LET US GO AFIELD 



True, it would seem a prodigious waste, the waste 

 of Nature with her wild life in America; but Amer- 

 ica has from the beginning been a land not only of 

 plenty but of waste, of utter, awesome waste in all 

 things. We are rich and careless. So is Nature. 



One day not long ago some farmers near Castalia, 

 Ohio, dug into a curious willow-grown mound which 

 had long been known in the little valley of the Cas- 

 talia trout stream. They found a mass of jumbled 

 elk horns, yards in extent, embracing some scores 

 of horns in all. These had been heaped up and 

 buried there by some earlier men, white or red, and 

 the moisture of their covering had preserved them. 

 By all rights they should have disappeared years 

 ago in the mysterious fashion in which Nature takes 

 care of the shed antlers of all the deer family. 

 Nature is scavenger for her own waste. She sets 

 squirrels and porcupines to gnawing at shed deer 

 horns, sets the elements to dissolving them and the 

 moss and leaves to hiding them, trying to cover up 

 the truth as to her own wastefulness. Otherwise we 

 could walk across the continent today on elk horns. 



The average citizen of today, studying the reports 

 of rust on the wheat crop of the West, or the short- 

 age of cotton in the South, does not reflect that a 

 few years ago wild animals roamed where crops now 

 grow. There were elk in the state of Michigan in 



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