CHAPTER II 



AN APRIL HIKE 



I STOOD it till the fifteenth of the month; 

 then a farmer who drove into town from the 

 westward said that the geese were going up 

 the Pipestone, and I shouldered my kodak and 

 hiked. The spring feeling had reached the 

 seventh stage of acuteness ; there was no remedy 

 but to go, to get out, away from the abodes of 

 men, out into the lonely places, where the wild 

 yell of the snow goose is music at day-dawn, 

 and the coyote sings to you at your little camp- 

 fire, through the night. For the great prairie 

 had awakened — that wonderful awakening 

 from winter's silent, white expanse of death, to 

 a glad place of teeming life and song — and it was 

 calling, " Come ! Oh, come ! " 



Winter dies hard to the Northward, and 

 the northwest breeze — the last breath of a three- 

 day blow — still had a brisk edge to it, though the 

 sun was very bright, when at eleven o'clock I 



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