he looks, as one American interviewer put it, rather "like a spare, intelligent, ruffled heron...
Nibbling the Cheese. These days, the heron is hobbled, too. In a fall last June, Forster broke an ankle, and he still keeps it strapped and limps about painfully. But the flashing intelligence and humane spirit which gave the 20th Century one of its finest novels, A Passage to India, are as unhobbled as ever...