126 EARLY DAY STORIES. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

 Hunting Near Home. 



These stories are as leaves taken from my own book 

 of memory. And how real, how vivid, how natural and 

 clear these things seem to me now. As I write them down 

 I am living over again the wonderfully bright and fascin- 

 ating life of forty years ago. I see again the vast expanse 

 of smooth rolling prairie, with its rounded hills, its long, 

 smooth, gentle slopes, culminating at a distance of four or 

 five miles in a broad swell somewhat higher than the rest, 

 the dividing ridge between two water courses. In an op- 

 posite direction, and perhaps a mile or so distant can be 

 traced the course of a timbered creek, winding its sinuous 

 way back and forth from one side to the other of its beauti- 

 ful and luxuriant valley, still in a state of nature just as 

 God made it, but holding in its embrace scores of embryo 

 farms, with a soil, it may be, the richest on earth. Tracing 

 the course of the creek to its confluence with the broad val- 

 ley of the Elkhorn one beholds a magnificent picture, un- 

 excelled in lovliness anywhere, even if it does not quite 

 match in grandeur, views to be had among the mountains 

 or along the shores of the ocean. No landscape picture is 

 quite complete without its hills, its plains, its groves of tim- 

 ber and its streams of water. All these were here in pro- 

 fusion and perfection, in the early days. They are here yet, 

 but with the marks of man's interference to so great an 

 extent that their original superb beauty has been almost 

 effaced. 



But the picture as drawn is not quite complete. To 

 be perfect and true to nature it would hold some of God's 

 wild creatures that were here in abundance in the early 

 days. Three or four little bands of antelope should surely 



