32 OUT WITH THE BIRDS 



The story of such a past here was being whis- 

 pered from the ground. The half-buried buffalo 

 skulls along the lake rim, or slough margin, and 

 the crumbling elk antlers in the hills told it ; but 

 even more eloquently spoke the blown-out sand 

 pockets along the base of the slopes. For here 

 in the hollows lay handfuls of crude pot- 

 tery fragments, flint flakes and chips, arrow- 

 heads made of a dozen different kinds of 

 stone, ranging from white quartz to black, 

 glassy obsidian — the latter transported thither 

 hundreds of miles — grooved pemican-stones of 

 granite, gaudy pebbles, quantities of burned 

 and broken bones and masses of fire-crumbled 

 granite, all in mute appeal adding their quota to 

 the tale of days agone. 



It was almost sunset when the last of the 

 geese went westward. They caught my eye 

 away off to the southeastward, first a dark mist, 

 then as they circled, they glinted in the sunlight, 

 like a host of tiny silver sparks ; and finally they 

 approached and struck out over the same course 

 as the others, this great throng of hundreds of 

 waveys passing across. the flat close to the hills; 

 and those long sinuous lines, black-tipped wings 

 and snowy forms shimmering in the light of the 



