Grouse. 85 



and small parties began to fly down from their roosts to 

 the berry bushes. While perched up among the bare 

 limbs of the trees, sharply outlined against the sky, they 

 were very conspicuous. Generally they crouched close 

 down, with the head drawn in to the body and the 

 feathers ruffled, but when alarmed or restless they stood up 

 straight with their necks stretched out, looking very awk- 

 ward. Later in the day they would have been wild and hard 

 to approach, but I kept out of their sight, and sometimes 

 got two or three shots at the same bird before it flew off. 

 They offered beautiful marks, and I could generally get a 

 rest for my rifle, while in the gray morning, before sun- 

 rise, I was not very conspicuous myself, and could get up 

 close beneath where they were ; so I did not have much 

 trouble in killing five, almost all of them shot very nearly 

 where the neck joins the body, one having the head fairly 

 cut off. Salt, like tea, I had carried with me, and it was 

 not long before two of the birds, plucked and cleaned, 

 were split open and roasting before the fire. And to me 

 they seemed most delicious food, although even in Novem- 

 ber the sharp-tails, while keeping their game flavor, have 

 begun to be dry and tough, most unlike the tender and 

 juicy young of August and September. 



The best day's work I ever did after sharp-tails was in 

 the course of the wagon trip, already mentioned, which 

 my brother and I made through the fertile farming coun- 

 try to the eastward. We had stopped over night with a 

 Norwegian settler who had taken and adapted to a farm- 

 house an old log trading-post of one of the fur compa- 

 nies, lying in the timber which fringed a river, and so 



